Letter from America: Stopping Terrorism in the West

Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian citizen with Norwegian parents slaughtered some 77 of his countrymen (which included teenagers) whom he considered in his twisted logic as traitors for supporting multiculturalism (and therefore Islamisation).

Its government must now answer: why it didn’t pay more attention to the threat of domestic terrorism, especially given the fact that, according to Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, he spent a decade planning his attacks. And why did it take police so long to respond to the shootings at the summer camp?

Automatic weapons and potent bombs allow the deranged and begrudged to slaughter scores of innocents in mere seconds. There are several examples of such mayhems at the University of Texas in 1966 (14 killed), Columbine High School in 1999 (13 killed), Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 killed), and Bath School disaster of 1927 in which an angry school board member blew up 38 children and 6 adults in Michigan. We also forget that most threats and violence tend to emerge from within a society and not from outside it. M.K. Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, King Faysal, Anwar el-Sadat, Indira Gandhi and Yitzhak Rabin were all assassinated by their fellow countrymen, and not by outsiders.

In the past two decades, much attention has been paid to extremist groups within the world Muslim community, while the potential terrorism from local rightwing extremist groups was ignored. Consequently, just about every ‘expert’ -- conservative chatterer with a blog or a Twitter account rushed to blame ‘Islamic jihadists’ for the bombing and gun massacre in Norway only to be proven wrong later. Just as in Norway, rightwing extremism could easily happen anywhere in our world. The Hutaree, an extremist Christian militia in Michigan accused last year of plotting to kill police officers and planting bombs at their funerals, had an arsenal of weapons larger than all the Muslim plotters charged in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks combined.

A more important issue is the growing intolerance across Europe for Muslims and other immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Inflammatory political rhetoric is increasingly tolerated not just in Holland, Denmark and France, but across all of Europe and America. Even Asiatic countries like India, Israel, Burma, Thailand and the Philippines are not free from such hateful messages. Look at the sheer number of anti-Muslim books, movies, TV dramas and websites that emerged in the post-9/11 era! And anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic parties are getting stronger notably in northern European countries that have long had liberal immigration policies.

While individuals are responsible for their actions, there is no denying about the harmful influence of hateful provocateurs which mold their beliefs and justify their criminal actions. For years, many morally bankrupt and utterly corrupt politicians have had nothing better to offer their constituents other than distributing anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant pills. Hatred sells, as it did in Hitler’s Germany. As there were once Julius Streicher and Der Stürmer in Germany (1923-45), so are there now hate-mongers and psychopaths like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly of the radio and TV journalism in the USA, let alone thousands of pen-pushing anti-Muslim bigots like Mark Steyn and Ann Coulter who sell their poison pills to divide our world into hateful camps. Look at the shameful statements made by mainstream Republican politicians with respect to the mosque controversy in Lower Manhattan. Outside the Mayor Bloomberg of New York City hardly any politician had the moral bites to decry such bigotry. This xenophobia is even packaged, promoted and propagated by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and other anti-Muslim right-wing tabloids.

There are think-tanks, dedicated to promoting hatred and bigotry against Muslims.

Nor should one forget about the impact of Jerusalem Summit in packaging hatred to the rest of the world.

In the 1980s, Jean-Marie le Pen of the French National Front, at the time a marginal politician, was one of the first to vituperate against the risk of Islamicization. Today, Islam as ‘the internal and external enemy’ is a staple of European political discourse. Anti-Muslim sentiment has now passed the dinner-table test to become socially acceptable. What message is the public getting out of such unambiguous displays of intolerance? In Europe, even mainstream politicians have sown doubts about the ability or willingness of Europe to absorb newcomers. At a security conference in Munich Feb. 5, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain closed ranks with French and German leaders saying the ‘doctrine of multiculturalism’ has failed in a Britain that encourages ‘different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.’ Multiculturalism ‘has failed, utterly failed, Mrs. Merkel said last October amid a national debate sparked by a racially loaded bestseller written by German bank official Thilo Sarrazin that criticized Arabs. Last summer French leader Nicolas Sarkozy said multiculturalism was dead as the French cracked down on immigrants and Gypsies.

I wonder if these politicians understand the difference between assimilation and integration or multiculturalism! What they truly want is not integration but blind, robotic assimilation, bereft of discernible cultural values that define one’s humanity and diversity. So to an intellectual midget like Sarkozy, it is the abandonment of the burqa and niqab that defines integration into the French society, and not the much-needed reforms that are essential for integrating Muslims.

