TOTALLY Terrorism Episode 7:
Lizzie Dearden: Exploring the Role of the Media in Countering Terrorism
Episode #007 – Lizzie Dearden - Exploring the Role of the Media in Countering Terrorism
Lizzie Dearden is the author of Plotters: The UK Terrorists Who Failed, which covers foiled attacks in the UK since 2017 and shifts in current threats. She has been covering terrorism as a journalist since Islamic State (IS) declared its caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2014. She initially reported on IS-inspired attacks around the world and the group’s propaganda and strategy, before her work widened to cover other kinds of terrorism. Lizzie has focused on terror attacks and prosecutions, security threats and extremism of all kinds in the UK in-depth since 2017 and was previously The Independent’s home affairs editor.
In this episode we talk about Lizzie’s experience as a journalist reporting on terrorism, the role of the media in countering terrorism in the UK, the risks surrounding being a journalist in this field, Lizzie's book Plotters: The UK Terrorists Who Failed, some of the difficulties surrounding mixed or salad bar ideologies, and what terrorism in the UK looks like going forward.
You can purchase Lizzie’s book Plotters: The UK Terrorists Who Failed, from the publishers here: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/plotters/ or from any other bookstore.
For regular insightful terrorism threat and risk information, as well as other Pool Re updates, please sign up to receive our emails at https://www.poolre.co.uk/signup/.
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Note: This episode was recorded on 22nd November 2023 prior to the festive period.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
Hello and welcome to Totally Terrorism, a Pool Re podcast. My name is Becca Stewart, a threat analyst at Pool Re. In this episode, we're joined by Lizzie Dearden, here to discuss her experience as a journalist reporting on Home Affairs, security, and terrorism. We'll talk about the role of the media in countering terrorism in the UK, the risks surrounding being a journalist in this field, Lizzie's book plotters, which gives fascinating details about terrorist plots in the UK since 2017 that failed, some of the difficulties surrounding mixed or “salad bar” ideologies, and what terrorism in the UK looks like going forward. We hope you enjoy this episode of Totally Terrorism and if you would like to hear future episodes, please like and subscribe through your streaming app of choice, or sign up for regular terrorism updates through our Solutions Centre at poolre.co.uk/solutions-centre.
Lizzie Dearden… Welcome to Totally Terrorism.
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Hello.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
It's really nice to have you here, so thank you for coming in. For our listeners, do you want to just introduce yourself and give a summary of what your current role is and what you do in the field of counter terrorism?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah, definitely. So, I started reporting on terrorism actually very early in my journalism career. It was a pure coincidence that I ended up in local papers in parts of London that were heavily affected by different forms of extremism. In about 2012, I started working at the Ilford Recorder. At that time, Anjem Choudary lived down the road, there was a pretty high pace of activity by Far Right groups like the BMP and the EDL, and I suppose in a way that's what really sparked my interest. And then I happened to join The Independent a few months before ISIS declared its caliphate in 2014. And again, this this was a pure coincidence. It wasn't something I had set out to do, to be honest, but that just became the biggest story in the world. And I really threw myself into trying to understand ISIS, getting involved in their online spaces, their propaganda, and, kind of organically, I started focusing on terrorism more and more, just in the course of my everyday work. And then in about 2015, when we started seeing the large attacks committed on continental Europe by ISIS fighters and ISIS supporters, because I was already doing some foreign reporting for The Independent, I started being sent to cover those. And so I ended up in different places, but I think probably the most recent one was the German Christmas market attack in 2016. And yeah, just ending up being more and more and more focused on terror attacks and ISIS. And then when the first attacks started striking London in 2017, the editors at The Independent decided that they would rather have someone who was familiar with reporting ISIS globally, rather than people who had previously been kind of routine crime reporters in the UK, covering it. So I think it was after the London Bridge attack they promoted me to become Home Affairs and Security Correspondent; I think my title was at the time. And my focus then became terrorism in the UK. So, it was kind of about applying that background of what I knew about ISIS and what I knew about attacks to what was happening in the UK and of course, we all remembered how terrible that year was, kind of one attack after the other. And then the kind of Far Right backlash with the Finsbury Park attack. And since that point, although I have continued trying to keep an eye on terrorism internationally, it's really been terrorism and extremism in the UK that's been my bread and butter from kind of street movements to online movements, even going into kind of conspiracy theories and some of the changes we saw in lockdown, to kind of the sharp end of ISIS, Al Qaeda and those threats that still remain.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
It's really fascinating and it sounds like you had quite a different experience being able to be close to different attacks across Europe from quite a close perspective, if you're going there to report on the incidents, something that perhaps most people in the UK wouldn't understand or experience.
