On Monday, for the second time in as many weeks, I began my week at AM640 discussing an Islamist terror attack in Britain. First was Manchester, with 22 dead and scores wounded. On Saturday, it was London, with eight dead and roughly 20 left in critical condition. These attacks followed the March attack on Britain’s Parliament, with five deaths, and numerous other attacks across Europe and North America in recent years.
I am not an alarmist on terrorism. As horrible as these attacks are, they don’t constitute an existential threat. (As I noted in a recent essay in Maclean’s, the attacks don’t even come close to doing the kind of damage you’d see on a mid-range night of the Blitz).
While one can never totally discount the danger of a spectacular attack on the scale of Sept. 11 or worse, in many ways, the current wave of terror attacks are a reflection of increased Western success in counterterrorism. We’ve done well preventing the big stuff, so the jihadists use knives and vans. On Sept. 12, 2001, that would have felt like victory.
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U.K. officials question why police stopped investigating London attacker -
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Neighbour of suspected London attacker reported him to police ‘but heard nothing back’ -
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Police identify 3rd London attacker as terror investigation continues -
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Neighbour of alleged London attacker claims he gave kids candy in attempt to radicalize them
Today? Not so much. An attack anywhere in the Western world is the lead story everywhere. Attacks in Orlando, London and Berlin, linked by ideology and social media feeds but not much else, don’t feel like disconnected incidents, but a steady drumbeat of disaster. An attack anywhere breeds frustration everywhere.
I want to stress that last point. I’m not talking about fear. We’ve figured out how to go about our lives. But anger and frustration, fed by genuine moral outrage and a creeping sense of helplessness, can take much deeper root than fear.
And that’s my concern. If things continue as is, we’ll probably be OK. Our short attention spans are a form of protection here — we move onto other stories in a few days (anecdotally, I’d say we’re actually getting faster).
But we can’t assume this will hold forever. Even setting aside the worst-case scenario of a staggeringly high casualty attack, there are two ways I can see things getting worse, and both are plausible: the first is more of the same kind of incident, but at a faster tempo, with attacks every few days, instead of one or two every month or so. The other plausible possibility is that the attacks simply get more devastating. Maybe not new Sept. 11s, but death tolls in the dozens or hundreds rather than single digits. Attacks of that scale are certainly possible; we’ve seen them in Paris and Nice. What if they became regular?
Fundamentally, I worry more about what frustrated Western voters will do if they give up on their governments than I do about terrorism itself. If even normally peaceable, moderate people conclude that their politicians are incapable of keeping them safe, they will look for other answers, and may not be picky about where those answers come from. In times of crisis, or even just perceived crisis, calls for perseverance and a steady hand fall flat. Calls for strong action, any action, carry much further.
Perhaps it’s started. In the aftermath of the London attack, we’ve heard the first real public calls for rounding up everyone on terror watch lists and jailing them pre-emptively. The calls for this aren’t particularly loud yet, and they’re coming from predictable places. But what if there’s another attack, and another after that?
Internment is a bad idea. It’s expensive and logistically complex. It clusters potential terrorists in close quarters with other potential terrorists, which is a great way to promote radicalization. And it would raise enormous legal and legislative challenges. But, dammit, who the hell doesn’t feel the temptation to round up those on the watch lists, even if they know, intellectually, that that’s a terrible idea?
It’s entirely natural to ask why our governments allow people known to be potentially dangerous to roam the streets. It doesn’t help when, as is the case with one of the London attackers, the man had literally taken part in a documentary where he pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State and praised martyrdom in the service of Islam against the West.
You don’t have to be an alt-right fascist to wonder what the hell a person like that is doing out on the streets, at liberty to take part in an attack that left eight people dead.
The real threat facing the West aren’t those kinds of men, though. The danger is that we’ll get tired of the low-level attacks and do something rash to end them. Our political leaders can’t just tell us after every attack that surveillance is hard and most attacks are prevented before they happen. Both of those things are true, but they won’t matter if voters become fed up.
Piers Morgan, not normally my go-to counterterrorism expert, made this point well in an interview this week on Good Morning Britain with London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Morgan demanded to know the location of British jihadists who are known to have travelled abroad to fight for the Islamic State. Khan replied that as mayor, he doesn’t have that information, and that round-the-clock monitoring is expensive and difficult, especially given recent cuts to police budgets.
He was right. But so was Morgan when he asked, “What can be a bigger priority than people coming back from a Syrian battlefield with intent to harm British citizens? Why is that not the number one priority?”
Morgan wasn’t calling for them to be locked up — just monitored, followed, and tracked. But after a few more attacks, or if the attacks escalate, it won’t just be TV hosts, and they won’t be so careful about distinguishing between monitoring and sweeping arrests.
How will our politicians respond to those calls? British Prime Minister Theresa May is already saying that if human rights laws make it harder to stop terrorism, she’ll change the laws. She won’t be the first, especially if things get worse. I hope they don’t, and I don’t necessarily expect that they will. But I’m nervous. More so with every attack.
Matt Gurney is host of The Morning Show on Toronto’s Talk Radio AM640 and a columnist for Global News.
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