AFTER MANCHESTER
Thwarting terrorism requires unity, but Donald Trump prefers division.
In family photographs, the innocent victims of the Manchester bombing look so young and happy. Each of them stares back at us, a moment frozen in time, with the exuberant look of someone who feels their life is a joy and is certain that it will never end.
But it did last Monday evening, in a horrific way, and we need to get past our grief to understand why. That is what those precious faces are demanding of us.
The suicide bombing of young children, teenagers and their parents outside a pop concert in Britain this week killed more than 20 people, most of them young. But it didn’t just happen, as if simply falling from the sky.
There were reasons, there were root causes and there was a context. And all of these we desperately need to confront — or this type of tragedy will happen again and again and again. That is the lesson from Manchester, England.
Police have identified the suspected suicide bomber as Salman Abedi, born 22 years ago in a working class area of Manchester.
Coming from a struggling immigrant family of Libyan origin, Abedi is described by friends as a highly impressionable loner, attracted to the aura of terrorism, who recently travelled to the killing fields of Syria and Libya.
The origins of this massacre lie well beyond the streets of Manchester, caught up in the turbulent, often hysterical political winds currently sweeping across Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
Terror groups thrive when Western leaders overreact to their provocations. They desperately hope their actions will frighten people and prompt political leaders to respond with overwhelming force that serves only to undermine personal freedoms and sow division within their communities. That is their goal. That instinct for melodrama was on full display this week on a variety of political levels.
In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May — in the middle of an election campaign — called the military out onto the streets and warned that another terrorist attack is “expected imminently.” In the Middle East, Donald Trump, the visiting U.S. president, enthusiastically sided with Saudi Arabia and its Sunni Arab neighbours against its regional rival, Iran.
Trump’s efforts to isolate Iran and stoke anti-Shia divisions within the Muslim world reversed America’s historic balancing role in the Middle East — and their impact is certain to increase violence within the region.
More than 85 per cent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are with the Sunni sect of Islam. Only 10 per cent of Muslims are Shia, most living in Iran, Iraq and Bahrain.
An irony is that it is not Iran that has been responsible for most recent terrorist violence in the Middle East, or elsewhere. Groups such as Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL) and Al Qaeda are Sunni and funded by interests from Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states. These groups target Shia Iran as much as they do Americans.
So what can be done to prevent other Manchesters from happening? The answers are daunting.
In the short-term, the challenge in Europe and North America is to achieve better policing in a way that balances security and liberty. In the long-term, societies need to figure out ways for their immigrant Muslim populations to integrate more successfully.
In the Middle East as a whole, Saudi Arabia and Iran need to learn how “to share the neighbourhood,” as Barack Obama once phrased it. It is only with that starting point that the many proxy wars in the region can be gradually wound down.
But ultimately, of course, it is the people of the Middle East who need to be heard from, and this is never easy. However, in an otherwise depressing seven days, there was more than a glimmer of hope in Iran’s presidential election.
Contrary to expectation, centrist president Hassan Rouhani was re-elected to a second term by a landslide. By defeating his hardline conservative rival, Rouhani received a dramatic endorsement of his plans to end Iran’s pariah status.
It is worth noting that such an election, however imperfect, would not be possible in most of the Arab and Muslim states that Donald Trump celebrated last Sunday in Saudi Arabia. Tony Burman is former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News. Reach him @TonyBurman or at tony.burman@gmail.com.