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah, it was a kind of strange sensation in the way that it all started feeling horribly samey. There ended up being a very similar cycle to everything. You know the methodology started becoming very similar. The target, crowded places, started becoming very similar. The reaction started becoming very similar. And it was a strange feeling actually because all the way through that period, when we were seeing a lot of attacks in France and Spain and Germany and all kinds of different places, it felt kind of strange for a long time that the UK had escaped it. And for a while I think there was almost a false sense of security because we're an island and because we didn't have the ease of travel that some of the returning foreign fighters, who carried out like the Bataclan attack, we didn't have the ease of travel to the UK with weapons and people that they had had. But I think it did feel kind of inevitable that it was going to happen here. And although it was horrible, I was kind of glad that I was coming into everything happening at home with that perspective, because it would have been, I think it would have been even more of a shock coming to that kind of cold.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
Yeah, I guess it would be more traumatic seeing these types of attacks for the first time on your home soil. Whereas you'd experienced them previously and, it sounds like your work now actually is quite similar to what we do here in that, whilst you have to take into account terrorism abroad and what happens in different countries, at Pool Re, we only cover UK property on the British mainland, so we really care a lot about UK terrorists, UK terrorist activity and the sort of things that you'd be looking at.
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah, it's exactly that and so I guess in the whole kind of career spiel, I only brought you up to The Independent. I actually left The Independent in August. The book plotters came out in March, and so I'm currently working on updating that for a paperback version, hopefully out in 2024, but also still focusing on terrorism in my freelance work. And still, yeah, still digging into it a lot and kind of waiting to see what comes next.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
We’ll come onto Plotters later because it's a really great book, and we'll include the link to it in the description of the podcast, so if anyone else is interested, we really recommend it. But I just wanted to talk more broadly about what you feel the role of the media is in counter terrorism. Do they have a role to play and how significant is that role? Can they really have an impact in the counter terrorism field?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah, it's a tricky one because actually the role of the media has been criticised quite a lot in the counter terrorism space. Some of that has been through things like the Manchester Arena inquiry, which looked into the experiences of some witnesses and survivors and bereaved families in the aftermath of the attack, and also there was some research done a couple of years ago that was commissioned by counter terrorism policing, looking at whether actually, the media and reporting of terror attacks contributes to what some people call contagion or imitation theory. Basically, the idea that people reading or seeing our reporting will themselves be inspired or feel that terrorism has been glamorised or gain kind of instructional material for their own attacks. So, in terms of the media’s role in countering terrorism, I guess it's kind of twofold. One is to be very wary about what we're actually doing. I personally think the reporting of terrorism has become a lot better as we've learned, when I talked about reporting on ISIS in the early days, it was the absolute Wild West, not just in terms of what ISIS was doing, I mean they were everywhere, they were on Facebook and Twitter, and they routinely used like Tumblr accounts which seems completely crazy now, but it was just there. And I think, partly as a result of the fact that it was so freely available, it became very normal in the media to report on their propaganda in a way that was effectively regurgitating it. And for a while, the consequences of that weren't clear. But as recently as during the kind of COVID period I was in a terror case, I think it was a Section 5 case, so someone who was mounting some sort of terror plot, and they had actually accessed ISIS propaganda on knife and vehicle attacks through a Daily Mail story, which had been very outraged, saying, you know, this is horrific, ISIS has published this magazine. But in doing that, they published a photo of this double page spread, which was so high definition that you could just read it. And so after all of the efforts to take down the original sources of those magazines, terrorists were using the Daily Mail. And it sounds crazy to say it, but that was a risk that I think people really weren't thinking about at the time. And now that's really changed. So, in terms of being aware of what we're doing and what we're reproducing, that's got a lot better, definitely on the jihadist side, the Far Right side's got some work to do. It's still relatively common after mass shootings and things like that, to see manifestos reproduced which could definitely be worked on. I think there's also been a lot more thought about how journalists talk to victims and witnesses and bereaved families. The kind of responsibility that comes with, in the immediate aftermath of an attack, doing anything or reporting anything that suggests a motivation where maybe it's not clear; kind of creating panic when there isn't any. We've had incidents where cars mounting curbs or things like chargers overheating on the tube have caused kind of mass panic and, you know, you see like “Terror Fears”, which really panic people. All of that stuff has really been improved, which I guess for countering terrorism is a good thing.
