Brussels central train station after the attacks, March 2016. Wikicommons/Romaine. Some rights reserved.
After Brussels, there are wider faultlines. On one side, those of us who seek to understand political violence in the round. Terrorism on the streets of Europe as blowback from 14 disastrous years of war on terror; ISIS the bastard child of our misadventure in Iraq (the > 700,000 dead, the installation of a sectarian government and the incubation of the Islamic State in US-run prisons) and the multilateral meddling in the Syrian uprising and the ‘war on terror’ launched by the Assad regime.
On the other, the armchair ‘terrorologists’, ‘radicalisation’ experts and cheerleaders for a new war on “Islamic extremism”. They acknowledge that the war on terror has been a disaster, but cannot countenance the idea that our liberal, enlightened societies bear any responsibility whatsoever for the actions of those Europeans who have joined the ranks of ISIS. This can only be down to something entirely alien and external to European culture: “Islamism”. To suggest anything else is at best disingenuous, at worst an “apology for terror”:
“As must have happened with the defenders of Stalin years ago who could see only the injustice of the capitalist powers while willfully blind to the gulag and the purges, it seems that the very love of our fellow human beings and rage at the sight of suffering that drives us to become progressives in the first place have thoroughly deserted these one-sided cynics”.
