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Nov. 15, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
57:19
Edition 229 - Paris Attack Update

Recorded after the atrocity in Paris, Professor Greg Barton - expert in Islamic Politics,Deakin University, Melbourne...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much indeed for all of your feedback, for the nice guest suggestions that you sent me and the good things you've said to me about this show and of course for your donations.
All have come through the website www.theunexplained.tv, the website designed, created and curated by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Now I've suspended the show that I planned to put out on this occasion simply because we've been overtaken again by events.
A dreadful, appalling, terrible act of terrorism concerted in Paris, a city that, as I sit here in London, is what, a hundred miles or so south of me.
We are very close to the French in many ways, although sometimes they laugh at the differences between us and we laugh at the differences between the two nations, the way that they do things, the food that they eat, the way that they speak.
But nevertheless, we are close in so many ways.
So many words in the English language are from the French language and would be understood in both.
And we respect and love their culture and their food and their way of doing things.
And they have the same respect for us.
That's the fact.
So to see something happening in a familiar place, so close to home, is an enormous shock to all of us.
I covered this on the radio live yesterday morning, one of the first programs to be done about this yesterday.
And I said, and I stand by what I said, for Paris, read London.
For Paris, read Sydney.
For Paris, read New York or Los Angeles.
Or Singapore or Jakarta or anywhere.
This is an attack on us all.
As I speak to you this morning, it's Sunday morning I'm recording this.
We now know that the carnage took 193 minutes to unfold.
As we understand this morning, 129 people are dead.
That may change.
350 wounded.
With an attack on a rock stadium where a band was playing and people were just enjoying themselves on a Friday night into a Saturday morning.
It was what they call a soft target.
People just opened fire with Kalashnikovs.
And there was another attack outside a big sporting stadium.
A string of attacks.
All of them on soft targets.
These were not military bases.
These were not government buildings.
These were just places where ordinary people go to unwind and have fun.
And the French know how to enjoy good food and good times, probably more so than the English.
It is a wonderful place to be, Paris.
It has a special place in my heart, I have to tell you.
So the scenes that I've seen on television and online are tremendously upsetting, I think, to all of us.
And that is why so many people, if you look at their Facebook profiles as I record this, have changed them to the red, white, and blue.
And one of the main talk shows in England that finished about 25 minutes ago, the Andrew Mars show on the BBC here, closed with the solo singer singing the French national anthem and everybody in the studio in complete silence, including the Home Secretary for this country, person in charge of security here, Theresa May.
This is going to throw up an awful lot of questions because people will want to know, how could this happen?
In an age where surveillance has reached a new peak, email traffic, metadata is constantly being analyzed.
How's this been possible?
So many people in a modern sophisticated city, France, Paris is not really like London.
London is a place where if you want to live in the center, realistically, you probably have to be a Russian oligarch or a movie star, or a rock star, or somebody with a lot of money in your pocket.
Paris is a place where ordinary people live.
I've stayed in a couple of their homes there.
You can rent somewhere to live, and people go out on a Sunday morning like this one, and they buy bread and fresh vegetables, and they sniff the morning air, and it's a beautiful city to walk and just be.
So, Lord knows how they're going to be feeling on this morning as I record these words.
Now, before we do what we're about to do, and that is to speak with an expert on all of these things, a man in Melbourne, Australia, Greg Barton, Professor Greg Barton, he's an expert in global Islamic politics at Deakin University, at institution in Melbourne, Australia.
Before we talk with him, and he's had a very busy 24, 36 hours or so, so it was good of him to make time for us.
I just want to say that, of course, we're recording this on Sunday morning, and things may have changed.
I sincerely hope that nothing else happens in between me recording this and you hearing it.
But we will inevitably get more information about all of this, so the conversation that we're going to have is in the context of what we know now, but I think there's still an awful lot we can explore.
And I hope you'll understand why I can't do any shout-outs on this edition.
I don't think it would be appropriate, but thank you very much for all of your contacts.
Please, please keep them coming.
You know that I personally see every email, and many of the guest suggestions that you've made, as you will know, I pursue them.
But on this occasion, I just think we have to talk about this.
It's so massively important.
We used to think that al-Qaeda was the biggest threat to us all.
Now it's IS, the so-called Islamic State.
Who are they?
What do they want?
And what do they expect us to do?
And how can we respond?
I mean, this thing throws up more questions, doesn't it, than answers.
If you want to get in touch with me or make a donation to this show, you can go to the website theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, and you can make a donation through a PayPal link there or send me your thoughts and comments, guest suggestions, whatever.
Just nice to hear from you where you are and how you use this show.
Let's cross now to Melbourne, Australia, where there is an 11-hour time difference from the UK, I believe, and talk with our guest, Professor Greg Barton, Professor of Global Islamic Politics at Deakin University there in Melbourne.
Greg, thank you for doing this.
These are terrible circumstances in which to be talking.
Just before we get into the subject and the meat of this, try and work out some answers or at least some signpost directions.
Tell me about you, Because your title is interesting, a professor of Islamic politics.
So tell me what that is, first of all.
Well, 28 years ago, when my career began with PhD studies, I was looking at reformist movements, democratic movements, particularly Indonesia, where they played a very significant role in the transition from the Sovato authoritarian government to the current democratic situation.
And I was happily going along in that field until I saw the World Trade Centre towers come down 14 years ago.
And I realised that I would have to pay attention henceforth, in addition to my interest in progressive Islamic thought, but also to reactionary extremist movements.
And the last 14 years, those movements have taken up more of my time than I would care to admit, but it's important to pay attention to that from the position of somebody who has a broad interest in Muslim society and Islamic thought.
