Anti-Terror, or Anti-Thought?

The best way to honour 9/11 victims? Dismantle civil rights and demonize a minority in the name of security, obviously.

Just days before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has indicated that he will bring back the anti-terrorism laws passed nearly a decade ago that make it legal to detain terror suspects without a warrant for up to three days. Tasha Kheiriddin of the National Post welcomes the move against “the ultimate random crime,” arguing, much like the prime minister has, that Islamist terrorists remain the biggest threat to Canadian security, and that these measures would help curb that threat. “But while terrorism is random, its perpetrators are generally predictable,” she claims, adding that its perpetrators are generally Islamists, even if that has been proved to be the furthest thing from the truth (Anders Behring Breivik, anybody?). Somehow, she connects that threat to the need for police to be allowed to detain anyone without charge and to compel those people to testify under the threat of imprisonment, though when those laws were still on the books, they were used a grand total of zero times. Even if Islamicism was the biggest threat facing Canada (it isn't, and the term that the prime minister was looking for is “Islamism”), that hardly justifies bringing back a law that was never used and only serves to infringe upon our civil rights.

The Ottawa Citizen's editorial board, thankfully, counters by saying that while yes, the threat of terror attacks remains, Harper's claim that the anti-terror laws are “useful” and “necessary” is flat out wrong, mostly because, again, they haven't been used. Pointing to the civil rights debacle at the G20 summit last year (biggest mass arrest in Canadian history FTW!), the board notes “we can never simply trust that authorities will use extraordinary powers appropriately.” And if there's been one defining characteristic of policing in Canada during the past decade, it's been instance after instance of poor judgment. Handing them even more powers to pursue a threat as nebulous and ephemeral as terrorism begs for that power to be abused.

Counterterrorism scholar Ronald Crelinsten argues in the Toronto Star that anti-terror laws and all the extra security rigamarole we've succumbed to in the past decade more often than not “fuels the very anxiety it is trying to allay.” Citing the resolve of Londoners during the Blitz and Norwegians after Breivik's massacre this year, Crelinsten says the best defence against terrorism is “to learn to live with terrorism and not succumb to its spell.” Security measures at North American airports haven't exactly done much to prevent terror attacks despite their intrusiveness. Would the return of anti-terror laws be much different? With the prime minister calling for stronger laws to protect us against an “Islamicist” threat, all he's doing is stoking fears against a minority that's never committed a terror attack on Canadian soil – an inappropriate and wrongheaded way to honour the victims of 9/11.