Terrorists Have the Last Laugh

“Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets… Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”

So says an insane nihilistic clown to a severe burns victim with a dual personality. But there’s a certain tragic truth to the Joker’s words in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man accused of trying to blow up an aeroplane en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day, appeared in court yesterday to plead not guilty. But whilst the bomb plot failed, it was, in many ways, a resounding victory for al Qaeda.

The purpose of terrorism, after all, is not really to kill people. Nations don’t go to war with the primary objective of obliterating as many enemy soldiers as possible; it’s just a gruesome means to a more important end. As Tony Blair so succinctly said on July 7^th 2005, “The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people.” And as Western governments scramble to introduce increasingly drastic security measures, turning air travel into an ever worsening nightmare for millions of commuters, the terrorists have succeeded in doing exactly that.

The British government is already rushing in controversial new scanners which threaten to breach child porn laws, the Americans want air marshals on every flight coming into the US, whilst Labour MP Khalid Mahmood has told us that racial and religious profiling is the price we’ll have to pay for our safety.

It goes without saying that everyone wants to feel safe whilst traveling, especially when they’re in a metal tube three miles high. I for one will never forget standing outside King’s Cross on the morning of 7/7 feeling very thankful that I hadn’t woken up twenty minutes earlier. But are there full body scanners at every ticket counter? Are there armed police officers in every carriage? Is every brown skinned man with a beard stopped and searched? Should we fear for our lives every time we get on the underground? No, because for all the millions of people who travel on the tube day in, day out, the four who took bombs on with them have not made us all paranoid with fear.

It is, of course, important to have security at airports, just as it is important to have intelligence services working to prevent terrorist plots. But it’s also important to keep a sense of perspective and not to allow one thwarted attempt to make us lose our minds. Making air travel ever more stressful for commuters for the sake of their safety is one thing. But by introducing measures that attack the human rights and civil liberties free society holds dear, we are doing the terrorists’ jobs for them.