in the name of...

Had Anders Breivik killed in the name of Islam we would now be hearing full-throated cries of "We told you so" from those, like Melanie Phillips and my fictional friend Andrew Craze, who believe that Europe is on the verge of being overrun by Jihadists (even though the data says anything but).

As it turns out, Breivik thought he was defending Christianity. I somehow doubt that these commentators will now blame the religion rather than the man. Boris Johnson has written an excellent column about this:

It wasn’t about immigration, or Eurabia, or the hadith, or the Eurocrats’ plot against the people. It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him, and his feeling of inadequacy in relation to the female sex. The same point can be made (and has been made) about so many of the young Muslim terrorists. The fundamental reasons for their callous behaviour lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause, that potentiates the poison in their bloodstream, that gives them an excuse to dramatise the resentment that they feel in the most powerful way – and to kill.

There is an important lesson, therefore, in the case of Anders Breivik. He killed in the name of Christianity – and yet of course we don’t blame Christians or “Christendom”. Nor, by the same token, should we blame “Islam” for all acts of terror committed by young Muslim males. Sometimes there come along pathetic young men who have a sense of powerlessness and rejection, and take a terrible revenge on the world. Sometimes there are people who feel so weak that they need to kill in order to feel strong. They don’t need an ideology to behave as they do.

Michael Ryan had no ideology in Hungerford; Thomas Hamilton had no ideology in Dunblane. To try to advance any other explanation for their actions – to try to advance complicated “social” factors, or to examine the impact of multiculturalism in Scandinavia – is simply to play their self-important game. 

I think BJ is only partly right about this. I am not sure about Breivik, but I certainly don't think Al Qaeda is best conceived of as a collection of mad, psychotic individuals who just happen to have gathered under the same banner. Neither, in fact, does Johnson, who concedes that ideology is what "potentiates the poison" but then goes on to suggest that terrorists are best seen as damaged individuals who "don't need an ideology". Clearly, many such people do need an ideology to kill, as well as the sense of being part of a special group, an elect. It's what turns their bitterness and anger into destructive and self-destructive action. It's what spurs them on to break the most fundamental morals and taboos of mainstream society. Suicide bombers surrender everything to the group of which they're a part. In the case of organised terrorism you can't, in the end, separate individual from ideology.

That's why, to combat terrorism, it helps to understand something of its ideology, even if the ideology is nihilistic and evil, as is the case with Al Qaeda. To suggest otherwise is to see only half the problem.

Comments

[John]

Anders B has just blamed "cultural marxism".

Given what was leading news agendas before this awful event, we should perhaps remind ourselves that national newspaper editors are not beyond stirring the pot a little:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jan/24/comment.comment

[Elemjay]

How does Boris Johnson have time to go around writing columns???

[Marbury]

As I understand it he writes very quickly, and - this is the annoying bit - well enough not to require editing. So it probably takes him, what, about one hour a week?