His name is David Capitanchik.
He first drew my ire during the G8 buildup, with frequent appearances in the Metro (free commuter newspaper) predicting that wicked anarchists would burn down houses and eat babies and so forth. I couldn’t work out then what he was doing providing comment – in a separate column with his own byline to boot – since he was identified as a ‘terrorism expert’.
He turned up in the Metro again on Monday, quoted in an article about the July 21 bombers:
Terror expert David Capitanchik, of Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, denied that July 21 bombers would have acted alone. He said: ‘People don’t wake up one morning and decide they want to be a suicide bomber. They are recruited, organised and trained.’
This, naturally, made my toes curl in disgust. The incredible straw man used to argue for a James-Bond-movie Al Qaeda – everything about this is wrong. He’s either a fool, or an incredible shill for the Bush-compatible worldview.
So I did a little digging about the guy. One google later I found a lot of work had been done for me already, by the Curious Hamster back during his G8 song-and-dance. He lists a bunch of Capitanchik media quotes, such as:
April 1
…David Capitanchik, a security expert at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University, said: “I was surprised when Gordon Brown encouraged people to join the anti-poverty march which I think is an occasion to worry about.
…terrorism expert David Capitanchick has warned north-east oil firms could be attacked by anti-capitalist activists.
And this brilliant, pre-mocked-for-your-viewing-pleasure account from the Dec 2004 ‘Tartan Bollocks’ awards for dodgy Scottish journalism:
…the Holyrood parliament could be attacked by �a lone terrorist with a lightweight mortar� standing on Salisbury Crags… David Capitanchik, �a terrorism expert� at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, who said he expected surveillance of the hills overlooking the parliament site to be stepped up in view of the danger of a mortar attack…
Well, Curious Hamster’s post was in June, so I’ve dug up a few more quotes:
June 5
�Most of the protesters who will come will just be ordinary people who will need to be protected,� says Capitanchik. �Strong-arm measures will have to be used against the anarchists that will not be appropriate for the crowd.�
13 July, in ‘Life Style Extra’ online news:
“The foot soldiers – the one who carry the bombs, the ones who blow themselves up – are the least important people in the operation. They are taken to the bomb, indoctrinated and given instructions. It is the planners, the organisers, the bomb-makers that make all this possible. That is the worrying thing.
I suspect they may be among the asylum seekers that have come into this country who are wanted for terrorism activities in their own country.
No-one knows just how many suicide bombers are out there
…Although the suicide bombers behind 7/7 were British born, it is impossible for these attackers to flourish without a complex organisation behind them…We may not know how many more bombers there are, but they are likely to be organised in small clusters, each group perhaps having no contact with the other. Behind the suicide bombers are those who orchestrate every move, indoctrinating and recruiting impressionable youngsters, and it is them that we have to thwart.
Terrorism expert David Capitanchik mused that al-Qaeda’s strategy was “Why attack the tiger, when there are so many sheep?”
etc. etc. etc.
What got me about Monday’s quote was that it was a direct response to Hussain Osman, member of the July 21 bombing group, who said
“We have no link with the Pakistanis [of July 7’s attacks]. We never had contacts with the Bin Laden organisation.”
It is abundantly clear that Al Qaeda is not a huge interconnected organisation with a hierarchy and small local cells operating according to instructions from on high. This myth was created by the Bush propaganda machine and propagated through a media that can soundbite a turbaned SPECTRE much more easily than the complicated truth of jihad.
Al Qaeda is a movement centred on a methodology and an ideology. It isn’t a big secret society, it’s a collection of micro-societies sharing a common perception of what is happening in the world, sharing information and encouragement with each other, and creating a mythology of honourable jihad amongst themselves. An appeal to Occam’s Razor is enough to establish that this is far more likely than Capitanchik’s layers of masterminding planners, constructing elaborate terror plots across the globe. If there is a secret society, we’d have lots more evidence of it than we currently have.
Now, this isn’t to say that there isn’t some level of planning happening – I find it easy to believe that a well-connected jihadi in Saudi Arabia can make phone calls to a bunch of different cells in the UK, and tell them some things to do. Isn’t this exactly what I’m saying doesn’t exist? No – for two reasons.
