November 16, 1989. An elite group of the Salvadorian army trained in and funded by the US entered the house of the Jesuits at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA). They brutally gunned down six Jesuits. Their only crime was their work for social justice and peace. They also killed a domestic worker and her daughter who happened to be in the house at the time.
January 7, 2015. Two Islamist extremists ambushed the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. They massacred 12 people, mostly famous cartoon journalists whose only crime was their advocacy of free speech. These barbarians then murdered in cold blood a policeman who was a Muslim. He begged for his life but the beasts had no pity.
The two cases are extremely different but also radically similar. Both cases represent the orgasmic revenge by those imbued by pure, undiluted hatred and intolerance against those whom they consider to be their enemy.
It was mainly in the 1970s and in the 1980s that we had seen in Europe scenes like those we saw last Tuesday. The Baader-Meinhof Group (later known as the Red Army Faction), the Brigate Rosse, the Irish Republican Army and other European born and bred terrorists groups bullied Europe with their violent stunts.
During those years, before the age of the blanket news coverage that characterises this decade, we had to wait for the evening news on television to witness the reportage of the carnage: mutilated bodies, blood all over the place, wrecked cars and buildings, people in despair and follow-up solidarity demonstrations held in defiance of the murderers.
Each group had to justify its barbarism by reference to what they believed to be a higher value. The left-wing oriented Bader-Meinhof and the Brigate Rosse spew violent deaths because they said they wanted a just world. The IRA murdered without pity because they wanted a united and free Ireland.
The Jesuits were considered to be a threat to national security because they advocated the preferential option for the poor. The French cartoonists were considered to be enemies of Islam. Extremists like the Paris murderers, Islamic State, Boko Haram and other radicalised Islamists are tainting Islam by making it to look as a religion of violence and extremism.
As Stephane Charbonnier, the murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, said some time ago after his offices were firebombed for printing a cartoon of the Prophet on his magazine’s cover: “When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.”
The worst mistake that can be perpetrated after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo is to frame it within the clash-of-civilisation narrative
The massacre was condemned largely as being an attack against free speech. It definitively was, but it is at the same time an attack against religion. Such barbarisms are blasphemies of the worst kind. Their perpetrators are the worst enemies that any religion can have. In fact Charlie Hebdo had printed a cartoon of the Prophet lamenting: “It is hard to be loved by assh***s.”
How can one justify such barbarism and savagery when one believes in a God most merciful and compassionate as described by Islam? None of these divine attributes were anywhere present in the Paris massacre. In similar fashion, God as Love was nowhere present in the holocaust of the Indios by the Spanish cattolicissimi or in the pseudo-religious Thirty Years War. The IRA did not douse their bullets in holy water before killing protestant ‘heretics’!
The worst mistake that can be perpetrated after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo is to frame it within the clash-of-civilisation narrative. Those who spin this kind of spiel would be helping the savages to reach their objective. Going through the comments on Facebook and news websites one could notice the massive stereotyping, the extreme simplifications, the budding racism, the crass ignorance and the nascent intolerance.
The billion-and-a-half followers of Islam are all lumped together and all labelled as terrorists. Moreover, they are all categorised as Arabs when they are not. Refugees and irregular immigrants in Malta are all dumped into the same Islamic cauldron, though several are Christians.
Muslim leaders never condemned such acts, many screamed as their ultimate proof that all Muslims are terrorists. This is a totally uninformed statement. Egypt’s leading Islamic authority, Al-Azhar, the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican, condemned the attack referring to it as a criminal act. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, also condemned the shooting. French Muslim leaders described the perpetrators as criminals and barbarians.
“They have sold their soul to hell. This is not freedom. This is not Islam,” they said. Many Arab cartoonists reacted with their own cartoons to denounce this crime of unspeakable brutality.
Stereotyping is never healthy. The dividing of the world into an ‘us’ and ‘them’ is a perfect recipe for disaster. The painting of a particular religion as violent or the coalescing of religion and terrorism are simplistic, and thus incorrect.
Prof. Riaz Hassan has shown the complexity of the relationship in a 2011 study about suicide bombers. He debunked the common wisdom that the personality of suicide bombers and their religion are the principal cause. While acknowledging that religion can play an important role while drafting and motivating people who can potentially sacrifice themselves, the driving force is not religion but a mixture of motivations including politics, humiliation, revenge, retaliation and altruism.
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who is no lover of religion, in an interview last September discussed the possible responsibility of Islam for the brutal beheadings carried out by Islamic State. He acknowledged that “religion itself is not responsible for this”. He noted the existence of the sensation of ‘us against them’ and the large number of young Muslims feel kind of beleaguered by the rest of the world.
As religious fundamentalists (in this case Islamic extremists) use religion to vent their great sense of frustration through horrible violence against their enemies; secular fundamentalists use such massacres to attack all religions, not any particular one.
The Paris assassins said one thing, though, which rightly and fittingly undermines them and their cruelty.
Their statement that Allahu akbar is a true statement of fact. God is greater than them. His benevolence drowns their vindictiveness. Their insularity pales into insignificance when faced by His all-encompassing attitude. His love extinguishes their hate. Through His power their attack on religion will be overcome. Insh’Allah – in God’s hands, indeed.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt