Ignore the liberals, fight Islamic State to the finish

By Kanchan Gupta

Textbooks on terrorism define its effects in four stages: first the horror, then the publicity, then the political grandstanding, and finally the climactic shift in policy. The initial act is banal. The atrocities in Brussels happen almost daily on the streets of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus. Western missiles and ISIS bombs kill more innocents in a week than die in Europe in a year. The difference is the media response. A dead Muslim is an unlucky mutt in the wrong place at the wrong time. A dead European is front-page news…”

This striking paragraph from an article in The Guardian, “The scariest thing about Brussels is our reaction to it”, by Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times, tells us a lot about what’s gone wrong with western Europe and why it is rapidly transmogrifying from a haven for Islamists on the run from their own benighted countries into a hotbed ofjihadism. It is also reflective of the deep rot within the liberal intellectual establishment that continues to indulge in self-flagellation and urges others to do penance that lacerates them for the sins of others. Liberalism is no longer about hovering over the Centre but tilting dangerously, precariously, towards the left of Centre.

On the face of it, there is nothing exceptionable about what Simon Jenkins says in his article on the bombings that left a trail of death and destruction at the airport and a metro station in Brussels on March 22. In Europe (and the West) a death toll of 31 in a terrorist attack would be considered shockingly high; in most other parts of the world, life would not be ruffled beyond momentary disorientation caused by screaming newspaper headlines and shouting matches in television studios. Human life is valued in the West, elsewhere it is accorded little privilege beyond desultory lip service.

Simon Jenkins is right when he posits more people die injihadi violence across the world every day than in a single terrorist attack in Europe (or the West). He is also right in pointing out media’s discrimination in covering terrorist attacks: A “dead European (or American) is front page news” but not a dead Muslim. Yet Simon Jenkins is equally guilty of the hypocrisy he accuses others of: A dead Jew, killed in Israel by a Palestinian knifer, is not necessarily front page news, neither is a dead Hindu killed in India by Pakistani terrorists, but both don’t find mention in his carefully curated list of victims. Long before Simon Jenkins discovered this media bias, Indians and Israelis discovered it, and learned to live with it.

There’s more to what Simon Jenkins has written than meets the reader’s eye. The deliberate though subtle attempt to diminish the enormity of the crime committed in Brussels is unmistakeable. The utterly false equivalence, what is called ‘whataboutery’ by the Left-liberal commentariat to denigrate the Right, is entirely misplaced: Because the Boko Haram kills, because suicide bombers pull the trigger in Iraq, because stuff happens in Syria, because drones claim collateral damage, is no reason to gloss over Belgium’s misery.

We could, for instance, argue that more people have died in a recent series of suicide bombings in Turkey than have died in the Brussels attacks on multiple targets, hence there is no need for saturation coverage. Or we could point out that the same Europe which is in shock over the Brussels bombings has repeatedly failed to demonstrate matching horror over every terrorist attack in India, against Indians. The Madrid train bombings of 2004, in which 192 commuters died, are still recalled as a point of reference. But who remembers the Mumbai train bombings of July 2006 in which 209 commuters perished?

Selective amnesia apart, there is good reason why importance is attached, not so much by Europeans or Americans as much by us who have been living with Islamism and its frightening manifestations, to terrorist attacks in Europe and America. There are multiple expectations built into this importance we accord.

We expect the West will now abandon its preachy pulpit activism and stop poking others in the eye for fighting terrorism in whichever way they feel and believe is effective in putting down this rabid monster. We expect the UN Security Council will get real and not be influenced by the spurious concerns of bogus institutions like the UN Human Rights Commission. We expect that France, having suffered 130 deaths in last year’s jihadi attacks on Paris, will permanently give up its duplicitous policies best exemplified by making the Islamic Revolution possible. We expect the US, having tasted Pakistani terror in San Bernardino, to part company with Pakistan. We expect Belgium, the Netherlands and other self-appointed minders of multi-culturalism and diversity to realise that to preserve human values, groups like the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda and many others need to be destroyed root and branch.

It has been suggested that the attacks in Brussels were an act of desperation by the Islamic State which is no longer on a roll but is being forced to roll back its geographical frontiers. That is not an entirely implausible explanation, but it need not be taken as the only explanation either. Russian jets have inflicted, and continue to inflict, massive damage on Islamic State assets. The US has been shown up as a tough-talking effete power: It has simply not been able to gauge the destructive power of the Islamic State which owes its birth in large measure to America’s misadventure in Iraq.

Tragically, Europeans have joined the Americans in questioning Russia’s intervention. Worse, both Europe and America have made common cause with Turkey whose current Islamist leadership, overwhelming evidence proves, is comfortable with the rise of the Islamic State as it rekindles hopes of a return the days of the Caliphate. There really is no reason to shed tears over either Erdogan or his mounting miseries, never mind what the liberal intellectual mafia has to say about this while tittering at the miseries of Belgium.

(The writer is a current affairs analyst based in NCR)

Source : Daily Pioneer