To cite just one of many examples that help to illustrate this uncertainty, the UK government is expected soon to reveal what it plans to do about “Control Orders” – a controversial bit of anti-terrorism legislation that would allow authorities to maintain strict control over those suspected of terrorism, including the imposition of curfews, electronic tagging, reporting in to a “monitor” of sorts, regular searches of the suspect’s residence and limits on personal communications of the suspect. (This is part of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, which came into force in March 2005).In order to use the Control Orders against a suspect, the authorities must demonstrate “reasonable grounds for suspecting that the individual is or has been involved in terrorism-related activity” and that “it is necessary, for purposes connected with protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism, to make a control order imposing obligations on that individual.“ Human rights groups, not to mention the British courts, have found this an unjustifiably sweeping power with conditions that are much too vague.

Have measures such as Control Orders and other human-rights-limiting legislation aided the fight against terrorism? No. In fact, everything that has been done under the auspices of anti-terrorism – from the launching of wars to the imposition of laws that would traditionally have been impossible against mass public outcry of civil liberties violations – has backfired, and indeed appears to have boosted the ranks of terrorists the world over.

Information Disservice

Beyond the disservice the media has done to the public in terms of helping to engender the misperceptions that have led to the situation in which we find ourselves today, it has also done a disservice to the public by reporting on incidents of Islamic militancy without digging below the surface. Journalism has become lazy and frequently unintelligent. The June violence that shook the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan (and possibly also the January 2011 violence between suspected ‘religious extremists’ and Kyrgyz security forces near the capital, Bishkek), is a case in point. The June violence was reported, almost across the board and even among more thoughtful alternative media outlets, as a cut and dry case of ethnic and sectarian strife. Because religious extremism (read: radical Islam) is the hot topic of the day, other angles to important developments are often ignored (not just by journalists, but by academics and policy-makers as well), to the detriment of global security. In Kyrgyzstan, because the focus of the recent violence is entirely on ethno-religious strife and Islamic militancy, another important angle, the Afghan drug connection, has been overlooked. The violence started in Osh, which is a key shipment point for Afghan drugs in Central Asia, and it is likely that the violence was connected to competition over the narcotics trade, which has boomed since the US invasion of Afghanistan.

But there is also a point at which we must all take responsibility for our actions; we cannot always blame the media for our own gullibility. A change in the way we think starts with us. Fear is an easy tool with which to control the way people think, and wae should keep this in mind when we decide what exactly it is that we fear.

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