This is not easy to research, I wouldn't have thought, because getting people to open up to you and talk about this, even if they are sincere and want to further your academic research, must be very difficult.
Yeah, you would think on the face of it that it would.
My experience with research beginning in Indonesia is that actually people are relatively quick to open up and be very generous.
Now, maybe that's a question of culture and language in Indonesia, and it does vary across the world.
But I've actually found myself frequently the recipient of very generous hospitality and not just a procedural kind of hospitality, but a sort of a welcoming into family and friendship, which has made it much easier to get a sense of their perspective, their world, how they understand things.
Of course, you know, we can never completely understand somebody else's point of view, but if you can begin to empathize and what you have in common, you're in a much position to do that.
Right.
And it is important, isn't it?
And a lot of these discussions have to start this way, but we have to differentiate the warm, decent, thoroughly moral Muslim individual on the high street in London or where you are in Melbourne or in Indonesia or wherever, versus the people who have a grudge against us here in the West that we don't entirely understand.
They're two polar opposites.
They are two polar opposites, and yet we have to be very careful if we're to understand the challenge that we face from Islamist extremism, whether it's al-Qaeda or today Islamic State, and in particular if we're to understand how they recruit, how do they persuade young people to come and join them?
The mystery here is that we very often see groups like Islamic State or al-Qaeda before it recruiting young people from mainstream backgrounds, from decent homes.
And it's counterintuitive how somebody coming from a decent home could be persuaded to go across to a very hateful extremist or terrorist group.
But what we need to understand is that journey.
And that journey begins with the offer of friendship.
Now, you know, it's a false friendship, of course.
Often it's very predatory recruitment.
But the messaging of a group like Islamic State is largely positive.
They portray themselves as offering purpose and meaning and belonging and being part of a force to change the world.
Once somebody gets deeply into a group like that, as with a religious cult, there are some parallels here, then they begin to absorb the perspective of that group and they cut off contact with the wider world.
And finally, they're capable of completely reversing their original position.
But if we don't appreciate the genius of a group like Islamic State and recruitment, we're not going to see what a formidable opponent we're facing.
And people may find this hard to understand or believe, but if you think about the way that cults operate and the way some people get suckered into religious groups and other weird, wacky, and strange organizations, if you accept that that can happen within our society, then it becomes easier to understand how young people from decent backgrounds can be suckered in.
That's right.
And the thing about cults, and there certainly are parallels here, is if you go looking for information about cults, you'll generally find a lot of discussion about doctrine and belief.
And often it's wild, you know, generally it is wild and wacky.
But people don't get involved in new religious movements, cultic or non-cultic, or indeed religious cults, primarily because of doctrine.
They become involved because of friendship.
Once they enter into a relationship of friendship and feel part of a group, then they begin to internalize the ideas and they start to own ideas which they would have found themselves very alien at the outset.
So social networks are really key here.
The same thing is true of radicalization.
The radicalization really begins with friendship and a sense of belonging to a group.
And then you see the cognitive shift, the radicalization where they internalize ideas, perhaps finally end up in a position which is diametrically opposed to where they started from, but not necessarily seeing the paradox because they begin to see the world through the matrix, through the lens of the group that they're associating with.
So in the case of Islamic State, they distrust mainstream media.
They think that it's all biased and unfair, and they believe that they're with the good guys, the freedom fighters.
That's, of course, been the story of terrorism from way back.
They always present themselves as being the freedom fighters.
But with Islamic State, it has an extra element of religious conviction and powerful religious narrative in the current time, of course, buoyed by this achievement in their own eyes of a colour fate, which for young people is very impressive.
Well, it is, and it is a more pervasive idea than many of us may believe.
Look, I used to work for Capitol Radio in London, which was a big commercial radio station.
And fortunately for me, I used to get a car in every morning.
They used to send a taxi for me, and, you know, the 15 miles or so into London, I used to just sit back, listen to the radio.
But I would often get to know the guys who were driving me.
And one of these guys, one of these mornings, and this was more than 10 years ago, opened up to me one morning about all of this, tried to make me understand how America was the great enemy, and America worked against all of our interests according to him.
And I let him talk because I wanted to understand what he was talking about, where he was coming from.
And he told me that he felt, and many of his friends felt, that the answer to it all and the answer to some of our morality issues here in the UK and in America and Australia and other countries is to have a caliphate.
And he explained to me what that was.
And the way that he put it, it sounded perfectly rational.
The guy was not foaming at the mouth.
He didn't sound like a raving lunatic.
He just sounded like somebody who had an ideology.
And I thought, well, you know, I'm not sure we need one of those here.
But the way that he put it, it sounded like a rational argument.
Not one that I would agree with, but this notion is more pervasive is the point that I'm making.
That's the point.
And 50, 60 years ago, perhaps less in some parts, you could have sat down with a colleague, a fellow student or even a university lecturer who was convinced that communism was the way of the future, and they would have told you about how ideal a proper communist society would be.
Now, of course, if that same individual traveled to communist Maoist China or Soviet Russia, they may have come back with a different impression or they may not.
But they wish to believe the utopian promise.
An Islamic state is premised on a utopian promise.
It's partly religious, but it also very much borrows from revolutionary Marxism with this idea that if we just change the system, we have the caliphate, we impose Sharia law, that'll end poverty and injustice and unfairness.
Everyone will be happy.
Yeah, but the problem is that the rest of us around the world have a different way of living, which we are hardly likely to give up readily.
Well, it's not just that.
It's also the case that, as with all these utopian revolutionary movements, they can't deliver on their promises.
