This morning, the New York Times ran an article about the sense of abandonment that many citizens of Muslim countries feel towards the West when we publicly lament ISIS attacks in developed, non-Muslim areas while shrugging off attacks in places like Istanbul, Baghdad, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and pretty much every other Muslim city of note. The article implied that a "sympathy gap" has come into relief across the world, where "people from one sect or political group often discount or excuse casualties from another."
The Muslim world is reportedly "stung" by our "indifference" to their suffering. I suppose as opposed to being stung by terrorist attacks from the extremist elements of their own population.
It's unclear what the West is supposed to do, exactly, but the impression is that the smart play would be to envelop the moderate, victimized Muslim world in the same compassion we extend ourselves when Paris comes under attack. If we do that, we'll be progressive and bighearted and then...
What?
What exactly is that magnanimity supposed to achieve? Will it finally convince our consolees that the Islamic State is not on their side? That they can count on us to provide the ameliorating tears? The ameliorating troops?
Here's the problem: there's no such thing. Tears may have an influence, because they can ultimately spur a society to change. But it would take quite a few troops to solve the problem militarily. A quantity of troops no one quite seems willing to commit to the cause—not Saudi Arabia, not Russia, not Iran, nobody.
If I were a victimized, normal Sunni Muslim, what I'd probably want instead of either Twitter sympathy or coverage by The New York Times is for my fellow Sunni Muslims to wake up and get around to this massive, culture-defining reformation we've been putting off for a couple of decades.
Look, we've done it here. We had a cultural reformation. And for as much misery as the West has caused around the world, we figured out a way to imagine something different than barbarity.
When Paris gets attacked by ISIS, we react with outsized horror precisely because the violence is a callback to a brutality we thought the city escaped. One of the sites of the violence that night, when 150 people were killed by ISIS gunmen, was a soccer game between France and Germany: two countries that have fought violently, in grueling war, within living memory. There were many decades where the two countries seemed intractably opposed, as if nothing could end the antagonism.
But the violence did end. And it didn't happen because they got enough get-well cards from England or the US. It didn't even end when a victor was finally declared. It ended when the continent embraced a new system of order. One oriented around concepts of trade and stability rather than military domination.
That's why a restaurant explosion in Paris galls us. (Gauls us?) Of course there's a large element at play of one's affinity for one's kin over people of a different race or culture. There are only so many tears one can shed, especially over events that have increasingly become normalized. But the real reason is that, for Westerners, it's triggering to watch our cultural maturity assaulted by cultural juvenilia.
Our Western countries are far from insouciant about the spread of radical Islam. Actually, we're terrified of it. The article points to Brexit and Trumpism as examples of "atavism." Quite the contrary. Sure, any nativist movement probably involves a rose-tinted view of a bygone time. But those movements are rooted in a very current fear of the spread of radical Islam. And it's a spread that leaves evidence everywhere, from Boko Haram to Indonesia's recent shift to fundamentalist Islam and, consequently, barbarism.
During the ongoing month of Ramadan, ISIS has perpetrated a series of attacks that have killed probably 500 people across the world, most of them Muslim. Their calls for holy war against infidels only ever ratchets up; never down. Diplomacy and intimidation, the tactics honored by rational state actors, have no effect. When you see Britain voting to exit the continent or Trump getting cheers for waterboarding, it's not just idle right-wing bloodlust. A good part of our polity is literally scared witless.
The last things we want to hear are complaints from the populations who have the most influence on ISIS that there isn't enough solidarity being extended them from the world of civilization and reason. The answer that boils inside of me when I read that is, there's a reason you have little of our sympathy. And the reason is that it's not a time for sympathy. It's a time for getting mad. For you getting mad. The Sunni people of Syria and Iraq and even the conservative Gulf states need to decide, without reservation, to take control of their religion. It's time for them to bring that reformation to its natural conclusion. And that's not a job anyone else can do. It has to be Sunni Arabs who decide what defines their culture to the world.
Maybe while they're having this reformation, they can hash out items like the place of women in their society. It all seems like part of the same conversation to me; Saudi Wahhabism is honestly only a few steps away from the conservatism of ISIS from the perspective of a Western feminist like myself.
ISIS is possible to end. It is an affiliation of people who feel more strongly related to a caliphate and Sharia than to civilization. But those people are regular humans, trying to live lives that are good like any thinking person. If they sign onto radical Islamist ideology, it's because they feel the same kinship to the extremists preaching it as we do to the French. That's why those ties of kinship need to do the healing, too. It's why the vastly outnumbering moderate Sunnis need to decide to take control of their identity.
Looking inward, it's also true that we Americans have a poor vocabulary with which to discuss the issue of the need for a Sunni reformation. The parties most likely to sign onto the above exhortation are the likes of Donald Trump, who today I heard praising the violence of Saddam Hussein, rather than sexy educated elites. But to these progressives, I have to point to the argument they advanced in 2001 and during our two Middle Eastern wars. Back then, they used to argue that the only way to create a terrorist is a bomb; that al Qaeda was a response to US foreign policy. Maybe there's some truth to that. But it falls apart when militant Islam starts to assert demands that even the New York yuppie recognizes are not satiable. This isn't an ideology that, like, makes sense. It's a cultural delusion. The solution has to come from within that particular slice of the Arab world.
America used to think it could solve Middle Eastern violence by intervening. That created ISIS and left an ugly legacy. Rightfully, we retreated. Now we're being asked to step back in, but just with our sympathies. Well, one doesn't come without the other. The Twitter user snarkily posting about how Americans don't care about Iraqis is wrong: we care about his fellow Iraqis. Not his neighbors in the apartment block, but the ones infesting the region with the truly atavistic ideas of society. And we care about them because they're moving, fast, all over the planet. Handle your shit, people.
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