7

MIRROR, MIRROR

DURING THE ARAB Awakening in 2011, some of the youth activists protesting their governments for greater equality, dignity, and freedom began intimidating the villages in which they lived. For example, they began threatening their neighbors with punitive measures, such as Molotovs, should someone violate an antigovernment “work strike” to try to earn an already meager living. The irony is that in fighting state-imposed oppression, marginalization, and economic inequality, the activists ended up perpetuating and deepening this very injustice.

Most individuals believe themselves to be morally upright, acting in defense of virtue. In reality, both sides of any conflict fail to recognize that they often end up embodying that which they oppose and defiling their moral and religious values in the process. We see this in wars that proclaim to be spreading freedom through repressive means and with activists who have legitimate grievances and are fighting against oppression. As the award-winning author and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich reflects in one of her two dozen books, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, “from the point of view of any particular side, in any particular war, the enemy may indeed be seen as a repulsively different Other. But the differences are often almost imperceptible to an outsider. . . .”¹

Consider this verse from the Quran: “And when it is said to them, ‘Do not cause corruption on the earth,’ they say, ‘We are but reformers.’ Unquestionably, it is they who are the corrupters, but they perceive [it] not” (2:11–12). Upon reading this, I interpret my “side” as the “reformers,” and Daesh as the “corrupters.” Meanwhile, Daesh unequivocally counterinterprets this very same verse. In reality, it is about neither “us” nor “them.” The verse was intended for a historical point in time that elapsed some 1,400 years ago. And yet perception is reality, and our fanatic, unwavering, and intoxicating belief in our own self-righteousness is precisely what provokes us to justify violence for a noble outcome.

This unsymmetrical perception can be partially explained by the fundamental attribution error, or correspondence bias. We overemphasize personal characteristics and the intentions of others, while ignoring the external or situational factors when judging their behavior. In other words, we are inclined to believe that people do bad things because they are bad people; their actions reflect who they are. However, if we are the ones acting less than favorably, we are obviously doing so for a justified reason.

To use a benign example, if one is speeding or cutting people off on the road, it’s because one is rushing to school to pick up a vomiting and feverish child, for instance. Seldom does one berate oneself with thoughts like, I am such an inconsiderate driver. What an arrogant road jerk I am! I could have caused an accident. Instead, one thinks, I’m being a protective and compassionate parent. I need to be there for my little boy. He must feel so awful We often fail to imagine these situational factors—except when we watch movies. Which is why we can still root for characters who would be considered villains or wrong-doers had we not been given a window into their lives.

Based on empirical data and anecdotal evidence on the push and pull factors driving terrorists, one may empathize with—without condoning—why many have gravitated towards militancy. Nonetheless, I must confess, I struggle to find an iota of humanity in Daesh leaders, and to be unbiased, as it were, in my own judgment. On first reading the harrowing accounts of Yazidi women sex slaves who had escaped the terrorist group, and the indescribably sadistic torture and execution methods, I found myself thinking, Bin Laden actually seemed moral compared to Baghdadi. And I am not alone in this assessment.

Before becoming one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, many who knew Bin Laden described him as a mild-mannered, humble, and moral individual.² Coming from a large family, Bin Laden—one of 29 siblings—was often brought in as the peacemaker and arbitrator for the inevitable large family disputes. His siblings expressed great admiration for him—though they did not necessarily approve of his violent acts.³

Paulo Jose de Almeida Santos, a Portuguese Muslim convert who was recruited by Al Qaeda to assassinate Zahir Shah, the exiled king of Afghanistan, recalls the planning of the operation. This was approximately ten years prior to 9/11, and Santos asked Bin Laden what he should do, hypothetically, if the King’s grandson happened to be present during the assassination attempt. Bin Laden was furious: “What are you saying? We are Muslims, we do not eliminate children!” Bin Laden added that he would rather have the exiled King return to Afghanistan and risk a civil war than to kill a child.⁴ In another interview Santos revealed that, while he was studying synthetic poison at a medical library in Pakistan, there had been some debate over testing the poison’s effectiveness on captured spies. When they sought a theological opinion on the matter, apparently the religious cleric almost kicked Santos and furiously declared, “You want to do such tests on human beings? Do you think we are Nazis?!”⁵

Similarly, when asked about killing American civilians Bin Laden answered: “No. The American government is one thing, the majority of Americans don’t even vote, they are totally apathetic.”⁶ Moreover, when it was proposed that Al Qaeda line its pockets through drug trade, Bin Laden condemned destroying families in the West as a means to obtaining money (the Taliban’s drug policy bore no such considerations).⁷ And yet something pushed Bin Laden to harden his stance and renounce his empathy and compassion for those outside his “in-group.”