So even for those who sincerely believe, many are going to end up in a very sad place where they realize that actually the caliphate isn't fair and just and it meters out very harsh punishment and it doesn't deliver on its promises of a utopian society.
But by the time they're at that realization, it's too late.
But of course, revolution, this idea that you can change things by force, it's bound to end up badly.
And I think with good reason, we're reticent to accept any longer the promises of revolution.
And if you're dealing with a bunch of people here who do not accept the legitimacy of mainstream media and believe it's all lies and garbage, then the opposite message is going to be almost impossible to get through.
That's right.
Once people lock themselves into a little feedback loop of just consuming very selective media and only referencing material that their friends have recommended, then they very quickly lose their horizon.
They lose sense of what's up and what's down.
And they're capable of sincerely believing the most bizarre things.
And unfortunately, that includes believing that the ends justify the means.
We have to do these painful but necessary things at the moment because we're trying to do the right thing.
And that's the motivation of the leaderships.
You believe that they are doing things that they may not necessarily want to do, but they believe that they are a necessary evil.
I think we've got to be cautious with the Islamic State and even imagining that we know who's in charge.
What we know is that it is a strange hybrid of religious cult, apocalyptic cult, where there is this belief that they really are on the side of history, but also in the back room, as it were, a lot of former Baath Party members and Iraqi generals, including intelligence officers, who understandably became disillusioned with their lot post-the 2003 invasion and see this insurgency as their best way forward.
Now, perhaps some of these guys don't even believe this stuff, but the point is they're contributing a high degree of technocratic rationality to making this project work, and it's a more formidable project than just a religious cult by itself would be.
this is a way for some of those people who were kicked sideways when Saddam Hussein fell, highly military trained, very, very savvy.
A lot of them we trained here in the UK, ironically enough.
This is a way for them to almost...
Yes, it's certainly that.
I mean, these are guys who in the prime of their life found themselves without pay and pension.
Then they witnessed their sons and daughters, nephews and nieces being pretty shabbily treated by a very sectarian government and became increasingly disillusioned with what was going on.
Some of them perhaps quite quickly joined the insurgency, others perhaps more reluctantly.
But there are sociological realities behind the predicament that they found themselves in.
And the importance of recognizing that is that if we're to see stability in Iraq and Syria in future, we've got to address some of the underlying political issues.
We have to have governments that govern for all and don't create disenfranchised minorities that seethe with anger and fall back into patterns of insurgency.
Wow, that's something that's very easy to say, isn't it?
But a lot of our countries that consider themselves civilized in the West struggle with that particular conundrum, don't they?
Well, they do.
I mean, I think we're very fortunate to live in societies that are open and clearly imperfect, but at least we can have this debate.
I think for many who found themselves on the wrong side of things, post-Saddam in Iraq, or indeed many who suffered in the civil war in Syria, they're dealing with basically police states that were most brutal in the way they treated them.
So no one expects to create utopias in the Middle East.
We know that that's the folly of Islamic State.
But we do have to try and make sure we end up with governments eventually that transcend sectarianism and have a degree of accountability, not perfect, but at least stable.
And ironically, for the people of Syria, they would have been better off staying under Assad's rule.
Assad's become very brutal, but it was a more even society.
And for all the faults of Saddam Hussein, which were very, very many, that stability for many people worked out better than the chaos that followed.
So we've got to learn the lessons of past mistakes in trying to plot the way forward.
One of the reoccurring mistakes we've made with the Middle East is we tend to think short, medium term, but not medium, long term.
And we don't think about the unintended consequences of what we do.
We fall back on the confident belief that we intend to do the right thing, even if people don't understand us, not really recognizing that actually there are consequences to what we're doing that we don't intend and we don't foresee that undermine the very good we're trying to do.
We've played games in a lot of countries, I think.
The Americans, the British, you know, we don't have entirely clean hands.
Are we reaping what we've sown?
Yes, I don't think in saying that that that sort of is an explanation for everything, but the truth is that we put off a lot of problems because of the argument that the Cold War meant we had to make tough decisions or, you know, we sort of better to deal with a tyrant who at least we had good relations with than to trust somebody who we thought would turn things against our interest.
Not sort of seeing the bigger picture and recognizing the cost we had to pay.
And in a sense, you know, our chickens have come home to roost.
All those years of short-term thinking and instrumentalism have meant that we haven't recognized the forces we've unleashed.
Now, that doesn't justify terrorist violence or civil war or any of these horrible things, but we need to understand how we got into the current problem that we're in if we're to try and find a way out.
And of course, it is our problem, but it is also the problem of the Muslim world.
The countries that are predominantly Muslim, where the regimes, the government's in power, may have turned a blind eye to all of this under their very noses.
They will have known about it, but they haven't done a whole lot about it either.
No, that's right.
I mean, as you say, none of us have clean hands.
Everyone involved with Iraq and Syria over the years, including the regional powers, including, of course, the local governments, all of us have soiled hands.
We've all made mistakes, often quite knowingly, sometimes unknowingly.
But we need to sort of, all of us recognize that the situation we currently have, the civil war in Syria, the rise of Islamic State, it's good for no one.
So if we can join hands, difficult though it might be with Russia and with Iran, and negotiate an end to the civil war with the Assad government, move to a post-Assad situation there, then begin to tackle Islamic State, work with the government in Baghdad to try and form a coalition against Islamic State in Iraq and then work towards a better government.
There's lots of unpalatable aspects to that, but it's what we're going to have to do if we're to move beyond the current quagmire we find ourselves in.
