Commentary:

When do we assign collective responsibility?

    By Jack Grant

The post I've been struggling with for over a week (before I got derailed yesterday) relates to what criteria do we use to blame an entire group, whether it be a nation, an ethnic group, a religion, a political party, or any other group, for the actions of some small percentage of the members of that group. Every day I read weblogs where the Democrats or Republicans are said to all be like some yahoo who tears up a sign and frightens a little girl or some moron who kicks a protester who is being held down by security. Every day I read weblogs where in reaction to yet another atrocity by Islamist nihilistic terrorists the authors write "Islam, the religion of peace my ass!!!" or other pejorative statements. Collective responsibility is routinely assigned for the actions of a few.

In the former Soviet Union, the Russians took actions that directly resulted in thousands and thousands if not millions of deaths of non-Russians in the USSR, yet I do not hear that all Russians are evil. In "the Great Leap Forward" in China, millions died for no legitimate reason, yet I do not hear cries that all Chinese are evil. In the years before World War II, the Germans instituted an organized effort to wipe out all members of the Jewish religion, yet I do not hear condemnation of all Germans. Why is it so easy to assign collective responsibility now for acts that while no less heinous do NOT result in the deaths of millions?

I know that some will say, "But it was the Communists that committed the atrocities in the USSR and China, and the Nazis who did it in Germany." That is indeed true, however, it is not all members who follow Islam who are committing the atrocities that prompt many to condemn all of Islam. John of Argghhh! pointed this out earlier this year, identifying Wahabism as the Nazism of Islam, yet I still read over and over again that all of Islam is evil.

The Economist magazine has published a good analysis of the current divisions within Islam:

THREE years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the anguish among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims has not diminished. Other Muslim fanatics have carried out other fearful crimes in the name of Islam. And non-Muslim armies have stomped into Muslim-populated lands to prosecute a war on terror that some perceive as a war on Islam.

The result is that ordinary Muslims find themselves confronted with increasingly fierce claims for possession of their faith. Rival narratives have emerged at either end of the extremely broad Muslim spectrum, and they could scarcely be more different. Expressing one view, a prominent Arab columnist decries the fact that while it is obvious that all Muslims are not terrorists, it is sadly apparent that these days nearly all terrorists happen to be Muslims. The spokesman for a jihadist group in Iraq dissents. Wherever you cast your eye, he writes in a recent posting to the internet, you find only one truth, which is that infidels are slaying Muslims “in every way, in every land, and with overspilling hatred.”

The two views produce radically different conclusions. With growing stridency, Muslim liberals are saying that it is high time for Muslims to act, to stop their faith from being hijacked and turned into a cult-like vehicle for a clash of civilisations. Their sense is that the violence of a radical minority is not merely ruining sympathy for just Muslim causes in such contested places as Chechnya and Palestine, it is beginning to threaten Muslims' peaceful coexistence with others everywhere.

For their part, the jihadists voice the conviction that sympathy for Muslim causes never existed in the first place. Islam, they say, is so imperilled that fighting for its survival is not merely right, but a sublime duty. And so vicious are its enemies that any means may be used to deter them, the more shockingly cruel, the more effective. Ultimately, they believe, Islam will triumph only if all foreign influence is chased from a vast, unified Islamic state.

To the non-Muslim world, there is little doubt which view is more realistic. Three years ago, it was only Americans who asked Why Do They Hate Us? The same question is now being asked by Indonesians, Spaniards, Turks, Australians, Nepalese, French, Italians, Russians and others whose citizens have fallen victim to jihadist “vengeance”. The puzzle is how so many Muslims could for so long remain oblivious to the extremism in their midst.

Egypt's leading newspaper, the government-owned daily Al Ahram, provided a clue recently. On September 1st, it relegated to inside pages the brutal massacre of 12 Nepalese kitchen workers by Iraqi guerrillas, who claimed to be “executing God's judgment” against “Buddhist invaders”. A day later, Al Ahram put on its front-page news that rioters in Katmandu, the Nepalese capital, had attacked a mosque—but did not explain what they were angry about. A slip, perhaps, but the omission reflected a pattern, repeated across the Muslim world, of harping on Muslim injury.