Ayman Al-Zawahiri—Al Qaeda’s current number one—reportedly told Bin Laden that the US would never take him seriously if his demands were reasonable. In other words, wanting foreign troops to withdraw from Saudi Arabia is something most Americans could sympathize with. Instead, Al-Zawahiri urged Bin Laden to issue a fatwa (religious edict) targeting all Americans and Jews. Al-Zawahiri reasoned that “The West, led by the US, which is under the influence of the Jews, does not know the language of ethics, morality, and legitimate rights. They only know the language of interests backed by brute military force. Therefore if we wish to have a dialogue with them and make them aware of our rights we must talk to them in a language they understand.”⁸

I don’t entirely disagree with Al-Zawahiri’s assessment. I have read similar sentiments with regards to Conservatives losing elections since George W. Bush because they have been “too nice.” Trump’s lack of political correctness resonated with many ordinary Americans and may have even been viewed as imperative for the Conservative Party’s restoration of power. ⁹

In The Management of Savagery, which continues to form a cornerstone of the contemporary terrorist curriculum, chief Al Qaeda strategist Abu Bakr Naji similarly favors the excessive use of force over moderation, reasoning that either way, “Our enemies will not be merciful if they overcome us. So it behooves us to make them think a thousand times before fighting us.”¹⁰

Initially, however, Bin Laden was unreceptive to the notion of considering every American to be his enemy. Unfortunately, as Al-Zawahiri predicted, Sandy Berger, the National Security Advisor during the Clinton administration, ignored an Al Qaeda statement calling upon Muslims to kill Americans and steal their money. Berger even mocked Bin Laden’s capability to harm Americans; Al Qaeda responded with the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi.¹¹

WHY DO YOU HATE US?

When Americans questioned “Why do they hate us?” following 9/11, the Bush administration claimed that terrorists hated freedom. Bin Laden responded through his “Message to the American People” in 2004 and in another message just days before the 2004 US elections. He asked, incredulously, how, three years after 9/11, the public were still allowing the President to deceive them—obscuring the real causes behind the attacks. Bin Laden added that the attacks were a last resort after he could not take it anymore. ¹² Could not take what anymore?

Luckily, Bin Laden was neither making a cryptic declaration nor playing mind games. He broadcast the roots of his anti-Americanism, which dated back to 1982, following the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon: “I couldn’t forget those moving scenes blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high-rises demolished . . . as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and should destroy towers in America.”¹³

In another 2004 interview Bin Laden admits he had never actually intended to destroy the Twin Towers but was compelled to act following the accumulated atrocities in Palestine and Lebanon. He continues, saying that the whole world watched as the tragic events unfolded in 1982 (Chapter 3) and rhetorically asks if self-defense can truly be called terrorism.¹⁴ By “the whole world,” Bin Laden is referring to the US and its allies, masked by the “unjust United Nations,” all of whom he believed to be systematically targeting Muslims.¹⁵

Bin Laden also qualifies his actions, saying, “What I seek is what is a right for any living being: that our land be liberated from enemies, liberated from the Americans. God gave every living being the instinct to reject invasion by outsiders.” ¹⁶ As far as Bin Laden—and many other violent extremists—is concerned, the American government had become synonymous with “ . . . pictures of one-year-old children with their heads cut off . . . whose members have been amputated . . . the children who died in Iraq, the hands of the Israelis carrying weapons that destroy our children.” ¹⁷

Many Muslims—and non-Muslims for that matter—are acutely aware of the Grand Canyon of disregard for non-Caucasian human life. Just as Americans asked “Why do they hate us?” the Lebanese were equally perplexed, asking why Americans hated them in 1982. Once an ally of the US, the Lebanese were shocked to find Made in America shell casings saturating the debris following the devastating bombardments by Israeli forces.¹⁸ Since 1976, Israel has been the largest recipient of US military assistance, and between 1948 and 2013, the US has provided Israel with some US$233.7 billion in aid (after adjusting for inflation).¹⁹ This has not escaped the attention of the Arabs or the Muslim umma.