And then the other thing I suppose is just awareness. Every year we have multiple campaigns from counter terrorism policing, things like, “See it. Say it. Sorted.”, and also kind of high visibility campaigns around like the Christmas period, which we're about to hit now. And, although we do it in ways that are kind of more subtle than saying. “look out for anything suspicious and report it to police”, the media does have a role in kind of using news coverage just to raise awareness of the kind of things that people should be wary of. And I think the police have found that helpful and it's completely anecdotal, but I think the general public, partly through our reporting, are just a lot more aware of kind of security and behaviour that looks odd. Even coming to your office now from London Bridge Station, I saw a big poster that effectively told people how to spot hostile reconnaissance. So yeah, I think I think a lot has improved in the last few years and the media has definitely been part of that.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
Yeah, I think I would also agree, and it's about understanding the responsibility to report on something that's happening without promoting it, and it's that balance of giving enough information so that you can say there was propaganda without regurgitating the propaganda. And even recently, although this wasn't propaganda necessarily, I know the Guardian removed Osama bin Laden's Letter to America, which they'd previously had on their website, because a trend of people suddenly re-thinking what it meant, appeared on the Internet, and they've then had to remove their reporting about the letter.
So the balance of reporting on it without promoting it is something that's clearly improved. And I think personally people are more likely to listen to things that they see in the media, whether they know it or not, because they consume it so much. You'll see people reading news articles on all kinds of social media as opposed to – “I wonder what the police have said today about XYZ.” You see the things you see on the media and slowly it will feed into your brains, so if the reporting is more responsible, then people's reactions, potentially could improve and the way that they respond to incidents that are happening, like you say, you don't want to get into inspiring others to imitate, you want to warn people of the dangers and highlight that it's a negative thing. So I definitely think that the improvement is clearly obviously having having quite a significant impact.
With reporting, however, particularly for the roles that you've done there comes risk of having your name associated with things you're writing about, and I know that we've had discussions within my team about particular topics we write about, whether we want to have our names on the reports, I know various organisations where they'll never use their names on their reports because the topics they're talking about could receive backlash. How have you coped with the potential risks associated with working in this field?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah, it's an interesting question because it definitely feels like something I should have anticipated and just didn't. Probably sounds ridiculous but, this isn't a particular criticism of The Independent, because I think it's the same everywhere, there's no training on risk, there's no thought about it. The same set of conventions are kind of unthinkingly applied across all kinds of journalism, no matter what you're writing about. So like you mentioned there, with names being taken off a piece, that's something I've never seen done. I don't think it can be done. I don't think we necessarily want to do it. There's a very, I guess it's a form of accountability in journalism, by and large, if you're writing something, your names on it, and you're the person accountable for it, to a degree. And I think that goes to a lot of kind of trust and just the mechanisms by which journalism works as a kind of eyes, ears, and translators, and relayers for the public. And my experience has been that, for a lot of journalism, people don't really notice your byline. It's very different in print than on TV. Of course, we have our little thumbnail byline pictures and stuff, but by and large, we're not kind of public figures. And so I think it's definitely less risky working for newspapers and online media than it is working in television and broadcast. Yeah, obviously not risk free as I've experienced.
I think coming into this area of work as I did, kind of organically, just kind of evolving with the times and what happened, and kind of following the news story as the kind of picture of terrorism developed across Europe and then hit the UK. When you're a journalist, you never feel like you are the story and you never think that you're going to become the story, and so it really surprised me when people started targeting me personally. And it's kind of interesting because I haven't really experienced it with jihadists. I guess my understanding of it, the reason probably is that ideologically groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and some of the jihadist groups we have in the UK hate everyone pretty equally on the basis that you're, you know, kind of against their project or you know you're a Christian or a citizen of a crusader country or whatever, you know. So, it never feels that personal with them. Whereas what I experienced is that for elements of the Far Right, it can generate a lot of risk because they consider journalism in a very different way, and it becomes very individualised and personal in terms of the threat from them. So, I think for me, everything kicked off back in around 2017 or 2018. Obviously, if you are reporting on these kind of issues, and at the same time I was reporting a lot on the Mediterranean refugee crisis, which was a kind of big topic of focus for the Far Right internationally, of course. I didn't realise that I was kind of becoming a bit of a lightning rod for kind of wider hatred of the mainstream media and a lot of conspiracy theories, you know, depending on your flavour of ideology, you might think that the media is part of a project to either further or cover up the replacement of white people in Europe, or you might be part of some kind of secretive Muslim cabal, or basically people think all kinds of things about the media, and then they started thinking all kinds of things about me.
