Terrorism, Racism and Preventable Loss
By Eric Hiariej
March 28 2016
The governments of great Western powers are used to believing that terrorists are enemies who come from places miles away from their respective territories.
However, since the London attack and the recent explosions in Brussels, they have had to realize that their countries have become a new source of home-grown terrorists.
Against the background of increasing terror threats on their own soil, leading figures of great Western powers seem to believe that (too much) pluralism and (too strong) civil liberty are to be blamed. It is argued that pluralism and civil liberty, for instance, have been abused by some extremists to preach hatred. Hence, they threatened to deport extremists and planned a controversial identification card initiative.
Naomi Klein poses a different view regarding the increasing number of Western countries that have become home for terrorists. Based on her observations of Husain Osman and Sayid Qutb, she has a different take, blaming “democracy” in Western countries.
Osman, one of the alleged terrorists linked to the failed bomb attack in London several years ago, made it clear to his investigators that he is probably just a casual terrorist encouraged by the media. He and his friends planned the attack after watching news from Iraq, “especially where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers”. Osman’s comments suggest that one underlying factor provoking his violent behaviour relates to his anger at what he understood to be extreme racism.
In the name of the war on terrorism the US, British and Australian governments have made American and European life worth more than Arab and Muslim lives. How many Iraqis have died has never been counted, while the comparatively small number of American casualties is counted day by day.
Injustice and racism have always had a place in history. Qutb — the Egyptian thinker and the “Lenin” of the radical Islamic movement — cultivated his radicalism while continuing his studies in the US. This puritan scholar faced directly and was shocked by what he later defined as the “evil and fanatical racial discrimination” of Americans.
Incidentally, Qutb, then a secular scholar, set foot on American shores in 1948, the year the state of Israel was founded. He witnessed Americans turn a blind eye to the misery of thousands of Palestinian who became permanent refugees amid the Zionist project. For secular Qutb, this was no longer a political issue as he took it as an abuse of his identity. He believed the American public had valued Arabs less than European Jews.
He decided to return home just after two years. Qutb then became a member of Ikhwan ul Muslimun, turned fundamentalist and fought against what he believed was blatant racism practiced by big states. He was arrested, brutally tortured and accused of being involved in an abortive attempt to overthrow the Nasser regime.
Qutb thought he had been strongly influenced by his experience in the US and prison. He regarded racism and torture as subhuman and, more importantly, implied that such sub-humanity included almost all aspects of social life that caused brutality to him — not excluding Muslims who supported and took no action against the unjust and illegitimate power.
The notion of sub-humanity is at the heart of his concept of Jahiliyah. His disciples have taken this idea as an ideological basis to justify their killing of infidels.
The stories of Osman and Qutb show that the practice — or probably malpractice — of liberal democracy severely fails to prevent extremism. Multiculturalism celebrated in this model of democracy highly obsessed by electoralism hardly ensures ethnic equality.
Multiculturalism, in Klein’s understanding, has degraded into “a Faustian bargain, struck between vote-seeking politicians and self-appointed community leaders”. This has created a new concentration camp of subsidized ghettos and government protection for minority groups, as the centre of public life is sterile from skin colour and cultural contamination brought about by substantial changes in ethnic balance at a national level.
Meanwhile global capitalism undergoes a radical structural transformation. This reorganization — some will argue disorganization — process has devastating effects for the fate of the majority of workers in advanced economies. Outsourcing and downsizing have forced workers to work part-time, without having permanent contracts. Even worse, they have to compete bitterly with the “invasion” of low-wage labor from developing areas.
For workers in advanced economies life becomes more risky, making them easily suspicious of ethnic minorities who they believe should take some s responsibility for increasing difficulties. As general elections approach, such “false consciousness” is manipulated by leaders such as Jean-Marie le Pen, Pat Robertson or Pauline Hanson.
This is a failure of liberal democracy to embrace minorities — hence limited pluralism and civil liberty. Liberal democracy and global capitalism have successfully trapped ethnic minorities within the political correctness of antiracism and, therefore, make fertile land for all sort of radicalism.
Racism produced by liberal democracy is in the way people discursively apprehend — or fail to apprehend — the lives of others as lost or injured through certain epistemological frames that are politically saturated.
The frames that produce liveable lives are themselves operations of power, the site of domination and subordination. Violent radicalism carried out by Osman and Qutb, although unacceptable, should also be comprehended as a challenge to racist frames of preventable injuries and loss.
Source: thejakartapost.com/news/2016/03/28/terrorism-racism-and-preventable-loss.html
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/terrorism,-racism-preventable-loss/d/106786