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President Obama’s speech, announcing his intent to reign in
America’s global war on terror is playing out with a certain grisly irony here
in England, a country reeling from the latest terrorist act.
The media
here is filled with ghastly images of a man, clad in a jacket and woolen
cap, glaring at the camera, a knife and meat cleaver in his bloody hand—just
after he and his partner hacked to death and tried to behead a young British
soldier in Woolwich in southeast London two days ago.
What is particularly
alarming is the similarity of these two newest terrorist murderers in the name
of Islam to the two brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon last month, to the
23 year-old son of Algerian immigrants, who shot down seven people in France a little
more than a year ago.
In England, as in the earlier attacks in the U.S. and France,
the terrorist killings provoked a wave of horror and outrage across the country.
Islamic leaders denied such dastardly deeds had anything to do with the true
faith. The murders were condemned as the totally senseless, cowardly act of
unhinged killers, their minds deranged by radical Islamist claptrap.
“Britain will never buckle,” said Prime Minister David
Cameron. “The terrorists will never win because they can never beat the values
we hold dear.”
In fact, however, as one of the two killers in Woolwich talked
to a horrified onlooker before the police arrived, in his own mind, at least, their
actions were quite rational. They were in retaliation for Britain’s
participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you
until you leave us alone.” the man with the meat cleaver said. “Your people
will never be safe. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are
dying by British soldiers everyday. We must fight them as they fight us. An eye
for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this
today but in our lands our women have to see the same.”
He went on, “So what if we want to live by the Sharia in
Muslim lands? Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists,
kill us?”
“Rather, your lot are extreme. You are the ones. When you drop
a bomb, do you think it picks on a person? Or rather your bomb wipes out a whole
family?’
The investigation in London is just getting underway, but
there is no evidence that the two men of Nigerian parents were part of al-Qaeda
or any sophisticated terrorist network. One of them had converted from
Christianity to Islam, but they were what the British authorities call
“self-starters,”a potentially far more dangerous threat to Britain and the West
than al-Qaeda itself.
They were almost certainly swayed by radical Islamic clerics
in England or via the Internet, such as the fiery English-language sermons
delivered by Anwar al-Alwaki, an Al Qaeda preacher based in Yemen. An American
citizen, he was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But the West’s dilemma is
that his call for wannabe jihadis to
launch whatever bloody attacks they can conjure, echoes on—as does the motto “Just
Do It.”
That’s also the story behind the bombings at the Boston
Marathon, perpetrated by the two young Tsarnaev brothers, immigrants from the
restless Muslim nation of Chechnya.
Here again, there is yet no evidence that they received any serious terrorist training
or were acting as agents of any sophisticated network. Like the two men in
Woolwich, they were freelancers--carrying out their own murderous schemes,
inspired by nationalist cum religious sentiments, abetted by on-line instructions
about bomb-making.
Their motives?
The surviving brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was determined to make them
clear. As he lay bleeding from his wounds, hidden from the police inside a boat
in the back yard of a Watertown, Ma., he wrote
a message on the interior wall of the cabin.
The note said the bombings
were in retaliation for U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the
Boston victims "collateral damage" in the same way innocent victims
have been in the American-led wars. "When you attack one Muslim, you
attack all Muslims," Tsarnaev wrote.
Again, in March 2012, France was traumatized by the murderous
outburst of another young Muslim in Toulouse. Mohammed Merah, 23, first gunned down three French
soldiers—one of them Muslim—then three days later he methodically shot four more
people—a rabbi and three students at a nearby Jewish School.
He attacked the military base, Merah later told police,
because of France’s involvement in Afghanistan; and the Jewish school because
“The Jews kill our brothers and sisters in Palestine.” He was also outraged, he
said, by France’s ban of the full veil.
As in Woolwich and Boston, the immediate suspicion that
Merah was somehow linked to al-Qaeda; but it turned out that it wasn’t. As
I blogged at the time, Merah had been to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but
there was no evidence that this former petty criminal was part of any serious
terrorist network.
That being the case, how on earth can the authorities in the
U.S. and Europe deal with the threat of such “Just-Do-It” jihadis?
Since 2005, for instance, British security services have
prevented more than a dozen terrorist plots on British soil, including a scheme
to blow up airliners with liquid-based bombs, to targeting shopping centers and
nightclubs with fertilizer-based explosives, to taking out the London stock
exchange. But the two Woolwich killers slipped through.
This, despite the fact that, according to reports here, both
of them had been on an MI-5 watch list. One had apparently been arrested while
attempting to travel to Somalia to join a radical Islamic group.
But after that, what should the authorities have done? Hold
him for life? Let him go but keep him under constant surveillance? With some
2.5 million people of Muslim descent in England? Many of them unemployed, alienated
from their government and its tendency to follow the lead of the United States
in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East. How do you keep a handle on them
all?
French authorities also singled out Mohammed Merah for
special attention after his trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Merah shared
space on that watch-list with some 600 other radicals from right to left just in
the Toulouse area alone. Don’t forget, there are more than five million people
of Muslim descent in France, many of them also bitter, unemployed, poorly
housed.
French authorities have also foiled terrorist plots over the
past few years, but there is no way they could have predicted that a young man
like Mohammed Merah, who first turned to Salafism in a French prison, would migrate
from radical “attitude” into full-blown terrorism. Indeed, apparently before he
set out to avenge his Moslem brothers for France’s military role in
Afghanistan, Merah had earlier tried to enlist in the French army, presumably
to go to Afghanistan to fight against Islamic radicals.
Thus, there are certainly other precipitating factors—apart
from ideology alone--that transform young men and women into terrorists. The
elder Tsarnaev brother in Boston, for instance, had been a promising amateur boxer.
He was apparently radicalized when the people running the Golden Gloves
championships restricted admission
to American citizens only. That decision meant the end to Tsarnaev’s boxing
career and turned him towards religious extremism.
But, the only real common ground among the terrorist killers
have been the statements they’ve issued themselves: Their bloody actions,
they’ve all claimed, are retribution for the policies of the U.S. and its
allies in the Middle East and Central Asia, the lurid pictures of collateral
damage from Drone strikes, and the continued shame of Guantanamo.
Ironically, all those actions were supposedly undertaken to
make the U.S. and its allies safe from terrorism.
Will the apparent shift in America’s policy announced by
President Obama change that fatal dynamic? It depends on whether or not he now backs
up his high-flying rhetoric with concrete action.
