The Column

If I Was A Terrorist
(With Flowers In My Hair)

Manchester Arndale
post-bomb

I was recently fortunate enough to be involved in a promotional event at a local shopping centre. Putting aside the obvious tedium of spending an afternoon handing out balloons to inquisitive toddlers, I was forced to converse with people who deliberately christen their children with misspelt names in the hope that it will inspire them to become pop stars. I am referring to people whose only source of regular exercise consists of the bi-monthly outing to the job centre to sign on, followed by an all-too-familiar circuit of the ‘anything for £1’ stores. This isn’t to say that the only people who visit shopping centres on a Saturday are illiterate freeloaders, but rather that they were the only ones who wanted to talk to me.

Upon arrival at the shopping centre I was required to sign in, as is customary in these times of pedantry and paranoia regarding health and safety. The ludicrous thing was that in order to sign in, I had to wander backstage unsupervised, ascend four flights of unfamiliar stairs, and navigate through a series of corridors (passing the stockrooms for a number of the shops in the centre) before arriving at a desk to scrawl my name on a visitor’s pass. As it happened, on this particular day I was unable to write with my left hand, and so my visitor’s pass featured an illegible scrawl which could easily have passed for Arabic script.

Bluewater, Kent

This red tape pantomime got me thinking about how many opportunities I had encountered which could have resulted in an accident, theft or worse still an act of terrorism. Nobody questioned me at any point on my way to sign in, and whilst a CCTV system was in place, the guard on duty was probably busy watching golf on another channel, or else reciting boorish innuendos to impress the nearest female. If the whole point of the signing in process is to track official visitors, and indeed closely monitor the shopping centre for any potentially dangerous activities, then surely the desk should be moved to a more visible, accessible place such as near the entrance.

The issue of terrorism is particularly significant given recent events, and whilst the above circumstances are more likely to attract petty opportunist thieves, as opposed to religious radicals, it is the small loopholes in any given security system which terrorists look to exploit. There have been numerous terror plots focused on shopping centres in the past, most recently the Manchester Arndale bomb in 1996, and the threats made to Bluewater in 2004. Given this evidence, one would expect security to be much tighter across the industry. On the other hand, in the case of the Manchester bombing, in which thankfully nobody was killed, some might say that the IRA did the city a favour. The bomb was considered an act of architectural sacrifice, being as the Arndale is the only shopping centre ever to be designed in keeping with the surrounding pollution (source: Manchester, England - Dave Haslam).

P Diddy

The word terrorism is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous in contemporary media; hardly a day goes by when the term isn’t used by a politician, critic or public figure to describe anything from the behaviour of unruly schoolchildren, to the musical offerings of P Diddy. Strictly speaking, a terrorist is any person who tries to frighten people or governments into doing what he/she wants by using or threatening violence. Despite what George Bush and other similar-minded world leaders would have us believe, terrorism is not a recent phenomenon. In the course of human evolution, terrorising one-another comes somewhere after learning to eat, and before mastering the art of bladder control.

The earliest recorded terrorist activity dates back to Roman times (1st Century AD), when an organisation known as the Zealots of Judea secretly assassinated numerous Roman soldiers, as well as any Jews who they suspected of collaborating with the Romans. In the Old Testament (Exodus 7-12), The Ten Plagues of Egypt show us that even God has to resort to terrorism sometimes in order to get results. By subjecting the Pharaoh to ten systematic attacks, God managed to get him to release the Israelites from slavery and made a household name of Moses in the process. At the heart of every terror plot is a motive to enforce change, and opinion will always be polarised between those who believe the change will be positive, and those who see it as the work of evil.

Michaelangelo's Moses

The UK is once again on full security alert following a recent spate of terrorist activity across the country. The fact that these attacks failed should, hopefully, serve as powerful message to the very people who believe that their actions would have resulted in a positive change. If I was a terrorist in training to be a suicide bomber, I would be asking myself what I really expected my cause (and my people) would gain from such an action, and more importantly, what I personally would get out of it. Based on recent evidence, it’s not a one way ticket to paradise; it’s a solitary bed in a burns unit in Glasgow, which is a long, long way from heaven by any stretch of the imagination.