A month after the terrorist attacks on Paris, (and a few days after emails threatening schools systems of our two biggest cities) you would think that we would be working hard to understand this terrible and frightening phenomenon for the usual reasons we try to understand something bad: to keep it from happening to us again. But the dominant attitude is that Muslim terrorism is inherently incomprehensible.
“There’s no ‘rationale’ for violent terrorism”, was the headline of a column by Jennifer Rubin which appeared in this paper on 21 November. Secretary of State John Kerry, in drawing a distinction between the Paris attacks and those on the magazine “Charlie Hebdo,” had said that for the latter there was “ a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, They’re really angry because of this and that.” (“The journalists of Charlie Hebdo,” commented Alexandra Schwartz in the “The New Yorker,” “had known that they were terrorist targets, and had carried on their work at great personal risk”; that is, almost as combatants.)
To Rubin, suggesting a rationale for any sort of terrorism was “ moral idiocy of the worst type.”
Kerry’s point was that while Charlie Hebdo was, however deplorable, at least understandable given the magazine’s mocking of Islam, the 13th of November attacks were “absolutely indiscriminate . . . It was to terrorize people.” In other words, if you can understand it, however much you deplore it, it isn’t flatout terrorism. If it is real terrorism, it is beyond—and beneath—comprehension.
Not understanding terrorism takes numerous forms. Terrorists are “nihilistic” (stand for nothing); “against pleasure”; “hate life”; just want to kill for the sake of killing; sadistic. “Evil,” in its religious meaning of being inherently the opposite of good. Characterized thus, terrorism is absurd in its sense of “meaningless, having no rational or orderly relationship to human life.”
An important step from the refusal to comprehend is the idea that terrorists are not into killing for its own sake or indiscriminately, but out to “destroy Western civilization.” They don’t hate life but Western life. That sentiment may make us implacable enemies, but it is comprehensible. And might make us curious about just what it is about us they want to destroy.
To suggest that there are certain socio/economic conditions in certain places that seem to nurture terrorism is an attempt to explain which invariably gets onto the slippery slope of blaming the victims. (“The New Yorker” had run a piece shortly before the attacks about the conditions of Muslim French in slums in the outskirts of Paris that could be taken almost as predicting the Nov 13 attacks.)
In the column on Kerry cited earlier, Jeb Bush is quoted as saying that Hillary Clinton, in suggesting that there is a way of understanding terrorism, “ wants us to empathize with terrorists.” Given the likely cost of uprooting the vicious weed of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, it behooves us to get past this false dichotomy of understanding and empathy. It seems like a dangerous idea that all we need to know in this fight is that we hate them and want to destroy them, as they want to destroy us.
The tactic of targeting innocent people out for an evening’s pleasure is a terrible thing, but it is not incomprehensible. We ourselves have a basis for understanding such an act of barbarism in the way we ended the Second World War. The deliberate mass incineration of non-combatants in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the greatest act of terrorism in human history, is widely defended as necessary to save tens of thousands of lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. Having an comprehensible reason for the barbarism makes a big difference.
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