Let’s hit the terrorists where it hurts
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
The barbarism in Brussels, a grotesque, misanthropic assault on flyers and commuters, has sent shockwaves through Europe. Many feel scared. Will London be next? Or Paris again? There’s already heated talk about what needs to change after the Brussels bloodshed. Perhaps border controls in Europe should be tightened. Given that the airport bombings took place in the check-in area, before security, maybe we need security checks at the very entrances to airports. And perhaps big public events should be called off for a while. There’s talk of Brussels going into lockdown for weeks, football matches being cancelled. ‘Stay off the streets’, everyone says.
This desire to stay home, this urge to limit the number of big gatherings that fatality-hungry terrorists love to target, is understandable. But it’s wrong. Europe’s response to this outrage should not be to change everything — it should be to change nothing. It should be to carry on with life as normal. Or, better still, with a keener determination to partake in and celebrate the openness and the freedoms and the huddling of humans in airports and restaurants and rock stadiums that these terrorists so clearly hate. They want us to feel fearful as we do the most everyday things of jumping on a metro train or clinking champagne glasses with a lover. So our response, our best blow to these lovers of death and loathers of the joys and associations of modern life, should be to refuse to feel that fear, and to live even more freely after the Brussels barbarism than we did before it.
Of course, action will need to be taken. Serious action. The authorities in Belgium and elsewhere must devote considerable energy to breaking up terror cells and punishing their members. No time should be wasted in bringing these hateful fantasists to justice. But this campaign should be discrete. It should be a clean, thorough, intelligence-led hunt for terror cells, not a demand for a society-wide, constant caution, for every citizen to feel scared, dodge crowded spaces, change their lives. Officials should hunt the terrorists, not do to our societies the very thing the terrorists want them to: make them less free, less open, more rigid, agitated, on edge.
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