I've been saying to my listeners, and Greg, thank you very much indeed for your time doing this, because I know it's Sunday night where you are and you've got a working week to stare down the barrel of.
But the BBC is telling me that one of the attackers has been named.
We said at the top, this 29-year-old French citizen of Algerian origin, Omar Ishmael Mustafai.
There are a few details about him coming out, and these are just provisional details, and our knowledge of all of this may well have changed by the time people hear this in 24 hours from now.
But this man, Mustafai, according to the BBC, was reportedly identified after investigators found a severed finger at the scene of the Batterclan concert hall incident where more than 80 people died in a terrible bloodbath.
What we know about him, he came from a town called Coqueron, nice place, 15 miles south of Paris, lived in Chartres, another beautiful place, beautiful history, lots of students there, that kind of thing.
He's said to have gone to a mosque in Luce, which was very near to Chartres.
According to reports, he had a history of petty crime, but never went to jail.
The security services deemed him to have been radicalized in 2010, but he was never implicated in a counter-terrorism investigation.
Are those bits of information saying anything to you?
Yes, what they're saying is this is the typical pattern of the sort of young people we expect to end up in trouble with a group like Islamic State.
And you might say, well, there we've got, you know, we've got a sort of set of parameters.
We should go looking for such people and pay attention to them.
The trouble is, you know, we've just described tens and tens of thousands of young men in France.
And I don't mean to demonize them.
I just mean to say that, you know, put yourself in the position of the intelligence authorities.
You're sifting through literally tens of thousands of people who you have reason to be concerned about, but not sufficient reason to take action against.
Who do you tell amongst those people who, you know, might go from stealing cars or, you know, other petty crime to being involved in the worst kind of murderist extremism?
It's not easy to tell.
We've got to pay attention to the social networks that reach out to them because it's those social networks that are key to taking them further on that path of radicalization.
But nothing about this individual's background seems at all remarkable, and that's the scary thing.
If he was remarkable, we'd sort of say, oh, now we understand.
It's these kind of extraordinary people that are the problem.
But unfortunately, it sounds all too typical.
I mean, we may find out subsequently that there were clues along the way, but in so many of these cases, here in the United Kingdom, maybe even the cases that you've had to deal with in Australia, but in other places, there have been no visible signs.
Not even their families have been aware.
Well, one thing we do know a bit more about is the Kawachi brothers from the Charlie Evdo attack.
And we know that one of the brothers was under surveillance for many years, and police got to a point where they had no new information, and they lowered the level of surveillance.
And people might say, well, that was a grave mistake.
But the police have got limited resources.
They can't be surveilling everyone at the same level.
And even with somebody like the Kawachi brothers, where you had contacts with AQAP, Al-Qaeda, and the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, and concerns about foreign travel, even then, it's very hard to know who you should be paying attention to.
We had something similar here in Australia.
The man behind the Sydney siege, the Lyd Chocolate Cafe siege in December last year, Manharon Monas, as he called himself, was well known to authorities.
But, you know, frankly, he just seemed like a bit of a disturbed fruitcake, not somebody who would be dangerous.
So sometimes you do have individuals you know to be of concern, but still you can't take action.
And other times, as you say quite rightly, families are really caught by surprise.
And that's because with the Islamic State, we're often seeing those final stages of radicalization proceeding very quickly in the space of weeks or months.
And you might know that somebody's become reclusive and a bit depressed, apparently, not talking to old friends.
You don't expect that in the space of three months they're going to go out and be part of a terrorist mission, but that's what's happening at the moment.
One of my listeners indicated to me that what we're seeing and what we have been seeing lately is just the tip of an iceberg.
In other words, there are very, very many more people of this kind in danger of being suckered into all of this than the public Are being made aware?
I think that's true.
I mean, on the one hand, we need to be very, very careful to say that the majority of Muslims across Britain, across Europe, including France, certainly across Australia, mainstream individuals have the same dreams and aspirations for the future of their children and sensible values of respecting each other and basically upholding to moderation, but also views that we'd call progressive or mainstream.
But at the same time, there's a significant minority, and it's hard to quantify this, but it might be 10% of the population that is overly prone to conspiracy theory and to seeing America as the root of all evil and to sort of buying into these silly ideas.
Now, for most of those individuals, this doesn't amount to violent extremism, but it means they are predisposed to being sympathetic to groups and networks they should actually be very cautious about.
So it's a sort of willful naivety or ignorance that exposes them.
And then groups like Islamic State that are very, very clever, come in, particularly with younger people, quickly shift them up a few notches beyond just questioning and being suspicious and being cynical to actively believing they have to do something.
And there is quite a large pool of such individuals out there.
It's incumbent upon us to work as best we can with all groups across society, but particularly with Muslim community groups, to try and shore up this precarious position to put younger people back into a more sure sense of identity and sort of belonging to the nation.
And to find ways of talking about the danger of extremist ideas.
I think David Cameron has good intentions when he raises this point.
But of course, we have to be very careful lest we paint ourselves into a corner.
We're not, you know, none of us would support the idea of prosecuting thought crime or saying that you can't have radical ideas.
And yet we do know that there are dangerous ideas that can lead people into a path of action that's dangerous to them and to others.
But what interests me about what you've been saying is that this is almost like a river, this radicalization process.
It's flowing in one direction and there comes a bend in that river.
There is one point where, as you say, a radicalized individual is turned into a terrorist.
And that is a very quick process.
And it seems to me that somehow, and I have zero idea of how they would do this, but that's what they're trained to do, that is the point that the security services everywhere need to be zeroing down on.
Yes, I think that really is the issue.
