It’s Time This Became Important

Peter Hitchens is on splendid form today:

My trains returned to ‘normal’ this morning, which means that the ‘train manager’ now once again urges us commuters twice daily to ‘report suspicious behaviour’ .

Apart from telling us (after it’s too late to get off if you’re on the wrong train) where we are going in tedious detail, or shouting at us about ticket restrictions, they love this stuff about ‘suspicious behaviour’.

Of course, there never is any. Then only thing that would make regular passengers suspicious on my line would be a train that arrived on time, and didn’t stop in Reading so long that the becalmed passengers became liable for council tax.

Fat businessmen who don’t shout into their mobile phones, and football fans who don’t sing loudly and tunelessly and laugh mirthlessly on Saturday evenings would also be suspicious.

But I digress. 

The reason I am annoyed by this appeal for vigilance is that I think it is propaganda, designed, by constant repetition,  to make us think we live in dangerous times (sometimes the warning is prefaced by the words ‘in view of recent heightened security alerts’ ). 

No doubt there is a possibility of terrorism. Who can deny it? 

And I think a certain level of vigilance is always reasonable. I have done since the days when IRA bombs in London were quite common (one, in Harrods,  killed a colleague of mine on the old Daily Express, mainly because he bravely did his job and went towards the danger to see what was going on).

From time to time one would hear the detonations, and worry about everyone one knew and cared about, until one knew they were safe.  

That’s why I recently chided an idiot for leaving his tatty unlabelled backpack unattended for long minutes in a station concourse while he went outside to smoke. 

I’d asked everyone nearby if the thing was theirs and nobody had claimed it. If he hadn’t turned up at that minute I would have ‘alerted the authorities’ as asked.   But in truth the danger is pretty small. 

And I am tired of it being exaggerated to get us to give up our freedoms, and to submit to searches, surveillance and bureaucracy. 

I’m also tired of the way so many of my colleagues fail to see that terrorism is called terrorism for a reason. The whole point of it is to make  us frightened of a force that actually isn’t that powerful.  

Simon Jenkins is quite right to refer to our ‘nationalising’ of episodes of murder which – horrible as they are – don’t threaten our national existence, our general security or our economy. 

This is exactly what the perpetrators wish us to do, to treat their wretched, shameful crimes as military actions and dignify them as if they were major strategic blows. 

We can mourn the deaths of their victims perfectly well without doing this.

We also elevate the standing and importance of these petty crooks by going on and on about how these crude killers are ‘trained’. 

What training, precisely, does it take, to murder unarmed civilians in a concert hall or on a beach or in a restaurant, when you have a sub-machine gun and they have nothing? 

And in answer to Douglas Murray’s claim that the Charlie Hebdo killers showed evidence of training by the way they bypassed the magazine’s building security, even bank-robbers, often not the brightest of people, know how to do this sort of thing. They don't need to be trained in Syria.  

These terrorists can be relied upon not to attack actual soldiers on duty or military installations, for they know that if they did they would be cut to pieces. 

The main characteristic that these people need is not 'training' but a total lack of normal human kindness and mercy. 

This is why it is so significant and worthy of inquiry that those involved, as I have repeatedly shown here with incontrovertible facts, are almost always long term drug abusers, out of their minds on potent psychotropics.

I have heard it suggested that the ISIS killers in the Middle East are also drugged, and find it easy to believe, but I have yet to see hard evidence of this.

But rather than examine this, we use the activities of these people as a pretext for ‘security’ measures and irrelevant military adventures in the Middle East, whose main purpose seems to be to entangle us in permanent conflict. 

But with whom and for whom? 

We rightly gag with disgust and shout in horror at the beheadings and other murders of ISIS, but the behaviour of the British government after Saudi Arabia’s mass executions at the weekend has been nearly as muted as our demands for law and freedom in China.

Many British media outlets initially and understandably concentrated on the fact that one of the 47 executed was Adel al-Dhubaiti, the murderer of a BBC cameramen Simon Cumbers and would-be murderer of the reporter Frank Gardner. 

