Andrew L. Urban
Tolerance can kill you. The paradox of tolerance, as espoused by Karl Popper, is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. Ring a bell?
Home grown terrorists in the West are difficult to detect and suppress. Many jihadists welcome death as martyrdom, leaving security forces without a practical threat. The Bondi shooters fall into this category, in my view.
So what leverage do our lawmakers have?
US Red Beret, Terry Schappert – Master Sergeant (ret) 82nd Airborne Division Special Forces – has an idea. I caught his idea on a Fox News interview: “Talking about home grown terrorists … sometimes you need to become what you aren’t to protect the future survival of what you actually are.
“The guys who are living here in the West … the killers, not the regular Islamic people. What do they care about? They hate the country they live in. What they care about is their family; they care about that group. So any time any of these guys does this (act of terrorism) their whole family should get picked up and deported, back to the country of their origin.
“I talked to my driver from the airport, he’s from Pakistan. I know a bit about Pakistan. We were talking about Pakistan in a friendly way, and I posited this to him, and he went: ‘hmm, that would work’.
“I’ve spent a lot of my life, almost 25 years, in the Middle East. I’ve lived with Arabs. I’ve trained their soldiers, I’ve fought with them, bled with them, I’ve watched them die. I was a Green Beret medic; I’ve delivered their babies, I’ve pulled their teeth, I’ve inoculated their farm animals. You’ve got to understand them, how these folks think. They’re worried about their family, their clan and their tribe. They don’t have a national identity. That’s why it’s such a hard sell. And most Middle Eastern countries are either kingdoms or theocracies or dictatorships … you have to crush them (clans & tribes) to hold the place together.
“You take from them what they care about and it would slow them down, if not stop them…”
Terrorism and counterterrorism expert Professor Clive Williams MG at Australian National University has “no doubt that such an approach (deporting whole families of convicted terrorists) would open the flood gates of intelligence from families about family members who have become radicalised – and it would no doubt be generally effective from a counterterrorism point of view.”
The ironic reality, though, is that the very countries at risk are unable to put such a policy into effect. Professor Williams says “it is not going to happen in a Western democracy – particularly in the US. There are many underemployed lawyers prepared to take on the government pro-bono if it tried to do something like this. There would be the added complication of family members who have no citizenship other that of their adopted Western country, or were born there. It would also be unfair to older family members who came to get away from violence – it usually being alienated younger family members that are the terrorism problem. In other words, it would probably work in principle, but is never going to happen – because we live in democracies and value the rights of the individual.”
And that’s the irony: because we value the rights of the individual, we are hamstrung in dealing with those that do not. Still, the idea has merit, at least in some iteration.
A better approach, says Professor Williams, “might be probationary citizenship for migrants that could be withdrawn under certain circumstances, for example conviction for criminal offences, terrorism etc.” Another good idea.
In this post-Bondi massacre era, purging Australia of those whose ideology and the attendant propensity for violence represents the biggest challenge for Australia. Every tool that could help should be examined. But I suspect Australia lacks the political cohort who can make laws that arm our natural tolerance with shark’s teeth. I hope to be proven wrong. Soon.