How has ‘Allah’ become code for ‘terrorism’?
As facts gradually emerge about Monday’s stabbing at a Canadian Forces recruitment centre in Toronto, one detail in particular has attracted special attention. “Allah told me to do this, Allah told me to come here and kill people,” the accused is alleged to have said, prompting conjecture that the attack may have been an act of “terrorism.”
These comments “fit the profile” of a “terrorist,” Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders commented — even as he cautioned against the “Islamophobia nonsense” and stereotyping of Muslims almost inevitably generated by announcements of “terrorist” incidents involving Muslims.
But would an assailant of any other religion who claimed that “God” instructed him to kill or wound similarly be deemed to “fit” the terrorist mould? The very fact that a reference to “Allah” is apparently sufficient to trigger suspicions of “terrorism” is itself problematic: a manifestation of the tendency to equate “terrorism” with acts of violence committed by Muslims.
The very fact that the dominant “profile” of a “terrorist” is someone who appeals to Allah and Islam — rather than to xenophobic or white supremacist or militant right-wing ideas — to justify his violence is a reflection of the fallacious but popular belief that “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
Muslims in Canada are seen through the distorting lens of the “war on terror:” a lens that projects the terrorizing atrocities of groups like Al Qaeda and Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL) onto Muslims unassociated with them, while leaving other (and in many cases more significant) sources of political and ideological violence invisible.
This produces a double standard in the language used to describe Muslim violence versus non-Muslim violence, even when the acts in question are comparable.
We must ask ourselves: Why has the Muslim become the paradigmatic figure of the “terrorist,” even though, according to internal CSIS documents described in the Star, right-wing and white supremacist violence is actually a greater security threat in Canada than violence by Muslims?
Why is the Boston Marathon bombing memorialized as a terroristic assault on the West (including in Canadian media, which marked the one-year anniversary of the attack with extensive coverage), while the most fatal act of violence that occurred that year in the United States — the shooting in the Washington Navy Yard by Aaron Alexis, which killed 12 — is largely ignored and forgotten?
Why was Mohamed Hersi convicted of “terrorism offences” for attempting to join Al Shabab in Somalia, while Justin Bourque, who specifically targeted RCMP officers in his shooting spree in Moncton, N.B., was not charged with “terrorism” but solely with “murder”? And why were the Muslim men who plotted to blow up a Via-Rail train labelled “terrorists,” while the non-Muslims who planned a Valentine’s Day massacre in Halifax were described rather underwhelmingly as “murderous misfits” by then-justice minister Peter McKay?
In post-9/11Canada, the assumption of a Muslim near-monopoly on “terrorism” is largely taken for granted. For instance, the RCMP’s 2009 publication “Radicalization: A Guide for the Perplexed” perplexingly insisted that “virtually all of the planned or actual terrorist attacks in Western Europe and North America since 9/11 have been carried out by young Muslims” — without citing a single source or statistic.
In fact, U.S. studies indicate that more people have been killed by right-wing and white supremacist political violence than by Muslims since 9/11. Reports from Europol (the European policing agency) likewise demonstrate that Muslims have been responsible for only a tiny percentage of political violence on that continent. But the supposed predominance of the Muslim terrorist threat is often treated as common-sense knowledge: no supporting evidence required.
Similar dynamics prevail in other western liberal democracies participating in the “war on terror.” In the United Kingdom, for example, English Defence League member Ryan McGee, who built a viable nail-bomb packed with 181 pieces of shrapnel to maximize carnage, avoided “terrorism” charges and received a twoyear prison sentence; prosecutors described McGee, who had written of murdering immigrants and praised Adolf Hitler, as an “immature teenager” rather than a “terrorist.” In stark contrast, Runa Khan, a British Muslim woman charged with “promoting terrorism” on Facebook, was sentenced to a five-year jail term. Even Muslim children have been flagged as dangerous in the U.K. Last week, for instance, nursery school staff raised alarms about the possible radicalization of a 4-year-old boy, whose drawing of a cucumber was mistaken for a “cooker-bomb.”
The reflexive connection of “terrorism” with Muslims is persistently forged and reinforced by media, politicians, and government agencies — creating a context where Muslim children’s cucumbers can become cooker-bombs, and Allah can become code for “terrorism.”