There are many third generation Turks and Algerians living in Germany and France, respectively, who are still not integrated into those societies, treated as being outsiders. Unless one’s parents are ethnic French or German, the roads to employment and upward social mobility are often nil for these grandchildren of immigrants from Asia and Africa. Consequently, they are forced to live in the ghettos or poor neighborhoods where public sector is dysfunctional. They routinely face bitter discrimination and witness monumental hypocrisy with almost everything. Unfortunately, when rioting exploded in France’s heavily-immigrant ghettos, many conservative pundits and politicians refused to see the obvious and dismissed claims that the violence had something to do with poverty, unemployment, and exclusion. No, what mattered is that the rioters were Muslims. And then blame it on failure of multiculturalism!

If these western governments had invested in human capital, creation of jobs and ensured equal opportunities, there won’t have been any problem integrating pale-, brown- and dark-skinned immigrants and their children and grandchildren, irrespective of whether or not they are Muslims.

Hatemongering provocateurs, who are no better than terrorists, have long been selling their poison pills of Eurabia - how Muslims soon will take over Europe, if they are not checked. The neocon ideologue Daniel Pipes discovered Jihad in the 2005 riots of France! Similarly, Mark Steyn wrote, “As France this past fortnight reminds us, the changes in Europe are happening far faster than most people thought.” In 2006, Steyn expanded his delusional paranoia into the book America Alone. As you can guess, it was a huge hit, a New York Times bestseller, amongst many delusional readers. Not surprisingly, the dim-witted former president George W. Bush is a fan. In Republican and Tea Party circles, Steyn’s vision of an enfeebled, infertile Europe overrun by fecund, violent Muslims is almost a truism. But to his dismay, no such ‘Eurabian civil war’ has been started by ‘wide-eyed’ Muslim ‘Jihadists.’ Instead, what we find is the terrorism of brain-washed white Europeans. For people like Steyn, that is more than enough. Tell a true story, treat it as typical (and not an exception) and then draw a scary conclusion. This is the standard operating procedure of alarmists like Steyn.

It is high time that these provocateurs, who have brainwashed terrorists like Breivik, denounce Breivik’s evil and apologize to Muslims. They simply cannot skirt off their responsibility for his heinous crime. The western government agencies need to investigate the activities of groups like the Jihad Watch, Atlas Shrugs, Stop Islamization of Europe (and America), and Jerusalem Summit that promote bigotry and xenophobia, and offer the justification for terrorism. They must also follow the trail of money that comes to these hate groups.

In a society where anti-Islamic xenophobic sentiments and open bigotry are tolerated, there will be hateful zealots who would feel legitimized in taking criminal measures. The government must make it clear that there is no room for such chauvinism in this age. They must also know that political opportunism, by tying knots with groups that are openly racists and bigots, much like what has happened in places like Israel and Denmark, is not a viable option and can actually do more harm than good.

As I have noted many times, Europe has never been able to shelve its innate Fascistic leaning that has defined much of its history. It is no accident that there are too many far right parties that draw upon two distinct constituencies. The first is a core of hardline racist bigots who are willing crusaders for neo-Nazi Fascism. These bigots, however, have been joined by a swathe of new supporters (the second group) whose hostility toward immigrants, minorities and Muslims is shaped less by old-fashioned racism than by a newfangled sense of fear and insecurity. They are dissatisfied with their lives, anxious about the future and distrustful of any authority figure. As noted by some area experts, there is little that can be done to sway the opinions of the hardline racists. This does not mean pandering to their prejudices. It means, to the contrary, challenging those prejudices openly and robustly. It means, for instance, challenging their false idea that immigration is responsible for the lack of jobs and housing, or that lower immigration would mean a lower crime rate, or that Western societies are becoming “Islamized.”

Truly, the western governments should have an open and honest debate about why immigration is important for their very survival in this age. It may be a great idea that when their leaders visit New York for attending the UN sessions that they should opt for taking a ride in a taxicab, driven by a naturalized citizen of the USA, to places like Queens in New York City and Edison in New Jersey to get a flavor of what multiculturalism truly means.

I am told that every year on November 11, the masses gather around the Cenotaph in London for the sacred silence. On the Cenotaph is carved the new creed of humanism: “One day we will understand.”

It is time for the Europeans to understand the new realities of our time – globalization and multiculturalism. Embrace them right or be left out in the dustbin of history!

[Dr. Siddiqui’s latest book – Devotional Stories – is published by A. S. Noordeen, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.]

- Asian Tribune -