People are dying because so-called Jihadists do the things
that take the lives of innocent people. And these jihadists are no longer
restricted to the types that originate in the Orient; they are born and raised
in Western countries where they often pull off their deadly operations; the
reason why they are called homegrown. And so the question is asked: Who is
responsible for the rise of this phenomenon?
You get a sense of how it all comes about when you read Sylvie
Kauffmann's article: “France 's
Homegrown Jihadists,” published on June 28, 2014 in the New York Times. She
describes what is happening in Europe, especially France ,
but there is a lesson for us here in North America
if we can discern the differences that exist between the two continents, and we
allow for the variations that come with those differences.
The article answers the question as to who may be
responsible for the phenomenon, in two ways. It does it directly by naming some
of the culprits, and does it indirectly by neglecting to name the obvious
others. Talking about the jihadists, Kauffmann asks: “Who are these young men
and women? What drives them?” And she answers by saying they are
self-radicalized individuals, some of whom were in prison, and some of whom
were brainwashed by video. They come from poor neighborhoods and from
middle-class families. They come from good families and from broken ones. They
are males disillusioned with life, and females disenchanted with the laws
restricting the wearing of the burqa in public places.
And this is where you get a sense as to which of the
culprits, the author has neglected to mention. You could say she neglected to
mention society, and you would be correct. But this answer does not yield
enough detail to help us understand the situation in depth, and certainly not
to help us formulate a workable response. In turn, you ask the question: Who or
what in society may have contributed to the rise of this phenomenon?
You begin with the wearing of the burqa. Certainly the
banning to wear that thing alone would not cause someone to strap explosives
around her body and blow herself up in a public place; especially that she was
born and raised in the West to a modern family that counseled her it was
backward-looking to wear the burqa. But something else; something undetected by
the parents was simmering in the belly of this young lady, and grew so intense
with time as to make her decide she had no alternative but to make her point in
a most dramatic way. What could that thing be?
It was something she could see in the society where she was
born and raised but the parents could not see being newcomers to that society.
It was the constant hurtling of insidious expressions of hate she saw coming at
her from every direction. Imagine what could grow inside a child who is first
told she is of an inferior race because the women in the place from where her
parents came wear the burqa. And she grows up watching a weekly television show
on international affairs with a half minute intro where images from several
countries are flashed in succession: there is the modern train in Japan, the
scientific lab in Scandinavia, the athletes training in America and yes, there
is also that wretched woman wearing the burqa in some Arab/Muslim country.
Week after week after week, she is slapped in the face with
this intro and with others similar to it, having been told that the burqa was
the symbol of her inferiority. And one day, she decides she has had enough, and
further decides she must make her counterpoint in the most explosive way she
can. She wears the burqa and the explosive belt and goes out to do just that.
And then, men and women whose parents did not come from that
part of the world – seeing the unbearable injustice that their countrymen are
inflicting on those who have no means to defend themselves – join the
defenseless in their struggle against the tyranny of the cowardly men and women
who fight them using an arsenal of hate with which to propagate insidious
images of half-truths and outright lies. They are the new breed of jihadists
who seek to right the wrong by making everyone, including the innocent, pay for
the injustice.
As to North America where
most people are conscious of their status as being immigrants in a land that
was not theirs in the first place, the European phenomenon did not materialize
at the same time. To make up for the difference in the two situations, the
cowardly tyrants are adding new weapons to their arsenal of hate. They are
pushing the idea that America
is an exceptional country modeled after the chosen people of the Jewish faith.
In fact, the Americans are told they are so exceptionally
superior, they have the duty to send an army infested with rapists of women and
men to go rescue nations from leaders who lead them badly – perhaps as badly as
the paralyzed American congress. To go rescue people from the mothers who
circumcise their girls – as bad as being massacred in a school or a movie
theater. To go teach people the democracy which says Israelis and Palestinians,
and destroys your career if you say Palestinians and Israelis. To go teach
people how to manage their finances by borrowing like there is no tomorrow. To
go teach people how to give everyone at least one gun and have a hundred
thousand murdered people a year. To go and show people how to jail two million
of their own, and spend more on each prisoner than they would on an entire
class of children. To go and show people how to let the Jewish lobby take over
the country, and turn it into a laughable joke.