And by the time I realised this was happening, it was kind of too late. My address got doxed and released online and then I started getting a lot of death threats and people saying I should be raped and killed and, you know, thrown off a rooftop and all kinds of mad stuff. And then it was mainly online until about 2019, when people started recognising me in person. And that felt like a big step up in risk, because although the online stuff was horrible, and I think it's easy to say, oh, you know, “water off a duck's back, they're just losers on Twitter”, I don't think the risk of that stuff should be underestimated. But at the same time, it felt very different when someone turns around in a courtroom and says “That's Lizzie Dearden from The Independent”. So from that point I had to restrict my movements in terms of where I went and who I was with, where I could be recognised. And then in 2021, there was a stalking case involving Tommy Robinson, the leader of the English Defence League. He's not a terrorist, obviously, but he has the capacity to inspire them and has done in the past. And so the risk, yeah, the risk now comes from multiple places, not just from individuals, but also from kind of their followers and the effects they might have on other people. And it's sad really but I've just started to be very careful in the way that I kind of live my life.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
It's really sad that in trying to do your job and keeping people informed, there's been such horrific repercussions that have made you think about how you live your life. And have such significant impacts on the way that you're living your life. Do you think that there needs to be more protection for journalists? Or at least more required education before you start to work in this field. Obviously if people are freelance, it's a bit more difficult, but when you're working at bigger newspapers, media organisations, do you think that there needs to be a requirement that people understand there is a risk associated?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah, I think definitely. And a couple of years ago, I was working with the Society of Editors and the National Union of Journalists to actually look at kind of best practise on that, because it's not just terrorism to be fair. I mean, people have very strong opinions about a lot of things and strangely, some of the worst abuse I've ever seen have been to my colleagues who are sports journalists. People really love football, love to hate about football. So I think it should be something that's more considered and perhaps it could be to all journalists just kind of standard operational security. You know, I wish that when I was entering my career, someone had said to me, you know, probably won't happen, but you should probably make your social media accounts private and you know, it will probably be fine, but you want to think about minimising the ways in which people could find your address, you know, have you thought about going off the electoral roll?, Are there any public online links that would direct people to who your partner is, and what they do for work? That kind of stuff. It's a tricky line because you never want to scare the bejesus out of people, especially, you know, young journalists and students. But at the same time, I think there are a really simple set of precautions that could be taken very early in people's careers that would not really have a negative impact on their kind of lives or their careers or the reach they have online, but could really make a huge difference. We're still not sure how certain people found our address, but we think it's potentially because my partner was still on the electoral roll and people found out he was my partner by scrolling through about 10 years of Twitter messages. The only public interaction I could find between me and him was like a 2009 Twitter chat about what we liked on toast in the morning. And unless there's some serious kind of, like physical spying going on, which is not impossible, that's the kind of dedication that people will go to. And yeah, if I had simply several years ago, gone through all my tweets and deleted that, you know, who knows what might not have been able to kind of happen later down the line. And I'm not victim blaming, and I'm definitely not blaming myself, but yeah, I think definitely there needs to be a greater conversation about those kind of precautions for journalists.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
Yeah, I guess it's just personal security in the same way that we're supposed to change our passwords, not use Password as our password and just being safe online. Anyone can be a victim of identity fraud and anyone can have their information stolen or misused. So those kind of things are basic level. If that kind of information was out there, it could do just even a little bit to keep people safe in what they're trying to do and. And talking about activities online, I'm going to somehow lead this into talking about your book. Now, this came out in March and, would you like to just summarise? Obviously you can't talk about all the plots, but summarise what the what the book is about and any key takeaways that you think there are from it and we can talk maybe in a bit more detail afterwards about it.
