Drunk American drivers kill a total of 10,000 Americans annually. Two Muslims killed fourteen Americans in December. So Donald Trump suggests banning — alcohol? No, he wants to ban Muslim immigrants. And Muslims don’t even drink.
Candidates’ tough talk is not about saving lives. It’s about ignorance. Daesh and Al-Qaeda adhere to their skewed interpretation of Islam, which rejects the religion’s call for peace and tolerance. Furthermore, the ability of terrorist organizations to attract followers doesn’t even stem from their intolerant ideology, but rather from their determination to resist foreign and sectarian domination.
It was the US invasion of Iraq and anti-Sunni brutality of the US-installed Shiite government that led to Daesh’s following, not its ideology. If the US wants to ban something, it ought to ban US invasions. The zeal of candidates to demonstrate their toughness against terrorism is maddeningly ignorant, because it is their very determination to degrade and destroy Daesh and exert US military power and political control over the Mideast.
Consider terrorist motivations behind actions such as 9/11. Some motivations are aggressive and illegitimate: Sadism, low empathy, domination preoccupations, black-and-white thinking, underdog biases, hostile interpretations of Islam, boredom and beliefs in killing’s usefulness.
Yet some motivations are defensive, and while the violence is not legitimate, the motivations are: Rage over anti-Islamist repression, foreign political interference, anti-Muslim prejudice, westernization, secularism, urbanization, social alienation, unemployment, capitalism’s callousness toward poverty, the Gulf War and sanctions, US invasions and drones, US treatment of prisoners, US military bases abroad, suffering from Israeli cruelty toward Palestinians and fear of western-Zionist.
Why not address the legitimate motivations? The following of terrorist groups and Daesh will then plummet. Certainly, those who fight for aggressive reasons will continue to inflict gruesome violence, but we can then all work cooperatively to arrest this much smaller group. After all, how could any of these motivations possibly be remedied by US violence? How could a violent US response possibly nurture peace, love, joy, trust, health and justice when communities are pulverized, violence is role modeled, and underlying causes of conflict are ignored?
The problem with the US reaction to both 9/11 and Daesh is the US belief in hammering out peace by controlling people. There has never been earnest effort at cooperative negotiation, as if this would be spineless appeasement or a pact with the devil. There has never been any reassurance on the part of the US that it will discontinue its military, political, economic and cultural intrusiveness in the Mideast.
Many factors contribute to Middle Eastern violence; US policy is only one factor. But instead of adding more killing to the killing in vain attempts to achieve physical control over people’s minds, the most powerful step the US can take is to change its own behavior to reduce tension within Middle Eastern minds.
Imagine the tables turned. Would you feel safe with the FBI being supplied by Egypt with weapons to suppress American civilians, US oilfields managed by Iraq, Afghanistan invading to construct pipelines and ads and movies everywhere featuring Middle Eastern products and values? The US seems to think the Mideast should take all this without complaint. If we honestly address legitimate concerns motivating Daesh violence, can we attract away from this terrorist organization those followers who don’t admire brutality and intolerance? Or is it too late? Have we left, unaddressed, the causes of terrorism for too long?
Paris climate conference attendees know they must reduce Earth’s heating before it reaches the tipping point, the point of no return. Have we reached that tipping point with terrorism? Are we drawing near to a black hole of hatred and violence?
Black holes have enormous mass and gravity. In astronomy, the event horizon is a spherical boundary around a black hole. Inside the event horizon, the escape velocity needed to break free from a black hole’s gravitational field is faster than the speed of light. There is no escape, for nothing in the universe travels faster than light.
Along the edge of the event horizon, the escape velocity equals the velocity of light. Just outside the event horizon, the gravitational pull of the black hole is enormous, but it is possible, with tremendous strength and velocity, to overcome the gravitational pull and avoid being sucked into the black hole.
With hope, courage, and determination, we must continue together to add to the velocity of our intellect, our hearts, and our will in order to attain the escape velocity that will enable us to leave behind the gravitational field of the state of war and violence, to keep us out of that black hole, and to pull us up and out into space where we can see the starlight clearly.