Al Qaeda’s spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith wrote of America’s arrogance and asked how the world could find it so puzzling that a country that uses terror itself eventually falls victim to its own actions: “For fifty years in Palestine, the Jews—with the blessing and support of the Americans—carried out abominations of murder, suppression, abuse, and exile. The Jews exiled nearly 5 million Palestinians and killed nearly 260,000. They wounded nearly 180,000 and crippled nearly 160,000. Due to the American bombings and siege of Iraq [a reference to the UN sanctions placed on Iraq after the first Gulf War], more than 1.2 million Muslims were killed in the past decade.” He continues, saying that leveling the death toll would give Al Qaeda the right to kill four million Americans—including 2 million children—and to exile millions and wound hundreds of thousands.²⁰ That is equivalent to approximately one 9/11 every day for three and a half years.

In Afghanistan, more than 10,000 civilians have been killed or injured—not since the 2001 invasion, but in just one year: 2017. UN officials only started documenting the casualties in 2009, and since then, over 28,000 civilians have been killed and more than 52,000 wounded.²¹ And in Iraq, war and occupation directly and indirectly claimed the lives of about a half-million Iraqis from 2003 to 2011.²² Imagine instead if half a million Americans had been killed, in America. Or even half a million US soldiers in Iraq during that same period? The numbers are incomparable. US military casualties numbered 4,500, which is less than 1 percent of the Iraqi death toll. And Iraq’s population is around ten times smaller.

By no means am I advocating a leveling of the death toll or wishing ill or harm on any civilian or military personnel. But in taking a moment to reflect on the extent of how one 9/11 has been painfully chiseled into the memory and psyche of Americans, can we empathize with the provocation of feelings—without condoning the consequent actions? September 11th continues to be memorialized, and likely will be until the end of time. Most Americans know someone who has been affected or have lost a loved one or a colleague. Everyone living in the US at the time remembers where they were when the planes hit. New Yorkers remember the fear, panic, vulnerability, disorientation, displacement. Running for cover from a deluge of raining debris in lower Manhattan. Unable to find a taxi. ATMs not working. Phone lines are down. Am I going to die today? And the worst part was waiting for something worse to happen. I recall twelve of us packed into a walk-in-closet-sized single dorm room in the East Village, watching the news as we strategized whether it would be safer to stay in the city that had already been targeted, or to risk traveling to nearby states and encountering another attack en route.

Months later when I volunteered at Ground Zero, rescue workers were still sorting through rubble and pulling out human remains. Enduring this is sufficiently distressing for those directly and indirectly affected. Now imagine going through this four or five times a day for a little under a year. The anguish of watching loved ones killed, drowned, or raped as you try to flee. Imagine fleeing to unimaginable thirst and starvation as you fight for a life whose value in living you have seriously begun to question. These are ordinary civilians, like us. Families, spouses, children, friends—not soldiers. And this is what Iraqis endured for 290 days during the takeover of Mosul.

To dislodge Daesh, Iraqi forces, backed by heavy coalition firepower, spent more than nine months using “annihilation” tactics in an offensive that was described by US officials as the most intense since World War II.²³ US-led coalition forces carried out more than 1,250 strikes in the city, hitting thousands of targets with over 29,000 munitions. By the time victory was achieved, Mosul’s civilian deaths had reached thousands—though the exact numbers have not been acknowledged by the US-led coalition, the Iraqi government, or Daesh. Fortunately for humanity, keeping count are Mosul’s grave-diggers, morgue workers, and volunteers who retrieve bodies from the city’s eight million tons of rubble—which is three times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza.²⁴

America has around 325 million citizens in all fifty states. Arabs number around 400 million across twenty-two Arab states. And yet the destruction, disruption, and insecurity the region endures is beyond compare. It is easy to become desensitized and glaze over the numbers of casualties in a part of the world where this has somehow become an expected norm. Ironically, the more “out of the ordinary” an attack is, the more media sensationalism and sentiment of solidarity surrounds it. Peace in the Middle East is an unrealistic and unattainable aspiration. This sort of thing happens all the time, and because of its frequency and greater degree of devastating impact, its significance is somehow diminished.

