The phrase ‘banality of evil’ was made famous by Hannah Arendt 52 years ago, while interpreting the significance of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi functionary during the Holocaust. Violent Islamism is often compared to fascism but it’s not banality that the events of the last two weeks bring to mind. It’s crumminess.
Some of the international reporting will have no truck with either banality or crumminess, of course. Only a super-sized Satan on the scale of Milton’s Lucifer will do. So Daesh (aka Isis) is described as an existential threat to the West, just like Nazism and Communism once were. The organiser of the Paris attacks – horrific acts of terror in part because people were killed as casually and easily as fish shot in a barrel – is called a mastermind.
I can see the allure. The idea of hardened enemies wedded to ideals incommensurate with our own makes this battle a war of the worlds, a clash of civilisations. A super-villain flatters our own sense of self-worth and, more importantly, aggrandises our leaders. What a transformation we have seen in President Francois Hollande, from a man cowering behind multiple failures to a war president haughtily telling Germany that the war on terror must override any pact of fiscal discipline.
Alas, a look at the detailed expert reports reveals only a crummy picture.
Much has been made – in grave discussion as well as in cartoons and stand-up – about Islamist fighters brainwashed into dying by the prospect of a heaven that offers them a paradise of virgins at their disposal. A different story is told by intercepted phone-calls between a Daesh fighter, surrounded by enemies, and Daesh HQ.
Fearing for his life, he asked for reinforcements. He reported his brother was already dead. HQ replied that his brother was in heaven already and that he should look forward to joining him. The fighter, shaking with fear, replied he didn’t believe in that heaven.
An exception? Reports routinely show that many Daesh recruits often do not have more than a cursory knowledge of Islam (remember the recruits who bought an Islam For Dummies to read on their way to Syria?). Their association with violent radicalism can also be very short.
Take the biographies of three of the people involved in the Paris attacks (among others reported in The Guardian). The current fugitive, Saleh Abdeslam, and his brother, Brahim, both used torun that most un-Islamic of establishments, a bar. The bar Brahim managed was closed down two weeks before the attacks on the grounds that it was used for drug dealing.
Crummy lives, crummy deaths. It doesn’t make what they did less wicked and their living partners in crime less dangerous
Hasna Aït Boulahsen was the woman who gained notoriety for her verbal exchanges with the police while they surrounded the apartment she was in (before another person with her blew the whole place up). She was known to family and acquaintances as a lost soul; for her psychological instability and, until shortly before the attacks, her love of vodka and parties.
The fatherless, 20-year-old Bilal Hadfi’s affinity for Islamist violence only became apparent to his college friends earlier this year, from his reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders.
He left for Syria a mere five weeks later. For the Paris attacks, he attempted to get into the Stade de France but was turned away. He died by blowing himself up in a semi-deserted street.
Crummy lives, crummy deaths. It doesn’t make what they did less wicked and their living partners in crime less dangerous. But it pays to get an accurate picture of what we’re up against. Otherwise we might make a bad situation worse.
Belgium is not overreacting to an imminent threat. It is good sense to go into temporary lockdown. It helps the police not spread themselves too thinly. It reduces the mobility of suspects.
But none of this is in reaction to an existential threat. An enemy with weapons of mass destruction is an existential threat. The current lockdown in Brussels is compatible with a hunt for several dangerous criminals, who make up a very small fraction of Europe’s Muslim population.
It is not playing with semantics to insist that Daesh is a terrorist group not a State. There are strategies for taking out a State and others for taking out a terrorist group.
When al-Qaeda was bombed out of Afghanistan, it simultaneously became less dangerous and more difficult to anticipate. Its weakened organisation and increased surveillance meant it had to depend small operations (difficult to detect in terms of arms and financial movements) and on very raw recruits (some unknown to intelligence services until a few weeks before an attack).
And once al-Qaeda was decapitated, after Bin Laden’s assassination, the organisation grew even weaker. Today, 14 years after 9/11, it is a faded alternative to Daesh.
None of this would have happened with a rogue state, which cannot be decapitated or displaced, only destroyed. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, couldn’t be destroyed; only dispersed and disorganised.
It is true that Daesh is different since it controls territory and oil revenues, which it can use to invest in cyberwarfare on our fundamental infrastructure. But in this it is different from other terrorist and criminal organisations only in the scale of its wealth. In the territory it occupies, it is experienced as a brutal occupier, not a legitimate authority, buying recruits with salaries that are twice the average and a good supply of Red Bull in territories where ordinary citizens need food kitchens to survive.
To recognise all this is not to minimise the security challenge we face. On the contrary, it is to demand more of our leaders. It is to expect that Hollande does not use this crisis as an electoral opportunity.
It is to demand of our European leaders that they bring pressure to bear on Turkey and other countries, whose mafias have dealings with Daesh.
It is to bring pressure on the region – once more, not least Turkey – to lift the constraints currently imposed on Kurdish fighters in Syria and Iraq; they have proved Daesh’s most redoubtable enemy but are kept penned in, just in case, in helping to liberate Syria and Iraq they go on to demand an independent Kurdistan.
Talking of a Europe at war absolves our leaders from facing some hard questions about responsibilities they are currently ducking. Recognising the crumminess of the evil is the first necessary step in not being swept away by hysterics.