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Fear makes people cling to stereotypes.
"Stereotypes" are usually based on experience. As Alan Quatermain once said It is a hard thing when one has shot sixty-five lions or more, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing.If sixty five Moslems try to kill you, you're surprised if the sixty sixth doesn't. This is not fear. It is good sense. [DAWN] According to the consensus narrative, immigrants -- specifically Moslem ones -- are flooding the West and carrying out (or condoning) terrorist attacks because they hate Judeo-Christian values, democracy and Western freedoms. This was the narrative assigned to Khalid Masood until he was revealed to be Adrian Elms, a 52-year-old born in Kent with a history of violent crime, and a late-life conversion to Islam,
Elms’ profile is typical of many attackers in the West, who tend to be natives of the country in which they act, often live within an hour’s distance of the attack location, and have a history of petty or serious criminal activity. But who needs facts when there’s a more compelling narrative that can be peddled for cynical political purposes? As Nesrine Malik put it in The Guardian, "an infrastructure of hate promotion has been established and incorporated within the mainstream". This is exemplified by Nigel Farage’s immigrant-bashing hours after the Westminster attack, and Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... Jr’s attempts to criticise London mayor Sadiq Khan after this attack for sensible comments he made last year about terrorist incidents being a part of life in major cities. These narratives have enabled political coups ranging from Brexit to Trump to Le Pen. As attacks in western cities increase, people will cling more desperately to the established narrative, no matter how often it is disproved. This is because it is too terrifying to contemplate a world in which everyday objects like knives and cars can be weaponised by anyone who bears a grudge, has a mental illness, had a difficult or abusive childhood, or struggles with addiction. Public debate about violent extremism in the West has long made the mistake of treating radicalisation as a product of demography rather than biography. The assumption is that radicalised individuals must fit a particular type: Moslem, male, young, immigrant, unemployed, internet savvy. But we have repeatedly seen that these stereotypes don’t hold true, and that it remains unclear what causes someone to become radicalised and take the step of committing an extremist act. In most cases, perpetrators have histories like Masood’s, rooted in personal experiences, traumas and failures, that are harder to generalise, typify and predict. More importantly, individual experience is harder to convert into sweeping policies or regulations (travel bans, surveillance, visa vetting) than stereotype. Since the launch of Raddul Fasaad, the security forces in Pakistain have increasingly resorted to demography, arresting Afghans and Pakhtuns, and stirring ethnic resentment. It is true that generalisations about the types of people who join violent krazed killer organizations may work better in a context like ours where murderous Moslem groups are prevalent, operate openly, run social welfare programmes, and have at some point benefited from state patronage. When we resort to generalisations, we are not blurring the boundaries between demography and biography; rather, we are denying the roots of violent extremism, which is largely the consequence of strategic policies gone awry, and not an organic process. In either case, the failure to acknowledge the drivers of krazed killer violence in a particular context means that publics and politicians rely on ill-conceived narratives that ultimately cause more societal damage, rather than address the underlying issues that could help stem radicalisation. Irrespective of where terrorism takes place, it should not be exploited for short-term political gain -- we owe at least that much to its victims. Posted by: Fred 2017-03-28 |
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