Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘root cause’

Damian Penny said it best in reaction to this:

A 19-year-old Israeli soldier opened fire inside a bus Thursday, killing four Israeli Arabs before being killed by an angry mob — the deadliest attack on Arabs in Israel by a Jewish extremist since 1990.

Damian claims there’s “no word for it but terrorism”:

So, will Ken Livingstone or John Pilger make excuses for this because of the gunman’s “desperation”? Don’t hold your breath. (And, of course, they shouldn’t – and neither should defenders of Israel. This act was vile, unforgivable and unjustifiable terrorism.)

No equivocation, no “buts”, no searching for “root causes” or justifications. If I hear any of that I will probably scream.

Edan Natan Zaada’s name should become synonymous with that of Baruch Goldstein or Yigal Amir. They should be universally condemned and reviled by Jews and non-Jews alike. These crazies are not part of my religion or my people. Their acts were unconscionable and there are no excuses. None.

Update: To put it more eloquently:

“I am shamed over the disgrace imposed upon us by a degenerate murderer. You are not part of the community of Israel. You are not part of the democratic camp which we all belong to in this house, and many of the people despise you. You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law. You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism.”

- then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in response to Baruch Goldstein’s murder of 29 Palestinians in 1994.

All I can say is, same goes for you, Edan Natan Zaada.

Back in 2003, a stir was caused by this New York Times op-ed that, seemingly flying in the face of logic, argued that poverty doesn’t cause terrorism:

The stereotype that terrorists are driven to extremes by economic deprivation may never have held anywhere, least of all in the Middle East. New research by Claude Berrebi, a graduate student at Princeton, has found that 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers are from impoverished families, while about a third of the Palestinian population is in poverty. A remarkable 57 percent of suicide bombers have some education beyond high school, compared with just 15 percent of the population of comparable age.

This evidence corroborates findings for other Middle Eastern and Latin American terrorist groups. There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society’s elites, not the dispossessed.

Impossible, people said. That can’t be right. It just doesn’t seem logical that people would strap bombs to their bodies and blow themselves up unless they were driven to it by total, utter hopelessness. Despite the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were far from poor, people simply didn’t want to believe it.

Now, two years later and the debate has been reignited with the London terror attacks and the realization that the bombers were British. Meryl points to an article in the Washington Post that discusses how the 7/7 terrorists were not products of poverty or despair, but middle-class, educated and privileged:

What will stop this revolt of privileged Muslims? One possibility is that it will be checked by the same process that derailed the revolt of the rich kids in America after the 1960s — namely, the counter-revolt of the poor kids. Poor Muslims simply can’t afford the rebellion of their wealthy brethren, and the havoc it has brought to the House of Islam. For make no mistake: The people suffering from jihadism are mostly Muslims.

This follows a discussion I was having on a web forum – yet another variation on the tired, endless debate on the “root causes” of terrorism and the people who argue that if we could just solve world poverty, we’d get rid of the recruits for all the jihad training camps in one fell swoop.

Now, I’m all for solving world poverty. It’s a nice dream, and it’s great that beauty queens get up and promise to attain it – along with world peace – in pageants around the world. But it’s time for us to realize once and for all that the notion that terror comes from poverty is utter hogwash.

Increasingly, terrorists aren’t poor people with nothing to lose, blowing themselves up because their lives are so miserable. The 9/11 bombers were engineers and scientists with American educations and jobs. The 7/7 bombers were also educated middle-class Britons. These weren’t people at the end of their ropes. They weren’t motivated by desperation. No, these are people born or educated in our cultures who are, for some reason, turning against it and deciding instead to attack it.

So if the terrorist aren’t being motivated by poverty, then perhaps they’re motivated by lack of freedom? That’s a fine theory as it goes, suits the Bush agenda of spreading democracy nicely, and works well when we look at terrorists in autocratic regimes. But how can you explain the British bombers, who lived in a very free society and chose to attack it? How do you explain the fact that the most extremist wings of Islamist political groups are emerging in Western countries?

