Tony Blair is determined to stamp out terrorism. Good for him. He’s like a reformed smoker– how could anybody have ever been so rude as to smoke in public? I can’t believe it. We must save them from themselves!
So he is proposing new legislation which makes it illegal to be a terrorist. Yay! Now we can arrest them all.
The new law allows the British Government “to deport anyone who fosters hatred, or advocates violence to further beliefs, or justifies acts of violence.”
How do we know who to arrest? That’s easy. They are Arabs. Oh wait– no, no, no– that would be racist. No, no, no. No mention of race, please, we’re British. We will arrest Frenchmen, Americans, Canadians, Poles, and even Catholics, if they “advocate violence” or “justify acts of violence” for the purpose of furthering beliefs. Not Arabs. Unless they advocate violence. And certainly not Moslems. Unless they’re Arabic.
Now will they arrest General Pinochet, if he happened to drop by for medical treatment again? How about Fidel Castro? How about Pat Robertson? George Bush?
The problem with laws that are passed as a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived crisis, is that they often serve more of a political than a practical function. It is already illegal to commit murder or arson in Britain. And the idea of arresting people who “advocate” violence is a fig leaf to be used to justify legal action against people against whom the government otherwise has absolutely no evidence, or patently unreliable or unconvincing evidence. It’s the kind of law that can be used to threaten people with long jail sentences in order to encourage them to provide information about other people who can be arrested, who can in turn be threatened. It’s the kind of law the police always insist will result in convictions because they very often just “know” who the bad guys are but can’t arrest them because of onerous restrictions issued by the courts actually requiring evidence and such.
The Government gets to make it look like it’s actually having an effect on terrorism and the general public can rest assured that the last names of the people prosecuted are never going to be “Smith” or “James” or “Wilson” or even “Blair”.
Blair also wants it to be illegal to attend a terrorist training camp. Is that going to be retroactive, like in the U.S.? Can we now prosecute Charles De Gaulle? Oops! Of course. Because the Vichy government was not legitimate, like, say, the governments of Egypt or Libya.
You think, of course not, but there’s no “of course” about it. Didn’t De Gaulle advocate violence against the government of France? You didn’t like that government? Neither did I. But I didn’t read the part of Blair’s legislation that lays out which terrorists are okay.
How is a terrorist training camp different from an enemy’s military training camp? I suppose terrorists don’t have an embassy, or loans from the IMF, or fighter jets. But there is a rather compelling case for the idea that most of the training camps in Afghanistan before the U.S. led invasion were actually branches of a national government’s military. You could certainly make the case that Afghanistan deserved to be invaded, because it harboured terrorists who may have been partly or wholly responsible for 9/11, but it is ridiculous to declare that every soldier who defended Afghanistan against the American-led invasion was a terrorist. They were soldiers. Their country was invaded by a large, belligerent foreign power. They were defending their homes and families against a foreign invader. They might have been defending a bad government, but up ’til now, we have never held soldiers responsible for the sins of their leaders.
Under Blair’s and Bush’s criteria, every German and Italian soldier in World War II could have been deemed a terrorist.
One of the reasons Blair feels Britain needs stronger anti-terrorism laws is that Canada and the U.S. have stronger anti-terrorism laws. Our citizens have too many civil liberties. Mr. Prime Minister, we cannot allow a civil liberties gap!
The fact that Anne Coulter had kind words to say about Tony Blair should have tipped me off as to just how vile this man is. He’s the ultimate defective permutation, a hybrid of nanny-liberalism and crypto-fascist authoritarianism. He and Janet Reno should govern Nevada together.