Invitation to Terror

It doesn't say Japan - because as a matter of fact, Japan often fails to blip on the Western radar - but the script of a discussion over Australia ABC Radio with British author Frank Furedi on his new book Invitation to Terror is a small treat. Here is a morsel that sounds like Japan :

It seems to me that there's a number of factors. One of them is that most governments actually don't trust the public to behave in a responsible, positive way. A lot of governments believe that if a terrorist bomb goes off in Sydney or in London, the public will panic, they will riot, they will become very antisocial, they will simply care about themselves. They believe that potentially society could become much weaker, it may even disintegrate under that kind of pressure. That's the official version of events. And because there is this real reluctance to take people into your confidence, the discussion of terrorism tends to have a very rhetorical, very general kind of character to it where problems are often posed in a sensationalist kind of way, almost the way you would talk to children. Often we talk about terrorism as meaningless, beyond comprehension, something that we cannot possibly understand. And if that's the kind of message you transmit to people, then of course there is no real public dialogue. You either take it or leave it, what governments say.

Something that gets lost into the haze is that racial fingerprinting is about screening out terrorists - real and would-be - who can but belong only to the non-Japanese creed.

There is a video recording of the same author at a conference over at Fora.TV