THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
The Origin of Modern
Terror and Crumbling Western Values
John Chuckman
Do you ever solve problems by ignoring them? Most of us
would say that is not possible, yet that is precisely what western governments
do in their efforts to counteract what is called “Islamic terror.” Yes, there
are vast and costly efforts to suppress the symptoms of what western
governments regard as a modern plague, including killing many people presumed
to be infected with it, fomenting rebellion and destruction in places presumed
to be prone to it, secretly returning to barbaric practices such as torture,
things we thought had been left behind centuries ago, to fight it, and violating
rights of their own citizens we thought were as firmly established as the need
for food and shelter. Governments ignore, in all these destructive efforts, what
in private they know very well is the origin of the problem.
Have Islamic radicals always existed? Yes, we have records
through the history of British and French empire-building of strange and
fearsome groups. It appears every large religion has a spectrum of believers,
always including at one end of the spectrum extreme fundamentalists. They are not
a new phenomenon anywhere, so why has one group of them, in the sands of the
Middle East, become part of our everyday awareness?
It is also nothing new that young men become hot-blooded and
disturbed over what they regard as attacks upon their kind. Western society’s
record of crusades, religious wars, colonial wars, and revolts, a total likely
having no equal in the histories of the world’s peoples, offers countless
examples of young men being angered by this or that circumstance and joining up
or running off to fight.
George Bush told us today’s terrorists hate our freedom and
democratic values, but like virtually every utterance of George Bush, that one
was fatuous, explaining nothing. Nevertheless, his is the explanation pounded
into public consciousness because governments and the corporate press never
stop repeating versions of it, the Charlie Hebdo affair and its theatrical posturing
over free speech being only the latest. Theatrical? Yes, when we know perfectly
well that most of those who marched at the front of the parade in Paris are anything
but friends of free speech.
All backward peoples are uncomfortable with certain western
values, that being the nature of backwardness, and backwardness is a defining
characteristic of all fundamentalist religious groups – Hasidic or
ultra-Orthodox Jews, Mennonites, Roman Catholic Cardinals, cloistered nuns,
Sikhs, and many others - who typically choose modes of dress, rules to obey, and
even foods to eat having little or no relationship with the contemporary world
and science. Of course, that is their right so long as they are peaceful and
law-abiding.
Any fundamentalist group, pushed by more powerful people
from outside their community, is entirely capable of, and even prone to, violence,
and all human beings are capable of violence when faced with abuse and
injustice. Centuries of religious wars and terrors in Europe about such matters
as how the Mass is celebrated prove the proposition and should be held as a
warning, but they are forgotten by most, if they were ever known. The tendency
towards violence continues today amongst many fundamentalist faiths. In so
relatively small and seemingly homogeneous a society as Israel, there are
regular attacks from ultra-Orthodox Jews against the country’s worldly citizens
or against fair-minded rules about such pedestrian matters as women riding
buses or walking on a street. The attacks become quite violent – punching, spitting,
burning down homes, and killing sometimes - and all go against what we call
western values, but because the scale is fairly small, and our press also has a
constant protective bias concerning all things Israeli, these events rarely make
our mainline news. They must be found on the Internet.
It took Western Europe literally centuries to leave behind
such recurrent and violent themes as witches and the need to burn them alive,
the Evil Eye, casting out demons, execution for differences of belief, and
countless other stupidities which characterized whole societies and destroyed lives.
And if you want to go still further back, go to the Old Testament, a collection
of ancient writing packed with violence, superstition, prejudice, and just
plain ignorance, which Christians and others even today regard as containing
important truths for contemporary life. Human progress, at least in some
matters, takes a very long time indeed.
Our world has more backward people than most of us can
imagine. The news does not feature their extremes and savageries because it
serves no political purpose. In Africa, for example, we find practices and
beliefs utterly repellent to modern minds: the practice of senior village men
raping young girls as an accepted right, the genital mutilation of 3 million
girls annually (an African, not an Islamic, practice), the hunting down and
butchering such “strange” people as albinos, their parts to be eaten as
medicine, and many others. In India, a country well on its way to becoming
modern yet one with a huge backward population, we have practices such as
marrying off mere girls to old men rich enough to pay dowries to poor parents.