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah. So in in a way, it kind of does what it says on the tin. It's called “Plotters: the UK terrorists who failed” and it's about exactly that. It's about the kind of “what ifs” and “didn't happens” since 2017. It does feature all of the attacks we have had, but rather than focusing kind of just on what would be termed successful attacks or kind of fatal attacks, it looks at the whole picture of terrorism, which for me, I think you have to include what was stopped. You have to include the rest of the picture, because otherwise you're only looking at a really small part of what's going on, you're really looking at kind of the tip of the iceberg. And I guess that kind of struck me when I was reporting on this whole picture because as much as the actual attacks were harrowing, when we started seeing more and more and more court cases of people who were being pulled up for terror plots it, in a way, it became scarier because you're thinking, “oh my God, you know, there's more”, and there could be more coming and all this stuff is going on that people just don't see, you know, the general public are obviously highly aware of when an attack happens because it's absolutely horrific, and I should say that every plot I reported on in my book had been covered by the mainstream media at large, but frankly, people don't necessarily read it. It seems to be the case that a bad news story is always more read than a good news story, and in a kind of slightly dark way, I guess plotters is a slightly good story in the sense that it looks at the kind of police operations and the security service operations that did work. But beneath that, it also looks at who these people actually are. That was something I was really interested in and I think, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but the word terrorist is such a weighty, dramatic word that really dehumanises people and in the coverage of attacks, it's very common to hear words like monster and things like that which are all perfectly legitimate. But what really shocked me when I actually started covering these cases in court is that a lot of these guys look like completely normal people. And I found that really, really interesting. And when people die, as often they have done in attacks quite deliberately, inquests and stuff do a really good job, but there's only so much information you get. And of course you don't get to question them, whereas in the terror plot trials we've had, you've had that really forensic analysis of their lives. You've had them questioned. And so I found that you got like a much fuller picture of these people's personalities and paths than you could when actually they've successfully committed an attack and been killed in the act. And I just really wanted to explore how people got there, you know, how do you finish your shift as an Uber driver one day and then decide to go off and try and behead a British soldier? You know, how are you studying at college and then think, “you know what, I'm going to blow myself up for ISIS". It sounds so unthinkable, and I think I wanted to kind of talk about these cases because the ones that got caught are really the closest opportunity we have at sort of understanding what's actually going on.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
I think, it's really important what you say there about, how we only hear when the police fail, really, because that's when the public recognise an attack happened. Or maybe let me rephrase that. You only hear when an attack has evaded detection. The police haven't been able to foil the plot. The intelligence services haven't been able to foil the plot. It's happened. The attack has happened. And people are so quick to focus on, OK, well, we had this many attacks in this many years. But a stat that we always look at in the same way that you've done here is how many foiled plots were there. And I think the CONTEST strategy gave the most recent number of 39 foiled plots since 2017.
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah I think we’re in the 40s now.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
In the 40s now. So we're in the 40s now, of foiled plots in a period of time when we had 15 actual attacks, now that's a significant amount of foiled plots. And learning from them, just because they were stopped doesn't mean that the terrorists don't want to do that. Or like you say, the label of terrorists, radicalised individuals, extremists, people that are thinking about acting on their ideological beliefs, what are they trying to do? That tells us what the trends are in methodologies.
Are all of these plots related to knives, or are they all related to bombs? Do people still want to build bombs? Do people want to do something more large scale? The plots tell you as much, if not more than the actual attacks do. So that's, I think why my team in particular found this really interesting, because it brought together all the information like you say, that's already in the media, it's already in open source, but it's everywhere and having it all in one place, it really opens your eyes to what actually happened under your nose that you didn't even notice, or hear about, other than the fact that a plot was foiled.
Do you think there are any plots in particular that you think really stuck with you?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Oh, so many. They kind of all live in my head rent free. I sort of needed to get this book out because I was just always thinking about these guys like, you know, you’re just driving along and your like, “wow, isn't that wild?”. I guess it's not so much a plot, but a person. One of the ones who really intrigued me was a guy called Mohiussunnath Chowdhury. He was the Uber driver who attempted an attack at Buckingham Palace in 2017, and he was only at Buckingham Palace because he had originally tried to go to Windsor Castle but, you know, as anyone getting an Uber will know, sometimes not so great with directions, and he accidentally went to the Windsor Castle pub in Windsor rather than Windsor Castle and then thought, sod it, I'll drive on to Buckingham Palace. So the whole attack was botched. And what was really incredible is that he got away with it at trial. He was charged with obviously attempting a terror attack because he had got out a sword and started shouting various slogans and attacked two police officers. And, when he was put on trial, the first jury couldn't make a decision because he claimed that he was suicidal and he was attempting what's known in the US as “suicide by cop”. So the idea that, you know, for miscellaneous reasons, you just want to die and you're going to provoke a reaction in