Wishful Thinking

"They are done [terrorist attacks] largely by people that are irretrievable, that are unsaveable, that are unstoppable, short of the things that we do."
"But the 99.9 percent of the other players would all benefit from a coordinated effort at outreach, at using the sort of broad and vast array of social programs and programming that exists at three levels of government. Co-ordinate those and then you've got something."
"I'm very aware that a big chunk of our vulnerable, potentially radicalized people in Canada may have mental health issues. But let's find them and let's help them before we have to find them and arrest them or get into a shootout with them."
"[Had police not been forced to kill Zehaf-Bibeau, he would have been charged with terrorism] And then he would have to say, 'I was so crazy I didn't know what I was doing'. I don't think that's the case, but I do think he had some issues that could have benefited from some of the resources and programming that exists."
RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, ISIL conference, Ottawa

The second tower of the World Trade Center explodes into flames after being hit by an airplane, New York September 11, 2001 with the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground. Reuters .. Sarah K. Schwittek

Even those whom society relies upon to use their intelligence professionalism find it difficult to imagine how or why compulsion to violent jihad is triggered in those whom they consider to be vulnerable to the call to engage in terrorism. This is the rational mind that speaks, that believes people can be engaged to discuss issues of complex emotional stirrings informed by a culture and a religion whose scriptures urge believers to commit to two basic tenets: jihad and prosetylization.

If conversion lags then jihad steps in. Non-Muslims who express no interest in a belief they find offers them no solutions to life's mysteries let alone life's daily miseries, are deemed to have insulted Islam by spurning it. Islamism is the fundamental belief that only Muslims have the right to live; all others are dispensable. And to dispense with them is an offering to Islam, one which makes a dedicated martyr out of the recruit who has responded as a conscript to violent jihad.

The thought that gentle intervention with psychological counselling might succeed in steering an ambivalent mind in another direction is a typical Western way of thinking, a kind of enlightenment that heeds the liberal call to believe that cultures and religions are all to be equally respected and given their rightful place, spurning the idea of a hierarchy in both, while Islam does believe in that hierarchy, and practices it to the detriment of living in peace with the greater world.

Photo from the terror attack in Armon Hanatziv neighborhood in Jerusalem : Gov't Press Office

It's true that people are infused with a violent ideology sometimes abetted by mental illness. On the other hand, civilized societies have a tendency to view the commission of death by beheading, by crucifixion and hanging, or any other means by which human life can be degraded to demonstrate contempt to be the work of demented minds. Few think of the Islamic State jihadis as being rational, but their methodology is not all that different from the institution of state punishment in Islamist regimes.

One might be hard put to imagine regimes in the West committing segments of their populations to suffering under state siege by deliberate starvation, attack helicopters, aerial bombings, chemical weapons, barrel bombs, arrests, torture, rapes and general extrajudicial murder. Yet this is precisely what has occurred in Iraq, Iran, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Rwanda, Sudan, Malia, Libya in Syria and among other geographic areas where politics is led by religion, tribalism and sectarian hatred.

The violence which began in the Middle East and in Africa has spread its tentacles into the West, and it will continue to do so. Hatred begets distrust and blame and vengeance are not far behind. A dysfunctional Islamic world searches for answers to their dystopia and they grasp at the solution they find most palatable; their plight is a result of the interference in their way of life by the West. The hatred of Islam is responsible for the malfunctions within Islam, its universal malice toward all others.

The fanatical belief system cannot blame itself and nor do its horrific acts of violence carry responsibility for inflaming the world of non-Muslims against Islam. The revenge of the committed jihadist is to slaughter those it identifies as the enemy, with the final sacrifice of noble self-annihilation committed as an honour to Islam. Hatred is contagious and we see the contagion growing from group attacks to 'lone-wolf' attacks.

Attacks that spring as from nowhere, from among those who share our communities but not our social bonds. Identify all those who might be vulnerable to the siren song of hatred and violence, and then commit resources in manpower and counselling to tenderly lead them away from their aspirations? The number of security personnel it takes to identify, track and secure one possible jihadist is beyond the ability of most intelligence agencies to commit to.

Islam holds that the Western world of social inclusion, philosophical enlightenment of liberalism, free speech, egalitarianism, social progress and opportunities are constructs to disguise the real aim of discrediting the Muslim world for which all of these practices run completely counter to Islam's total control of people's lives, of Sharia law's ensuring that people know their place and remain there without default.

Bataclan Theatre, Paris