This CBC column starts off well enough in doing just that, before taking the typical CBC turn and arguing that the world should capitulate to the terrorists’ demands to make them less angry. But let’s ignore that for a moment and focus on the actual valid points being made here (and yes, there are a few):

Go to any university campus in Canada’s larger cities and you’ll see the first seeds of a conservatism being born in young Muslims. For example, at the University of Toronto’s Muslim Students’ Association, male members won’t make eye contact with the females, they won’t address them, won’t sit next to them, and, worst of all, the female students pray behind the male students, even though in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, men and women pray side by side.

This separation between the genders is not happening at the universities in Karachi, Cairo or Dhaka, but for some reason, it is happening among Muslims in the West. While these “social regressions” may not seem like a big deal, they are emblematic of a larger trend towards rejecting everything that is western.

Like I said, from there the article isn’t much help, because it goes off into its appeasement arguments quite predictably for something published by the CBC.

So then what’s the solution? If they are blowing stuff up not because they’re poor, desperate or oppressed but because they’re comfortable, educated and free, then what’s the next step in the war on terror? How can we fight people who know our culture, understand it, are born and raised in it even, and then turn on it so vehemently? If we want to identify and fight the true “root causes” of terror, where do we go from here?

There is an interesting small point in the CBC article that perhaps wasn’t focused on enough:

Ali says that these youth just want to have a voice that opposes foreign occupation and wars in their countries but, unfortunately, moderate Muslim leadership is lacking, so they join hard-core fundamentalists groups, not necessarily because they are religious, but because it’s the only organized response out there.

I’d argue that right there is the starting point. The first and most pressing problem is a lack of a strong moderate Muslim leadership. We’ve all argued that the voices of moderation are too few and too weak to outweigh the voices of the extremists.

But this is a bit of a different spin on the issue. The argument here is that young people of any culture are just looking for a place to fit in, to get involved, to forge an identity. This is true of any culture in a multicultural society. Religious groups, community groups or social groups play very valuable roles in the lives of nearly everyone.

But if the only – or most readily available – options available to young Muslims are extremist political groups, then the indoctrination of this sort of hatred will only get worse.

Maybe that’s a place to start, then. An alternative voice. Another way for young Muslims to get involved in religious, community or political issues. Another sort of cultural identity, one that has nothing to do with hating the west or blowing stuff up. The one that everyone keeps assuring us exists, but that we see so little of. In short, “religion of peace” needs to be more than just a slogan used by Muslims to attempt to convince us on the outside; it needs to be what’s “cool” on the inside. It has to become cooler to be into peace than into militancy. After all, everyone has a need to belong somewhere. Maybe it’s time people started having better things to belong to.

I don’t know any of the the answers here. I don’t even know most of the questions. But maybe – just maybe – that’s a place to start.

As usual, Mark Steyn hits the nail right on the head when he discusses the cultural roots of Palestinian terror:

The Palestinian death cult negates all the assumptions of western sentimental pacifism: If only the vengeful old generals got out of the way, there’d be no war. But such common humanity as one can find on the West Bank resides, if only in their cynicism, in the leadership: old Arafat may shower glory and honor on his youthful martyrs but he’s human enough to keep his own kid in Paris, well away from the suicide-bomber belts. It’s hard to picture Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi or any of the other aging terror apologists who hog the airwaves at CNN and the BBC celebrating the death of their own loved ones the way Miss Jaradat’s brother did. “We are receiving congratulations from people,” said Thaher Jaradat. “Why should we cry? It is like her wedding day, the happiest day for her.”

[ . . . ]

On the West Bank, almost all the humdrum transactions of daily life take place in a culture that glorifies depravity: you walk down a street named after a suicide bomber to drop your child in a school that celebrates suicide-bombing and then pick up some groceries in a corner store whose walls are plastered with portraits of suicide bombers.

Steyn goes on to claim that by giving Arafat’s leadership legitimacy, the world has ensured that a future Palestinian state would be nothing but a terorrist entity. And this sort of terrorist leadership should not be rewarded.

The Or Commission Report was released yesterday. Key among its findings was that the Israeli police used excessive force in reaction to the October 2000 riots by Israeli Arabs:

In a landmark report on the country’s treatment of the Arab minority, a commission of inquiry has found police used excessive force in stopping Arab riots three years and that the country’s leaders badly underestimated the community’s anger after decades of systematic discrimination.