There is nothing abnormal in rooting for your own. American coverage of, say, Iraq, is hardly exemplary in even-handedness. The trouble comes with the cumulative effect of repeating a tale of Muslim victimhood, of amplifying it through mosque sermons and manipulating it for short-term political gain. All too many governments have found it convenient to direct their own peoples' grievances into offshore arenas, such as Iraq, and so deflect demands for empowerment closer to home.

Seeing the world through a lens of victimhood has grown into a comfortable habit. So it is that some Arab commentators have explained the kidnapping and murder of foreign civilians in Iraq as the work of American agents. The agents' aim, says Galal Duweidar, who edits Cairo's mass-circulation daily, Al Akhbar, is to “demonstrate the barbarism of Arabs and Muslims and so justify Washington's war on Iraq and its purported war on ‘terror'.”

This distorted viewpoint in the Muslim community adds credence to using a Nazi analogy to understand events. Hitler rose to power on a tide of anger arising from the feeling of victimhood after the punitive actions of the Allies towards Germany in the wake of World War I. That anger was manipulated by Hitler through demagoguery, just as Muslim anger (justified or not) is being manipulated by Islamofascist demagogues.

The Economist article continues with:

Such conspiratorial views seem to reflect a need to sustain coherent plot-lines to explain what are, in fact, rather messy situations. America's occupation of Iraq must be seen to be just as wicked as Israel's occupation of the West Bank, or Russia's of Chechnya. Resistance to all these onslaughts must therefore be noble, however ugly its manifestations may appear.

The desire to paint Muslim resistance with glory leads to peculiar equivocations. Yusef Qaradawi, the most popular television preacher in the Arab world, says that while Islam distinguishes between soldiers and civilians in war, it is hard to make this distinction in practice. Killing prisoners is sometimes justified, he argues, but disfiguring their bodies is a sin. Adel al-Muada, an Islamist radical who is the deputy speaker of Bahrain's parliament, recently declared that while he personally condemned the attacks on New York and Washington, he could not condemn Osama bin Laden because there was “no proof” that he was responsible.

Such wilful blurring of lines is made easier by the way the war on terror has been conducted. The lumping of a range of movements that happen to have a Muslim colouring—some of them at root ethnic, some national, some indeed religious—under the single rubric of terrorism can perhaps be portrayed as “moral clarity”, but it tramples on the real grievances behind many of the causes.

Scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have made it difficult to maintain that there exist universal notions of human rights, rather than particularist and discriminatory ones. America's record in Iraq is not pretty. The past week's imagery alone has included a bombed ambulance, a dead infant being removed from a shelled building, and the on-camera killing of an Arab television journalist.

Even so, the sheer nastiness of jihadist violence has begun to generate a powerful groundswell of angry Muslim opposition. The coincidence of the anniversary of September 11th 2001 with the horrific slaughter of schoolchildren at Beslan provoked a chorus of condemnation. This was not only against terrorism, but also against the clerics whose extremist interpretations support that terrorism.

Why, demands a former Kuwaiti minister writing in the Saudi daily Al Sharq al Awsat, have we not heard a single fatwa against Osama bin Laden, when Muslims fell over themselves to condemn Salman Rushdie for writing a “vapid” novel? Who has done more damage to Islam? Muslims must no longer remain silent, declares an editorial in the Egyptian weekly Rose al-Yusef; our fear of speaking out has become the terrorists' fifth column.

Islam is no more unified than any other group, and less so than many. So why is it that we persist in assigning responsibility to all of Islam for the heinous acts of a few? As pointed out before, we do not condemn all Germans for the acts of the Nazis, we do not condemn all Russians for the acts of the Communists.

Why is it I read over and over again cries for the return of personal responsibility, but then I read from those same sources a blanket assignment of responsibility to the group rather than holding the actual perpetrators accountable?

I read over and over again statements that offer a blanket condemnation of all Democrats because of the actions of a few.

I read over and over again statements that offer a blanket condemnation of all Republicans because of the actions of a few.

Are we really so lazy that we are unwilling to make distinctions between the individual actors and the groups?

Posted by Jack Grant at 14:24 on 18 September 2004