Christchurch massacre: intelligence better than censorship at curbing terror attacks

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks during a press conference with Police Minister Stuart Nash at the Parliament House in Wellington on March 21, 2019. - New Zealand is banning the sale of assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons with almost immediate effect, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on March 21, rapidly making good on a pledge to tighten the country's gun laws. (Photo by Yelim LEE / AFP)

One name the world is likely to remember after the massacre of the innocents in Christchurch last Friday is that of Jacinda Ardern. The passion and sincerity of the New Zealand Prime Minister have marked her out as a rare kind of leader. So when she called for the name of the killer never to be used, it was an appeal that had real moral force. It seems repugnant that he be rewarded with the notoriety he sought, when his victims’ names are likely to be forgotten.

Moral force, but does Ardern’s suggestion have any practical force? Would erasing the murderer’s identity make similar acts of terror less likely? She appeared to argue that it would. And though not arguing for a legal ban on the use of his name, she therefore became aligned with a very powerful strain of thought, which is that the publicity given to extremists and their views is itself a major cause of their actions.

This view took parochial wings over the weekend when the BBC’s Newsnight aired in the wake of Christchurch was attacked for having “given a platform” or a “voice” to the leader of a far-right British group, Generation Identity.

The “voice” in question was in audio only and was given about a minute, divided into three clips, the clear purpose of the film being to establish a link between the ideas propagated by his group and the mad views of the Christchurch murderer.

Somehow, however, for critics this had become a “platform” which was offensive and also might lead to a “normalisation” of far-right ideology.

There is something supernatural about this. One of my colleagues reminded me of the influence of the Harry Potter stories, where for much of the time the ultimate demon is “he who must not be named”. Many older cultures believe spirits come when you use their names.

Likewise, the objection to Newsnight seemed to be the hearing of the voice itself, as though it had an occult power.

We in Britain have been here before. In 1988, after nearly 20 years of violence in Northern Ireland, the Thatcher government effectively made the use of voices of members or supporters of banned organisations illegal, to deny terrorists “the oxygen of publicity”. If they were deprived of such coverage, the argument went, then their arguments would go unheard and their violence would be less effective.

The government chose this odd form partly because it would not ban outright the reporting of the words of bad people in all media, and thus could really focus only on the heard voices on radio or television. Those of us in broadcasting at the time well remember what a farce resulted.

The BBC, in a film about the conditions in the Maze prison, interviewed republican and loyalist prisoners about their lives and was able to use their real voices. But as soon as a prisoner appeared who represented the IRA in the prison, his voice had to be dubbed. He was complaining about the prison’s sausage rolls.

The ban strengthened the argument of Sinn Fein and others that the government was oppressive, and it made the authorities look ridiculous.
It also weakened Britain’s reputation abroad as a champion of free speech.

And, of course, it didn’t work. There probably never was anyone who became an IRA gunman simply because he or she had heard a clip of Gerry Adams being interviewed on the news. Nor is there likely to be someone whose transition to becoming a far-right terrorist is conditional on hearing the name of the Christchurch killer or catching 20 seconds of Generation Identity on a Newsnight film.

If notoriety is the spur, the logic wouldn’t be to ban the words or avoid the name, but rather to significantly reduce coverage of and reaction to the event itself. Some people do argue for this. Perhaps if we reduced our expressed horror levels, the logic runs, the terrorists would be demoralised and would stop.

Back in the days of the far-left Baader-Meinhof gang, the West German government tried just this tactic. It created in effect a news blackout on terrorist kidnappings. But even before the internet, the ability of foreign press to disseminate news undermined such attempts.

In any case, it seems that the “stop them being heard” approach to terrorism misunderstands how terrorists are created. Before anything else, radicalisation is about ideology, not fame. Far-right terror, from Utoya island to Christchurch, rests on an assumption of “white” or “national” victimhood, in which good people are deprived of their birthrights by marauding foreigners in league with shadowy elites. A strong belief in conspiracy theories is essential in this belief system.

Bizarrely, the best two examples of this thinking in the mainstream this week came from a president and a president’s son. Donald Trump Jr’s column in the Daily Telegraph, while ostensibly dealing with Brexit, was practically a concert recital of far-right themes and conspiracist ideology, from “the elites who control London from Brussels” via “the Democrats and deep-state operatives in our justice system” to the claim that “democracy in the UK is all but dead”. Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey publicly blamed Western government conspirators for Christchurch and seemed to pledge action against them.

But the next lurking killer is not reading the Telegraph. Such people find each other in whatever way they can: social media, and if not that then on the dark net, and if not that then by word of mouth, or gatherings in pubs or clearings in woods. Intelligence and surveillance, not censorship, are the tools you need to track such people.

Finally, a terrorist needs the means to kill. For the Christchurch murderer, that was provided by New Zealand’s incredibly lax gun laws. Never mind his name; why in god’s name would an ordinary New Zealander need an assault rifle or three? To fight off a particularly savage flock of sheep? He couldn’t have destroyed so many lives so easily without those unnecessary weapons.

The Times