At one stroke this enriches the parents and relieves them of the burden of a
child, a female child too, always viewed less favorably. The practice generates a large population of
widows when the old husbands of girls married at, say, twelve die. These women
are then condemned to entire lives as widows, never allowed to remarry,
required to dress and eat in certain ways, and basically shunned to live in
squalid equivalents of old folks homes., living entirely meaningless lives.
India also has the practice of “bride burning” where new brides who are deemed
unacceptable for various reasons become the prey of the groom’s family,
literally being burned alive. There are many other barbarities in that society
too, including “honor killing” and young women who are made inmates in certain
temples to serve as glorified prostitutes.
Our press assiduously avoids much of the world’s horrors as it
focuses on “Islamic extremism,” and politics are the only explanation for the
bias. The press theme of Islamic terror and indeed real incidents of terror
grow from a reality always taken for granted, never debated, and certainly
never criticised: the elephant in the room, as it were, is Israel’s illegal and
agonizingly long occupation of the Palestinians.
It may be not be important to our press and governments that
Israel holds millions as prisoners, crippling the lives of generation after
generation, or that Israel periodically strikes out in every direction – Gaza,
Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank – causing the deaths of many thousands, or that
Israel is seen to bulldoze people’s homes and sacred monuments with complete
impunity, but it very much matters to many millions of Muslims in the world,
and some of them, fundamentalist men, strike out against it just as young men
everywhere have sometimes struck out against keenly-felt hurts and injustice.
In western countries, under the hard influence of America, a
country in turn under the hard influence of the world’s best organized and
financed lobby, the Israel Lobby, we have come to regard Israel’s behavior as
normal, but it is, of course, not normal, not in any detail. What is normal
about holding several million people prisoner for half a century? What is
normal about bulldozing homes and literally stealing the land upon which they
stood? What is normal about declaring an honestly elected government as
criminal and treating its people as though they were criminals? What is normal
about limiting people’s opportunity to earn a living or to import some of the
needs of life? What is normal about killing nearly a thousand children, as Israel
has done just in Gaza, since 2008?
Pretending that Israel’s behavior is not the major cause of
what screams from our headlines and news broadcasts has reached absurd levels. America
has only vastly compounded the problem of Israel’s organized abuse of a people:
it and its silent partners have destroyed Iraq, destroyed Libya, are working
hard to destroy Syria, have seen to it that Egypt’s tens of millions again live
under absolute government, ignore countless inequities and barbarities in
secretly-helpful countries like Saudi Arabia, and carry out extra-judicial
killings through much of the region. All of it is carried out on Israel’s
behalf and with Israel’s cooperation. Can any reasonable person not see that this
vast factory of death also manufactures countless grievances and vendettas? The
stupidity is on a colossal scale, rooted in the notion that you can kill your
way out of the terrible consequences of terrible policies.
In America, paid political shills (Newt Gingrich was one)
have campaigned about there being no such thing as a Palestinian. Others (Dick
Armey was one) have said that millions of Palestinians should be removed, all
their land left conveniently to Israel. That last is an odd thing to say, isn’t
it, considering there are supposed to be no such thing as Palestinians? And just
what country would take millions of “non-existent” Palestinians? Obviously no
politician with even pretence of integrity would say such things, and how can
intelligent and successful people like America’s Jews take satisfaction in hearing
politicians reciting such embarrassing scripts? But this is a good measure of
the way intelligence and sound thinking are scorned in American politics. How
can you achieve anything worth achieving without intelligence and sound thinking?
You cannot, but that doesn’t stop American Presidents and Secretaries of State from
carrying on the world’s longest-running dumb show, something called the “peace
process.” The sombre, moose-like figure of John Kerry is photographed
playacting at statesmanship while American-supplied arms just keep killing thousands
of innocent people.
