ANM

“Narrative is everything” was the central message of Lord Carlile’s inaugural lecture as an Honorary Professor of Swansea University (pictured above) on 21st March. The talk, entitled “Counter–Extremism and Counter-Terrorism – Are They the Same?” was delivered to a packed room of students, lecturers and University grandees.

We attended as researchers of the connections between different forms of coercive control, a growing field of interest globally.

At the conference of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) in 2017, the knitting together of understandings about authoritarian groups, coercive relationships and cults, was clearly bearing fruit with agencies and even Governments now coming to these experts for their knowledge and experience.

We found many points of similarity between our own experience of being covertly stalked and harassed by ideological skeptics and humanists, and many other varied experiences of radicalisation in diverse contexts.

We therefore expected Lord Carlile’s talk about extremism to provide further insight, and we weren’t disappointed.

 

Extremism as Free Expression

Lord Carlile asked the question, “is extremism not just a form of free expression?” 

“If their opinions are hateful”, he asked “why isn’t the ordinary process of debate sufficient to deal with this?”

To answer this, we would have to look at the intention of the expression and the method of its deployment, he said:

“it’s strongly arguable that often it provides evidence of intention beyond merely the intellectual vanity of expressing unusual and even heretical opinions.”

This accords with Lady Hale’s comments on harassment and drawing “sensible lines between the ordinary banter and badinage of life and genuinely offensive, unacceptable behaviour.”

Lord Carlile went on:

“One circumstantial piece of evidence to show what some extremist ideologues are really about is the determination with which they use encryption to hide their opinions from those who may disagree with them.” 

Lord Carlile said it was precisely by observing the deceit with which these lies are practised that the game was visible.

In other words, when people have to persuade, coerce and threaten covertly, they are likely up to no good and this can be a indication or precursor of actual terrorist acts, and that’s not all.

 

Grooming

Lord Carlile also addressed the subject of grooming and after the abusive denial of several judges, it was refreshing to see an establishment figure acknowledge the ordinary reality of grooming in a non-sexual context.

“There is clear evidence from cases where convictions have occurred that recruiters use the dark net to plan and launch a terrorist attack, sometimes grooming as perpetrators people with whom they have made initial contact in an exchange of ideas, as opposed to on the platform that explicitly seeds such action.

“And what I do say to you is there is ample evidence, which has been proved in court cases, that young people particularly young men are been groomed and recruited for terrorist activities by extremists just as people are being recruited for sexual offences on the dark web.”

In the questions, he was asked about the use of the word, but he defended it saying:

“I think it’s forgivable to use words such as grooming because it is actually answering the thought process of those who do, through extremist words and actions, potentiate others to become terrorists. But what are they doing? They are not working on the ethical matrix that we lawyers like to work on all the time, difficult as it is sometimes. They are actually promoting their own moral valuation which most people don’t accept for one moment and they are trying to persuade other people to follow that moral programme that they are creating.

“So grooming is a bit like training an animal to do something which they would not do by instinct but they are taught to do […] so I think it’s a legitimate term to use and it does describe accurately what some extremists are doing”.

This view of grooming, of targets and collaborators alike, reflects our experience as explored in this talk we gave at ICSA.

 

Freedom of Speech

Lord Carlile concluded that in trying to find the line between extremism and terrorism, and admitting that covert behaviour can be an indicator of malicious intent, it is vital that we protect freedom of speech:

“It is not unlawful to think outrageous things and we should all be wholly opposed to anything that comes near to criminalising thought. It is a smaller step than we might imagine from freedom to Room 101.”

Lord Carlile expressed his strong belief that in considering legislation to address extremism, grooming and radicalisation, preserving freedom of expression depends on those who legally advocate and judge such matters. They must hold true to ethical values:

“It’s not worth being a lawyer if you don’t understand your ethical matrix. Indeed you have no business to be a lawyer if you do not work within an accepted ethical framework”

That’s interesting, because we’ve had to document lawyers leveraging the covert nature of their well-connected clients’ stalking, harassment, disability abuse, and mental health smears in order to create an extreme narrative to hide the effects of their harassment. This is what barrister Jonathan Price and solicitor Robert Dougans of Bryan Cave (now merging with Berwin Leighton Paisner) do.

