Woolwich: it’s time to confront the truth

It’s time to confront an obvious truth: actions in faraway places can produce reactions on streets at home.

Perhaps, it might be useful, as we contemplate the horror of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in Woolwich on May 22, to have a quick look through the history books.

In 1971, for example, Robert Campbell killed 15 people in a bomb attack on McGurk’s bar in Belfast. He was not a Muslim. In 1984, the then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was shot dead by two of her security guards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh. They weren’t Muslims either. In 1991, a suicide bomber named Thenmozhi Rajaratnam blew herself up and killed Indira Gandhi’s son Rajiv Gandhi. She was not Muslim. In 1998, 29 people were killed in a bomb attack in Omagh, in Northern Ireland. Not one of the bombers was Muslim. And yes, I’m coming to it, in 2001, a group of hijackers killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. All 19 of the hijackers were Muslim. As were the attackers who killed more than 200 people in Bali in 2002, another 200 in Madrid in 2004, 52 people in the London bombings of July 2005, and 160 in Mumbai in 2008. Oh, and while I’m at it, in 2011 Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Oslo, and last December, Adam Lanza killed 26 people, most of them children, at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. Neither Breivik nor Lanza were Muslim.

There’s nothing “Islamic” about acts of violence. So, all those anguished questions along the lines of “What is it about Islam that drives people to such terrible acts of violence?” seem to me to be entirely specious. Of course, there’s a tiny number of Muslims who say they carry out acts of violence in the name of their religion, just as there are some Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and — as we’ve seen in Burma — even Buddhists, who say the same.

There are many people who object to US and British policy in Afghanistan and in other Muslim countries, such as Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria. Plenty of Muslims and non-Muslims alike have been sickened by images from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. They may be deeply opposed to US President Barack Obama Administration’s use of drones to kill “high value targets” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — but they don’t go out onto the streets of London or New York to kill soldiers.

So it seems to me there are two tough questions that need to be asked: first, can anything effective be done to reduce the number of vulnerable young men who are likely to be persuaded by the sort of propaganda that leads them to commit acts of violence?

Second, does it make sense to go on pretending that these acts, when they occur, have nothing to do with government policy? It may or may not have been right for Britain to join with the US in invading Afghanistan and Iraq, but can we honestly claim that British military action in those countries has had nothing at all to do with the radicalisation of a tiny handful of young Muslims?

This is not to argue for one moment that government policy should be made dependent on the perceived threat that it could upset a few alienated urban youths. But perhaps, it’s time, at least, to confront an obvious truth: actions in faraway places can produce reactions on streets at home.

And when such crimes happen, I believe it’s better to focus on the heroes rather than the villains when publishing material.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 28^th, 2013.