DEMOS

I'm slightly puzzled by the semantics of point four. Terrorism is crime, surely. In fact, aren't all violent threats going to involve some sort of crimminality? Its like saying that weather is the biggest source of rain.I think part of the reason for the percieved down-hill slide is the unwitting conflation of concepts. I recall a ridiculous headline in The Sun a year or so ago: 'Terror Fear', as if one word didn't entail the other. And then there is the 'War on Terror' which Bush equates with Nazism. But terrorism is a weapon, not an ideology or a country.

From Derek:

I'm slightly puzzled by Robert's comments. He disagrees with the notion that terrorism and other types of crime are distinguishable. He then argues that 'unwitting conflation' of these concepts is to blame for the 'downhill slide'. I'm confused because he appears to be saying that, on the one hand, no distinction between terrorism and other crime is necessary, and on the other that the lack of categorisation is fuelling our fear. He cannot have it both ways.

Despite the fact that terrorism is a crime in most democratic jurisdictions that I am aware of, I would argue that we can, and should, make legal distinctions between terrorism and other criminal behaviour (this should not undermine the point that they are both types of crime). This is necessary to support our responses to terrorist activity. Put another way, if we were to follow Robert's advice, we would see financial fraud in the City, for example, as indistinguishable from gun violence in Birmingham, because they are both types of crime. Such an approach would seriously undermine any efforts to combat each type of crime.  The same lesson  must apply when dealing with terrorism because of the unique challenges that are posed in attempting to disrupt it, and the unique risks that arise when law enforcement agencies fail in their efforts.

As for the argument that an 'unwitting conflation' has fulled public pessimism, unsurprisingly, I disagree. I do not believe we are less able to distinguish between terrorism and other crime than before. On the contrary, I think the British public are more discerning now than ever before, partly because of the expansion in media output. I prefer the view (although I am not entirely convinced) that we may be more worried by problems of crime and terrorism now because the two are mutually reinforcing - this is to say that fear of one 'spills over' into fear of the other, creating a level of nervousness that is disproportionately great to the actual level of security threat.

More generally, the International Alert figures do point to an interesting paradox. I understand that the incidence of violent conflict across the world, and the mortality rate in each, is declining, although this is not the case verywhere. This would suggest that we are getting better at preventing the outbreak of conflict, and when conflict has started, mitigating the levels of violence. So, just at the moment when our conflict management performance is improving, why are we becoming more pessimistic about our ability to make positive changes?

Ah, I may be a victim of CSS here. The sentence beginning "I think" should be on a new paragraph, but for some reason its been conflated into one. The result is two separate thoughts are conflated into one.To clarfity, I am not suggesting that the public have a failure to distinguish between terrorism and other forms of crime. Just that terrorism not some kind of ideology like Nazism, as many would have us believe.