Brad Sallows said:
Infant_Tree said:
Both useful ways to see it, and both are more or less on the mark, though we could haggle a bit over what we mean by 'indiscriminate'. I view 'indiscriminate' as a failure to discriminate, e.g. a carpet bombing in a military campaign that goes after military targets but wilfully disregards the disproportionate presence of civilians in the effected area. Conversely, a lot of terrorist operations are very discriminate indeed. They don't care which particular civilians they kill or harm, but they ARE specifically targeting civilian targets in general in order to achieve the desired political effect of their fires.
Old Sweat said:
Terrorism will almost always be also inherently criminal; I struggle to think of where those would not overlap. It is that intent to exert political/ideological/economic influence through that unlawful use of force that pushes acts that are criminal anyway into the more narrow criminal realm of terrorism. As for the home-grown ones, it's hard to tell where religion and ideology start and end and blend in to each other... A lot of discussions could be had about the doctrinal legitimacy of religious justifications for violence/terror; that's outside I think almost all of our arcs here- I'm not aware of anyone on the site who professes theological expertise sufficient to this. Suffice to say a lot of lines are blurred.
It has been my observation both from what has made the news and from what I see at work that many of our 'home growns' do not come from backgrounds that necessarily lend themselves obviously to radicalization. Aaron Driver, the Ontario suicide bomber last year, was the son of an RCAF member. Tevis Gonyou-McLean, who has been in the public eye here in Ottawa as the subject of a terrorist peace bond, is another red headed white kid. who seems to have descended into a combination of drug abuse/mental illness, and then at some point in recent years slid into self-radicalization online. Michael Zehaf-Bibeau (Parliament shooter) was the son of a Canadian bureaucrat and a Libyan businessman, and was Roman Catholic for 22 years before converting and subsequently radicalizing. Martin Couture-Rouleau (St. Jean attack that killed WO Vincent) was a young adult, had recently failed in small business and undergone a religious conversion and brisk self-radicalization.
There are plenty of others who have been reported on, and many more who have not. A lot of them would very easily slip into the current on any major city's streets- living out of the shelters, in and out of drug abuse, uttering paranoid / anti-government rantings that seem more attributable to mental illness than anything. Most will never present a genuine security threat, but of course that cannot necessarily be known at the point of risk assessment. And that switch may flip abruptly and with little warning. We were lucky Aaron driver was an idiot and posted a YouTube video that got the U.S. to alert Canadian authorities. Several of the others, obviously, we did not learn about sufficiently until they acted.
So is there a clear line between criminality, ideology, mental illness, and terrorism? No. I would contend that while mental illness is not a necessary cause i acts of individualized terrorism, it is often present. The ideology in such terrorism is usually linked to at least the perpetrators interpretation of a religion, usually Islam- though this is not always the case; Anders Breivik comes to mind, and the most recent ramming in London looks initially to have been an attack against a religious population but not likely motivated by the attacker's own religious beliefs.
How useful is it truly to have a working definition of terrorism? I would say very, and this is for pragmatic purposes- it gives police and intelligence agencies something to hang their hat on with regards to identified potential threats to the state/society that exist outside the normal rationality of criminal behaviour. I believe there *is* something distinct about someone or a group who want to specifically harm our society, vice those who act criminally for acquisitive purposes, or due to more run of the mill human idiocy- those who target individuals, or satisfy their own sick urges, versus those who deliberately attack the social fabric itself. I believe more steps are justified on the part of the state to combat the latter, and we see that in certain investigative and enforcement powers that put a bit more weight against terrorism offences.
I do not believe we can have a perfect operational definition of terrorism that will be both inclusive and exclusive flawlessly and precisely. I believe we have erred on the side of not including things in terrorism, versus erring on the side of including things that we shouldn't. I believe this is the correct decision to err, because there is still quite a bit that can be done once a risk is identified, even if they don't outright commit terrorist offences. However the legitimacy of such an enhanced security approach rests on us being cautious in its application. I think we mostly get it right.
I believe, unfortunately, that there is no way we can get this 100% right, and that as a result we (the collective Western 'we', inclusive of Canada) will take the odd hit and will suffer losses. Canada has barely seen this yet- we will eventually have major attacks on our soil that will test our resolve and probably make my week very crappy. There is a diminishing rate of return on added security measures, and I think other than certain target hardening there's not a great deal more we can achieve simply by putting more police on the streets (or troops, for that matter, if it came to it). Though I am cognizant that in the past couple of days police and soldiers have interrupted attempted attacks in both Paris and Brussels, resulting in the deaths of two separate suicide bombers who both launched their attacks poorly. So I don't dismiss the utility of the 'boots on the ground' approach in major urban centres at all. Some target areas are reasonably predictable. But that's a decision well above my level.
I don't see a way out of this. We will simply have to keep doing the best we can to be vigilant, flexible, adaptable, and at times promptly ruthless when an imminent threat is identified. And we will have to keep learning from each new attack. I can assure you that a lot of information and training is now flowing to those of us on the front lines in our communities. We'll do our best.
