Why Do Terrorists Target Democracies?
PARIS
— When terrorists attacked the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo
last January, the prevailing view in Europe was that their target was
freedom of speech, “a key component of our free democratic culture,” as
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said then.
On
Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush had a similar explanation for
why the United States had been singled out. “America was targeted for
attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in
the world,” he said in a speech to the nation.
Democracies have come under repeated terrorist attacks over the last 14 years. There were the Madrid train bombings in 2004, the London subway attack in 2005, and in more recent years, sporadic cases across Europe. These included an attack on a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse in 2012, killings at a Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014, a thwarted attack on a Catholic church outside Paris and most recently, an aborted shooting spree on a Paris- bound high-speed train.
These
attacks have been attributed to Islamist extremists, but other
attackers have targeted their own societies in more solitary wars:
Anders Behring Breivik, obsessed with a hatred for multiculturalism,
went on a murderous rampage in Norway in July 2011.
Democracies
are not the only target of terrorist groups. Suicide bombings occur
with deadly regularity in the Middle East and elsewhere, often in
societies that lag far behind the democratic ideal, claiming the
overwhelming majority of terrorism’s recent victims.
And
yet the repeated attacks in Western countries continue to raise
questions about the terrorists’ goals. Are democracies targeted because
their social and political freedoms are antithetical to the jihadists’
vision of a rigid theocracy? If killers targeted Charlie Hebdo for its
caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, why did a fellow terrorist, two
days later, target a Jewish grocery store?
Islamist
leaders have never hidden their disdain for democracy. Osama bin Laden,
in a message to Iraqis in 2003, called it “this deviant and misleading
practice.” The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, considered the founder of the
so-called Islamic State, also known as ISIS, challenged the 2005 Iraqi
elections on theocratic grounds. “The legislator who must be obeyed in a
democracy is a man, and not God,” he said. “That is the very essence of
heresy and polytheism and error as it contradicts the basis of faith
and monotheism.”
Yet
most experts today would argue that Bin Laden attacked the United
States in 2001 because of its military presence in the Middle East, not
because of its freedoms. “If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us
why we didn’t attack Sweden, for example,” the Al Qaeda chief said in a
video broadcast on Al Jazeera in 2004.
As
Islamist terrorism has evolved since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the
thinking about the terrorists’ motives has also shifted. The recent
arrival on the scene of ISIS or Daesh, its Arabic name, has redefined
the debate once again, as about 20,000 foreign fighters — including
hundreds from Europe — join the war to establish an Islamic caliphate in
the Middle East.
The
fear in France and elsewhere in Europe is that Western recruits will
return to wage a campaign of terror in the countries where they grew up,
raising again the question of why Western democracies continue to be
targeted, and if they — precisely because of the freedoms built into
their systems — are more vulnerable to attack.
Gilles
Kepel, a professor at France’s Institute of Political Studies, has
argued that ISIS, in contrast to Al Qaeda, is playing a deeper and wider
game by deliberately stoking tensions “at the heart of Europe in order
to destroy it by unleashing a civil war between its Muslim and
non-Muslim citizens and residents.”
Mr.
Kepel, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde last January,
cited a strategy elaborated in 2004 by Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian
ideologue, who called for individual acts of terror in Western societies
designed to incite Islamophobia. He argued that this, in turn, would
alienate more local Muslims, making them potential recruits for jihad.
The
advent of social media, and a full-out war waged by ISIS in Iraq and
Syria, has allowed this strategy to be put into action, according to Mr.
Kepel. “The entire world became a battlefield for Daesh,” he said in
the interview.
“‘Blasphemous’
cartoonists, Muslim ‘apostates,’ the police, Jews are all choice
targets,” he said. “Daesh has identified precisely cultural, religious
and political divisions, and has set their objective to turn them into
fault lines.”
Other
Islamist strategists have elaborated the theory of a “leaderless
jihad,” which does not try to organize terrorist actions, but rather
inspires them from afar, avoiding huge bills and risky command
structures.
Jessica
Stern, co-author with J.M. Berger of “ISIS: The State of Terror,” said
the movement’s message was strikingly simple. “Everyone must come join
the jihad, but if you can’t come, then stay home and carry out attacks
there,” she said. The eventual goal is polarization and chaos — an
“apocalyptic narrative” favored by Mr. Zarqawi.
“Social
media has certainly made it much easier to encourage individual cells,”
said Ms. Stern, a lecturer on terrorism at Harvard. “It is very
effective because it makes it hard for law enforcement to know what is
going on.”
Democracy,
in that sense, may be more the setting than the target — opening a
debate about whether democracies are more vulnerable because they allow
more room for free speech and greater protection of human rights.
Experts note, for instance, that autocratic societies like China have
experienced fewer terrorist attacks than, say, India.
Others
argue that repression only fosters terrorism. “The more you fight any
expression of dissent under the banner of ‘counterterrorism,’ the more
you foster the very same terrorist threat,” Jean-Pierre Filiu, a
professor at the Institute for Political Studies, wrote recently. He
cited the case of Algeria, where an Islamic party’s victory at the polls
in 1992 was suppressed by a military coup, leading to a decade-long war
with marginalized jihadists that cost the lives of some 150,000
Algerians, mostly civilians.
As
they set out to recreate a caliphate, ISIS leaders have reportedly
instituted elements of a functioning state in places like Raqqa in
Syria.
But
ISIS rule is enforced by fear, rather than free consent. “If you
believe the right way to regulate society should be determined by the
word handed down by a 7th century prophet, that rules out having a vote
on it,” said Patrick Cockburn, an Irish journalist and author of “The
Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.”
ISIS’s
military victories against the Iraqi Army and aggressive U.S.-led
airstrikes have made it into something that Al Qaeda never was: a
winning cause. An anonymous author, identified as a former official in a
NATO country with wide experience in the Middle East, wrote recently in
The New York Review of Books that the movement’s achievement has been
to create a monopoly on jihad, luring fighters from all over the world.
“The
only change is that there was suddenly a territory available to attract
and house them,” the author wrote. “If the movement had not seized
Raqqa and Mosul, many of these might well have simply continued to live
out their lives with varying degrees of strain — as Normandy dairy
farmers or council employees in Cardiff.”
“We are left again with tautology: ISIS exists because it can exist,” the author wrote. “They are there because they’re there.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/world/why-do-terrorists-target-democracies.html?_r=0
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