Alternatively, to reconcile and placate a restless conscience, we proclaim the greater good. Like the US-led offensive on Mosul. Aside from the long-term consequences and new grievances this has planted—which we will no doubt reap in coming years—I wonder how many of us could accept losing the person we loved most in this world because it was speculatively going to make the world safer? And the real ammunition in what is already a heart-wrenching situation is that I am not convinced it does make us safer. If victory means a short-term territorial or military defeat then, yes, perhaps. We annihilated the cancer with cell-destructive chemo and radiotherapy but neglected to transform our regimes to ensure the cancerous cells don’t return. We overlooked the fragility of our current state, and our increased susceptibility to disease, because in decimating the bad, we also extinguished the good. We are likely to have planted an entirely new slew of grievances for a reinvented Daesh, or some other group, to emerge. One such group—Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham— has already self-assembled in Syria, as a merger between five Islamist organizations.²⁵

Moreover, inflaming the blind rage of grief even further is the apathy of the US and its local and international allies for failing to offer any indication that they will undertake a comprehensive survey of the loss of life in Mosul. No significant steps have been taken to compensate the families of the “collateral damage” inadvertently killed by “friendly forces” as the smallest token of acknowledgement that their lives were of value.²⁶ In December 2017, the Associated Press estimated the civilian casualties in Iraq to be 9,000 to 11,000—nearly ten times higher than previously reported. At least a third of the blood is on the hands of coalition or Iraqi bombardments.²⁷ And if it were possible to be even more unbelievably and satirically perverse, the survivors are unable to obtain death certificates proving the demise of their loved ones. After unearthing their bodies, which have been reduced to meat and bones under the piles of rubble, they are told “What’s this? We need to see faces.”²⁸

These are the moral double standards that immortalize extremist ideologies and enrich a historical gallery of grievances, which interminably curates injustices and outrage.

SELECTIVE COMPASSION

Many of Bin Laden’s statements explicitly point to Western apathy towards Muslim spilled blood as a justification for violence. In his “Message to the Peoples of Europe” Bin Laden says: “In what creed are your dead considered innocent but ours worthless? By what logic does your blood count as real and ours as no more than water? Reciprocal treatment is part of justice, and the one who initiates hostilities is the unjust one.”²⁹ In another interview in 2002, Bin Laden says, “When we kill their innocents the entire world from east to west screams at us. Who said that our blood is not blood, but theirs is . . . ? Who has been getting killed in our countries for decades? More than one million children died in Iraq and others are still dying. Why do we not hear someone screaming or condemning, or even someone’s words of consolation or condolence?”³⁰ Bin Laden also tells them that “security is a vital necessity for every human being. We will not let you monopolize it for yourselves.”³¹ Without endorsing his actions, Bin Laden’s words plainly evoke raw emotion.

Like the many foreign fighters flooding into Syria to join Daesh in defense of the atrocious injustices against their in-group, it is not that Bin Laden lacked the capacity for empathy, but rather, that he began to discriminate in his empathy. It is this prejudice that best predicts intergroup violence, according to neuroscientist Emile Bruneau, who researches cognitive biases driving intergroup conflict.³²

Bruneau’s work has attracted interest and funding by diverse institutions, often with opposing agendas, like the United Nations, the US Institute for Peace (USIP), the Soros Foundation, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Office of Naval Research. Having tested the effects and differences between in-group empathy and out-group empathy in three contexts (Americans regarding Arabs, Greeks regarding Germans during the Greek financial crisis, and Hungarians regarding Muslim refugees during the refugee crisis), Bruneau came to an enlightening conclusion.

In all three settings, the participants’ feelings of empathy for the suffering of random out-group members correlated with an increase in their willingness to help those out-group members and a decrease in their willingness to harm those members (for example, making donations to civilian victims of drone strikes). However, when participants experienced empathy for the suffering of their in-group it predicted the opposite: less willingness to help random members of the out-group, and more willingness to inflict harm on members of the out-group.³³ In other words, violence begets violence.

Sean Hannity asks, in his book Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, “How many noble freedom fighters target innocent women and children? How many build torture chambers in the basements of their official buildings?”³⁴ Collectively, the answer is probably many of them—no matter how unwittingly. In gross violation of fundamental human rights principles outlining the proper conduct of terrorist offense investigations, terror suspects are unlawfully abducted, denied access to a lawyer or fair trial, mentally and physically tortured, and subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment in secret detention sites around the world. This global system, which was largely designed by the US government, totally violates both international and domestic laws. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Law School students compiled the traumatic comprehensive briefings outlining the narratives of thirty-seven such extraordinary rendition and torture victims.³⁵

