We are all Belgians, Parisiens, Americans.. uniting with victims of Islamic terror everywhere and always!!
If anyone thinks that Trump’s campaign for the white
house has not been given a big boost by the Belgian terrorists who struck
yesterday morning in both the subway system and the nation’s airport, killing
nearly three dozen and injuring another 150, with reports still coming in,
they are living under a rock. One reporter on CNN echoed the phrase “shaking
the hornet’s nest’ as the metaphor used by Belgian authorities as they
anticipated some kind of violent response to the arrest of the Paris terrorist.
Can we, in North America, conceive of ourselves as
Belgians, or Parisians, or Nigerians, or even New Yorkers (after 9/11) in our
identification with the victims of the Islamic terrorist scourge? What would it
be like if this story were focused on Pearson airport in Toronto, or Trudeau
airport in Montreal, and our neighbours and possibly our friends were no longer
alive? While we all know that that is not the situation this morning, we also
know that there is no reason to be complacent that we are not potentially under
threat of an attack. It would seem that the most important difference is that
there is no public statement from our security apparatus indicating that
attacks like these in Belgium or those in Paris are imminent in Canada or the
United States. Single acts of violence by disturbed men, as Canada witnessed
last year, while not wreaking the kind of havoc that the people of Brussels are
going through this morning, are harbingers and warnings to each of us.
And while Canadians like to consider ourselves
“nice” and hospitable and just and fair, and for the most part we are,
nevertheless, it will grow increasingly difficult for many Canadians, as well
as Americans and Europeans who also think of themselves both individually and
collectively as hospitable and fair, to remain unmoved, and also tolerant of
this kind of violence, and the implications that arise naturally from
consideration of its source. Radical Islam, (even if Islamic scholars
repeatedly tell us that this terrorism is not representative of the true nature
of their faith) is a blight for which neither our police nor our military have
been prepared. Individuals or even gangs who seek to carry out acts of violence, drug deals, bank heists, and more
lately cyber crime, while troublesome, are not normally motivated by the depth
and breadth of hate, and religious fervor that drives this sinister movement of
men (and a few women). And their acts and the prospect of more violence do not
leave only dead bodies and pools of blood, broken families and destroyed
buildings in their wake; they also, and possibly even more importantly, leave
every witness in a different state of mind, an elevated state of anxiety, and a
significant elevation in the propensity to bully even among what are normally
civilized people. Simply put, we live
out our lives differently than before we were confronted by this
political/military/intelligence monster, driven by their perverted, distorted,
thalidomide-like mis-shapen aspiration for an after-life for themselves and a
caliphate for their troubles.
The theft of intellectual property, one of the more
visible signs of contemporary culture, (think China’s vacuuming of corporate
and military and possibly even political intelligence) is also accessible to
the terrorist effort. They have and use the most secretive and quickly erased
messaging technology, making the efforts of our security forces to trace their
behaviours and their plans virtually imposible. So they can be legitimately
dubbed both strategically successful (Brussels is the home of both the EU and
NATO) and tactical, in that they use the most primitive and the most
sophisticated of available resources, from nails and batteries to eraseable and
highly secret software. And our airports, for example, have not been planned
and built on the premise that security checks were required immediately upon
entry; they were reserved for the gates to the boarding gangways. Now the
experts are arguing for a wider circle in all airports, making billions of
public funds necessary for such a change.
And through both the residual impact on all of us,
anxiety, depression, even anger, and the massive impact on our public policy
and government spending decisions, a little terrorist violence goes a long way
to destabilizing many things. Obama rightly maintained his schedule in Cuba
(the U.S. was not attacked) and all leaders, including both Trudeau and Obama
defiantly repeated that the terrorists will not ‘win’. And the people of
Belgium have shown their own defiance in their public gatherings and memorials
in the public square in Brussels. And the whole world supports those attitudes.
Nevertheless, there have been 6 such attacks in the
last year, and from the expressions on many ‘talking heads’ one has to conclude
that there will be more. And as Jonathan Capehart, columnist at the Washington
Post, speaking on MSNBC, put it, alienating the Muslim community is the best
way to remove their help in this ubiquitous conflict. We need all moderate
Muslims (and we have repeated this plea many times in this space over the last
few years!) to bring the ‘monster’ in their midst to heel. All the bombs and
all the missiles and all the arrests and the convictions will not, by
themselves, eradicate this cancer. And all of the security apparatuses that we
construct will not detect and thereby prevent more tragedies like this one in
Brussels. This is not to say that we should stop all of our efforts in both
regards: military and homeland security. It is, however, to argue that
increased collaboration and co-ordination between and among all the national
security and intelligence forces is required, something that apparently, is not
the normal way of operating for those professionals. Pride, both national and
personal, cannot and must not impede our pursuit of the intelligence and the
perpetrators. However, given the state of international relations, and the
level of distrust that underlies all diplomatic efforts, including those among
“friendly” nations, and the increasing disregard for the United Nations among
too many nations and practicing political leaders, the effort to enhance the
strength and the credibility of international bodies like the International
Criminal Court, and the United Nations initiative on Climate Change and Global
Warming, the world is right to be sceptical of much progress in efforts to
bring the world together in one conjoined initiative to do anything, even to
eradicate Islamic terrorism.
And the ironic aspect of this political and
diplomatic ‘sin of omission’ is that there is no country in the world that does
not face the prospect of becoming the target of these attacks. However, if we
look at the history of the world’s collaboration over the last half century to
combat climate change and global warming, (Suzuki tells CBC’s Peter Mansbridge
in his recent interview celebrating his 80th birthday this week, we
are further behind than we were forty years ago) we cannot not have much real
hope or expectation that a scourge that leaves material evidence of an
unequivocal nature in its wake (the evidence of climate change and global
warming has been disputed, as has human participation in its generation from
the beginning), will meet with concerted and unambiguous and persistent
collaboration from all the world’s powers, and the world’s Muslim community.
What we do not need, and certainly cannot even countenance are the kind of
moves coming out of the mouth of candidate Trump: torture terrorists and
consider withdrawing from NATO, or from the mouth of candidate Cruz: police
patrol in all Muslim neighbourhoods. We cannot even countenance either of these
men actually attaining the Republican nomination for the presidency.
So, while we all mourn and pray for the victims of
the Brussels attacks, and we wring our hands that these urban IED’s will
explode on our city streets around the world, and we watch dedicated civil
servants and law enforcement personnel commit to their protective duties,
nevertheless, we all lose a little more hope, and little more innocence and a
lot more confidence in the kind of future we will leave to our grandchildren,
on both the terror and the environment fronts.
And these “voices crying in the wilderness” (like
this one) will merely be dismissed as “bleeding heart liberals” who are not in
touch with the real world.
And the power and money of the “right” will exert an
inordinate amount of political muscle in the decisions by world politicians.
Terrorism and climate change are not politically
ideological ‘files’: they are both, in their own way, existential issues
demanding our common human sharing, and the sooner we ditch the distrust and
the pride in our attempts to address both and all sing from the same song sheet,
the better.
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