That seems to be the very opposite of what Lord Carlile is saying is necessary in order to defeat terrorism, because it is itself a form of social terrorism.

Their actions comprise many of the extremist red flags mentioned in Lord Carlile’s talk, in a social context. Price’s Chambers, Doughty Street, publicly prides itself on championing the vulnerable and the values emphasised by Lord Carlile, so why do they in fact tolerate and support this deceitful and fraudulent course of conduct?

 

Controlling the Narrative

“I’ve spent my life as a lawyer and as a politician, and I believe that in both the law and in politics, narrative is everything. You know you’ve got the principles right; they can disappear down the shoot very quickly unless the narrative gives them credibility.”

All this is also where covert online stalkers and harassers chime with domestic abusers, murderous terrorists, and all other coercive abusers in their manner of grooming others into their extremist hateful views: in secret.

Although he may not be aware of the futility of expecting lawyers  as a group to hold to true values, Lord Carlile at least understands the relationship between covert behaviour, subverting democracy, and the danger that results from grooming others into damaging ideologies:

“The narrative of extremism is very powerful”.

That’s an easy thing to say, but could Lord Carlile imagine what could happen to a country if Judges themselves, those guardians of the sanctity of fairness in law for the benefit of the people, were to fall for these slick lawyers’ extremist narratives and begin to disseminate them? This would turn law itself from true justice, and make it into a weapon of social terrorism.

 

Reclaiming the Narrative

Lord Carlile advocated fighting extremist narratives by working hard to produce your own narrative and this is of course what is required, and the only option.

Ask yourself, why would Robert Dougans who apparently won for his clients, spend nearly 24 hours tweeting to us his interpretation of the whole case history and repeatedly tweet the misogynistic gaslighting of socially extremist judges?

Why not just let the evidence stand next to the judgements and trust that the narrative will hold?

This is another red flag for extremism, Due to the unnaturalness of groomed behaviours, extremist narratives will always require tending, and further grooming.

 

Extremism and Terrorism are they the same?

As researchers into coercive control, we know the instructive value of the fact that in case 3SA90091 four judges have, in fact, been persuaded to, as Lord Carlile described, “throw away what is best in this society” by deliberately hiding harassment while blaming targets for the effects of it, and by adopting socially extremist doctrines of personal and misogynist hate.

We certainly weren’t surprised that Lord Carlile finished by stating that the distance between extremism and terrorism is ‘getting shorter’.

Hate is hiding as decency, where it can easily be secretly used to groom as many as possible into becoming social terrorists, burying enemies beneath the rubble left when truth and democracy are blown up by malicious and covert communications.

If social terrorism like this is actually perpetrated by value-free lawyers, by doctors who covertly smear others’ mental health, by humanists who covertly make death threats, by influential skeptics who covertly threaten people with shunning if they themselves don’t ostracise chosen targets, all in the name of ‘evidential skepticism’, how on earth do we hope as a society to overcome the murderous avenging narratives of Daesh?

During the last week, Met Chief Cressida Dick has also compared the speed at which young people with no previous or very limited criminal record can become killers, to the way some Islamic extremists become radicalised in a matter of days.

Making these connections cannot happen fast enough.

The fact is, hateful ideology, whether practised on citizens by a hateful, greedy government as “austerity”, or forgiven by biased judges as “honest belief”, will destroy the fabric of our society as surely as any bomb. This kind of internal destruction, leading to general mistrust and fear, is the main purpose of all manner of terrorists.

Thanks to Lord Carlile for joining more of the dots.

3SA90091, Amazon News Media, ANM, Bryan Cave, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, Cressida Dick, Doughty Street Chambers, Doughty Street Public, featured, Hilary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Jonathan Price, Lord Carlile, Robert Dougans

By ANM

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