One of the moral dicta of history is the famous one from George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The advice is clear: history is told in part to teach of what went wrong in the past so we can avoid it in the present (and future). So far, so good.
The terrorist attacks yesterday in Paris afford us an unfortunate opportunity to consider Santayana's famous advice. The right and left have lined up in response to this outrage with their respective chants of closed borders, anti-Muslim rhetoric, Eurocentric panic, etc. (the right), and religion of peace, not all Muslims, look-at-Syria-what-do-you-expect, etc. (the left). I virtually always come down on the side of the left, and even in this case, in which I think it's obvious that Islam as a religion has the capability of being exploited for its inherently violent content -- just like, it absolutely bears mentioning, Judaism and Hinduism -- I still tend to come down that way. I would hate to see Muslim refugees turned away at the borders of Europe, and I would also hate to see Europe experience a wave of right-wing nationalism in the face of attacks such as these.
At the same time, I recognize that, at least for those people who perpetrated the attacks and their sympathizers, their values are deeply at odds with the hard-won standards of the west, and I don't apologize for believing that, in a struggle between maintaining those standards and helping people in need, the former is more important than the latter in the long term. That said, I do believe that this position is a liberal one -- individual rights and freedoms are sacrosanct. You have the right to say what you want and no right not to be offended. But I digress.
What does history tell us about Muslim fundamentalist terrorist violence against the west? Curious about this particular question, I did some Googling to see what I could find. Among the first sources -- and, it turns out, more reliable -- I found was one from the PBS web site, which indicated that the current problem of terrorist committed by Muslims against western people and targets didn't begin very long ago; rather, PBS dates its advent to 1968, with the vast majority of terrorist acts committed by members of one national group -- Palestinians -- against civilian and government targets in western Europe. The problem with viewing these attacks as Muslim fundamentalism is that the groups carrying out these attacks all began as part of the PLO, which is an explicitly secular organization. In fact, one of the key militant Palestinian leaders during this period -- George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- was Christian.
So at least part of the equation we're seeking to solve doesn't fit here. Yes, there were Muslims committing acts of terrorism against the west in 1968, but they weren't doing so as Muslims, and that's an important distinction. Also, given the sheer amount of global unrest in 1968, it ends being somewhat unsurprising that there was Palestinian violence in this year -- and it becomes doubly less surprising when one considers that Israel had begun its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem the previous year.[1]
The PBS site makes clear that there was not the onset of terrorism committed against western targets and westerners until 1979, which is a bit of a watershed year in the history of Muslim fundamentalism, since it was the year in which the Islamic Revolution occurred in Iran, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, was seized by guerrillas. Since 1979, there have been relatively regular attacks on the west by actors expressly wanting to be considered Muslim. Since 1991, coincident with the power vacuum created by the collapse of the USSR, it has intensified. Since 2001, it has intensified further. So we're not talking about a long and involved history of Muslims attacking the west in terrorist attacks. We're talking about less than fifty years. That alone should indicate something about whether Islam is inherently in a conflict of civilizations with the west. Clearly, if it were, we'd have had a big problem a much longer time ago -- the religion itself is more than a thousand years old.
The other side of the equation concerns Muslim emigration to Europe. Bearing in mind that, for hundreds of years, there have been Muslim-majority countries in Europe (Bosnia and Albania), if we consider the countries with the largest Muslim populations today that did not have indigenous Muslim populations a hundred years ago -- Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Greece,[2] Austria, Sweden, and Denmark all have populations that are both at least 2% Muslim and that number at least 200,000 Muslims -- it's not as if there is some one-to-one correlation between having Muslims living as a notable minority in one's country and suffering from terrorism.
On top of that, it's not as if Muslim immigration to Europe is a brand new thing. It began with decolonization, which began (in the case of the U.K. with Pakistan) 68 years ago. It picked up in the 1950s and 1960s (Algerians emigrating to France, e.g., with continued decolonization), in part to meet labor needs (e.g., Turks emigrating to Germany). Following a bit of a clampdown on immigration after 1974, since 1988, emigration to Europe of Muslims has increased again, contributing to the current levels.
If it seems there's a connection between increased terrorism beginning in the late 1980s to early 1990s and increased Muslim immigration to Europe during the same period, that's because there is. The problem with assuming a cause-effect relationship between the two is that these two phenomena are both effects -- the cause was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The key thing to remember is that correlation does not imply causation.
To summarize, Muslims have been immigrating to Europe for a long time -- much longer than there has been a specific issue of terrorism committed by Muslims "in the name of Islam" against westerners. If the mere presence of Muslims in the west were the core of the problem, it would have been a problem decades ago. This is not to say that there are not Muslims currently living in the west with values radically different from those of most westerners, and that fact is not limited to those who actually act on their ideologies and that this is not something of a problem. But it is to say that anyone offering a "clear solution" like stopping Muslims from immigrating to Europe isn't looking at the bigger picture. Nor, for that matter, are they bearing in mind Europe's own home-grown "Christian" terrorists who, while perhaps less theatrical in their actions, were no less deadly.[3]
What happened yesterday is a terrible, awful thing for which there is no explanation or excuse. We ought not compound that horror by enacting policies that don't make sense.
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[1] It's also not very surprising because 1968 was the year that Yasir Arafat arose as the primary figure in the Palestinian leadership, although he would not official become the leader of the PLO until the following year.
[2] Greece has always had a Muslim minority, but it's become more notable in recent years.
[3] I think here of the actions of certain Irish republicans, the Basque Euskadi ta Askatasuna, etc.
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