Jail for a thought crime? Why ever not?

YOU COULD almost feel the splutters of apoplectic indignation leaping off the newsprint and spraying you splat in the face. “Justice has been done,” cried one angry father. “These boys didn’t do anything wrong. Everybody does it.”

“A victory for common sense,” hailed another parent. “We should not be convicting people for what is effectively a thought crime,” growled the Chairman of one influential Human Rights Commission. “Individuals are being targeted because of their ethnicity or religious affiliation.”

And so the condemnations sprang forth, ad infinitum. The Court of Appeal’s quashing of the convictions of Messrs Irfan Raja, Awaab Iqbal, Aitzaz Zafar, Usman Malik and Akbar Butt is the latest kick in the teeth for New Labour’s law and ordure programme. Charged and initially convicted under the 2000 Terrorism Act for possessing unsavoury material on their computers, the famous five Bradford students are now poster pin-ups for the anti-anti-terrorism cause. And something about all this troubles me.

The whole mess stems from some exceptionally poor drafting of Section 57 of the Act, which prohibits in mealy-mouthed politico-speak the possession of articles for a purpose connected with an act of terrorism. At trial, to cut a long story short, the imprecise wording of the statutory provision put everyone in a pickle, the prosecution failed to prove the necessary connection between the offending articles and an imminent terrorist plot, and the Court of Appeal ruled that in all the circumstances the convictions were unsound.

Accordingly, it would be the case that these men were wrongly imprisoned, convicted contrary to the spirit and letter of the legislation, yada yada yada. But Good Lord, can somebody please pass the perspective? The compulsion to portray these men as ruddy-cheeked imps persecuted for scrumping apples or any other homely clichéd nineteenth century pursuit is as bizarre as it is infuriating.

Simon Jenkins in The Guardian last week drew on comments from one of the men’s solicitors, commenting that the initial conviction was akin to imprisoning five innocents for reading Mein Kampf. If the innocents in question had also amassed a wadge of Nazi videos, songs and propaganda burned onto self-authored “philosophy disks”, downloaded pictures of the Reich ministers and superimposed their own faces over those of Big A and the gang, changed their MSN names to Goebbels, Himmler, Göring, Frick and Hitler, regularly discussed travelling to Nazi hotspots to further the noble cause of Aryanism and left their parents a note saying, “I’ve taken my passport and gone to help out in the Holocaust. Don’t wait up”, then I would be inclined to accept the analogy.

The simple truth is that these young men were not unfortunate victims of circumstance whose carefree googling inadvertently returned one nasty result which they browsed out of idle curiosity. They were not crusaders of academic freedom, courageously storming unchartered frontiers of intellectual exploration through critical research of terrorism theories. I managed to compile a reasonably comprehensive MA thesis on terrorism without accidentally wading into a chat room and asking for advice on how to travel to Pakistan without raising suspicion, or making copies for all my friends of an idiot’s guide to suicide bombing.

The quantity and nature of the material in their possession is, if not technically against the law, certainly a cause for concern. The giant mound of smouldering self-righteousness that sits as Chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission is off his rocker if he genuinely believes these men were spuriously targeted on account of their ethnicity and religion. This is not indiscriminate “criminalisation of Muslim youth”, as Massoud Shadjareh would have his audience believe. This is a lucky escape for five potentially dangerous men who had a darn sight more terrorist propaganda in their possession than their defence of “intellectual curiosity” sensibly accounts for.

The only person in the room with a grasp on reality is Dr Ghayasudin Siddiqui, leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, who amongst the shouts and wails of victimisation has valiantly tried to point out that jihadi websites are “a dangerous area” and that all young people “have to keep themselves far, far away from visiting these websites”.

In any event if, as is no doubt inevitable should an appeal to the House of Lords founder, the government elects to criminalise the viewing and downloading of terrorist material per se, this would be no more a tectonic shift towards crimethink than the current laws against child pornography, embracing almost identical precepts. Even if looking at the material is simply sublimation of visceral urges upon which the anorak/wannabe Osama has no intention to act, the unspeakable harm implicit in the production and distribution of the images brings the viewer too close to the crime to be considered an innocent spectator.

In a libertarian utopia, web-browsers would be free to view what they please. Intellectual curiosity would provide as much a defence to the Bradford Five as to Chris Langham. But, rightly or wrongly, whilst we are entitled to think what we like, that which we browse, collect and distribute can be and is the subject of prohibition. And if the government does decree to extend this to terrorist propaganda, the law will be no more a vindication of the IHRC’s tiresome victim complex than it is an encroachment on Chris Langham’s intellectual curiosity.

Has Dan got it all wrong? Tell us on letters@student-direct.co.uk

Diana-watch

Brilliant. Simply brilliant. If anyone was labouring under any doubt that Mohammed Al Fayed’s appearance at the Diana Pantomime/Inquest bonanza would be a corker, last week has no doubt disabused them. Tony Blair is the latest addition to a list of co-conspirators that The Times now counts as including Prince Philip, Prince Charles, British, French and American security services, the French judiciary, ambulance staff, pathologists, newspaper editors, two former Metropolitan police commissioners, Diana’s sister and brother-in-law, the former British ambassador to France and Diana’s legal team.

Apparently Prince Phillip could not countenance the thought of a Diana/Dodi marriage because the latter “was naturally tanned with curly hair”. Yes Mr Al Fayed, I’m sure that’s the reason. Nothing to do with the thought of family get-togethers with the in-laws.

Your Union

Next week heralds the annual spectacle of Students’ Union elections. Traditionally, turnout to elect those paid to represent your interests lies at a pitiful 10% of the Manchester student body. It would be a fairly non-contentious notion to therefore suggest that an increase in voter turnout should be something of a priority for those charged with invigorating student democracy and election campaigns, yes? A priority for someone like, for example, the Students’ Union Campaigns Officer? Yet curiously when one comes to consider the reform measures that would naturally lend themselves to a soaring increase in voting numbers – voting booths at halls of residence, email and Facebook campaigning, online streaming of candidates at hustings – one person has consistently blocked their implementation in Union council meetings.

Now, if I were a cynic I would point out that the Campaigns Officer is part of a fringe political movement which traditionally relies heavily on voter apathy to ensure it can wield its powerful voting mobilisation to get its members into these nice career-boosting positions of influence. But I’m sure his reasons are less self-serving than that. So don’t take my word for it - go find your Campaigns Officer today and ask him why he’s so eager to repress democracy. Any responses will be gratefully received.