In my own university work in Australia with my colleagues, we've spent a lot of time trying to understand radicalization, and we believe that there are observable signs of behavioural change that point to radicalization.
In particular, we've come to the view that when somebody's changing their social relations over time significantly, and at the same time, simultaneously, they're also changing their views, becoming more extreme in their articulated views.
And thirdly, simultaneously, they're also becoming more aggressive or transgressive, perhaps criminal in their behaviour.
Those three things together point to a high likelihood of radicalisation.
And so if we can help family and community, including school communities, look out for these warning signs of somebody's well-being being threatened, we can make an early intervention.
We've had some encouraging early results in Australia, but of course it's a long way to go.
But I think that's where we're going to have to work harder, is spotting those signs that somebody is getting into trouble very early.
In Australia, the metaphor might be less about rivers and more about beach culture where you're worried about kids getting caught in a rip.
People often don't understand the dangers of the beach.
When they get caught up in an ocean rip, they panic and in their panicking, they become even more vulnerable.
But of course, if they're at a patrolled beach where there are lifeguards, lifeguards spend their days scanning the water, looking for signs that somebody's in trouble.
And they know the signs to look for.
And they're signs where even somebody swimming nearby may not recognise that a person is at the point of beginning to succumb to drowning, to slipping below the waves.
A trained lifeguard knows those signs, see a body go limp in the water and know that they've got to move to action.
And that's what we've got to do when it comes to rescuing young people who are in danger of being radicalised.
So for Australian lifeguards spotting dangerous riptides and their victims, read profilers, I guess.
Well, it's a question of seeing the signs that somebody is in trouble, that they're struggling, that they're slipping below the waves.
And some of those signs are not obvious to somebody who's not trained to look for them.
Of course, you also recognise the dangerous conditions.
You say, well, that left-hand side of the beach today, there is a strong rip flowing.
And if people are swimming over there and they're not aware of it, they're not strong swimmers, they'll suddenly find themselves being moved out to sea in a way that's going to cause them to panic.
And in that panicking, they've become very vulnerable.
So recognising the sort of the lay of the land, the topography we're dealing with, recognizing signs that an individual's in trouble, those two things go together.
There aren't any standard profiles of a person who is likely to be radicalized.
They come from all sorts of backgrounds.
But there are sort of family resemblances in terms of behavioural changes that we can observe.
And so where does this leave us with all of this talk, certainly in the UK and in other countries, about we need to be able to access metadata from people's internet service providers and we need to know who they're talking to.
We don't need to necessarily know what they're saying in their texts and phone calls and emails, but we just need to know who they're contacting and when.
By the sounds of that, this human factor, being able to visibly see the changes in people and detect those and do something about it, sounds to me like it's more important than all of these things that the politicians are trying to get us to buy into.
Yeah, I think it's understandable.
We invest a lot of time and human resources and physical hardware in digital surveillance.
And there is certainly a place for metadata.
When it comes to a court case, police will tell you often even to persuade a magistrate to proceed with a case, you need to present data.
And if you haven't got it stored, you know, you're stuck with nothing.
So I appreciate the need to do this work, but we have tended to underplay the importance of human intelligence and of understanding human society.
In some ways, the policemen of 1950s, 60s Britain probably could tell us a few salient lessons that we may have forgotten, which is that being out in your community on the high street, talking to locals, understanding what's going on in your neighbourhood is really key.
That's first order.
If you don't have that, no amount of electronic trickery is going to replace it.
You're so right, Greg.
My father was a policeman in Liverpool.
He knew every family.
He worked in Bootle, which is a district of Liverpool.
He knew every family.
He knew the background.
He knew the good ones, the bad ones.
He knew who was in danger of going off the rails.
We don't do that now.
Yeah, look, I think it still has its place in policing, but probably we have tended to lose track of its value and not value it sufficiently and not value those old school men and women who had this personal knowledge built up over many years.
We've tended to see that as being less important, perhaps, than credentials.
The important thing to recognize with the Paris attacks last Friday evening was that a network was able to put together a very audacious and quite sophisticated plan completely under the radar.
We had no idea this was coming.
And it's very possible that the reason they achieved this was that they were communicating through non-digital means.
And that reminds us that the only way to be aware of a group like that recruiting young attackers, putting together their plans, is to be plugged into the community because that's an area where digital surveillance is just not sufficient.
If these guys go dark, if they go off the digital grid, then our hardware and all of our clever data mining algorithms is not going to do us any good at all.
So I think there's a timely reminder with the Paris attacks.
We'll have to learn more, that we've got to pay more attention to working with communities, to human intelligence, to understanding society, looking for individuals who are in trouble, but also looking for signs that things are not right in a network, or indeed seeing that there's an online network appearing in a group of people and maybe up to no good.
It is early days, but you were saying to me on the radio yesterday, just in the wake of these attacks, that it was very possible these people had learned by listening to security ministers and senior police people saying we're going to be looking at your electronic communication, that they've actually gone back to passing paper notes and having personal meetings.
Yeah, it certainly works for organized crime.
They've been quick to learn that lesson.
And bear in mind that in the back room of Islamic State, behind the guys out front doing the religious apocalyptic cult stuff, we've got many former Iraqi generals, senior officers, many of them intelligence officers, and they're very good at what they do.
They spent their careers in a police state under Saddam's Iraq.
And I'm sure that there's quite a lot of analysis about how they should proceed.
I say this because when I look at their media production, it's flawless and remarkable, of a very high quality.
And so you'd have to assume the stuff that we can't see, the strategic planning, the assessment, is also of a very high quality.
And that would explain why the networks behind the Paris attacks perhaps were told very deliberately, you don't communicate by phone, you don't use internet, you don't use social media.
