As cruel and senseless as the bombings in Brussels were this week, we should pause to consider how we reached this point where murderers can seemingly move with impunity from one city to another in their cause to wreak havoc.
Our reaction to prevent further slaughter, as we have seen recently in Brussels, Paris and San Bernardino, is to tighten security and advocate closing European and North American borders, which provides fodders for right-wing western extremists determined to create a climate of fear. The result is a victory for terrorists.
Muslims, of course, condemn the Brussels attacks in the strongest terms. But perhaps it’s time to remind the world’s leaders that King Abdullah in 2011, when he provided seed money for the United Nations Counterterrorism Center, said terrorism is not just a threat to Muslim countries, but will ultimately impact every country. Unless the entire world unites against violent militants no one is immune from attacks. Since that stark warning, the world leaders have done little to anticipate attacks other than obviously unworkable solutions.
Tightening borders — although no one argues against a strong level of security — singling out minorities for selective treatment and profiling ethnic minorities are tools the media uses to stoke fear, thus creating an even wider gap between Muslims and the western powers that be.
Western nations 15 years after 9/11 still regard dealing with violent militants as a police operation and not an act of war. Daesh and Al-Qeada are at war with the West and there will be no end to this war until the West submits to the whims of killers. Leaders in Daesh and Al-Qeada have delusions of grandeur and by their own incompetence and arrogance will die as violently as they lived. But on the way to their deaths they will take as many innocent people with them as possible. As long as the world’s security forces react to attacks as if they were ordinary street crimes (more guns and severe restrictions to our civil liberties) then more innocents will die.
To combat this ideology, we must treat Daesh as if they were an existing nation that has declared war on us. French President Francois Hollande said that “France is at war” with Daesh, but other than airstrikes by French fighter jets, he has done little against the enemy. US President Obama promised severe consequences if Bashar Assad crossed “red lines” by using chemical weapons. And we know how that turned out. Republican Party presidential candidates are advocating closing US borders and Donald Trump wants a noninterventionist foreign policy.
Seriously, just how many bombings and shootings in public places must be committed before we recognize we are at war with fundamentalist nutters?
The answer lies in demanding that nations’ leaders quit their political posturing with empty rhetoric and ineffective security measures and tackle the issue as if we are experiencing a viral epidemic. Stamp out the symptoms of violent radical ideology by delivering a fatal blow to the nerve center of Daesh operations in Syria and Iraq while at the same time examine the causes of radicalism and treat it intelligently.
Effectively neutralizing Daesh means troops on the ground whether world leaders like it or not. It means repairing the damage caused by the United States when it invaded Iraq. Let’s not kid ourselves; the goal of Daesh is revenge for Iraq and West’s destructive meddling in the Middle East, not some harebrained ideology and establishing a caliphate in name only but a brutal dictatorship in reality.
Although I sometimes feel that I am flogging a dead horse, it bears repeating that Saudi Arabia’s rehabilitation program for militants works, achieving a 20 percent recidivism rate that should be the envy of any American penal institution. Yet too many governments fail to address the issue that counterterrorism measures must be taken at the elementary school level.
The United Kingdom has developed a program that refers individuals, and children as young as 9 years old, to its counterterrorism program. The UK’s institutions are obligated under law to tackle extremism. In 2015 nearly 4,000 people were referred to the program, up from nearly 1,700 in 2014.
The program’s effectiveness is up for debate and such programs are ripe for abuse by stigmatizing people merely expressing an opinion, but credit must be given to the UK for attempting to address radicalism at its roots.
While Saudi Arabia has a program that targets adult extremists, it lags in tackling the issue at the elementary and high school level. But even a military and educational approach won’t effectively curb terrorism until the United States and its allies rebuild nations that it has destroyed and use their resources to rescue those countries that are in extreme danger of producing more radicals.
