In the few days following the Paris attacks, I have been repeatedly asked to imagine myself having a coffee there at the time, and whether I would have liked to be caught up in the massacre. Now while it is obviously true that nobody wants to go through such a terrifying ordeal, it is also an incredibly trite observation.
Of course, to say this in public exposes me to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, a trend which, predictably as ever, is spreading fast across Europe. A couple of nights ago, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs told an anecdote on TV how someone in Saudi Arabia refused to shake his wife's hand, as though this was a reason to go to war. Let's just hope the Chinese never take offence if one of us refuses to kowtow.
There is a Facebook group which depicts a tart in some form of armour, complete with Maltese cross, shouting "Barra!" The object of this patriotic attack, the threat which this heroine defends us so valiantly from, is represented as a pig in a turban. The disdain that such images reveal, the disgust and hatred visible on the faces of people like the Italian Minister, and that must lie in the hearts of those who find such images acceptable, is what worries me most. I know it well; it is the same disdain and disgust I feel for people who do not live up to what I believe are basic moral standards. I find myself trimming my list of Facebook friends every time something like this happens. It is my pathetic response to the fences put up, and the Schengen rules re-written, with the aim of keeping Muslims out of Europe.
I have a confession to make. I take no automatic sides between IS, Russia and the West, and if that makes me unpatriotic, then arrest me. The only people I'm 'with' are the victims of this war, whether in Paris or in Raqqa. What I try to do instead, in my limited way, is to understand the situation as best I can, and modify my own behaviour accordingly, and the best way to do this, I believe, is with an open, critical mind.
First of all, we can search our own memories. The Paris attacks were merely the latest in a series that started with 11th September in 2001. Not long after that, two years after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, France was dealing with riots against police harassment and police brutality in its Muslim communities. If that rings a bell, it is because the same thing is still occurring in the US today. Allow me to answer one trite observation with another; history repeats itself.
My memory also stirs up a range of emotions from disappointment to rage at the actions of US-led coalition forces, who were warned at the time by many of their own experts that going after al-Qaeda in Iraq would be counter-productive. The biggest stinker is the memory of those "weapons of mass destruction" which, of course, were never found. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died during this protracted war, including more than a hundred thousand casualties among civilians and non-combatants.
The only real result of this so-called War against Terror, as I remember it, is that Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist acts have grown exponentially all over the world ever since. Jihadists come from as far as Australia these days, and some had no previous ties to Islam. Iraq itself is split into factions and has seen little peace. If ever there was a colossal failure, this war was certainly one even according to its own stated objectives.
And yet, there they go again, France-led and Russia-led coalitions, this time going after the IS in Syria, in what is openly described as a 'retaliatory' act. More bombs, more drones, more airstrikes. I wonder whether we realize that people also drink coffee in Raqqa. I'm sure that they too, like the Maltese couple who found themselves in Paris, are terrified each time there is an attack.
Without going into the details of whose fire is hitting whom, details which, for the time being at least, remain unverified, let us see what else we can surmise about the situation. Until last week, we were feeling relatively safe in Europe. The Hebdo attacks were becoming a thing of the past, and we were mostly getting on with our lives. The same, of course, could not be said for the people in Raqqa and for those thousands of refugees turning up at our doors.
Some of our global leaders are trying to tell us that this is a religion-inspired attack on our culture, values, and way of life. While it may be true that it is our Western lifestyle that is being targeted, I doubt the perpetrators are truly motivated by religious faith. Most of the so-called jihadists involved in this last series of attacks started their careers as petty criminals and users of illicit substances, and according to the Belgian Prosecutor's Office, which interrogated two of them this year, this is first of all a social problem, one which is festering on French and Belgian soil, and which cannot be solved merely with tighter surveillance and security or through retaliatory acts in Raqqa. First of all, we need to understand why these European youth are so disaffected, as they have been showing us at least since 2005.
European jihadists are disaffected mostly because IS tells them to be so, but why does the message of radical Islam strike such a chord with these young people, who are raised and educated in our schools, supposedly protected by our welfare system and reaping the rewards of our great democratic systems? Again, that is not a question I can answer at the moment. All I can point out is that "brainwashing" is not a scientific term; all it means is something like 'mind control,' or 'indoctrination' and there is as much research backing it as there is for telepathy, hypnosis and other phenomena popularly known as hocus-pocus.
When the outcome of such analysis is so meagre, the only thing to do, I believe, is to adopt a precautionary principle. When the results of previous military intervention have been so devastating and counter-productive, it is unlikely that further strikes against terrorist cells in the Middle East will do much good. Scholars of international relations have been saying as much since 2002, even before the Iraq Invasion and it is now become patently obvious that they were right in that case. Is it not much more likely that IS, Russia and the West will all gain somehow from the war, as great powers generally tend to, and as America and Russia already do for example, from the sales of arms to IS? If the IS buys weapons from American factories in order to carry out these attacks, the first thing should be to put a stop to that.
Better, I think, to take the sides of the victims at all times and to try and understand your enemies. Now, while I in no way condone any violence whatsoever, I must admit I understand why someone would be angry at the Western lifestyle. It is the same anger I feel at the moral bankruptcy of those who made a whole hullaballoo about these latest attacks without realizing the inappropriateness of their response. The West used to have the values of stoicism, scepticism, and the intellectual and moral virtue to recognize the extensiveness of death and suffering in the world, including that brought on by war. Faced with a tragic event, we should know by now that the best outcome is never served by following our initial emotional reactions, but by thinking about things reasonably. Without wishing to reduce human deaths to statistics, a sense of proportion needs to be kept at all times.
It also needs to be remembered that those in power are probably lying to us, as they often do, and that many IS, US, Russian and European politicians will have their interests served very nicely if we allow them to escalate this war through hatred and fear. Instead of finding out later that we were puppets in their games, we can make sure that we are the stronger ones by responding to suffering and death with compassion wherever we find it and not giving in to our instinct to hate or fear, or to act merely in retaliation. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, a wise man once said.
A wonderful example of this approach can be found in Antoine Leiris's open message to the perpetrators of the Bataclan attacks. Leiris, whose wife was one of the 89 victims, defiantly claims "You will not have my hatred." Instead of imagining how scared we would have felt in Paris, let us try to imagine how this man feels. Let us be thankful none of our loved ones were there this time, while recognizing that the world is a very dangerous place, in some places far more than in others. Let us keep the image of Ayan Kurdi, the little boy who drowned in our seas, in mind, and remember why, a few weeks ago, Europe was opening up its borders a little. If we are afraid, well, as our politicians keep reminding us, this is war, maybe it is time to buck up a little. Most of all, knowing how wars tend to take on a different narrative with hindsight, let us view our politicians and the stories they tell us about this one with as much suspicion as we can muster.