Firstly, the secret society theory relies on the assumption that all terror acts fit into a master plan of secret organisers. Some might fit the plans of some ‘secret master’ or other, but far from all do, and it is this lack of comprehensivity [is that a word?] that undermines Capitanchik’s worldview.
Secondly, the secret society theory relies on the assumption of loyalty to and dependence upon these secret organisers by any cell. There is no room for local initiative. This is, to be quite honest, ridiculous. If you have dozens of small groups of fired-up jihadis ready to murder for an ideological struggle, they aren’t all going to passively sit and wait for instructions from on high. Passion leads to action.
This is important. (I’m getting to the point here, honest.) The secret society theory has been peddled so heavily because it obscures the causes of Islamist terror. If we have a massively decentralised movement, then we need to accept that people are not joining that movement because they are brainwashed by malicious James Bond villains. They are joining that movement because they have severe grievances that they feel cannot be addressed any other way.
In other words, the secret society theory disguises the fact that the West’s actions have given rise to intense anger among segments of the Islamic community. It heads off entirely the question of whether that anger is justified. (And of course, whenever that question is raised on its own right, it is treated as if it is a moral apologia for suicide bombing, which it plainly is not.) It furthers the mythology that terror arises from people who have the inexplicable motive of ‘hating freedom’ or even ‘hating democracy’.
Hussain Osman:
The Iraq war was the ‘main motive’ for the attempted London bomb attacks on July 21…
David Capitanchik:
People don’t wake up one morning and decide they want to be a suicide bomber.
David Capitanchik, you’ve been sold, you’re part of the apparatus of disinformation, and for these grievous failings I mock you. I mock you lots. I mean, hell, a mortarman on the Salisbury Crags? Are you one of those people that takes ’24’ really really seriously? Does your bedtime reading revolve around those airport thrillers where a hero named Jack Thorn or John Steel or something tracks down devious terrorists and leaps through windows with his guns blazing, nailing the bad guys with his ex-Marine shooting expertise? And when you sleep, do you dream about being Jack Thorn? I bet you do. Yee ha.
(Any suggestions for getting the media to stop going to him for scary sensational quotes for their articles?)
How do you know so much about the inner workings of Al Quaeda, anarchist? 😉
I found the mortar quote to be, well, mortar-fying. I thought the same thing you did: “What trashy novels has this idiot been reading?”
“it is impossible for these attackers to flourish without a complex organisation behind them” – too bad Timothy McVeigh didn’t know that.
And how about those ANARCHISTS who the crowds will need to be protected from with strong-arm tactics? Is anyone else picturing sadists with big evil grins and fizzing bombs?
Judging from the quotes you’ve provided, David Capitanchik lives in a cartoon world.
It’s good to find another Capitanchik follower. He really does speak some nonsense. Did you see this post?
http://bsscworld.blogspot.com/2005/07/expert-predictions.html
He’s often said to be “of” either Robort Gordons University or Aberdeen University. Not strictly correct in either case.
Hey Garry,
cheers for that – I haven’t had a chance to go through your blog and find out more about you than that one post (and its antecedent).
The fact that the media reports don’t seem to get his University affiliation right very often doesn’t exactly speak well of their attention to detail and, er, accuracy…
Commentators like Capitanchik are amazing mirrors of the edges of society though – only a society which is already engaged in a violent mythos could further extend that to mortora attacks from the Crags!
During the G8 it struck me that the UK as a whole has so little experience of peacful crowd situations that they had absolutely no idea how to relate to it and the police had little or no idea of how to act – the closest thing they could draw on was soccer crowd control which in Scotland in particular can be sectarian flashpoints. The negative assumption of public virtue comes to crowd = drunk, agressive and violent.
Jim Veitch at Vic Uni is an expert on Terrorism and religion – maybe we should put him in touch with the Metro?
“only a society which is already engaged in a violent mythos could further extend that to mortora attacks from the Crags!”
Absolutely. That this is not absurd on its face to everyone says a great deal about the kind of mythology our society/culture has developed around itself.
Veitch is probably too remote to have much impact as an alternative impact – and Capitanchik is clearly already on the cellphone contacts list of lots of journalists in the UK. It may be nearly impossible to shift him. Hmmm.