This is an important story, especially since Mr Gardner has declined invitations to forgive the wholly unrepentant al-Dhubaiti. I think he is quite right to take this view. 

I am amazed at the current view that Christianity requires unconditional forgiveness of those who trespass against us, even if they show no sign of remorse.

I don’t believe anyone living at the time of the Gospels would have even imagined forgiveness without repentance, any more than they could have imagined dawn without the sunrise. 

I would not expect to be forgiven by anyone for something I hadn’t repented of, and I expect the same. And The Gospel according to St Luke  (Chapter 17, verses three and four) seems to support me.

Christ says =: ‘Take heed to yourselves: if thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him and if he repent forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a  day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee saying ‘I repent’, thou shalt forgive him’. (Emphases, of course, my own.) 

But again, I digress. 

It’s an interesting part of the story, but I suspect that the great majority of those shot or beheaded by the Saudi state on Saturday were not unrepentant murders. 

And the execution by Riyadh of a government opponent and Shia Cleric (in a very Sunni country),  Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a blatantly political execution, seems to have been much more typical of this mass slaughter. 

It has provoked fury in Iran, led to a breach in diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh, and brought the region closer to open international conflict than it has been for years.

Who knows how it will end? Shouldn’t we be much, much more interested in this than in the headline-seeking ISIS film? 

Shouldn’t be we, in general, be much more interested in and perturbed by Saudi Arabia than we are? And perhaps a bit less focussed on Islamic State, whose power and wealth are so much less? 

Oddly, ISIS wants our attention. Saudi Arabia, normally closed to western media and so uncommunicative it makes the Sphinx look garrulous, definitely does not.  

Shouldn’t this make us wonder whether we are getting this right? 

The initial reaction of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was very telling. Its press office issued a ‘line’ on Saturday stating that :

‘The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.  The death penalty undermines human dignity and there is no evidence that it works as a deterrent. 

‘The Foreign Secretary regularly raises human rights issues with his counterparts in countries of concern, including Saudi Arabia. We seek to build strong and mature relationships so that we can be candid with each other about those areas on which we do not agree, including on human rights.’ 

Apart from its generally limited and understated nature, and its obvious desire not to single out Saudi Arabia for particular criticism, nature, this is an astonishing thing to have said.

There have, it is true,  been subsequent, fuller statements as the inadequacy of this response has become more and more obvious. 

(A junior and obscure foreign Office Minister, Tobias Ellwood, was produced on Sunday to say: ‘I am deeply disturbed by the escalation in tensions in the last 24 hours in the Middle East. The UK is firmly opposed to the death penalty.

‘We have stressed this to the Saudi authorities and also expressed our disappointment at the mass executions.

‘We have discussed with the authorities in Riyadh, and expect that Ali Al-Nimr and others who were convicted as juveniles will not be executed.

‘The UK will continue to raise these cases with the Saudi authorities. We are deeply concerned to hear of the attack yesterday on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran.

‘It is essential that diplomatic missions are properly protected and respected. There are those who will wish to exploit the situation and raise sectarian tensions higher.

‘This would be against the wishes of the vast majority of those in the region. I urge all parties in the region to show restraint and responsibility.’)

But this was the first reaction of the government department charged with Britain’s standing abroad.

I am seeking clarification, but this ‘line’ appears to mean that the FCO  is equally exercised about the execution after due process in a free country with separation of powers, invigilated by a free press, of a convicted murderer in, say, Texas as it is by the political snuffing out of a government critic in a despotic unfree monarchy, Saudi Arabia.

Can this really be true? [Yes, thank God.] But what else does the very categorical statement, with its use of ‘all’ and ‘every’, otherwise mean?

The coverage of the Islamic State video on Sunday night and Monday morning must have delighted the cynics who made it.

And while we let these not-very-clever manipulators make our flesh creep with their filmed murders of helpless prisoners, and their vague threats, we, as a nation and a government, seem utterly unable to make sense of our national relationship with Saudi Arabia.

It’s time this became important.