Muslims in general must fight this ‘monster’

DAVID SAKS

Van Gogh was adjudged to have committed blasphemy on account of a documentary he had made on women in Islam. His last words, before he was shot again and decapitated were, “We can still talk about it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it.”

Van Gogh was the product of a culture where freedom of expression is an inalienable right and where all subjects are up for debate. His killer, by contrast, believed that certain things cannot be said, on pain of death, and was willing to put that belief into practice.

Van Gogh’s pathetic appeals to “talk about it” were futile; so far as Bouveri was concerned; there was nothing to debate. The incident highlighted what would seem to be an unbridgeable gulf between two widely contrasting world views, the most recent consequences of which was the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week.

Millions of people took to the streets in France on Sunday to protest against the terrorist attacks in the capital, which also included the killing of four people in a kosher supermarket. All that was well and good, but the curbing of jihadi terrorism will depend on what practical action is taken, not feel-good gestures.

Here, not only France but all democratic nations are confronted with what appears to be an insoluble problem, which is: Can democracy be defended without resorting to methods that are fundamentally undemocratic?

aced with an enemy that recognises no law or boundaries, the West finds itself hamstrung by the multiple checks and balances that are necessary for maintaining a free society. It is a weakness that jihadists are exploiting to the hilt.  

So frequent have terrorist atrocities become, and so global, that it is becoming all but impossible to keep up with them. No sooner has one outrage been committed than another occurs somewhere else. Thus, as people were getting to grips with the first terrorist attack on Australian soil, the seizure of hostages in a Sidney deli by an Iranian immigrant and subsequent death of two of them – news was received of 140 children murdered in a school in Pakistan.

Sometimes, incidents take place simultaneously, resulting in some being noticed and others not. Serious as the incidents in France were, they should have been completely overshadowed by the latest Boko Haram atrocities in northern Nigeria, where, according to the latest reports, over 2 000 people have been massacred. Quite rightly, Nigeria has complained bitterly about the relative lack of attention these events have been accorded in the international media.

Evidently, a dozen or so deaths in a Western white-majority country are more newsworthy than the mass killing of thousands of black Africans. That we knew already, of course, as shown when hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims were dying in South Sudan.       

South Africa has hardly been unaffected, as shown by the murders of Pierre Korkie and of Pastor Werner Groenewald, and his two teenage children in Yemen and Afghanistan respectively. Like so many other incidents (who remembers, for instance, the 60-plus victims of the September 2013 Westgate Mall attack in September 2013?), these tragedies are now all but forgotten by the general public.    

One of the common responses to the jihadist threat that doesn’t seem to be working, is that of emphasising how moderate most Muslims are, and how the overwhelming majority of them abhor the acts carried out in their name by extremists every time a particularly appalling atrocity is committed by the latter.

Certainly, it is crucial to make this point, given the danger that innocent Muslims might be targeted in random revenge attacks. Jews, for one, know only too well what the consequences can be once the pernicious notion of collective guilt takes hold.

However, by continually qualifying any condemnation of Islamic extremism with careful assertions about the greatness of Islamic civilisation and of how a few unrepresentative criminals should not be allowed to besmirch its good name, is the so-called “moderate majority” not, to some extent, being let off the hook?

It remains undeniable that, however unrepresentative they and their actions may be of mainstream Islam, those committing murder and mayhem in its name, are a product of Muslim society as a whole. Aberration it may be, but having produced this monster, is it not ultimately up to Muslims themselves to deal with it?

Here, the broader religious leadership, which, as regular assurances would have it, is moderate and tolerant, have a decisive role to play. Jihadists believe that they are justified in killing infidels, heretic and other enemies of the “True Faith” and that they will receive their reward in Paradise for doing so.

The message that mainstream imams, educators and academics within the Muslim world surely need to instil in their followers – and from an early age – is that the cold-blooded murder of innocents in the name of Islam is not a ticket to Paradise, but to an altogether different place. From what I can see, this is not happening, or at least, it is not happening nearly enough.