‘Fair is foul and foul is fair…’

“Hover through the fog and filthy air.” Thus spake the witches in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the paradox then gets explored in bloody depth throughout the play. The crones make promises of future greatness, inciting Lady Macbeth to kill Duncan and the truth of the paradox is revealed in that situations which might appear good when in reality they are evil or vice-versa — are all around us. People have the capacity to be good whilst appearing to be evil as well as to be evil whilst appearing good.

All of which is a roundabout way of trying to unpack and understand what is happening to the nature of terrorism, especially in respect of the changes in the terror paradigm being wrought by Islamic State (IS). Just as they brought to the table the borderless state (the ‘caliphate’) so they have brought do-it-yourself terror. Terror delivered with the everyday and the mundane, the off-the-shelf terror that can be bought in your local DIY store in the form of a set of kitchen knives or an axe to chop firewood. Or hired in the form of a ten-ton truck and then driven into crowds of people. No need for elaborate plotting, or the acquisition of complex and expensive equipment or guns, just go shopping is all.

Radicalisation, that word we all think we now understand, that comes off the shelf as well, and it does not have to be a long and intensive process, it can happen within hours or days. And where there are groups of highly-suggestible people with a powerful sense of victimhood it is not difficult to envisage the embedding of a sense of righteousness that finds expression in the carving up of a few people on a train, or the cutting of the throat of a priest in his own church in front of the congregation with whom he was celebrating mass.

What is more the IS has delivered a blanket invitation to embrace the black righteousness. You do not have to have signed up, been recruited, indoctrinated or shipped off to a desert location for some exotic firearms-and-munitions training — not at all. All you have to do is pre-prepare your exit statement, dedicate it to IS in some retrievable format and the IS will be more than happy to take you as being of their own. They quickly embraced the two who died on the steps of a church in Rouen… fair is foul and foul is fair. Just depends on your perspective, really.

But if you really want to go the whole nine yards and build yourself a back-pack bomb then the essentials are at your very fingertips. Any one of you reading this online would be able, within minutes if you are nimble of finger and mind, to gather together a recipe for an explosive device. Even the bangables themselves can be home-grown, made in the garage. Buy a couple of kilos of ball-bearings and a simple electronic switch, find yourself a music festival in, say, southern Germany and there you are. Bits of Germans all over the landscape and righteous duty duly done.

Again from the viewpoint of IS any exploitable vulnerability in the human version of carpet bombing is desirable — like a certain mental instability or illness. Those of unsound mind who also happen to belong to marginalised minorities are fertile ground, and given the incidence of mental ill-health in any community, marginal or otherwise, we should not be surprised to find that some of our freshly disaggregated bombers have troubles of the mind — known, documented and sometimes treated as well. Not that that made a scrap of difference, did it?

The playbook of terror is being re-written before our very eyes, and for those that are used to having their terror packaged for them by the IRA, or ETA or Boko Haram or any one of the other franchises that have come and gone over the past fifty or so years, this is not easy reading. The paradox at the heart of the tragedy of Macbeth has been parlayed into a gruesome modern manual for the times. Shakespeare would have understood, of that I am certain.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 28^th, 2016.

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