Charlie Hebdo attack: Terror in Islam's name will make all societies less liberal

One of the depressing realities of the Paris terror killings by Islamic fanatics at satirical publication Charlie Hebdo is this: no matter what liberal societies do, the terrorist usually wins.

At best, the state can strengthen surveillance and policing capabilities, with small costs to the citizen. At worst, it could unleash right-wing fury and retaliatory strikes against Muslims in France – or elsewhere. Either way, the jihadis would have caused damage to the fabric of society, with a rise in mistrust or even sharp social polarisation.

This has been the case all through since 9/11 – and no society has found an answer that is still liberal while also being effective against terrorism.

When terrorists crashed planes into the Twin Towers, they forced the US to divert taxpayer resources from productive uses to security and counter-terror operations, and triggered two invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter was unnecessary, but it happened). Today, even after spending billions of dollars and using drones and assassins to kill many terrorists, the US is nowhere near winning the war on terror. Rather, it has spawned more of them – not just al-Qaeda, but Boko Haram and ISIS. The fight against terror has damaged the US economy and it is now a much diminished superpower. Moreover, the US has effectively rolled back civil rights, especially (covertly) the right to privacy, by extending the ambit of citizen surveillance. It is now in the non-liberal position where it is prosecuting Edward Snowden, the man who blew the lid on Uncle Sam's invasions of privacy.

The US may not have had a major terror attack since 9/11 (we still had the Boston bombings), but its laws are now less liberal. Americans outside America are relatively unsafe. The terrorists have scored.

Israel, forever the victim of Palestinian terror, has effectively built a police and surveillance state, given the all-round hostile neighbours it has. So, it runs a brutal counter-terror operation, complete with punitive strikes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Despite the innate liberalism of Israeli society, citizens live in constant fear of attacks, with the country's security establishment barely able to protect them. It is an open question: has Israel's response to terror gained its enemies more recruits or less? The answer should be obvious.

Russia, after a brief flirtation with democracy in the Boris Yeltsin years, and thanks also to western stupidities in treating it the same way it treated the old USSR, has used Islamic terror by Chechen groups to clampdown on all dissent. While Vladimir Putin is nobody's idea of a liberal democrat, there is little doubt that some of the clampdowns on civic rights are the result of the state's response to Islamic terror. The Moscow theatre and Beslan school hostage crises were stark reminders of the brutality of the terrorists; they were ended by brutal state action.

China is doing the same with its Xinjiang Islamic militants, but the chances are that it has driven more to the terror cause than the other way round. Only, we can't know much, since China does not allow much information to leak out. China was never a liberal democracy. It has been executing Uighur separatist Muslims frequently (read here and here). The fact that it keeps executing more of them shows that hard state action is only generating more of them.

In Europe, right-wing groups have successfully begun mobilising against Islamic immigration, using both xenophobic and Islamophobic undercurrents in society to benefit politically. In the last elections to the European Parliament in mid-2014, right-wing forces gained huge ground, especially in France and the UK. In Germany, such forces recently organised a massive anti-Islam rally despite the Angela Merkel government's strong disapproval of it. Now, with the Charlie Hebdo attack, it is more than likely that the far-right National Front will gain from it. Its leader, Marine Le Pen, wants to bring back the death penalty. No European Union member can bring back the death penalty, with France itself abolishing it as far back as 1981. However, the mere fact that she can call for a referendum on the issue shows that terror has scored. Most terrorists would welcome the prospect of martyrdom in the "Christian west.”

I could go on and on, but Pratap Bhanu Mehta makes the dilemmas involved crystal clear in his Indian Express article today (9 January). He says the Charlie Hebdo killings are an "insidious trap to destroy freedom”, where "where every response can be seen by the perpetrators as vindication. It is, like all al-Qaeda traps, designed for a "heads we win, tails you lose” strategy. If you give a call, in the aftermath of an attack, saying we should respect people's religion and not be provocative, the attackers have won a kind of victory. They have induced self-restraint. If, on the other hand, such an act inflames anti-Islam feelings….then also a purpose is achieved. It produces the kind of polarisation al-Qaeda would like. States might use the language of bringing the killers to justice. But in the era after 9/11, it has invariably led democratic states to commit all kinds of excesses in different parts of the world, to the point where their moral self-confidence is dented. Again, al-Qaeda achieves its purpose.”

The question to ask is this: is liberal democracy going to become less liberal, thanks to the onslaught of terrorists, who clearly don't believe in it? Is it time to recognise the truth of the Hegelian idea, that every historical process contains within it the seeds of its own destruction? Terrorists benefit from having the right to use a liberal society's freedoms to sell their ideas to illiberals. So how is a liberal society going to prevent the destruction of its own liberalism?

Or is there a better answer? Mehta himself believes that answer is "not fighting the bad guys to the end of the earth; it is understanding why some fall under such murderous spells in the first place?”

The answer, in the case of Islamic terror, at least, will be complex, and possibly beyond the scope of any one government to understand. Hindu terror, to the limited extent it exists, is easy to understand as it would be concentrated in one country (ours), so would Buddhist terror (Thailand, Myanmar, or Sri Lanka), but Christian terror or Islamic terror would be unfathomable. More so since the attraction of terrorism may be both internal to a country or external – as seems to be the case with many Europeans who were drawn to ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria).

A CNN report last September quotes a CIA source as estimating that ISIS had "more than 15,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 Westerners.”

The Pew Research Center publishes surveys on Muslims attitudes from all over the world. The responses vary from very illiberal to fairly liberal on various issues.

Two paragraphs from the survey, based on interviews with 38,000 Muslims from all over, are indicative.

"The percentage of Muslims who say they want sharia to be 'the official law of the land' varies widely around the world, from fewer than one-in-ten in Azerbaijan (8 percent) to near unanimity in Afghanistan (99 percent). But solid majorities in most of the countries surveyed across the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia favour the establishment of sharia, including 71 percent of Muslims in Nigeria, 72 percent in Indonesia, 74 percent in Egypt and 89 percent in the Palestinian territories.”

If so many Muslims want sharia, it is likely that some of the illiberalism is intrinsic to the followers of that religion in many countries.  Another paragraph from the Pew report, on suicide bombings and killings, is revealing.

"Few US Muslims voice support for suicide bombing or other forms of violence against civilians in the name of Islam; 81 percent say such acts are never justified, while fewer than one-in-ten say violence against civilians either is often justified (1 percent) or is sometimes justified (7 percent) to defend Islam. Around the world, most Muslims also reject suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians. However, substantial minorities in several countries say such acts of violence are at least sometimes justified, including 26 percent of Muslims in Bangladesh, 29 percent in Egypt, 39 percent in Afghanistan and 40 percent in the Palestinian territories.”

Charlie Hebdo's murderers could, conceivably have come from any of these places – though they have shown no inclination to commit suicide in pursuit of their goals. But if assumptions about the killers being French citizens are true, the job of figuring out why people become terrorists would be well and truly fathomable.

While an understanding of what entices people to terror may be useful in preventing a larger numbers from heading in that direction, it is physically impossible in diverse societies to really prevent people from moving towards this fatal attraction.

The only answer, in that case, is to go after the most extreme groups, bring them to justice, and make sure that the vast majority is not attracted to terror through political messaging of inclusiveness.

Source http://m.firstpost.com/world/charlie-hebdo-attack-terror-in-islams-name-will-make-all-societies-less-liberal-2038461.html