For the last year or two in primary school I was in the school choir. It was a Christian Brothers school. Among the songs that Brother Lynch taught us was The Bold Fenian Men. That’s about the Fenians who killed English cops, planted bombs and tried to invade Canada. Then there was The Foggy Dew. That’s about the Easter Rising when a small number of people staged an insurrection during World War One, fought the British Army and killed British soldiers. Going a bit further back The Minstrel Boy told the story of 
a musician who went to fight against an English army with a view to killing some of its members. While we were committing these songs to memory the ideological successors of the people they commemorated were having gun battles with the British Army and planting bombs in the city centre. Some nights my father made us leave the living room because the local news used to show body parts being shovelled into bin bags.
23 year old Samina Malik’s world view is slightly different from that of most of the readers of this site. Her nom de plume is “The Lyrical Terrorist”, chosen because she thought it sounded cool. According to The Times “One document in her handwriting read: “The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom, the need to go increases second by second.” She fancied herself as something of a poet. Her works include How To Behead and The Living Martyrs. Part of the evidence presented to the court against her was that she had visited websites connected with Abu Hamza and had downloaded information about weapons systems.
For these crimes of opinion and curiosity she is looking at jail time. This is something that should be concerning for all of us. We all have the right to be curious, stupid and wrong and we shouldn’t have to worry about ending up in prison because of it. Researching the materials at the extreme end of the spectrum is part of everyone’s political and intellectual development. If you are of a certain age the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades might have seemed cool for about six months. If you are a young Muslim in Europe you might well want to look at these websites and be momentarily attracted by them . Then when you roll up to your job behind the counter at WH Smiths the real world reminds you that it’s still there.
Malik’s views might be wrong and her poetry is probably worse than Bobby Sands’ but that is no reason to put her in prison. New Labour is flexing its authoritarian muscles and Samina Malik is paying the price. She hasn’t killed anyone. She wasn’t planning to kill anyone. She wasn’t conspiring to do anything illegal. She was just silly enough to get caught writing down some daft ideas and visiting some unpleasant websites. These are not things she should go to prison for because if they get away with this sort of thing New Labour will find some other opinions to criminalise.
Thanks to Charlie Marks for the video suggestions.
Liam redux 
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