[F]ree speech is the fundamental civil liberty without which there can be no others. Democracy requires debate and challenge, the rule of law requires the right to be heard in court, genuine education requires questioning and access to information. Without free speech none of these things is possible.

A. C. Grayling

Liberty in The Age of Terror

Anjem Choudary has been convicted at the Old Bailey of inviting support for ISIS, and is due to be sentenced on the 6th September. I have spent some time soaking in the vogue sentiment around this topic and am wary that what I am to write will largely be against popular opinion. Given the thesis of my last piece, I am conscious of the possibility that I might develop a reputation of being a contrarian in the habit of defending individuals and organisations whom I often dislike and on occasion detest, especially after reading Nick Cohen’s quip in What’s Left when he described being a contrarian as “an affectation most people get over around puberty”. I make no apology for doing so, and by the end of this I hope to have persuaded you that Choudary’s conviction and (in all likelihood) imprisonment for this offence, will not have been a good thing.

The offence for which Choudary was found guilty was one of inviting support for a proscribed organisation. This is contrary to section 12(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000, the wording of which requires no further elaboration – it simply says exactly that: “a person commits an offence if he invites support for a proscribed organisation”. There have not been many indictments for this offence, and as such the words “invite” and “support” have not been thoroughly tested; nor have interpretations been forced through stated cases. They can be taken at face value to hold their most literal meanings. The majority of my work on this blog has been written on the subjects of liberty and religion, and more specifically my wish for more of the former, and less of the latter. I have previously drawn a line between speech and action as follows: Speech becomes action where the means of the communication infringes upon the freedom of a receiver to ignore it (thus constituting harassment); or where its content constitutes a threat or untrue message (such as yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre when no fire exists), where the receiver would reasonably be expected to make some imminent and otherwise unnecessary change to their activities through fear of physical peril.

The expression of an opinion will always fall on the ‘speech’ side of this line, and as such, I submit that it should never be within the jurisdiction of the State to decide what opinions may be expressed by its citizens. ‘Actions’ may be constituted by words uttered or written. For example, if I refused to abate my incessant writing of letters to you, regardless of their content, I would have infringed on your freedom to ignore those letters, and would thus be harassing you. Of course most ‘actions’ for which the State is rightly in the business of deciding acceptability have nothing to do with words; they are assaults, damages and thefts.

Against the backdrop of our war against Jihadism (and make no mistake; a war is exactly what this is) these distinctions can be considered from perspectives of both principle and pragmatism, and I believe that my position wins in both respects. The free expression of ideas and opinions, however offensive or foul, is a necessary liberty. It is the natural result of a secular outlook which acknowledges the ultimate admission of agnosticism across all debates. It stems from an acknowledgement that as we cannot know anything with philosophical certainty, that we are bound to strive to proportion our beliefs and our policies to the available evidence and argument. To stem the flow of ideas within this argument is to diminish the prospect of finding truth for all of us; and as John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, if the ideas or opinions in question are wrong, we also lose “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” The principle of free expression is almost universally accepted. In fact, criticisms often come couched in the vacuous “I agree with free speech, but…” dictum. The lines of these “buts” are often drawn in poor places without following the logical implications of one’s distinction to its reductio ad absurdum. No, the criticisms are invariably over matters of pragmatism; and here, in a discussion concerning terrorism and ‘radicalisation’, where the stakes are as high as they can be, the principle of free expression can be properly tested in the context of an age of terror.

I submit that more will be lost in this war if we legislate against the brazen Anjem Choudaries [yes, I’ve relegated his surname to ‘improper noun’ status] of this world, who wish to openly declare their disgusting beliefs, and demonstrate their pride in them. Their willingness to advocate their perverse desires to live under Sharia, and to seek to garner support for terrorist organisations such as ISIS (note that raising money constitutes ‘action’ and therefore goes beyond ‘support), has advantages for the police and the intelligence services. Beliefs matter: we should not be surprised that our world is inhabited by individuals who are willing to steal and destroy the lives of others by blowing themselves up in crowded places, while beliefs in heaven and hell – and the necessary conditions for gaining entry into the former – are so prevalent. Sam Harris’ utter vindication for the concerns and views which he has expressed for the last fifteen years has come, and it is unequivocal. The latest episode of his podcast, What do Jihadists Really Want, is forty-five minutes long, and is densely populated with information of paramount importance [I cannot recommend highly enough that you take the time to listen to this, and listen carefully]. It turns out that the Jihadists actually believe what they say they do, as the clear-thinking among our commentators have been saying all along.

