The roots of violence

Editorial

The spate of foiled (and one successful) terror attacks in the United Kingdom last week raised shock and alarm, as they should, albeit perhaps for the wrong reasons. The aborted vehicle bombs in London and the incident at Glasgow Airport, in which fast thinking by a heroic baggage handler averted mass catastrophe, stunned British and world observers.

It is not so much the incidents themselves that are alarming – we have been on the watch for the next terrorism incident and so, when it comes, it is almost with a sense of expectation that we hear the news. What is particularly disconcerting is the reaction to the professions of the accused.

The world's surprise to find engaged in terrorism what is alleged to be a cadre of medical professionals, employed by Britain's national hospitals, suggests we remain deeply misguided about the nature of the terrorist threat. Seven suspects have been detained (not all have been arrested), of which five are medical professionals who worked in British hospitals. The Hippocratic imperative – "first, do no harm" – may not have been the guiding principle in this case.

We hope British police were not as surprised as the public and the media that the individuals held under suspicion do not fit the profile we have, apparently falsely, created of a "terrorist." Given that these people may be innocent – a possibility that remains even in a political environment where habeas corpus is sometimes seen as a mollycoddling luxury that cannot be afforded in times of crisis – we should avoid jumping to conclusions.

But if the men turn out to be involved in planning terror, it is not the violent behavior itself nor the professional care-giving careers of the accused that should strike us as shocking. What should shock us is that, in a time when "profiling" is an almost-legitimate part of the anti-terrorism approach employed by Western countries, we seem to be profiling precisely the wrong people.

Racial profiling, which was previously known as racial prejudice, is being used, whether political leaders acknowledge the term or not. Yet, looking back at the first incident in our current era of fighting terrorism – Sept. 11, 2001 – we should have learned that the perpetrators are almost certainly not who we think they are. The 9/11 perpetrators were, overwhelmingly, wealthy or middle-class Saudi Arabians. They were decidedly not the put-upon proletariat of Arab society driven by a personal "desperation" to act out against an occupying force. No, they were very much participants in and beneficiaries of a time and place of material comfort. What drew them together was not shared misery, but shared ideology.

Across the Arab and Muslim world – which, thanks to satellite television and the Internet, spans the globe – an ideology of hatred and xenophobia is nurtured from childhood to early death. After global outrage at the Mickey Mouse-like propaganda rodent employed by Hamas television to inculcate martyrdom in children, the network killed off the mouse last week – by having it beaten to death by an Israeli soldier. Yet the mouse myth was just the most blatant of a panorama of incitement and ideology that encourages young Palestinians and others to commit murder by blowing themselves up. Violence is glorified and encouraged in school textbooks, in martyrs' camps, in popular music and on TV. Playing fields, parks and schools are named for suicide murderers. This propaganda has been successful in drawing adequate numbers of martyrs to shake the security of Middle Eastern and, now, Western countries.

Perhaps we have subconsciously accepted the "progressive" viewpoint that terror is just another word for justifiable homicide. The corollary of this position, which has been used against Israel at least since the onset of this intifada, is that terrorists act out of a personal motivation created by political impotence. This is probably due to a charming, if fatal, progressive inclination to see only the best in human nature. If someone is driven to kill themselves and others, it must be for a very good reason, goes this worldview. So progressives have created an idealized terrorist, whose violence is the last-ditch means of overcoming a world of despair. To the terrorists, though, the cause is not their own desperation, but that of a larger theology and ideology, which sees as a personal threat anything in the world that defies their own sense of morality. In such a case, profiling by way of economic condition or national origin fails spectacularly. Ideology is invisible. If there is a lesson that should be learned from the case of these doctors, it is that our own perceptions of who is at risk for offending may be founded on a flawed ideology of our own: that the root cause of violence is oppression.

The root cause of violence is violent ideology. Six years after 9/11 and seven years into this intifada, it's time the world learned this vital truth.

^TOP