Among them is Fatima Bouchar, who was four months pregnant when she was wrongfully detained, interrogated, and tortured for many months. Her captors delivered her and her husband to be tortured in Libya in one of Gaddafi’s prisons. Bouchar was tortured to the point of threatening her baby’s survival. Today, she and her husband have rejected a settlement offered by the UK government because it failed to provide an official apology and semblance of accountability from all the governments involved in Bouchar’s treatment. Without the acknowledgment of the suffering she, her husband, and baby were subjected to, a settlement would be meaningless.³⁶

Another victim, Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj, was electrocuted, severely beaten, and threatened with sexual abuse, dogs, and snakes. He was penetrated in the anus, made to wear a diaper, handcuffed and shackled to the wall, placed in solitary confinement in a two-foot-by-three-foot wooden cage with no toilet, and detained at the Dark Prison, where he was subjected to loud music and complete darkness, and was force-fed whenever he refused to eat. As of 2017, Al Hajj had been in US custody for twelve years. One his attorneys, John Chandler, commented on his deteriorating condition, saying, “His health is ruined by his treatment by or on behalf of our country. He can eat little but yogurt. He weighs perhaps 120 pounds. The United States of America has lost its way.”³⁷

Abu Yusuf, a Daesh leader who supervised the group’s hostage program, told a female reporter that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been unjust: there were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraqis were tortured in Abu Ghraib, and the Americans faced no consequences. “Then they’re pointing at us and saying how barbaric we are.” In his eyes—and no doubt, heart—Abu Yusuf believed his group of freedom fighters would liberate Muslims from oppression by Western powers. “If the U.S. hits us with flowers, we will hit them back with flowers. . .But if they hit us with fire, we will hit them back with fire, also inside their homeland. This will be the same with any other Western country.”³⁸

Contrary to these gross abominations of humanity, I would venture to say that many, if not most, American soldiers are altruistic in their motivations. To be willing to die for a belief or cause and prevent suffering is a benevolent display of courage and compassion. Even more so when one considers the warrior’s honor code that many soldiers strive to embody—in which they hold themselves to the ultimate ethical and moral standards, even in life-threatening situations.

At the US Naval Academy’s Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law, students make a vehement distinction between a warrior and a murderer, according to Professor Shannon E. French. “Almost without exception, my students insist that a ‘warrior’ is not a ‘murderer.’ They can even become emotional in the course of repudiating this (intentionally provocative) potential synonym. It is very important to them to be sure that I understand that while most warriors do kill people, they never murder anyone. Their remarks are filled with contempt for mere murderers,” she observes.³⁹ As far as these soon-to-be naval officers are concerned, murder is committed in cold blood out of hate or without noble reason against the unarmed and innocent. A warrior, on the other hand, knows how to control his anger, only kills in battle when it is unavoidable, and does not take advantage of the weak.⁴⁰

COUNTERTERRORISM BY ANY OTHER NAME

So where does that leave us? Both sides are pursuing what they believe to be moral outcomes using immoral means. Both sides dehumanize the enemy. These cycles do not end with force. They end with justice. Indeed, counterterrorism is terrorism by another name, and it is counterproductive. A UNESCO peace publication, Blue Dot, notes that “All forms of violent extremism seek change through fear and intimidation rather than through peaceful means.”⁴¹ Should we, then, consider all those who seek change through fear and intimidation rather than through peaceful means to be violent extremists?

Another Security Council Resolution in 2001 “reaffirms its unequivocal condemnation of all acts, methods and practices of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, in all their forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever committed,” and “underlines that acts of terrorism endanger innocent lives and the dignity and security of human beings everywhere.”⁴² We read these security resolutions framing “the others” as terrorists without considering “the other” may be reading them, too, and despairing that humanity and the world has turned their back on them. It is by some remarkable feat of faith, grace, and resilience that the majority of those subjected to these unforgiving circumstances don’t end up turning to violent extremism.

This is particularly remarkable when it doesn’t take a “special type” of individual to commit evil. We are all capable given the right circumstances. The reader may be familiar with the Stanford prison experiment, illustrating what social psychologists like Albert Bandura call situationism. Drawing on studies of violence from across the human sciences, Bandura concluded that “it requires conducive social conditions rather than monstrous people to produce atrocious deeds. Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.”⁴³ In the experiment, the researchers aimed to test the hypothesis that it was the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards that primarily caused abusive behavior in prison.

