Political Insanity and the “War on Terror”

As a child of Holocaust survivors, I’ve often wondered what made ordinary, nice Germans tolerate Hitler. Actually, many  positively loved him. Even more than that good people turned evil, what puzzles me, though, is that perfectly sane people turned insane.

It was not a personal type of insanity that Germans fell prey to. The insanity Germans suffered from was a political insanity. Antisemites with crazy ideas for various reasons managed to make those ideas appear, little by little, less and less crazy. Eventually, intelligent people – philosophers, sociologists, school principals, doctors, lawyers – came to think there must be some truth to the idea of Jews as a form of invasive bacteria, destroying and taking over the world through their cunning, plotting and manipulation. The solution to restoring the health of the infected organism was obvious and even logical, once you accepted the sick delusion as normal analysis.

I call such sickness political rather than just personal insanity, because it is the madness of the whole body politic, from the highest to the lowest forms of government and from public speeches to chats over the dinner table.

Now there is a new madness afoot. We can perhaps thank the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, that a Holocaust of Muslims is unthinkable today or in the future. I would hate to be misunderstood as prognosticating such a terrible thing. Yet the similarities between the Islamophobia of today and the antisemitism of yesterday are increasing. No longer is it the case that in the imagination of western bigots, the Muslim is the external enemy and the Jew the internal, as Gil Anidjar of Columbia University once suggested. The Muslims are here among us. The Jews were once thought by too many to be the danger that will destroy western civilization from within, and now it is the Muslims. This is not a clash of civilizations each with its home region, as was imagined by Samuel Huntington. The enemy is imagined to be right here in our homes, and as was the case with the Jews, the enemy is partly hidden; its machinations must be managed by first identifying who among us belongs to its ranks. Though most Muslims may be more visible than most Jews, enough of both can “pass” for ordinary white people to warrant deranged demands to identify them: yellow stars once, a Trump-style registry now.

There are some major differences, to be sure. Jews never conducted a series of mass terror attacks in the West, and there were never Jewish suicide bombers. Right. (There were Jewish terrorists once, too, but they acted as anarchists and not as Jews, and they did not choose their targets indiscriminately.)

But the issue is not if there are Muslims who are terrorists – there definitely are, though, contrary to stubborn Islamophobic opinion, countless Muslim leaders have distanced themselves from the terrorists’ criminal version of Islam.

Political insanity resides not in the true statement that Muslims have committed horrifying terror acts, but in the false suggestion that it is Islam and Muslims that are a major cause of the problem. This is, paradoxically, accepting the very same nonsense that the jihadists advertise and believe, that is, that they are acting in defence of their religion.

Look at the biography of almost all of the terrorists that have murdered people in France this year. Do you see boys learning Quran in a madrassa? Do you see teenage girls wearing the veil? Do you see young people sitting in a mosque, listening to the imam’s sermons?  This is not what the picture of a terrorist upbringing looks like. Instead, we hear of young people, strangers to the mosque and restless in school, growing up in disadvantaged immigrant suburbs and broken families. We hear of petty thievery. We hear of drugs. Here, surrounded by gang and family violence, being able to resist insult by insulting gives a young person power and status. More than one terrorist once admired expressions of assertive American ghetto culture, and some featured in amateur rap videos.

Joining an Islamist radical group is similar, in such conditions, to joining a gang. Gang members require a code of respect. For some of the youngsters growing up in the neglected, despised urban cesspits of Europe, their Muslim background allowed Islam to become that code: the explanation of one’s marginality and the method of restoring respect. It is easy to see how such people, ignorant of Islam, would become attracted to misinterpreted snippets of the Islamic tradition, a religion that like the Christian and the Jewish, does include injunctions against blasphemy (viz. the Charlie Hebdo incident), and punishes other signs of disrespect. Though they passionately embrace Islam, the terrorists are gangsters more than they are Muslims.

True, Islamism in the Middle East has provided inspiration for the terrorists, mainly by digital incitement on the internet. Islamists in the Middle East, some of them expatriates themselves, do provide indispensable training for returning jihadists. Eradicating groups like Islamic State, which may be impossible militarily, would put a big dent into terrorism in the West, as well as ridding the world of an evil menace.

But the real breeding ground of terrorism is not in the Middle East. It is in the West itself. It is in the marginalization, segregation, and unemployment practices that serve both to keep everybody’s wages down and to create a politically attractive target in Muslims. Such practices help to rally the population behind the now well-entrenched economic and social policies that would otherwise be more easily unmasked as hurting both us and them.

The political insanity, the great delusion, that more and more of us believe and that may already have become normal, is therefore that the problem is Islam. It is still an insanity if we add, like so many good, nice people, that only a small minority of Muslims supports terrorism, and that the Islam we have to fight is not “real Islam.” Actually, it’s not a religion at all – in any form – that needs to be fought, but the conditions that turn Islam into a gangster’s code of honour.

The main cause of terrorism in the West is not Islam, and not even the Middle East, but the continued marginalization of poor people in the West itself. Most of the terrorists are natives of western countries but have not become active, contributing, loyal citizens. They cannot because they are excluded by persistent patterns of economic, cultural, and racial discrimination.

Once you believe the political insanity that the problem is primarily Islam and the Muslim Middle East, then you are ready to support expensive and scary policies that have never worked, and you know they won’t work this time, either. A sane policy would spend the same money and effort on the necessary police work (not war), and above all on finding ways to eliminate slums, unemployment, and racism.

Let’s refuse to be intimidated, either by terrorists or by political insanity.