Don’t blame Canada for home-grown terror. Blame the terrorists - Omer Aziz But in the lone-wolf attack, Islam is often in the background. In the foreground are troubled individuals. Or, as journalist Glenn Greenwald and others would have you believe, it is Western foreign policies that cause murderers to attack citizens. Leave aside for a moment that this dehumanizes the Muslim, makes him an automatic and anonymous respondent to distant violence done against “his people.” The argument is as toxic as it is inaccurate. First, it assumes that the attackers’ perception of the government’s foreign policy was accurate; otherwise, any state action anywhere, anytime, could “cause” a person to take up arms against his country. Second, the argument’s indictment of the victim first is morally bankrupt in the general sense, and factually wrong in the Canadian case. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien flatly refused to go to Iraq. Canada assisted in the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and later played a consequential role in reconstruction efforts in Kandahar. In the case of Iraq-Syria, Canada is supporting the coalition currently bombing the Islamic State, a group that has inflicted misery on thousands of Iraqis and Syrians. You won’t hear a word from the blame-the-West first types about the plight of Yazidis, Druze, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds and Christians; or about Bosnian Muslims saved from fascistic and genocidal militias by NATO – including Canadian – warplanes; or the Afghan girls who can now actually go to school; or the Ahmadi and Shiite Muslims who have seen their children murdered by Taliban thugs for practicing the wrong variant of Islam. Is there a thought to be spared for these and other humans, who are not Westerners but have been maimed, and tortured, and killed by Islamic jihadists at a rate that we would call genocide if it happened in a single country. This simplistic argument that the Washington and Ottawa’s policies are the cause of any homegrown terrorism is exposed for what it is when one looks at other attacks around the world. There was no Western act that caused violent jihadists to bomb a nightclub in Bali in 2002, killing 200 holidaymakers. Nor was there any nefarious plot but the jihadists’ own that led them to storm the Indian Parliament in 2001 and kill a dozen people. But the men who commit carnage in the name of religion and ideology are not shouting Khadr and Arar’s names. They are conjuring up fantasies, and using religion to articulate grievances. But this is Canada. The nation deals with threats and failures in a measured manner that adheres to its values and institutions. Focusing on intercommunal relations should be the logical next step rather than even harsher new anti-terrorism laws that will invariably be felt first and longest by people with brown and black skin. Recovering from an incident of terrorism requires looking back to the traditions of pluralistic Canadian democracy, as much as it does looking forward to continuing this project of Peace, Order, and Good Government. theglobeandmail/globe-debate/dont-blame-canada-for-home-grown-terror-blame-the-terrorists/article21422886/
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 07:06:08 +0000
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