The instinctive reaction to the idea of testing for terrorists, particularly psychological testing with a view to establishing some kind of rating on a scale, is a fairly strong negative one. A "potential terrorism rating" appears to me to be unhelpful, not least because, even if somehow it was accurate, it would only be so for one moment in time and the vulnerability of any one individual to extremist ideologies evolves according to his personal development and the circumstances which condition his world.

 

For a start, it mirrors the recent work of many security services over recent months - which I mentioned in a previous posting - focusing neither on al-Qaida the organisation, nor al-Qaida-ism the ideology but on the vulnerability of certain individuals to being drawn into violent militancy and on how to recognise those individuals early enough to divert them from it. Here we are in a world of sociology and psychiatry that is far from classic counter-terrorism that has traditionally been dominated by police, military and security service thinking that gives relatively short shrift to "social" explanations.

And much of what Razzaque says is plain common sense. You would not expect nuanced thinking, underpinned by doubt and a serious interrogation of sources, from fanatics, be they Marxist, Islamist, Zionist or whatever. A tendency to authoritarianism is more difficult to establish and comes dangerously close to discredited theories about the existence of a Nazi typology explaining the worst horrors of the second world war.

Razzaque is however right to focus on integration and cultural identity as key. One reason for the failure of the neoconservative project in the Middle East is that it relied almost entirely on the individual as a rational economic actor and fundamentally underestimated the collective and the emotional.

French analysts on Islamic militancy talk of the "British paradox". The Muslim community in the UK, they say, is the best integrated in Europe but Britain suffers most from violent extremism. One possibility is that the violence itself is a function of integration - or at least the British way of integration and its combination with broader geopolitical factors such as the war in Iraq. It has always interested me that the four targets hit in the 7/7 attacks were have no real military, cultural or political significance but are all profoundly representative of a multicultural society - Tavistock Square, full of tourists and students, Edgware Road, the heart of the Arab community, Aldgate East, the traditional entry point of immigrants and still home to a large Bangladeshi community and one of the most multicultural spots in the world - Kings Cross underground on a rush-hour morning.

Razzaque's tests fail to convince however. One problem of looking just at the individual - security services now talk about radicalisation before recruitment rather than vice versa - is that it tends to minimise broad political factors external to any one person. Also, one key element that is increasingly evident is the role of group dynamics in the formation and the radicalisation of a group. It is difficult to test for the propensity to interact in certain ways. A test which highlighted leaders would be likely to miss the followers. Both are necessary to most terrorist operations.

And finally, perhaps the most obvious point of all, Razzaque's test in fact looks for vulnerability to any kind of fanaticism, closed thinking, all-encompassing worldview or ideology, not just what makes a 7/7 bomber or 9/11 hijacker. We already have people who should be looking out for the danger signs there: family, friends, teachers, colleagues. If we do not systematically test for susceptibility to cults, rightwing extremism and nutty conspiracy theories of all kinds then we should not be testing for anything else.

Jason Burke 

Source: The Guardian