the police that you know will get you killed. Obviously a lot easier done in the US than the UK. And the jury didn't know what to do with that, because a key part of terrorism legislation in the UK is that it has to be for the purposes of advancing a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause. And without that purpose for advancing a cause bit, everything falls down. So the jury didn't know what to do. And then there was a retrial. And then he got acquitted. And it was amazing, because even in prison he had been drawing these, like, really gory, hand drawn pictures of, like, police officers being shot outside Downing Stret street and like blood everywhere and I think he’d done a sketch of 9/11. Anyway, really no sign of this guy being kind of chill. And then he came straight back out and then he tried again. And I don't think it's the first or last case of that happening, which is a kind of another interesting point of conversation, but I found it absolutely amazing that this guy had originally had one plan to attack Windsor Castle, that had gone wrong, so he tried Buckingham Palace, that had gone wrong and he’d gone to prison, got out of prison, then come straight back out and starts planning an attack, which by this point the security services were absolutely crawling over him and he didn't get too far, but he was looking at targets like London Pride, Oxford Street, he was considering all kinds of things and, yeah, that's the kind of thing that really stuck with me. The fact the kind of “if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again” and, you know, not to freak anyone out, but this year is the number with the highest turnover of terrorist prisoners, so the highest ever number of terrorist prisoners released from British jails. And I guess one of the kind of what next questions is we're going to start seeing really, really quickly if interventions and rehabilitation are working, or if we're going to start seeing this kind of “if at first you don't succeed" crowd.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
It's a really good point to make because particularly for our office, we're based at Monument. The Fishmongers Hall attack happened right outside the office and we know that Usman Khan, who committed the attack, had been in prison for terrorist offences, came out and, like you say, tried again. So it'll be interesting to see what happens coming up with these people being released and seeing whether the interventions have worked. What do you think that the plots that you wrote about tell us about the current terrorist threat in the UK?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
I think at the moment it's fairly stable in the sense that it's lone actor, lone wolf, self-initiated terrorist, you know, everyone has a different term they like to use. Basically, people acting alone in the event, often who are part of kind of loose online communities of some sort, but acting mainly alone in the sense of actually doing the thing physically. That shows really no sign of changing. The other thing that shows no sign of changing massively is where the threat comes from. It's still dominantly jihadist, but with a large proportion of far right and we're starting to see some other groups come in. Whether these groups count as terrorists or whether they should be considered separately is a pretty live discussion. But we're starting to see, you know, plots, as you would loosely turn them, by conspiracy theorists, by incels, by people, often children, who are very obsessed with the idea of school shootings, mass violence. So the questions of what people will do or what they want to do seem quite stable. You know, knife attacks, vehicle attacks, bombings and shootings if they can get their stuff together. The why and what for could change, and I think that's a big question at the moment.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
I think those are sort of similar to the assessments that we make in our team, that it will continue to be lone actors. We're not going to see a massive influx of coordinated groups going forward. It's a really disparate threat and we use the term “salad bar ideology”, which I know there's different terms that people can use. You've got mixed ideologies unstable ideologies, but we use salad bar to refer to the fact that they pick bits of different ideologies to support their frustration. And it might even be contradictory ideologies. But its concerning, because how do you stop an ideology or intercept with an ideology that you don't understand? And if they don't understand their ideology, how can people trying to intervene and understand their ideology?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah, I mean this would be pretty radical, but a couple of the interviews I did for the book got me thinking where some people were asking if the actual concept of terrorism we have is even that useful anymore? You know, are we actually hampering ourselves and creating blind spots by kind of cleaving to the idea of an ideology at all? You know, just playing devil's advocate, should we actually all take a step back and kind of throw ideology out the window and start thinking about mass violence, for instance, you know, and then rather than being like, “oh yes, they wanted to kill a lot of people, but was it for the purpose of advancing a political, racial, religious or ideological cause”? You know, kind of scrapping that and saying, “ok, did they want to kill people”? If so, why? Basically. And I think that discussion might gain more force to be honest, because., the amount of debates I've heard about the idea of salad bar ideology, some people say that's where the picture currently is, some people will absolutely reject that assertion, some people say that even the concept of that is completely misunderstood and a lot of people who look like mixed ideology are actually one ideology, often far right, but kind of opportunistically pick up instructional material or material that they find useful from other areas, but still in the service of one cause. I covered a neo-Nazi case not long ago where the guy had a lot of like communist material and in court I think the defence was trying to argue, oh he wasn't really a neo-Nazi because he had drawn like a hammer and sickle on his desk, and you know, the case was made about why he was actually viewing that material and, you know, what it meant to him and I think it's just going to become harder and harder and harder to box people and I don't know if or when that's going to transform into a space where maybe it just doesn't become useful to try. And yeah, maybe flip things on the head a bit.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
