REVIEW & OUTLOOK
London, Again
A 21st-century threat; 19th century laws.
Due to some combination of good luck and possible incompetence, Londoners were spared serious casualties in yesterday's apparent bus and train bombings. This is not something to take much comfort in. As the second attack in as many weeks, it means the Israelization of the war on terror may now be upon Britain and, sooner or later perhaps, Europe and America, too.
By "Israelization," we refer to the steady stream of bus, cafe, grocery, mall and street bombings to which Israeli civilians have been wantonly subjected these past several years. Unlike the September 11 attacks in the U.S. or last year's Madrid bombings, none of these have been terrorist "spectaculars," in the sense that they required extensive preparation and resulted in three- or four-figure death tolls.
Even so, the effects of Palestinian-style terror are in many ways more devastating. No place feels safe; ordinary living becomes vastly more difficult; security costs to government and businesses are massive. And the killing adds up: In a country as small as Israel, nearly everyone had a personal connection to one of the 1,000 Israelis murdered in terrorist attacks over the past five years.
Yet "Israelization" also means the methods Israelis have refined over the years to contain the terrorist threat. Throughout the course of the intifada, these methods came in for high-minded criticism as being violations of civil and international law. But as Australian Prime Minister John Howard observed at a press conference in London yesterday with British counterpart Tony Blair, many of the laws currently on the books in the West amount to "19th-century legal responses" to a 21st-century threat.
Chief among Israel's innovations--since adopted by the Bush Administration--has been to treat terrorism as something different from criminal behavior, and to respond to it as something more than a law-enforcement problem. In some instances, this has led to actions that make civil libertarians uneasy, particularly the round-up and imprisonment of hundreds of Palestinians deemed security risks, although this has been key to reducing the number of terror attacks by more than 90%.
Yet one need not endorse such tactics for Britain and Europe to see that the current approach is failing. Earlier this week, Germany's Constitutional Court set free Mamoun Darkazanli, a German national who is suspected of being Osama bin Laden's principal money man in Europe, on what amounted to a legalism regarding the constitutionality of a Spanish judge's extradition request. That followed on last month's release of Mounir el Motassadeq, who had previously been convicted by a Hamburg court as an accomplice in the 9/11 attacks. Here again, he owes his release mainly to legal niceties, which al Qaeda members are trained to manipulate.
Much the same goes in Britain. Late last year, Britain's Law Lords ruled as unconstitutional a 2001 antiterrorism law that gave the government the right to detain indefinitely terrorist suspects who were not British nationals, provided they could not be returned to their home countries (where they might risk torture).
The Law Lords' reasoning may have been sound, but it raised the question of what, if anything, Britain could seriously do about suspected foreign jihadists living in its midst other than set them free. As we have learned in recent days, it is precisely such attitudes, along with a laissez-faire approach to all forms of "political" speech, including speech that incites to violence and sedition, that turned London into the European haven of choice for Muslim extremists. Mr. Blair's government is now in the process of outlining plans to ban even indirect statements of support for terror and violence, which might or might not pass constitutional muster.
All this has ramifications for the U.S. Even as Europe tinkers with new ways of dealing with terrorism, critics of the Bush Administration seek to return the U.S. to where Europe is today. Thus the relentless assaults on the legality of Guantanamo, the renewal of the Patriot Act and the treatment of U.S. citizens, such as Jose Padilla, who are held as enemy combatants.
But whatever one thinks is the best legal framework required to deal with domestic and foreign terrorist threats, what the bombings in London make clear is that the old legal tool kits no longer work. And the sooner we learn to "Israelize" our approach to terror--both in Europe and the U.S.--the better the chances our lives won't be Israelized in turn.