This time we're going to go back to just meeting face-to-face.
We'll pass notes through couriers.
We'll make sure they've got no idea of what's going to come.
And this is a lagging indicator.
In other words, this all happened some time back.
So for all we know, there are people doing that in London or New York or Sydney or Melbourne right now.
That's right.
And that's hence the anxiety in Paris this new week that, yes, Friday night's over.
And yet how many more people are there out in those networks?
How many people are on standby for the next wave?
How many people are already recruited in the wings for future operations?
We just don't know.
And of course, we feel for the people of Paris and we sort of breathe a little sigh of relief.
It's not our city, but maybe our city is going to be next.
David Cameron says that it's inevitable.
They've been saying it for a long time, that we are going to have something happen here.
What we've got to do is try and be as lucky as we possibly can and as smart as we possibly can for as long as we possibly can.
Well, being lucky and being smart means being adaptable.
So, you know, our approach to dealing with al-Qaeda has served us well.
In the last 10 years, there's been no large-scale al-Qaeda attacks.
You know, after 9-11, after Madrid and London, for the last decade, we've been blessedly clear of that because we're very well advanced plots, very large plots, before they could be executed.
But we're dealing now with a group that's al-Qaeda evolved.
It's al-Qaeda 3.0.
It's more agile, it's more youthful.
And although it's become masters at using social media and viral marketing, it's also probably learnt that there are times to go off the digital grid, to go dark, and to do things differently.
And I don't think we can be assured that our previous kind of smartness is going to be good enough for the future challenges.
We're going to have to learn to innovate.
This group innovates.
We're going to have to innovate as well.
I heard one expert say yesterday on radio, and I thought that's something I haven't heard before, suggest that IS, ISIS, Islamic State, is in competition with al-Qaeda.
It's almost like a race to be the bloodiest and the most brutal.
Do you buy that?
We have to be careful to not fall into the assumption that al-Qaeda and Islamic State are forever bitter rivals and never work together.
We know that Islamic State grew out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and then there was a falling out between Zawahiri and Baghdadi.
We know that there is a degree of rivalry, and Islamic State is clearly trying to outplay al-Qaeda.
It's now these last five weeks with four big attacks, beginning in Ankara, then with the downing of the Metrojet, we think, and bombings in Beirut and now Paris, all together taking 500 lives.
Islamic State is now playing in the League of Al-Qaeda with mass casualty events.
And yet we think about things like the Sharley Ebdo attack.
We had the two Kawachi brothers who were linked to AQAP, and yet their close friend, Ahmed Ikulabali, who launched his own attack on the kosher hypermarket was very much linked to Islamic State, and his widow is living in Raqqa and being celebrated by Islamic State.
Because of friendship, in this case, AQAP and Islamic State guys worked together.
We have reason to be concerned that the downing of the Metro jet may have involved the sort of advanced non-metallic explosives that have been developed by AQAP.
Maybe through friendship, maybe through deliberate partnership, there may have been some transference of technology there or even actual assistance.
So yes, on the one hand, Islamic State is trying to make itself a bigger brand with its colour fate and now with its global attacks than al-Qaeda ever was.
And it's now managing to move into the market that al-Qaeda dominated, the mass casualty events.
And yet that may force some within Al-Qaeda to say, now is the time to come back and work together.
So I don't think we should assume anything about these two organizations.
Or better off by the sounds of it.
What does this mean?
Because I've heard a number of people say over the last 24 hours, whether it's just sort of knee-jerk reaction, nothing can ever be the same now.
What does it mean for our free societies?
Well, we heard those statements after the downing of the Metrojet when it became increasingly clear, it's still not confirmed, of course, that it was Islamic State that had put an explosive device on and brought it down, that that would change air travel.
I mean, it hasn't happened overnight, clearly.
But I think the combination of these attacks is going to force us to reassess the way we do intelligence.
It's going to shaken our faith in digital surveillance.
Clearly, that's not something that we can rely upon to the extent we thought we could rely upon.
We're going to have to go back to this old school type of human intelligence and community engagement.
We're going to have to try and understand better how radicalization and recruitment occur and try and interrupt it in the early stages.
And we're going to have to get better at thinking about whether there are gaps in our security that we could close.
For example, what happened in Paris on Friday night was it was a mixed story.
There were three suicide bombers who tried to get access to the National Stadium in Saint-Garni.
They didn't get access.
They couldn't penetrate perimeter security.
One occasion, a security guard patted down one of the bombers who immediately fled.
That was something that was working.
That same kind of perimeter security wasn't working at the concert venue, and perhaps it should have been better done there.
I don't think we can expect such security for cafes and restaurants.
Of course, they have to be open to the street.
But there's got to be a few lessons to be learned about just doing things better.
One of the lessons of the Shamul Sheikh Metrojet case is that, by all accounts, security at Shamul Sheikh was very, very shoddy.
And there are dozens, probably hundreds of airports around the world like it where we know what we should be doing in terms of best practice and we don't do it.
We've got to get back to not being so complacent about thinking that we haven't had any major attacks for so very long that we're fine now.
It's all over.
In fact, we're back in that sort of dangerous zone where we've got to prepare for the worst.
And we can let our guards slip.
Listen, after 9-11, only a matter of weeks after it, I was visiting Mexico.
I just went across the border from, I was staying in San Diego or near there, went across the border to Tijuana, spent two hours in Tijuana, walked straight back across the border with a load of other people, every race, style, type, every kind of luggage, loads and loads of different people.
And the security guards, I swear, were not even looking at them as they walked on through.
