Good citizens must face the Islamist threat

Good citizens must face the Islamist threat

By Gil Troy
Canadian Jewish News
July 2006

Apparently, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s wife and children took the recently uncovered plot to behead him personally. Speaking after the arrests of 17 Toronto jihadists, Harper bravely joked that he could cope with death threats, as long as they did not emanate from caucus. He later admitted the threats were “tougher on the wife and kids” than “on the person in question.”

The Harpers reacted sensibly. They should take this gruesome threat seriously and personally. Far more outrageous is the way too many people tried to obscure the latest Islamist threat. In a triumph of politically correct doublespeak, the RCMP described the 17 suspects, six of whom attended the same Sunni mosque and at least 16 of whom are Muslims, by saying “They represent the broad strata of our society. Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed.”

Less than a month later, American reportage was equally laughable when federal agents foiled the Miami “terror plot.” It took CNN seven minutes – an eternity in TV-land – before anyone uttered the word “Muslim.” The Associated Press dithered for seven paragraphs before acknowledging the obvious.

Such willful ignorance adds another dimension to today’s “asymmetrical warfare.” For years now, a hateful Islamist ideology has targeted the West, while Westerners have downplayed the threat. Many cells are operationally disconnected, but most share the same ideologies, heroes, tactics, targets – and the same religion. Journalists and security officials are paid to find patterns, to see what unites and motivates criminals working together, rather than ignoring clear ethnic, religious and ideological connections. If Christian evangelicals or Jewish settlers, let alone neo-Nazis were arrested, wouldn’t blaring headlines emphasize the accused affiliations and ideologies?

Following the cues of polite society’s opinion leaders, the Muslim apologia brigade further soft-pedaled the shocking news that so many Muslim Canadians had been charged with plotting to pulverize Canadian monuments and invade Parliament Hill. While correctly emphasizing that the allegations remained unproved, many Muslim leaders also minimized the Muslim connection and pooh-poohed the jihadist motivation. In a classic example of blaming the victim, CTV News reported that “many in Canada’s Muslim community believe Canada’s participation in the U.S. ‘war on terror may be a factor.’” Justifying that claim, Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress said, “After five years of this war on terrorism, instead of going down, [terrorism] has accentuated, it has increased.”

Canadians need to learn from the Americans, especially President George W. Bush, and Muslims should learn from American Jews – much as each might find these tutorials distasteful.

After Sept. 11, in what might be his most unappreciated act of statesmanship, Bush focused anger on Islamist terrorists without targeting American Muslims. It’s hard to celebrate a negative, but without that nuanced, yet aggressive, leadership, there could have been a bloodbath.

Meanwhile, Muslims can learn about communal responsibility and self-policing from American Jewry at the beginning of the 20th century. Embarrassed by a Jewish immigrant crime wave and facing exaggerated accusations that Jews accounted for half the arrests in New York, American Jewish leaders boldly fought crime within their own community. Organizations such as B’nai Brith and the National Council of Jewish Women worked on community education and dramatic interventions to stop individuals from becoming outlaws. Writers and performers led a communal outcry – Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, revived last month at Montreal’s Saidye Bronfman Centre, resulted from that wave of artistic angst.

Perhaps most dramatically, the “Bureau of Social Morals” in New York functioned as a “Jewish secret service.” Understanding that Jews could infiltrate Jewish criminal syndicates better than non-Jewish police officers could, these improvised “Jewish police stations” sought, as one popular slogan had it, “to catch guilty Jews first.” Going undercover and sharing information with local police led to hundreds of arrests and the closing of dozens of illegal establishments, including 33 brothels on the Lower East Side. Eventually, the Jewish crime wave receded.

Like the Harper family, we all should take terrorism very personally. We must not become accustomed to the unacceptable. The more of us who remain vigilant, mobilized, outraged – especially those with ethnic, ideological, religious, moral or financial leverage over these sociopaths – the sooner we will tame this beast, or at least keep it far from our shores. No good citizen should shirk that responsibility.

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