Terrorist brutality not limited to Muslim world

In an op-ed by Ian Saxine entitled ‘Enough Apologia, time to take responsibility” in the 9/16/05 edition of The Miscellany News, Saxine claimed that “Islamism…thrives in part because mainstream Muslims and others refuse to condemn it outright.” However, a simple Google search reveals just how fallacious this claim is.

The Sept. 11 attacks, by far the most devastating act of political violence carried out by Muslims, were met with the following response by a confederation of American Muslim groups: "American Muslims, who unequivocally condemned today’s terrorist attacks on our nation, call on you to alert fellow citizens to the fact that now is a time for all of us to stand together in the face of this heinous crime." This outright condemnation was published in an open letter signed by the leaders of Muslim groups that together represent a substantial majority of the seven million Muslims in the United States.

Perhaps Saxine does not consider these groups “mainstream,” or perhaps he was firing from the hip when he blurted, “To claim there is an active, organized, and influential Muslim movement dealing with Islamism is like saying that the United States has a strong socialist party.” Or, perhaps, there is a political agenda lurking behind his uninformed pronouncements about what “Islam” is or is not doing about political violence.

While Saxine makes repeated disclaimers that he’s not a racist or an Islamophobe, he seems to think that there is something especially devious about political violence when Muslims do it. Indeed, for him, this violence is qualitatively distinct from other, equally destructive, acts of political violence.
He goes so far as to say that “the great threat to the world is to be found in the Muslim world.” (my emphasis). What he misses is the way that Muslim extremists participate in a global system of violence and counter-violence. Hence, when he calls for social transformation in the Muslim world, he does so in a political and historical vacuum which enable him to repeat the words “social change” a half dozen times without addressing any of the grievances (he would say “apologia”) from which political violence originates.

Saxine is right to decry recent political violence committed by Muslim extremists. The sheer loss of human life, whether in the London Tube, on the streets of Baghdad, or the train tracks leading into Madrid, is staggering and deeply unsettling. But while he is busy moralizing from the bare facts of bloodshed, he fails to mention the deeper tragedy of political violence—that it pushes the borders of what is acceptable political activity.

No matter if we are talking about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the brutality of the Taliban, or the militancy of such figures as Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf, we can see that increasingly brutal acts of aggression and retaliation become a method—and in the worst cases, the only method—for achieving political goals.

If one read the pamphlets produced by the Islamic resistance (HAMAS) during the first Intifada, or watched the entire Daniel Pearl execution, one heard specific political demands involving non-Islamic things such as territorial sovereignty and political autonomy for Palestinians, or an end to U.S. military bases in Pakistan.

Yet, when someone like Saxine reduces these acts to their Muslim character, this wider context (for explanation, and hence, good decision making, not for justification) disappears. We are left with the simple mantra of the other’s religious fanaticism. Actually reading the ideological positions of these various Islamist militants, it becomes clear they are not merely Islamic, but are articulating a coherent set of explicitly political demands, hopes, and even fears in Islamic terms.
I’m not apologizing for the inexcusable violence of fringe groups, nor am I denying the Islamic character of self-identifying Muslim militant organizations. But Saxine fails to recognize that, like other forms of political violence, Islamic militancy is primarily political, and as such, participates in an on-going conversation (which regrettably uses violence as a language) with other global forces.

We should not content ourselves, as Saxine does, with demanding that “Muslims,” and presumably only Muslims, should “think of a better response to their own domestic issues than to blow up civilians in far away places.” It’s too easy, not to mention irresponsible, to project all responsibility onto the supposedly “domestic” problems of the Muslim world for what he thinks of as exclusively Muslim violence. If we follow his assumption that Islamism is only a Muslim social problem, we conveniently excuse ourselves of culpability in the present state-of-affairs; moreover, at best we come to half-solutions because we cannot acknowledge our own responsibility for a number of the obstacles to social transformation in Muslim societies.

—Max Shmookler ’06