Commenting on the recent massacre of 17 Afghan civilians that
was allegedly carried out by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, Glenn
Greenwald, a leading pundit on the American political left,
wrote the following:
There is, quite obviously, a desperate need to believe that when
an American engages in acts of violence of this type, there must be
some underlying mental or emotional cause that makes it sensible,
something other than an act of pure hatred or evil. When a Muslim
engages in acts of violence against Americans, there is an equally
desperate need to believe the opposite: that this is yet another
manifestation of inscrutable hatred and evil, and any discussion of
any other causes must be prohibited and ignored.
This is a typical example of how Greenwald engages in
overblown rhetoric. To take just a couple of examples that refute
his inaccurate generalizations here, no one attempted to
rationalize the Mahmudiyah killings in 2006, which involved the
massacre of an Iraqi family — including the gang rape and killing
of a 14-year old girl — by some U.S. soldiers from the 502nd
Infantry Regiment.
Indeed, the unequivocal condemnation was entirely
justified, and the motivation for the massacre was made clear for
all observers: namely, a hatred for Iraqis as a people and a desire
to engage in a punitive revenge attack. We know this because that
is how one of the perpetrators — James P. Barker — explained it.
As
he said in an interview in 2009,
“Because I hated Iraqis. They smile at you, then shoot
you in the face.”
As for acts of violence perpetrated against Americans by
individual Muslims, one need only look at the cases of Nidal Malik
Hasan, who was responsible for the spree shooting at Fort Hood, and
Faisal Shahzad — the failed Times Square bomber — to see how many
commentators, officials, and media outlets tried to explain their
actions in terms beyond “inscrutable hatred and evil.”
For example,
on NPR radio in the aftermath of the Fort
Hood massacre, Tom Gjelten — covering the story for the outlet —
referred to “a phenomenon that you could maybe call a
pre-traumatic stress disorder” as an underlying cause behind
Hasan’s rampage.
In a similar vein,
Muqtedar Khan, writing in the
Washington Post’s “On Faith” section, made the following
argument: “It is important to understand that Major
Hasan is an isolated, alienated and sad individual who was clearly
not well adjusted to his life. In a community that values family
life, he was single at 39 and still looking desperately for a wife,
according to his former Imam.… He was frequently taunted and
harassed for being a Muslim by his own colleagues… [H]e did not
feel as if he belonged and perhaps that was the key to why he could
turn on his own.” It is hardly as though Khan was subject to
widespread condemnation for what he wrote.
Likewise, many observers were
quick to note that Shahzad “had
faced the loss of his family home to bank repossession,” a supposed
stepping-stone on his path to radicalization. Others primarily
focused on Shahzad’s anger over American drone attacks in
Pakistan.
Greenwald’s writings on this matter come in the wider
context of attempts to equate the Afghan massacre with the recent
spree killing in Toulouse, the work of a French Muslim called
Mohammed Merah. A case in point is a
blog post by Harvey Morris at the
New York Times, in which the author rhetorically asks:
“Robert Bales? Mohammed Merah? Maybe they were both
mad.”
The issue of massacres and motivations behind them needs
to be clarified on several counts. When it comes to incidents of
spree-killings, it is always good to start by asking whether the
attack is planned in advance and the targets are intentionally
chosen.
In the case of Merah, who killed three Muslim paratroopers
and then four Jews at a Sephardic school, it is clear that the
perpetrator’s attacks were premeditated, and in keeping with al
Qaeda’s jihadist ideology that not only deems non-Muslims who do
not live under Sharia as legitimate targets for jihad — whether
“offensive” or “defensive” — but also Muslims perceived to be
apostates for serving in the armed forces of Western countries,
inter alia.
The latter concept is known as takfir, and is
well illustrated in statements made by Islamist thinkers in the
West aligned with al Qaeda. For example, Abu Izzadeen, a former
spokesman for the banned Islamist group al-Ghurabaa,
was filmed proclaiming that any Muslim who
joins the British Army should be beheaded. Further, Merah
proclaimed himself to be a “mujahideen,” and Jund al-Khilafah
(“Army of the Caliphate”), a group linked to al Qaeda,
took responsibility for the attacks.
It is therefore evident that Merah’s acts were driven by his
ideology.
As for Robert Bales, the problem is that many details of
the massacre have still been withheld from public disclosure, hence
the
wide variety of speculation on causes
and motives and whether the attacks were premeditated. What might
suggest premeditation is that Bales
may have carried out the massacre in
“two episodes, returning to his base after the first
attack and later slipping away to kill again.”
If this be the case, then it is plausible to suggest that
Bales was driven by a desire to carry out what he saw in his mind
as a punitive revenge raid on Afghans, not dissimilar to the
perpetrators of the Mahmudiyah massacre. What will be crucial to
determining Bales’ motivations is his own testimony at his
forthcoming trial, where he could be facing the death
penalty.
In fact, the Bales affair demonstrates the failure of
trying to draw equivalence between his actions and those of
Mohammed Merah. The very fact that Bales is being prosecuted shows
that the U.S. military does not have a policy of inciting hatred
against Afghans, does not encourage soldiers to engage in revenge
attacks on civilians, and does not promote any sort of supremacist
ideology. On the contrary, the American armed forces pursue
a
policy of accommodation towards local
cultures.
If it turns out that Bales is simply “mad,” it does not
follow that the same is true of Merah. It is untrue to
claim,
as Nicolas Sarkozy recently did, that
the “Islamic faith has nothing to do with the insane
motivations of this man [Merah],” for the concept of
takfir has a precedent in earlier Islamic thought,
specifically in
the works of Ibn Taymiyyah, while
jihad against non-Muslims has much broader elements in traditional
theology that justify it.
To round off, it is worth coming back to Greenwald, who
regards the likes of Faisal Shahzad as driven solely
by political grievances (in Shahzad’s case,
U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan) rather than any Islamist ideology.
Where Greenwald errs is to assume that these grievances and
ideology are mutually exclusive. Of course Shahzad is angry about
American drones, but what he himself said in a video released
by al-Arabiya illustrates that his
motivations go beyond an aim to end drone strikes.
In particular, Shahzad declared, “You’ll see
that the Muslim war has just started… until Islam is spread
throughout the whole world.” This fits in with
traditional ideas about jihad as warfare to expand the realm of Dar
al-Islam. It is also notable that Shahzad affirmed his desire to
avenge the death of Baitullah Mehsud, who was the leader of the
Tehreek-e-Taliban until he was killed by a drone strike in August
2009. Mehsud outlined
his goals as follows: Drive out the
non-Muslims from Muslim lands, and then attack them in the West
until they pay jizya or convert to Islam.
Recognizing that the problem of Islamist terrorism is
foremost an issue of ideology with roots in traditional theology
does not amount to characterizing the actions of Islamist militants
as manifestations of “inscrutable hatred and evil” (to use
Greenwald’s words). Rather, it is simply based on examining what
the militants themselves say they want to achieve.
I am no fan of Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan (based on
the erroneous assumption that the primary cause of the decline in
violence in Iraq from 2007 onwards was the increase of U.S. troop
numbers and COIN strategy) or the use of drones, but these policies
should not be changed merely because Faisal Shahzad is angered by
them. It is difficult to think of a counter-terrorism measure
against his fellow Islamist militants that would not similarly
anger him.
Instead, a policy of containment is needed, and on the
understanding that Islamism is ultimately rooted in questions of
identity and the role of Sharia in the modern world, it should be
acknowledged that the burden of stopping Islamist terrorism lies in
the hands of Muslims.
