Terrorism, defined here as violence inflicted on innocent people for political ends, is not new to Canada, the West, or the world. The Muslim world deals with it on a routine basis. But shouting terrorism in the crowded public theatres of Twitter and Facebook can be counterproductive when the identity and motives of the suspect are unknown. In the case of the Toronto dropouts-turned-jihadists, and the Ottawa shooter, a powerful stew of extremist ideology, personal pathology, and illusive dreams of violent glory, coupled with selective readings of the Qur’an, long preceded the bullets and bombs. When these attacks happen, it is important to distinguish conservative, Salafist Muslims from individual terrorists, who may or may not share literalist interpretations of Islam. The Islamic world’s intransigent conservatives have a corrosive impact on freethinking, critical inquiry, and women’s rights in Muslim communities, but they are largely not a threat to security. Neither the Boston bombers nor the Ottawa shooter had done any serious study of Islam before killing innocents, though they did share common traits of drug use, criminal records, and lives lived without purpose that gave symbolic death its own cultish appeal. In some cases, Salafist or Wahabbist Islam is directly tied to individuals wanting to kill others because the religion becomes – and in some verses, is readily amenable to – a political, anti-imperial program of violent revolution. Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri regularly quoted from the Qur’an; IS’s leaders do the same in their sermons, as do local jihadist groups in Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. Where Salafism is state ideology – in Saudi Arabia and the regime run by the Islamic State – beheadings, amputations, and mass torture take place at home, while the mullahs and financiers do their bit to export it abroad. 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.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 14:37:49 +0000
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