It's the sheer randomness of it that makes
it so terrifying. The idea that the victim would be utterly generic: not a
politician or a soldier, but a random person. This person would be an
abstraction, really. They are everyone precisely because they are no one in
particular. What would matter is the image. The video had to be made, the event
had to be broadcast. This matters more than the killing itself.
Now will come the courtroom arguments about
whether this is a serious plot or empty, youthful bravado, but they will have
no public purchase. Terrorism is all about the fear, the anxiety, the outrage.
It's nothing without it. And what can scare or outrage us more than the thought
of ISIL within?
And it's that thought that perhaps has the
most to teach us in Australia. ISIL is not simply a group to be vanquished. It
is not a fixed, finite, collection of people we can somehow control or
eradicate. For us in Australia, it's most dangerously a symbol: a brand a young
man from Sydney can claim for himself; a flag in which he can wrap himself, and
his proposed victim. For all its pretensions to statehood, the key thing is
that it's anything but. It exists in the mind as much as on land.
So it's not the kind of thing we can simply destroy with
military force. Modern terrorism doesn't work that way. We keep killing
"senior figures" in terrorist groups – indeed, it's more than three
years since we killed the most senior of them all – and nothing substantive
changes. We tried to smash al-Qaeda. It fragmented, then morphed into a mass
movement not truly under anyone's direct control, with Osama bin Laden mostly a
symbolic figurehead. Then it begat ISIL.
This yields a devilish problem: namely, that we are trying
to confront a threat that exists nowhere in particular, and anywhere in theory.
We can't destroy that. Not in the short term and not with the kind of
conventional force the state has at its disposal. What we can do is manage it.
Arrest, prosecute, convict. The good news is, we're good at that. The bad news
is that this isn't a cure. It's the (certainly necessary) treatment of
symptoms.
Long-term, it's about us. It's about how resilient we are
as a society, and how focused we are in our response. There is one very clear
way in which this alleged plot can succeed, even if it is never carried out:
that we become so emotionally manipulated, so provoked, that we end up
helplessly polarised. That becomes a problem because a symbol as ghastly as ISIL
can only prosper in a febrile atmosphere.
"Right now is a time for calm," urged NSW police
commissioner Andrew Scipione. "We don't need to whip this up."
He's entirely right, but even as he says this he must be
asking himself a very scary question: is that going to be possible?
Waleed Aly is a
Fairfax columnist and a lecturer in politics at Monash University.
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