Thirteen Israeli Arabs were killed in the October 2000 protests, in which thousands threw stones and blocked streets in a show of support with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A Jewish motorist was killed by a rock at the time.

After hearing 377 witnesses in nearly three years, the Or Commission released its report of several hundred pages. It was only the fourth probe of such a scope in the country’s history. The others were a 1974 investigation into reasons why the government failed to predict the Yom Kippur War, the 1983 commission into massacres of Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Lebanon and an investigation into the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The commission’s recommendations are not legally binding, but carry strong weight. The 1983 findings forced Ariel Sharon to resign from his post as defense minister.

The reaction to this has been instantaneous, on all sides. And as usual, I feel the need to weigh in with my two cents.

On the one hand, it’s fair to say that the excessive use of force should be strongly condemned. If, as the report’s findings suggest, rubber and then live bullets were used too readily, and the situation escalated too quickly, then those responsible ought to be taken to task. In addition, the report brought the very important problem of discrimination against Israeli Arabs – often swept under the rug – to light. While it is illegal to institutionalize racism in Israel, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any. The problem exists, like in most democratic societies, and in Israel it is compounded by the decades of hostility and all-out war by what too many generalize as “the Arabs”. Understandable, maybe, but not excusable.

On the other hand, the commission of inquiry system speaks to the relative transparency of the Israeli system. And what I find frustrating is the knowledge that this will be used to paint Israel as the sole villain by the Palestinians, who would never dream of mounting a similar commission of inquiry for any wrongdoing on their side. The very transparency that makes Israel what it is, in a sense, is also its weakness. Israel is shining a self-reflecting light on its own shortcomings, knowing full well that the Palestinians would never do the same. And the Or Commission report will become nothing but another propaganda tool. I mean, could you ever conceive of a Commission of Inquiry held by the Palestinians in their eventual state, finding that police used “excessive force” against a Jewish minority? Palestinian security force members who kill Jews don’t get reprimands; they get hero’s welcomes.

It also makes me uneasy to read things like this:

The report put the blame for the riots squarely on the shoulders of the Israeli establishment, saying a major cause was systematic government neglect of the Arab minority.

“The state and all its governments failed consistently in dealing with the problems raised by the existence of a large Arab minority within a Jewish state,” it said.

That sounds suspiciously like a “root cause” argument.

Now, for the record, I’m not denying the existence of “root causes”. I think they are important in the long-term in working to alleviate tensions and solve problems. But in the immediate term, the blame for an action has to be on the person causing the action, not on those reacting.

Israel holds itself to a higher standard than the rest of the Middle East. And a cornerstone of democracy is the ability to self-examine and self-criticize. For those reasons, the findings of the Or Commission are important.

But instead of self-criticism or a long hard look in the mirror, the rest of the Middle East prefers to use such admissions of wrongdoing as additional propaganda against Israel. Because it’s easier to point the finger outwards than inwards.

Update: Imshin gives her personal take on the events.

I’m getting really sick of hearing these “root-cause” arguments for hatred. Between Osama’s apologists, Arafat’s cheerleaders, and the Jaggi Singhs who insisted on blaming everyone for the rioting at Concordia but the rioters, it seems that nobody takes personal responsibility seriously anymore.

In a letter in today’s Gazette, Dorval resident Juerg Bangerter blames Anglophones for being resented by Francophones:

If some 25 years ago or even 50 years ago, the French-Canadian population would have been treated equally and with respect in Canada, the Parti Québécois would never have risen to power. If English Quebecers would have treated the francophone Québécois majority as equals, there would never been any of the language extremism we all hate today.

If there were as many bilingual anglophones as there are bilingual francophones in Canada, there wouldn’t be any controversy about the Quebec flag, and we would behave as citizens of a real confederation in which all minorities are equally respected.

If Bangereter wants to criticize the members of the Anglo society fifty years ago who didn’t treat Francophones as equals, then that’s certainly legitimate. But his suggestion that “they hate us cause we don’t all speak their language” is ridiculous. Firstly, many of us do speak their language. Secondly, since when is it grounds to hate someone simply because they don’t speak a certain language? Silly me, I was under the impression that this constitutes discrimination.