Drive a truck down a New York street and knock people down, and you’re “a sick and deranged person”. But what if you drive a truck down a New York street, knock people down and shout, “Allahu Akbar”? You are a Muslim terrorist, a global news story and a threat to the security of nations. You drive a president to “extreme vetting” procedures and bring down a plague on all Muslims who dare to visit the United States.
When President Trump first rushed to tweet about Tuesday’s New York killings, he sensibly assumed the “deranged person” thesis. His one-man global newsfeed may exaggerate bad news when it involves foreign cities – as in recent London terror attacks – but he is reluctant to do so when the news is about his home town. Only when told about the “Allahu Akbar” cry did he change his stance. Then he had to be a man of power, defender of his nation.
It appears that the culprit is yet another “lone wolf”. He has the familiar background of rootless immigrant, described by those know him as quiet and hard-working, an Uber driver who passed all security checks, and who had a wife and family. His entry into America in 2010 was from a country, Uzbekistan, that is not on Trump’s list of “dangerously” Muslim places. Yet Trump could still demand an enhancement of immigration control as part of his “war on terror”.
Those who know and admire the United States recognise it for two qualities. The first is its robustness towards the slings and arrows of fortune, as exemplified by its attitude to gun ownership, unemployment and healthcare. America’s public realm borders on the callous, echoing the tough individualism of the wild west. It is proud to distance itself from the safety nets and sensitivities of Europe’s welfare societies.
This was manifest last month, in Trump’s response to the massacre by machine gun of 58 people, and the wounding of 500 others, in Las Vegas. There was no mention of “extreme vetting” of gun owners, despite their posing a threat a thousand times greater to Americans than any terrorist. There was no hint that any change in the criminal law, or in the wider regulation of this particular pastime, was due. Las Vegas has passed into history as just one of those things that happen. Guns are a very American form of terror.
Yet amid this toughness lurks a pathological wimpishness towards the outside world. The most powerful and secure nation on Earth, its territory last threatened with invasion by the British in 1815, quivers with fear before an imagined army of hostile forces massing across every border and beyond every sea. Its budget groans under the burden of “homeland defence”. Its politics is dominated by “tough on terror”. The reality is that by no stretch of geography is America’s security, let alone its existence, under threat.
This leads to a syndrome displayed by Trump and his predecessor-but-one, George W Bush: the construction of scenarios requiring presidential reaction. Bush’s response, desperate not to seem weak in confronting terror, was the disastrous “wars of 9/11”. Trump in opposition ridiculed these wars. Yet from his first day in office, he searched for similar enemies against whom to arm his rhetoric. Hence his imposition of migration controls that have proved discriminatory, unjust and inoperable.
The politics of fear is poison to the body politic. That Britain is no less vulnerable to it was illustrated by last month’s claim by its head of MI5, that the nation is “more under threat than ever”. I am sure Andrew Parker is right to worry about Islamic State fighters returning to the UK and what they may wish to do, but it is most unlikely they will kill even remotely as many people as Britain has faced in many decades of homegrown terrorism, without national security being undermined.
Lone-wolf suicide killers are the toughest of all criminal nuts to crack. Even if it one day becomes conceivable to match facial recognition to mass surveillance, and to tail all suspect individuals and sniff out all explosives, it will remain impossible to forestall a determined suicide killer. Prevention on the ground soon degenerates into the absurd clutter now on display in London’s tourist West End – a blight of ugly barriers, bollards, cones and gates. They indicate nothing beyond a city in panic-stricken thrall to terror, and no mayor with the guts to call a halt.
The reality is that a modern city-dweller is far more at risk from traffic accidents, gangland knives, air pollution and hospital infection than from terrorism. No reasonably open society can work without a degree of vulnerability. This has long included politically motivated violence. But of all the risks to life and limb that a modern citizen runs, such violence is almost trivial in its incidence.
Terrorism is a means to an end: that of coercive publicity. It will happen. It will happen especially where we polarise confrontations of race and religion round the world. It will happen when weak people cannot resort to armies or bombs or drones, to gain leverage in enforcing their ideas of how society should be run. There is no such thing as a terrorist state. There are just people who use terror as a means to an end.
The only power that can be deployed against this curse is the power of perspective. It is to treat terror as a criminal means of making a point. This has not changed since Joseph Conrad described the terrorist as “terrible in the simplicity of calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world … like a pest in the street full of men”. What cannot be prevented is best accommodated. It is the psychological price we pay to live in an open and liberal society.
These dangers pale against those our grandparents and their forebears had to manage. We are incomparably safer than humanity has ever been before. A community that can devote so much attention to suppressing contentious gatherings, offensive remarks and “invalidations of my identity” is not a society under existential threat. As for how best to help the traumatised people of New York, the answer is to do the opposite of what Americans did to European cities hit by such killings, which was to boycott them. The answer is to book a New York holiday, now.