834 Enough is enough
My jaw dropped when Malcolm Turnbull parroted Theresa May, saying "enough is enough", and I wrote
an (unpublished) letter to the newspaper:
Saying 'enough is enough'
is to misunderstand terrorism completely
Waleed Aly, SMH
"Enough is enough" ... stop, you naughty boys, stop terrorising us.
But there is one thing Aly disregards when he talks
about the narrative that sustains terrorism: religious indoctrination. It is
likely that Islamists' terrorism will stay with us for at least a generation;
it will take that long to reform Islamic education ... and that reformation is
necessary.
Terrorists
will be hard to either defeat or at least de-radicalise, as long as suicide
bombers believe if they kill in the name of Allah, they will go to heaven
... where 72 virgins are awaiting them. Only education will bring about a
change in impressionable young Muslim men (and their families).
The new
paradigm must be: There is no heaven for them, and they bring shame - not glory - to
their families.
Saying 'enough is enough'
is to misunderstand terrorism completely
Waleed Aly, SMH
“There is something undeniably true
about British Prime Minister Theresa May's declaration this week that
"enough is enough". But it’s also misleading. "Enough is
enough" implies a level of control. It's what you say to a misbehaving
child just as you decide it's finally time to impose a punishment. It's what
you say when you decide to quit the job you hate.
“But terrorism is nothing like that.
It does not exist merely because we haven't yet decided to extinguish it. It
does not end simply because we decide it's time.
“To see this, consider that we've
been saying this kind of thing more or less since the September 11 attacks.
That, you will recall, was meant to be the moment that changed the world, that
ushered in a new war unlike anything we've seen. "There was before 9/11
and after 9/11", explained a former CIA director of counterterrorism.
"After 9/11 the gloves come off."
“So we rushed off to two
interminable wars. The US government opened black sites around the world and
tortured people on the flimsiest evidence. And we've been taking gloves off
ever since, introducing new counterterrorism legislation, steadily expanding
the power of the state, and its ability to gather intelligence. Still the
attacks come. Indeed, they increase.
“At terrorism's heart is the
narrative that sustains it. That narrative is itself a complex of things:
social circumstances, an array of grievances and crucially, an ideology that
makes these things coherent and directs that anger towards an enemy. Islamism
is currently potent because it does this so efficiently. You can't imprison
that potency out of existence. You can only try to make it ring less true, so
fewer and fewer people are attracted to it …”