One has to ask why terrorists like those who struck last night in London, and earlier in Manchester, launched their attacks now. It is difficult not to infer\u00a0that\u00a0their violence\u00a0was\u00a0timed to influence\u00a0the UK election on Thursday. Those behind the attack – whether those carrying it\u00a0out or those dispatching the terrorists \u2013 want to have an effect. Terrorism is the use of indiscriminate violence for political ends. It has a logic, even if it is one we mostly do not care to understand.<\/p>\n
So what do these terrorists hope to achieve?<\/p>\n
Based on prior experience, they will assume that by striking now they can increase fear and anger among the British population \u2013 intensifying anti-Muslim rhetoric, justifying harsher “security” responses from the British state and shifting political support towards the right. That is good for their cause because it radicalises other disillusioned Muslim youth. In short, it brings recruits.<\/p>\n
Islam is not exceptional in this regard. This is not a problem specifically of religion. As experts have repeatedly pointed out, disillusioned, frustrated, angry (and mainly male) youth adopt existing ideologies relevant to them and then search for the parts that can be twisted to justify their violence. The violent impulse exists and they seek an ideology to rationalise it.<\/p>\n
Once Christianity – the religion of turning the other cheek \u2013 was used to justify pogroms and inquisitions. In the US, white supremacists \u2013 in the Ku Klux Klan, for example \u2013 used the Bible\u00a0to justify spreading terror among the black population of\u00a0the Deep South. White supremacists\u00a0continue sporadically to use terror in the US, most notably Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.<\/p>\n
Terrorists can exploit\u00a0secular ideologies too, on\u00a0either the far-right or far-left. Just think of the Baader Meinhof Gang and\u00a0the Symbionese Liberation Army, back in the 1970s. The latter famously made a convert of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of publishing empire magnate William Randolph Hearst (aka Citizen Kane). After\u00a0she was\u00a0taken hostage, she quickly adopted the group’s thinking and its\u00a0violence as her own.<\/p>\n
The Islamic terrorists of our time believe in a violent, zero-sum clash of civilisations. That should not be surprising, as their ideology mirrors the dominant ideology \u2013 neo-conservatism \u2013 of western foreign policy establishments. Both sides are locked in a terrifying dance of death. Both believe that\u00a0two “civilisations” exist and are incompatible, that they are in a fight to the death, and that any measures are justified to achieve victory because the struggle is existential. We use drones and “humanitarian intervention” to destabilise their societies; they use cars, guns, knives and bombs to destabilise ours.<\/p>\n
The dance chiefly takes place because both sides continue it. And it will not be easy\u00a0to break free of it. Our meddling in the Middle East dates back more than a\u00a0century \u2013 and especially since the region became a giant oil spigot for us. The tentacles of western interference did not emerge\u00a0in 2003, whatever we may\u00a0choose\u00a0to believe. Conversely, a globalised world inevitably entails\u00a0one where a century-long\u00a0colonial battlefield can easily come back to haunt us on our doorsteps.<\/p>\n
The solution, complex as it will need to be,\u00a0certainly cannot include\u00a0the use by us of\u00a0similarly indiscriminate\u00a0violence, more “intervention” in the Middle East, or more scapegoating of Muslims. It will\u00a0require\u00a0taking a step back and considering how and why we too are addicted to this dance of death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One has to ask why terrorists like those who struck last night in London, and earlier in Manchester, launched their attacks now. It is difficult not to infer\u00a0that\u00a0their violence\u00a0was\u00a0timed to influence\u00a0the UK election on Thursday. Those behind the attack – whether those carrying it\u00a0out or those dispatching the terrorists \u2013 want to have an effect. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-2647","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-britain","8":"tag-war-on-terror"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}