That's interesting, considering at the moment there's already a lot of questions about what is extremism, what is terrorism, related to the protests that we've been seeing around the country really, but predominantly in London. Whether there needs to be a rethink about the definition of terrorism. Terrorism's definition has never been agreed on, it's something that around the world, every single country has a different definition, maybe slightly different, they might mean the same thing, but, there's no agreed upon global definition for terrorism, which also makes things difficult. It also means that, what's stopping it from changing, or being updated, or being adapted to suit the current times?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Yeah, I think the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, who you know is a UK watchdog who really does what the title says, he reviewed the definition of terrorism not long ago, I think, and he concluded that it was sufficiently flexible that it didn't need any immediate change. And I guess, I guess that that flexibility is true. The definition of terrorism in the UK is flexible to an extent that has been controversial because when you look at what the actual words say, it can be applied to anything and it becomes an operational and political decision, what you choose to apply it to. And we've seen that play out about five years ago, the CPS tried a wave of prosecutions against people who had fought with or supported the Kurdish People's Protection Units in Syria and, of course, that was the same Kurdish People's Protection Units that were fighting against ISIS with the military and financial support of the British government. And so we had a kind of slightly farcical spectacle where people were being pulled up in the Old Bailey on various charges, you know, support or assisting, you know, travelling, and my recollection is none of them ever got to a jury because judges were basically sitting there saying, “well, wait, wait, we’re going to sit here and charge someone with fighting against ISIS for a group that has a direct backing of the British government”. And some of those prosecutions got kind of slightly revised in the end, where instead people were alleged to have had some kind of interaction with separate Kurdish groups that actually were prescribed; the PKK. And then in the end, they were all dropped. And it was an interesting lesson because it showed how flexible that definition of terrorism is. You know, on paper are people who are joining or supporting groups that are hoping to set up a Kurdish state in parts of Iraq and Syria, you know, using violence or the threat of violence for a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause, yes. Does it fit the definition? Yes. Would it ever get past the jury? No. And I think, the question of the definition is an interesting one because in some senses it's not, it's not that it's too narrow ideologically, it could be that it's too broad. And on the flip side, it comes down to the ideological question again, where the laws hinge so much on ideology that it puts it at the risk of excluding other forms of mass violence, for instance, the Plymouth shooting where Jake Davison murdered multiple people. That wasn't declared a terror attack and that became very controversial. And I talked to the police officers involved in that decision and they said that they considered it very closely and that no one contested that he was an incel, an involuntary celibate, but the missing link was that they couldn't establish that the shooting was for the purpose of advancing the cause of inceldom, and that made a lot of members of the public very angry and it raised some questions internally about whether that gap is having an effect on what the police and security services are doing, the threats they're assessing, and I think there will definitely need to be a conversation to be had about that definition, ff that ideology requirement keeps on getting in the way of action to stop violence of other types.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
Yeah, you made some really great points and I think particularly with that case of Jake Davison, there were so many questions surrounding, is this terrorism, isn't this terrorism, people waiting for the answer and that also sort of fits in with this changing ideology. We didn't have people who were incels, involuntary celibates, a few years ago, or at least not being labelled as such and being labelled as potentially violent. These are changes in ideologies that we have going forward. What do you think are the drivers, the most significant drivers, of terrorism threat in the UK?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
I think broadly it's a combination of grievance, so either personal grievance, or what people in the trade call grievance narratives. So you get big, big, overarching ones. You know, if you're a jihadist, you're going to think that Muslims are being oppressed globally, Muslims are being murdered. You know, all of which is true in different ways in different places, but you're going to hold that very close to your heart. And if you're on the far right, you're very likely to think that your race or culture is under threat from some kind of external force. And if you're a conspiracy theorist, you're going to think that various kind of shadowy organisations or elites are up to something nefarious. And if you're an incel, you're going to think that basically the world is against you, and you might need to take revenge. And if you're into school shootings, you might just think, like, that would be great. But basically, people who have a personal or societal kind of grievance.
And the next step I guess is then legitimising violence. Kind of crossing the Rubicon where you start to think that violence is justified for some kind of aim related to that grievance, whether it's revenge or whether it's some kind of cleansing. There's all kinds of reasons, but it's the drivers, I think are definitely a combination of, yes grievance, and then the justification of violence in terms of that grievance. And what those grievances and justifications are vary for people. We have some constants. Obviously, ISIS's grievance narrative about the deaths of Muslims in aerial bombings and more widely. As recently as 2021, David Amess, the Conservative MP was murdered solely because he voted in favour of ISIS strikes against ISIS in Iraq, and that shows no sign of going away. On the far right again, we have plots tricking through all the time. People who are targeting MP's or certain faith or community groups who they think are part of this kind of perceived war on their race or culture, and then other grievances are forming.