Similarly, after the Sharm el-Sheikh thing, we're told that security, some of the security people at the airport with returning Brits and other nationalities wanting to get home after that thing, we're told that some of the security people were playing candy crush and not looking at the people going through the security barriers to check them out.
We have to be a lot tighter.
Yeah, it's a perennial problem.
I mean, we don't want to end up in a paranoid society where we go to excessive lengths with security and make life just miserable.
And that has happened a little bit with air travel at its worst.
But at the same token, we can't afford to be so relaxed as to not recognize we're facing real challenges.
And there is now an active group out there who has the intent and the capacity to cause us real harm.
It may well be the case that al-Qaeda's best days have come and gone and they're not the force that they used to be.
And we've become complacent because we've largely defeated them.
But we haven't defeated the Islamic State.
They're going to be here for a long time and now they're moving into al-Qaeda territory.
We'd better get back on top of our game when it comes to these basic security measures.
President Hollande said just after the attacks, one of his first statements was that we would be merciless in pursuing the people behind all of this.
Practically, though, what does that mean?
Well, there's a couple of concerning aspects to that statement.
You can certainly sympathize with what President Hollande was saying.
If he had said we will be unfailing and unflinching and relentless in not giving up until the hard work is done, that would have been more reassuring.
Merciless plays into the same apocalyptic language that Islamic State itself uses.
And the danger is we'll repeat the mistake we made after 9-11 when we got so understandably outraged at the attacks that we entered into a series of military reprisals that weren't well thought through.
I mean, Iraq was the worst, but even what we did in Afghanistan was not well thought through.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do things in response, although Iraq was probably unjustified whichever way you looked at it.
But we need to recognize that terrorists do provocative things because they want to provoke us.
They commit outrages because they want us to be outraged and they want a response from us.
Modern terrorism depends upon provoking a reaction.
And if we're too easily provoked in the direction the terrorists want us to go in, then it's them that are winning and us that are losing.
Was it wise of our Prime Minister David Cameron to almost proclaim to the world that we'd taken out Jihadi John, a man, of course, responsible for appalling beheadings and a man from this country?
Look, I think that there was good reason to be targeting Jihadi John, and there was good reason to be as transparent as we can be About what was going on and to speak about what was achieved.
I just think we have to be very careful with the tone of our language, lest we slip into triumphalism or a sort of an us-and-them kind of pattern of speech, which actually plays into the narrative of extremist groups like Islamic State.
So I think we're going to have to stop and look at those announcements and say, did we slip up in terms of the way we styled that?
Could we have been wiser in the middle?
Well, the Prime Minister was quite measured in announcing it, but one of the tabloid papers here, The Sun, which I'm sure you'll be aware of and its approach to things, had a headline yesterday that I certainly couldn't read on the radio when I did the press review.
And the headline had a picture of Jihadijan and it said, jihad it coming.
And that's the kind of thing that, you know, as much as people feel angry, and boy, do I understand that, as you say, we need to be measured.
We have to try and show that we're, in all circumstances, better than they are.
That's right.
And we have to show that this is not about us and them.
You know, this is about a genuine concern for common humanity and people who take murderous action against common humanity.
We're not going to fall back to their level in the way that we think about what we're doing.
We'll do the hard things we have to do, but not celebrate in the way that they celebrate.
We perhaps made some mistakes after the killing of Osama bin Laden in the way that it was celebrated.
You remember that there was understandable euphoria, fist-pumping the air, etc.
You can certainly see why that's the response.
But I think we need to learn some lessons from this and say, let's be very careful lest we're just providing fodder for propaganda machines.
And for confused youth who are trying to make sense of who's right, who's wrong, who are the good guys, let's not make it easier for the propagandaists to persuade those youth that indeed we are part of some evil Western conspiracy.
We know ourselves what we intend to do, but it's a question of how we're perceived.
Perception is so very important in politics and in life generally.
Absolutely.
We have to be careful how we phrase things, what we do, what we say.
Finally, Greg, and thank you very much indeed for your time on what is a Sunday night for you in Australia.
Do you believe that all of us now, those of us who live in big cities, places like London, have to take more responsibility for our own security?
I travelled by rail into central London a couple of days ago for an important meeting.
I had to be there.
And it was a very happy place.
You know, it's all preparing for Christmas and it's very smart now.
It's been a little while, even though I don't live far from the center of London.
I don't often go in there.
But I just had this little thought, you know, I hope that we're able to remain as free and happy and open as this.
And in the light of what happened in Paris, I'm not sure.
And I'm not sure now how much responsibility for my personal security I need to take and all of us need to take.
I think we need to be very wise about this.
I don't think we should be blaming restaurant owners or patrons of restaurants if a gunman walks in off the street or indeed fires from a passing car.
That's not their fault.
We want an open society where you can sit out on the footpath and enjoy a balmy evening and no one should take that away or think that it's reasonable to take that away.
But we probably have to be more careful with things like concert venues to just do the sort of the due diligence checks, make it a bit harder for somebody to storm in quickly, put a few more obstacles in their way so that they'll be delayed if that's their intent.
Just be more thoughtful.
And we've sort of been through this in the past.
We know that unattended baggage left sort of sitting around in an open space, an airport or even indeed a shopping mall, we should, as they say, if you see something, say something.
I think we have to find that balance between being attentive and not being paranoid.
A good driver driving their car down the motorway knows how to drive defensively, so they're always paying attention, but they're not doing so in such a paranoid fashion that they can't get on with life.
