Searching for a Reason

There is a disturbing tendency that has grown in the West in recent years. That is the tendency to put our own prejudices in the mouths of terrorist. The tendency of people to decide that when a terrorist atrocity occurs it is done for the reasons which we wish it to have been done for. In the wake of the atrocities in Paris last week this tendency has become more pronounced than ever.

So there have been people like the Muslim Public Affairs Committee in the UK who insist that the perpetration of murder for the ‘crime’ of blasphemy is in fact about an objection to certain foreign policy decisions of the West. They decided straight away – when all anyone knew was that the gunmen had shouted ‘Allah is greatest’ and ‘we have avenged our prophet’ – that in fact the murders of journalists and Jews was about Iraq. Or Mali. When the terrorists’ Yemen link emerged MPAC immediately said ‘You see – it was about foreign policy.’ Ignoring the fact that Al-Qaeda in the Yemen said the gunmen were trained abroad in order to carry out Islamic blasphemy law in Europe.

Others have been equally brazen with their own reasons. There have been those who have blamed the shootings on the ‘innate racism’ of French society. Those who have blamed it on the housing projects which many of Paris’s North African-origin Muslims live in. And there are those who have said the shootings were not in fact done for the reasons the gunmen did them but because they wished to ‘divide us’. Once this narrative is adopted almost anything can be attributed to them. So for instance the Conservative MP Anna Soubry this week declared on British television that the Paris terrorists were people who ‘See no distinction between a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim.’

It is quite an amazing thing to say about people who deliberately targeted a Jewish store in order to gun down Jews that they ‘see no distinction’ between Jews, Muslims or anyone else. Of course they do. That’s the whole point. People like Ms Soubry may not like the fact that the killers make such distinctions, but in an honest political culture we would not claim that they exercised no such ‘distinctions’ simply because it would be better for our narrative. The terrorists don’t obey Ms Soubry’s narrative. They obey their own. And nobody is going to be able to stop more terrorists like them simply by trying to will away the reasons that make them kill or die.

From professional outrage groups to professional politicians these tendencies of false motive-attribution are a very bad sign of our societal health in tackling this long-term problem. Many people may die in the years ahead in terrorist atrocities like that last week. But the only thing worse than such a violent death must be the knowledge that after the violence the culprits will have false motives donated to them by people who will ensure no possible clarity or understanding comes from the atrocity thanks to people who would rather everybody else suffered a bit longer than that their own fantasies finally exploded.