And the big question at the moment is around Israel and Gaza. You know what happens there? So far, it's not on that scale, but we all know what effect the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria had on terrorism all around the world. You know, ISIS wouldn't have happened without Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of attacks in the UK wouldn't have happened without ISIS. And so all of these conflicts end up having consequences that can be completely unpredictable and at the moment we're seeing a much lower level and separate but kind of concerning explosion in hate crime in the UK. So anti-Semitic hate crime is nearing an all-time record. Islamophobic hate crime is jumping up too and we're starting to see the mobilisation of all kinds of extremist and terrorist groups who are trying to jump on this conflict to assert their own narratives. I was reading one of ISIS’ recent copies of the Al Nava magazine, and even though they're, you know, competitors with Hamas effectively, you know as much as some people say it, they're not related as a terrorist group, even they were praising it. They released this massive article called “Practical steps to fight the Jews”, and it's a very long article and I won't read it all out, especially after my point about propaganda, but basically the kind of overall point was saying this is great, but we shouldn't just be worrying about the Jews inside Palestine as they call it. We should be fighting the Jews everywhere. It's not enough to achieve the elimination of the Jews. The Jewish state in its composition relied on a rope of people. And basically ISIS is trying to widen out that conflict to say it's not just Israel that's the problem, it's the US that’s the problem and it's the UK that's the problem. It's American and European countries, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's just one example of places trying to kind of internationalise that conflict in the way that the Syrian civil war became internationalised. And we don't know if that will work. But the longer it goes on, and the more people that die on all sides, it becomes more and more likely that there may be some kind of inspirational factor, and that attacks might kind of spread globally.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
So just on that point on the potential for the inspirational factor, the potential impacts of the conflict, what do you think the future of terrorism threat in the UK looks like? What's going to change? Is it going to stay the same? What do you think it looks like?
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
At the moment I can't see any change in the basic pattern of individual people being inspired to act by a combination of things, which sounds kind of simple but it's very different to what we used to see with large, organised hierarchical groups of people being directed to act in a certain way. There doesn't seem to be any return at the moment to that very organised hierarchical way of doing things. So it looks like the future threats going to be very much in the individual space. But, I think it's pretty hard to say right now what those individuals will look like and what they'll be doing. Definitely, I think it's still vehicles and knives. Having studied a lot of plots and a lot of people who try this kind of stuff, some of them kind of start with fairly grandiose ambitions to make a bomb or do something really advanced, I mean drones, and I think someone was even talking about using a self-driving car. Sometimes people start on that road and then it all just gets too difficult, especially with the laws that have been brought in around precursor chemicals and things like that. It just gets too difficult and everyone tends to fall back on knives and vehicles and so, yeah, I think knives and vehicles, crowded places, or politically targeted assassinations will very much continue to be the modus operandi.
But yeah, the motivating factors I think could go absolutely anywhere or potentially in all directions at once. It's kind of a political point, but people talk about kind of the age of individualism, and that's kind of helpful for looking at terrorism. Even when people may superficially be appearing to act on behalf of a group, often the reason they're acting is intensely individual and about their own lives. I remember years ago there was an ISIS inspired attack in France, but the guy’s target was his boss who he really hated at work and he beheaded him, but he beheaded him for ISIS. So people are kind of finding a way of marrying up individual grievances with a kind of noble aim, and I think that pattern will continue. But yeah, what the grievances are and what the aim is will just continue changing in response to international events.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
Well, I think that says it all. And if listeners want to learn a bit more about the age of individualism, our fifth episode with Martin Gallagher is actually titled the age of the Individual.
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
I didn't even know that. That's amazing.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
Yeah, if you want to listen more to Dr Martin Gallagher's opinion on the age of the individual and the state the world is in now in terms of terrorism and talking about how these lone actors seem to be dominating, then check that episode out. But overall, I really think that we're in an uncertain time like you've highlighted in terms of ideology. We don't know which way it's going to go. All we can do is keep monitoring and be prepared for whatever new ideologies could emerge and any results of the current conflicts that we're seeing abroad. So I think that's the end of our discussion for today. Thank you so much for coming in. It's really been great to speak to you and for anyone that wants to read Lizzie's book, the link will be in the description.
Guest Expert: Lizzie Dearden
Thanks so much, it was great to come on.
Threat Analyst: Oliver Hair
Thank you for listening to the latest episode of Totally Terrorism, a Pool Re podcast. We hope that you have found this discussion useful for supporting or building your knowledge and understanding of terrorism threat. We hope that you'll join us next month for another conversation between a new guest expert and one of the Pool Re terrorism threat analysts.
Threat Analyst: Becca Stewart
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Threat Analyst: Oliver Hair
Thank you for checking out the podcast and we look forward to seeing you next time on Totally Terrorism.