Twenty-four psychologically stable and healthy male college students were recruited for a two-week prison simulation. The participants were predominantly white middle-class and the study intentionally excluded those with criminal backgrounds. They were assigned roles randomly as either guards or prisoners. As their roles developed, some of the “guards” began enforcing authoritarian measures and demonstrating sadistic behavior—ultimately subjecting some prisoners to psychological torture. Some prisoners passively accepted the abuse and became withdrawn, whereas others—at the guards’ request—actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop the torture. This escalation occurred in a matter of just five days. It stands to reason that the real-life prison sadism and torture that take place are exponentially more cruel.⁴⁴

Even innocent children are not immune, as the equally renowned “blue eyes brown eyes” experiment demonstrates. The day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, a third-grade school teacher in Iowa conducted an exercise to teach her all-white class about discrimination. Jane Elliott designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group, giving them special privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess. The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and were encouraged to only play with one another.⁴⁵

The brown-eyed children were not allowed to drink from the same water fountain as the blue-eyed children. And Elliott chastised and singled out the brown-eyed students when they made mistakes. At first, the blue-eyed students resisted the notion that they were superior to their brown-eyed peers. That is, until Elliott lied to the children, saying that melanin was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, the blue-eyed children—believing they really were “superior”—became arrogant, bossy, and unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades even improved, while those of their “inferior” classmates suffered.⁴⁶

We have a tendency to believe such experiments don’t apply to us and that we would never falter in such a contrived, or real-life, circumstance. There’s a name for this over-optimism: moral overconfidence. Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School, explores this phenomenon in the context of CEOs decimated by front-page scandals, like Enron. Using the controversial Milgram experiment as an example, Nohria shows the gap between how people believe they would behave and how they actually behave, essentially concluding that we are far less virtuous than we think we are.⁴⁷

In the Milgram experiment, study participants are instructed to administer increasing levels of electric shocks to a “learner” who answers incorrectly or not at all. The “teacher” and “learner” are separated in two rooms where they can hear but not see one another. After a certain number of volts, the “learner” bangs on the wall pleading for the “teacher” to stop and complains of his heart condition. Then all responses from the “learner” cease. Since the failure to answer a question is subject to an electric shock, the “teacher” is instructed that he must continue with the experiment. In reality there were no shocks, of course, and only prerecorded sounds of escalating anguish from the “learner.” What is interesting is that while some footage shows participant “teachers” in the study becoming exceedingly uncomfortable, what allows them to morally reconcile their actions is to absolve themselves completely of any responsibility by confirming that the authority—and not themselves—will be held accountable.⁴⁸

COMPASSIONATE COUNTERTERRORISM

Captain Wayne Porter, retired former naval chief of intelligence for the Middle East from 2008 to 2011, is convinced that the only solution to terrorism is to deal with its root causes. According to him, “The only existential threat to us from terrorist attacks, real or imagined, is that we stay on the current counter-productive, anarchically organised, money-driven trajectory.” Porter, who teaches counterterrorism to military officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, adds, “Our current counter-terrorism strategy, which is no strategy, will destroy our democratic values.”⁴⁹

Looking in the mirror with dirt on one’s face and then proceeding to clean the mirror is an exercise in futility.⁵⁰ Terrorism is an ugly reflection of ourselves. We need to stop cleaning the mirror and start addressing the societies and conditions that are being reflected. To do that, we must start with compassion; that is the true radicalism of our time and the most humane and effective counterterrorism strategy we have at our disposal. But what does compassion actually mean? It is not the often-misunderstood notion of an anemic love that overlooks rampant injustice. Rather, it is the motivation or intention of our actions to prevent suffering.

Rooted in this pure motivation, our actions will be just and compassionate. There’s a beautiful parable about the Buddha, who, in one of his lifetimes, was a ferryman transporting 500 saints. A thief jumped aboard the ferry, threatening to kill the saints and steal their belongings. So the ferryman swiftly evaluated the situation and concluded If the thief kills the saints, he will suffer in hell. If I kill him first, I will save the saints and prevent him from creating terrible karma. And my suffering will be less than his ⁵¹

How often are we that indiscriminate in our compassion? It doesn’t mean not speaking truth or enforcing justice but simply expanding our sphere of empathy beyond victim or perpetrator, us versus them. Effective counterterrorism necessitates this intentionality and compass of compassion to ensure that in fighting terrorism, we do not become and proliferate that against which we are fighting.