Smothering the burning embers of terrorism
As I lay in bed looking at the ceiling late Monday night, I wondered what was giving me such a restless night.
An image from 30 years ago floated into view. It was of a figure from central casting — massive shoulders and bald head, dark glasses and a rough gravel voice. Our security consultant for a dangerous mission in the Middle East.
Patronizingly, he said, “Terrorists commit terror because it works — it terrifies. And it’s cumulative; your 10th attack is more terrifying than your first. So, here’s how to stay out of trouble …” And on he rambled about not doing dumb things in dangerous places. It was the Manchester horror that was running a black tape loop in my unsettled brain, I belatedly realized.
My wife left Harrod’s less than an hour before the IRA’s Christmas attack. The savage bombing of the Queen’s Horses and their trainers rattled my London office windows across the park. I watched a terrorist hit team spray women and children with blood and tissue, murdering one of Palestine’s saints, 10 feet in front of me in a crowded holiday hotel lobby. The Tokyo sarin attack took place a few trains after I had arrived at my office on that same line.
But the patronizing security guy is both right and wrong. Those memories never do go away and can easily be triggered. But incredibly, one adapts. You suppress fear and show defiance, returning to the scene of the attack with hundreds of others to raise a middle finger to evil.
Donald Trump’s attempts to whip up anti-Iranian and anti-Shia sentiment across the Muslim world is not merely morally offensive, it is dangerous to the safety of Americans and American allies. To deliberately incite state-to-state violence in the world’s most volatile region will also certainly raise the prospect of terror in other parts of the world. For as long as he is on the world stage, we must assume the threat barometer is swinging widely against stability or security.
Canada had been astonishingly blessed to be mostly free of all but a few murders by angry young men mimicking serious terrorists — so far. But that is surely not a predictor of our future. Those more brutally stung by repeated attacks have moved far ahead of us in radicalization prevention, at-risk youth outreach, monitoring and countering incitement rhetoric online, in school, and in the community.
It is way past time that we made compulsory again the study of civics, in every elementary school year. A program of learning on the responsibilities of citizenship, on why a socially tolerant Canada is the only path to a safer Canada, on the story of the giants of our history on whose shoulders we stand, having been bequeathed this blessed, but always fragile, new nation.
This is not about attacks on other communities, other cultures, disguised as a “discussion about Canadian values.” Nor is it jeremiads like Supreme Court Justice Abella’s against “narcissistic populism” as powerful as they have been. It’s about demonstrating to everyone the meaning of the shared responsibilities of citizens in our democracy, and those we have to each other. What Toronto political sage Bill MacDonald has so elegantly dubbed the “Canadian culture of mutual accommodation.”
As we celebrate our 150 years of success in building a new form of nationhood, we cannot let our pride blind us to its perennial fragility. Canadian religious and public safety leaders, for example, need to deepen their conversations about the boundaries between acceptable and illegal hate speech, develop stronger models of shared engagement focused on mutual education and prevention, not merely surveillance and arrest.
Perhaps most important of all, Canadian business, civic, and community leaders need to make it clear to politicians and pundits who use racial, religious and ethnic divisions for votes or clicks, just how certain will be the destruction of their reputations and careers.
For it is not insensitive to the suffering of the Manchester families of the children who were victims of this latest atrocity to remember this: it is how we react to attack that is the path to less terror. We invest in prevention, we make punishment certain, and we double down on the peddlers of hate.
Perhaps with a deeper commitment to prevention our day will never come. But as the Japanese cliché has it, “People don’t learn from experience, only from catastrophe.” If, despite all our efforts, the one time we fail leads to tragedy, we must ensure that our defiance in the face of attack includes a resolute commitment to the open inclusive Canada that so much blood was shed to build and to guarantee.
Canadian leaders need to deepen their conversations about the boundaries between acceptable and illegal hate speech
Robin V. Sears is a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a Broadbent Institute leadership fellow.