Those beliefs in and of themselves, and their expression, while that expression does not infringe on the liberties of anyone else, are but a very useful guide for what the subscribers of these beliefs might want to achieve if they had the capability to. This is precious information, and we shouldn’t squander our opportunities to use it, yet this is exactly what section 12(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000 does. There is a fascinating and tragically entertaining video on YouTube titled ‘Merry Christmas Mr Islamist’ it features Maajid Nawaz conducting interviews with Muslims who fall on the more strict interpretation of their religion. One thing that we might have up until recently been able to rely on these closet Islamists to do, was when push comes to shove, declare what they actually believe. Having advocated for the freedom of Muslims to live under Sharia in the United Kingdom, when asked the question of whether they would condone the execution of homosexuals under such a circumstance; they will play the usual politician’s game of avoiding the question, answering a different one altogether or employing feeble talk about ‘context’. They will under very few circumstances however, lie. They will never say “well of course I wouldn’t advocate executing homosexuals, or stoning adulterers; what do you take me for, a barbarian?”

There are interesting reasons for this steadfast dedication to the party-line. What I do not contest is that the individuals who express these views actually believe them. Why they might express them so publicly, and especially on television, is most easily explained by their genuine wish to have the hideous system under which they want us all to live (or die) realised. They also have the consideration of how their peers will perceive them, and the answers which they give. An argument often erroneously employed by those among us who seek convoluted motives lacking in parsimony, to explain the apparently ‘un-Islamic’ phenomenon of Jihadism, is that the most prevalent groups of people who are most likely to be the victims of such attacks, are themselves, Muslims. This argument misses by failing to account for the different factions within Islam, and tellingly commits the crime for which the other side is so often accused, by painting all the Muslims with the same brush. Nawaz’s interviewees within the mentioned compilation will have reasonable concerns that they might be declared apostates by their fellow hard-liners, if they fail to give true answers to the questions posed about the fate of those deemed under Sharia to be Kafir.

Read Sun Tsu’s The Art of War or Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, and what will be plain is that honesty in war or adversarial politics is not a virtue held in particularly high esteem by some of the notable thinkers in our history on the subjects. We find ourselves with an unprecedented advantage when our enemies, and more importantly, our enemies’ supporters have been so vocal and transparent in telling us what they really think, and Choudary has been an example of this. We diminish this advantage and do ourselves a great injury when we seek to prevent through law, the expression of these beliefs, and the verbal advocacy for these organisations.

What is our wish in this war; what is our foreseeable best-case-scenario? It is that the people who believe such things, and are so absolutely certain in their doing so, might change their minds. We should hope that Islamists who believe that homosexuals should be thrown from cliffs, or the tops of the tallest buildings when no cliffs are available; might be confronted with reason to doubt the validity of those beliefs. It is for this reason that the Quilliam Foundation, and the work of Maajid Nawaz and his colleagues is of the upmost importance. The ideas must be targeted, and alternatives which allow for pluralism and true liberalism must be presented. What then, do you expect the result of these ideas to be, when the would-be espousers are forced underground by legislation?

Though I have cited the example before, it’s relevance makes it necessary to do so again: Morten Storm’s memoir Agent Storm made it clear that doubt is the key in targeting these ideas. Storm may have been an anomaly, in that when disillusioned with his failure to reach Somalia in order to fight with his Jihadi brothers, he googled “contradictions in the Koran” out of anger. The vast majority of Islamists and Jihadists – at least those who are not beyond the point of no return, and dug in too deeply in their beliefs – will require the assistance of others to reach the freedom that doubt brings. Ibrahim Anderson and Shah Jahah Khan, who were convicted in January this year of the same offence as Choudary, after they handed out leaflets in support of ISIS on Oxford Street in London may well have been two individuals far beyond any help in addressing their poisonous beliefs. But some won’t be; some may never have heard a decent argument put forward against their position: an argument that might plant the seed of doubt which might eventually bloom into interpretative relativism or even pluralism. Criminalising the expression of these views will not stop the views from being expressed; it will only stop their receipt in the public sphere, where they might actually be challenged. The conversations will still go on, but now they will be behind closed doors and only among Islamists, Jihadists and their sympathisers. With no contraflow in the traffic of ideas, what do you think will happen to them? They will become more extreme. As Mick Hume wrote in Trigger Warning, bad ideas hidden away from the spotlight will “fester”. This is not a good thing.

The difficulties now faced by the secularists and even Muslims who wish to challenge the poisonous ideas if Islamism in the UK are well-documented, and the recent manifestations of the State’s base infringement on these freedoms to criticise will predictably be a subject for another post in the near future. But what is clear is that the dice have been loaded callously so as to make this war against Jihadism a difficult one to fight. While we have some advantages we should not squander them so myopically. Choudary’s conviction, and the legislation for which he eventually fell foul, will ultimately have been a hindrance in this war. The bullet in our foot was very much fired by us, not for the first time, and tragically I fear, not for the last.