A
recent poll revealed that just over 70% of people in the UK
Terrorism,
like fruit, vegetables, cars and holidays has a supply and demand curve.
Consider terrorism as a good with a demand curve - by which I mean that
terrorism is an activity that currently some people wish to engage in to achieve
a religious or political goal. The price of engaging in terrorism is paid in
the form of the risk of death, injury or imprisonment.
Similarly,
there is a demand curve for burglary, speeding, and fraud, and the price paid
to do these things comes in the cost of a fine or a prison sentence. To put it in
formal terms, we could in theory draw a demand curve for all of these crimes
and then plot the likelihood of punishment on the vertical axis, and the number
of crimes committed for each on the horizontal axis.
Ascertaining
the steepness of the demand curve is like asking whether an increase in the
probability of punishment will amount to reduced instances in crimes committed.
Measuring the slope of the demand curve for, say, burglary is equivalent to
measuring the deterrent effect of the punishment for burglary. Crimes like
burglary, which are often committed to feed a drug habit, are likely to have
steep demand curves because drug demand is usually fairly inelastic for an addict, which is why recidivism
rates for drug addicts are so high. With speeding, on the other hand, the
demand curve seems to be pretty flat. In other words, the single appearance of
a speeding sign or a camera leads to a huge decrease in the incidences of
speeding.
Now
when it comes to terrorism and the sort of people who are likely to commit
terrorist acts in the name of ISIS , the demand
curve is about as far from flat as it is possible to be, because most of the
causes with which the terrorists identify are causes bigger than the crime
deterrents (including even death). In other words, many terrorists are
perfectly willing to die for their cause, believing that in doing so they are
offering a noble service to Allah, meaning in most cases there is no deterrent
to flatten down the demand curve for terrorism.
If
terrorists have no care for the consequences in terms of punishment for the
crime, and if Islamic State continues with the same momentum in recruiting willing participants to fight for their cause, then terrorism is going to
continue to be a problem, and immigration only changes where the incidences of
terrorism take place - be it Britain, France, Germany, Holland or Belgium.
Regarding
the aims of Islamic terrorism, and the fact that those aims even seem able to
subvert the moral compass of the perpetrators, I see no signs of incidences of
terrorism decreasing. The wide scope of this evil regime is that Islamic
State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wants to establish the Caliphate of all
Caliphates, unleashing terror everywhere he can, and ruling Islamic State
nations under the thrall of their terror-inducing domination.
There is,
though, perhaps one fly in the ointment - if only he was a bit more
familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle, or even a bit more cognisant of
historical antecedents, he and his fellow Jihadi thugs would see that their
aspirations are probably
unrealistic in
the longer run.
Here's why.
A general pattern throughout the history of military or political coups
is that even when they are brutal and catastrophic for the citizens, they soon
reach a point of relative stability, not least because it's nigh-on impossible
to rule a country under continual internal strife. In other words, good
conquerors, even Caliphs, totalitarian as they were, still allowed at least a
semblance of autonomy and harassment-free administration of people. That's why,
even though it is likely that these horrible terrorist incidents will
continue to occur, and
Islamic thuggery will continue to pop up, the idea of ruling
nations consistent with the backward, brutalised, oppressive, freedom denying
methods of Islamic State is wholly unrealistic in the long run.
