David Jessel explores some of the thoughts on terrorism put 10 him on a recent trip to the United States for BBC 1's award-winning series Heart of the Matter.
| 1 | 1 | Keeping a sense of proportion in the face of terrorist atrocity may seem a counsel of | |
| 2 | appeasement. What moral constraint, after all, binds the terrorist? If we are at war with | ||
| 3 | terror, is the victim world expected to fight with hands tied behind its back by the moral | ||
| 4 | cords of St Thomas Aquinas' definition of a 'just war'? In fact, after seven centuries the | ||
| 5 | principal threads of Aquinas' prescription stand up remarkably well to a modern view of | ||
| 6 | what is just and opportune: that the reaction of a state should be in proportion to the | ||
| 7 | wound inflicted upon it, that such action should not merely add to the volume of | ||
| 8 | violence, and that the outcome of any counter-attack should not lead to a greater | ||
| 9 | injustice than that which was the casus belli. | ||
| 2 | 10 | The tactic of a punitive expedition clearly has limited relevance in the context of | |
| 11 | fanatical terrorism, given the definition of a fanatic as 'someone who knows he is doing | ||
| 12 | exactly what the Lord would do if the Lord were also in possession of the facts'. | ||
| 13 | Punishment of a people, however reprehensible their deeds, loses much moral and | ||
| 14 | practical validity if it leads, far from a recognition of sin, to a more acute sense of | ||
| 15 | righteous injustice. It is also , of course, a tactic of terrorists, as for instance in Northern | ||
| 16 | Ireland, to provoke a reaction - better still, an over-reaction - from authority to fuel the | ||
| 17 | fire of tension and hate. | ||
| 3 | 18 | The former director of the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, is certain that, after | |
| 19 | Beirut1) , his old organization will have submitted to the President a list of retaliatory | ||
| 20 | options. Admiral Turner, who served President Carter during the 444-day Iranian | ||
| 21 | hostage crisis, hopes those options have been qualified in two ways: first , how specific therefore | ||
| 22 | how just - would the retaliation be? Secondly, 'Do you want to go before the | ||
| 23 | court of world opinion and acknowledge that the US - or Great Britain - is willing to take | ||
| 24 | the law into its own hands and kill people without due process of law?' | ||
| 4 | 25 | Turner sees the question of yielding to terrorism as one of degree, therefore of | |
| 26 | flexibility; if terrorist demands are simply unfulfillable without unacceptably dire moral | ||
| 27 | and political compromise, then they must be resisted. The US, ultimately, could not | ||
| 28 | return the Shah to Iran to face torture and execution without doing violence to the | ||
| 29 | political integrity of its alliances and the moral integrity of humanitarianism. A lesser | ||
| 30 | demand might have been met. Pragmatism, in this context, is not necessarily a vice; it | ||
| 31 | may be as wise as it is weak to yield to the acceptable in the face of the intolerable. One | ||
| 32 | has only to imagine a hijacked airliner, wired with explosives to thwart any rescue | ||
| 33 | attempt, and with the hourly executions of innocents, to see the shortcomings of the | ||
| 34 | vaunting slogan of 'No surrender, no negotiation'. | ||
| 5 | 35 | Terrorism, after all, however despicable, is merely a tactic ; terror is a tool as old as | |
| 36 | war. Wars are fought with tactics, but for reasons; there must be a cause to generate such | ||
| 37 | frustrated fury. It might be the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people, or majority | ||
| 38 | rule for black South Africa. History, however annoyingly, often seems to be on the side of | ||
| 39 | the terrorist; at least two men, Kenyatta and Makarios - although they may never | ||
| 40 | personally have handled a Sten gun - have dined as honoured guests at Buckingham | ||
| 41 | Palace. At the same time, of course, terrorism can frustrate history itself; it is manifest | ||
| 42 | that the IRA complicate and prejudice any tentative step towards Irish unity. Does the | ||
| 43 | resort to terror of itself invalidate the cause in which it is a mere, terrible tactic? | ||
| David Jessel in The Listener, September 5, 1985 |