'Ridiculous'

More from the Liberal Democrats' Spring Conference: The Observer records a curious judgement by Charles Kennedy and an apt riposte (ignore the journalist's irrelevant speculative explanation for its motivation) by the Home Secretary:

Kennedy ... called for a renewed involvement of the United Nations in Iraq to tackle the 'thugs' of al-Qaeda.

In a sign of the Government's jitters over Iraq, that drew an unusually sharp retort from [David] Blunkett, who dismissed him as 'astonishingly naive', adding: 'We are fighting a war against franchised terror groups of suicidal, maniacal killers, whose very aim is to destroy our democratic values and institutions such as the United Nations. To describe them simply as thugs is ridiculous.'

I always try to be fair, and have even in the past been generous, about Charles Kennedy, and so I shall be in this case. Clearly the message he intended to convey was that, as religiously-inspired terrorists, al-Qaeda may aptly be compared to the Thugee movement of rural India from the 7th to the 19th centuries. The Thugees sacrificed their victims - usually travellers who were waylaid - by strangling them in homage to the goddess Kali.

Unfortunately, beyond this historical analogy I cannot go. Whereas the identity of the Thugees' victims was incidental to the terror - what mattered was the religious sacrifice - and no wider goal was sought than this ritual, al-Qaeda's victims are carefully specified: the fatwa endorsed by Osama bin Laden in February 1998 under the auspices of the 'International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders', and in which observant Muslims are urged to kill American civilians wherever they may be found, leaves little scope for exegetical debate. In practice as well as aims and ideology, the movements are far removed from each other. The Thugees murdered their victims individually (though over so many centuries the aggregate number was admittedly huge). Islamist terrorists aim to kill as many infidels as possible, and to do it now. Again Osama bin Laden's May 1998 statement entitled 'The Nuclear Bomb of Islam', which asserts 'the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God', is not the most delphic religious utterance I've come across.

I thus reluctantly conclude that Kennedy's analogy is strained and fallacious. I even have the uncomfortable suspicion that - but no, surely this cannot be - he was not thinking in historical terms, or even thinking much at all, when he drew it, but sought instead to compare Islamist terror to the more common modern usage of the word 'thug', meaning someone like a football hooligan. Such people are violent, odious, often racist and sometimes murderous. They are a threat to the safety of the neighbourhoods they live in. They are not remotely an existential threat to western civilisation. If Charles Kennedy really meant to say what he actually said - that Islamist terrorists are comparable to such people - then it indicates something about him and his party.

The first task of any government is to ensure national security, and I unreservedly support our government's record on this with regard to the war on terror. An opposition party has every right to express tactical disagreements with the government of the day on how to safeguard national security, but in the statement The Observer cites Charles Kennedy goes far beyond such a stance. He is demonstrably uncomprehending of the nature of the threat that Islamist terror poses to the survival of everything that the Enlightenment tradition of tolerance, pluralism, and religious and political liberty represents.

Much has been said in the past few days about Kennedy's personal condition - his health, his drinking habits and his undeniable ineptitude in delivering speeches on important occasions. None of these points seems to me to matter quite as much - if at all - as his chronic lack of imagination. Ernest Bevin was scarcely literate and hardly eloquent (Denis Healey records in his memoirs that Bevin's Commons speeches "often collapsed into tedious obscurity, though he was never guilty of 'clitch after clitch after clitch' - to quote his description of Eden's speeches"), yet he had the insight and imagination to understand implicitly the nature of Stalin's expansionist designs and totalitarian ideology. Acting on this insight, he became the greatest of all Britain's post-war Foreign Secretaries.

Charles Kennedy by contrast is without insight and experience (he has never had a job, having been elected to Parliament at the age of 23). His speeches are wooden and pedestrian, certainly, but then so are his thoughts: the medium is the message, so to speak. There have been some Privy Counsellors in the past who were unfit for an office of state (Jonathan Aitken, for example), and some who were inadequate to it; I cannot for the moment, however, think of any quite so incongruous in that role as the current leader of the Liberal Democrats, a void within a vacuum, a banality made flesh. I can understand why the Home Secretary considers him ridiculous, but I fear it's much worse than that.

Comments

[Matty]

Please tell me this is a parody.

Kennedy was using the term "thug" generically (meaning scumbag) as millions of people do and not only do you unravel it's origins but try and use these to demonstrate what Kennedy "must have meant".

Do you think the people who read this blog are idiots or something?

[Oliver Kamm]

I was attempting irony by attributing sense and thoughtfulness to Kennedy's analysis where none exists. I see I must chalk it up as a failure.

[peter]

Oh Matty,

'Do you think the people who read this blog are idiots or something?'

The evidence is deliciously overwhelming.