And as we sort of motor along, we need to be looking around, paying attention, seeing if something's not right, listening to gut instinct, speaking up, and yet, you know, celebrating the fact that we can sit there on the sidewalk enjoying a supper in the balmy evening and not expect or see it as being reasonable to expect that a gunman will come storming along.
And we have to remember at the end of all of this that the definition of terrorism is engendering within people a feeling of terror.
So there is, as you rightly say, a balance to be struck among all of us, those of us who live in big cities and perhaps are more in the firing line than others, that we must be mindful and we must be alert and we must expect the security services to have our best interests at heart and the politicians.
But equally, we've got to carry on.
If we stop doing things, if we cancel sporting fixtures, if we scale down rock concerts, if we do that kind of thing, then these guys have won.
That's right.
All of that is true.
And the other concomitant part of that, which we have to hang on to, is that if we give up trusting one another and celebrating diversity, if we start to be suspicious because of somebody's religious background or the way that they appear, then we've really lost something in society.
We need to hang on to all these positive aspects and not lose them, whilst being attentive to the fact we live in a more dangerous world and we do have to take that on board.
We just have to hold this in balance with wisdom.
And while dealing with the bad guys, we have to try and understand that if we are excluding some people from the benefits of our society in whatever ways we might be, then maybe we also need to work at home on ways of building those people back in and making sure they don't slip down the net and find themselves sucked into that riptide you talk about.
That's right, particularly at a time when there are literally millions of people looking for refuge and asylum, fleeing the most awful wartime situations.
If we allow our fear to get the better of us and if we treat these new arrivals with an excessive amount of suspicion and lack sort of human decency and make their life miserable, and I think this is something in Australia we haven't done very well, frankly, if we're not Human and decent about the way we treat the stranger, then not only is that undermining our own cultural values and our own humanity, it also undermines our security.
Our security is at its best, it's best served when we are at our best as human beings.
And so, even though there are people on radio phone-ins right now phoning up and saying, let's go and get these people, let's kick them, in many ways we have to be a little cleverer than that because that could be wholly counterproductive.
That's right.
And that is the us and them language of the freedom fighter that groups like Islamic State use so artfully to persuade people that they are the good guys.
We need to sort of rise above that simplistic way of thinking and also that sort of judgmental way of thinking that proposes that there are black and whites out there.
There certainly are evils.
There certainly are bad people.
There certainly are wrong things that we need to tackle, but we need to be wise about how we tackle it because this is, as the old saying goes, this is a struggle for hearts and minds as much as it is a military or policing struggle.
Last question, I promise.
Is there one thing that perhaps you haven't been researching or maybe not researching as deeply as you might have that after Paris you will be researching more or you will take up?
Yes, I think we need to start to pay more attention to the transnational nature of a group like Islamic State and how it manages to coordinate responses around the world and to move information sometimes without us even seeing what's going on.
I think we've forever been making the mistake with Islamic State of underestimating it.
I think we've got to treat it more seriously now and not think it's just a bunch of evil terrorists.
You know, there is that, but there's something else going on that's cleverer than that.
We've got to be clever in responding.
And I presume there are people probably even within Islamic State who are wavering.
Just like there were people around Hitler who didn't really buy into all of it and wavered.
There will be people there who we could work on to try and turn them almost.
Well, that's certainly the true when you have people, the case when you have people wanting to return home.
The Danes are very smart in reaching out to people who are having second thoughts and trying to find a way home for them.
We're going to have to increasingly pay attention to people who are trying to disengage from this network and to re-engage with mainstream society.
And as we have military success in the future and as Islamic State has diminished in Iraq-Syria, that sort of last days of the Third Reich sort of dynamic will become more and more apparent.
You'll have people who are genuinely turning away from a system they've come to understand is bad.
And we need to find a way of engaging with them.
Professor Greg Barton in Melbourne, Australia, expert in global Islamic politics at Deakin University there.
Greg, look, I'm very, very grateful.
We talked once on radio yesterday, and I phoned you up this morning and asked if we could maybe do my personal podcast, The Unexplained, together, because I thought it would be useful, especially for my listeners around the world, places like the US.
And you agreed to do that, and I'm very grateful to you, and thank you very much indeed.
You have deserved whatever dinner you're about to have in Melbourne now and a good night's sleep.
Thank you, Greg, very much indeed.
If people want to know about you, by the way, and your research, is there a place online they can go and check you out?
I should be more organized than I am, but if you Google my name and my institution, Deakin University, I think you'll have no trouble finding more stuff than you probably want to read.
But yes, I'm happy to reach out and engage if people have questions.
But it's been a pleasure speaking to you, Howard, and thank you for inviting me on.
Greg, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
Well, you've been hearing Professor Greg Barton, an expert in global Islamic politics at Deakin University in Australia, about the threat that we now face in the Western world, in the entire world, from a new kind of terrorism adapting itself to operate in different ways.
It'll be a regular edition of The Unexplained next time round, but thank you very much indeed for all of your support.
Please keep your donations coming vital if you can do that.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, the website designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
There you can leave me a donation via PayPal and send me your thoughts, guests, suggestions, anything you want to say about this show.
I have to say, I am, as millions of people around the world, I am still in shock about what happened in Paris.
I know that place well.
It is a city that, unlike London, you don't have to be a rock star or a Russian oligarch to afford to live in the center.
You can rent an apartment there in a way that you can't in London.
And people, on a Sunday morning like this morning I'm speaking to you, would be going out and buying their bread and their fresh vegetables.
It is a beautiful city and a city where people live and work and play.
So I am sending my deepest sympathy to the people of France and the families of victims of this attack.
And, you know, we hope that some kind of resolution to all of this one day may be found.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I'm in London.
And until next time we meet, please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
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