A week after the Paris attacks, Doug Saunders, the Globe and Mail’s international affairs columnist, raised what he called “one of the crucial questions of our age”: why most immigrant communities “succeed” while a few produce “marginal, dangerous patterns” including “violent extremists.”
He argued, in a lengthy feature based on a year-long international studies project, that material structural factors – economic improvement, including small business opportunities, better schooling, housing, and enhanced transportation, which currently vary almost district by district in Belgium – would create conditions for successful integration that “can avert extremism before it starts.”
Ideological factors, such as extremist religious fervour and indoctrination – versions of radical Islam – played no part in Saunders’ analysis. There is no reference to individuals, even when their material circumstances are favourable, making moral choices – especially extremist and violent ones.
Nor is there any account of why many immigrant communities around the world lacking such material conditions for successful integration have not turned to terrorism – a word, along with “Islamic,” that Saunders avoids.
In contrast to Saunders, mere days after the Paris carnage, renowned French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy told Globe and Mail readers in an opinion piece that it is wrong to view the assailants as marginalized.
Levy was asked in a Ha’aretz interview: “All the terrorists who have been identified were disciples of extremist Islam. To what extent should France do more to guarantee better integration of its Muslim citizens into society?”
Levy responded: “Of course the problem of integration hasn’t been solved and of course it must be solved. But I’m not willing to accept the link implied by your question between it and jihadism. Those who perpetrated the attacks in France are not les misérables. They aren’t people who suffered from [failed] integration. It’s important to oppose this connection, this correlation, because they’re mistaken.”
Ha’aretz added that Levy mentioned, as examples, both Mohamed Atta, leader of the 9/11 attacks, who was not a marginalized immigrant in Germany, and former Briton “Jihadi John.”
The role of religion and, particularly, religious extremism and indoctrination must be faced honestly, Levy argued. And he called upon the French government to ban imams who preach hate.
Reflecting on the Paris attacks, New York Times columnist David Brooks cited a new book by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, in which, according to Brooks, Rabbi Sacks “argues that ISIS is in fact typical of what we will see in the decades ahead. The 21st century will not be a century of secularism… It will be an age of desecularization and religious conflicts.”
Religion, including Islam, is not itself inherently violent, but, as we’re witnessing today with Islamists of one stripe or another, in extremist and politicized hands it can – and indeed has – become just that.
For Levy, the major religious conflict now is not between Islam and the West, but rather is a struggle within Islam itself, between what he calls the “enlightened” and the militantly radical or “fascist” visions of the faith. This “primordial opposition,” as he terms it, is “the only clash of civilization that matters.” And it cuts several ways: between Sunni and Shia branches, as well as between various rival Sunni factions.
While ISIS now monopolizes global attention, let’s not forget that the dominant Shia power in the region, the “Islamic Republic” of Iran, is designated by the U.S. State Department as the primary state sponsor of terrorism in the world.
Iran’s Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, and Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force (both listed by Canada as banned terrorist entities), have long been aiding Syrian President Bashar Assad, backed by Russia, in the slaughter of his own people. They’ve contributed immensely to the deaths of more than 200,000 Syrians, far exceeding ISIS’ grim toll.
No wonder maverick Algerian writer Boualem Sansal predicted recently that Iran, bent on becoming the regional hegemon, will soon dominate a tormented, increasingly fractured Sunni Arab Middle East.