Don't take holiday snaps

The geographer Ghazi Falah was caught between Israel and the Arab world, John Gravios writes in the American Chronicle of Higher Education.

Falah, with dual Israeli and Canadian citizenship, was held by the Shin Bet allegedly for spying until released after 23 days following a campaign by fellow geographers and other academics.

He felt he was being questioned more about his academic career - and that it was held as an accusation against him - than about any putative spying.

Most of all, the article concludes, Mr. Falah is haunted by the sense that his imprisonment was meant to send a message.

"I feel it was like a punishment," he says, meant to scare him and other Palestinian scholars into self-censorship.

And that's the way of police states, the purpose of interrogation and torture: not solely the punishment of the individual but the breaking of civil society and the crushing of any independence of thought and autonomy of action.  If the Palestinians are to be cowed then any who attain prominence of any sort - within or outside the Palestinian territories - become legitimate targets. 

And across the world the police seem to go to the same school.  Keep interrogation and torture hidden and secret so that no-one can see what is happening, but make sure it's an open secret so that it can terrify the rest of the society.  There is nothing so powerfully destructive as a dirty secret that everyone knows.

In the end the use of force is unsustainable - but in the mean time too many are broken and suffer from it.

Where do terrorists come from?

There is an interesting article at The American called What Makes a Terrorist ,by Alan Krueger.

First- not poverty or lack of education, though these have been fastened on as explanations.

On the contrary, higher education is correlated with greater support for terrorism in research in certain Islamic countries.  The indications are that actual terrorists are likely to be less poor and more educated than the average in their countries of origin.

Krueger is an economist and sees things in terms of supply and demand, including terrorism.  As people choose to be suicide bombers for a a range of reasons, he says, reducing the supply is difficult.  More sensible is to reduce demand by the dual programme of aggressively reducing the capacity (technical, financial) of terror groups to act while, simultaneously, enabling political engagement and non-violent protest.

Thus the absence of civil rights and sufficient GDP may be expressed in a greater number of potential and actual terrorists.  These were people taking reasoned decisions to try to impose an extreme solution on a political problem by the use of violence.

Thus (in my opinion) terrorists and terrorist groups should be treated as rational, as open to reason and engagement.  The necessary 'war' on terror should be targetted as precisely as possible (I accept Krueger's suggested targets). 

And it should be accompanied by, and perhaps be secondary to, political programmes which enable populations to have the capacity of political engagement, to be able to make a difference.

Countries which use harsh repressive measures and torture will breed violence much of which will rebound against them.  (It has to be acknowledged that many such countries do not engender international terrorism and that a strong universalist ideological programme may also be a necessary condition for the supply side of terrorism.)  But at the very least this provides a strong self-interest argument (where moral arguments seem insufficient) for western countries to stop supporting repressive regimes.