Cause ... or effect?

In a discussion that veered to the causes of terrorism, some colleagues took the position that the problems we have with terrorism are only weakly linked to socio-economic conditions, the invasion of Iraq, the American bases that had been constructed on Saudi soil, despair and unemployment among those of Middle Eastern descent, and other events. The real problem causing terrorism’s escalation, according to my colleagues’ position, is inherent in religious fundamentalism. As I understand their premise, all the events that might ordinarily lead to violence are coincidental. The actual incitement is the religion itself.

I am no fan of any organized religion but I believe that that’s a simplistic argument. It ignores the madrasas boarding schools where poor families in the Middle East, who have no access to free public education, send their children, by the tens of thousands, to learn. Those children not only get an education, they get an indoctrination, isolated from families who might offer alternative viewpoints. The rank and file of the Taliban and al Qaeda are said to have been mostly products of these boarding schools. Poverty created the opportunity to mold impressionable children into eventual jihadists. It still does.

But, the other side might counter, young second-generation Muslim-Europeans are shucking it all and becoming terrorists. Since they weren’t subjected to indoctrination as children, but freely chose jihad, the argument goes, the fundamentalist Muslim religion, in and of itself, must be enough to incite terrorism.

I don’t buy that argument. Religion has been used to start wars, justify racism, murder, torture, and probably to justify every type of horrible act of which man is capable. But how do people get sucked in? What causes people to embrace forms of religion that preach violence? Is everybody susceptible or only those who have some sort of a genetic flaw?

I am not convinced that violent fundamentalism falls on the “cause” side of the equation in a cause-and-effect analysis. I suspect that, for the most part, it belongs on the effect side. I am also not persuaded that it’s because of something inherent solely in the Muslim religion.

What if there were no free public education in the U.S., and most of us were too poor to send our kids to school? But Pat Robertson or somebody like him ran free boarding schools where the curriculum included a good education in the basics along with Robertson’s interpretations of Christianity (sprinkled heavily with his ideas on how to deal with people he didn’t like). Might the U.S. have tens of thousands of thoroughly indoctrinated, potentially violent Christian fundamentalists?

What if we had a king, not a president, and that this oppressive monarch allowed Saudi Arabia to build military bases in places that held special meaning for us? Would we be angry? Might some of the tens of thousands of graduates of the Pat Robertson boarding schools get radical about it?

What if a Muslim super-power invaded Canada on some phony pretext? Would some of us cross the border to fight the invaders? Would we feel threatened that we might be next – especially if the guy leading the invasion had made it clear that he coveted Canada’s natural resources (and our country was rich in those same resources)?

Would more of us get religion? Would the fundamentalists among us find passages in the Bible to justify blowing up the enemy?

Aren’t a lot of us, right now, willing to justify open-ended imprisonment of Muslim detainees in Guantanamo, who are not charged with any crime? Aren’t a good many of us, right now, willing to give our government carte blanche to torture those prisoners or do anything else it wants to them? Don’t some Americans already use religion as a justification for this? What else might we feel justified in doing if we feel further threatened?

It’s easy to discount cause-and-effect in all terrorism in and about the Middle East by shaking our heads and saying, it’s those insane fundamentalist Muslims. Lay it all on their religion. In this view, somebody picks up the Koran, sees a passage about killing infidels, and goes from his nice little life in the suburbs to strapping explosives on his chest so he can blow up a bus or a pizza parlor or a subway. Our emotions demand that we demonize our enemy this way. We were attacked, damn it. And we hadn’t done a thing to provoke the attack.

But guess what? Those we’re demonizing appear to feel the same way about us.

I am a firm believer in cause-and-effect. The actions of the Western world against the Middle East, over the past half-century or more — but especially since Iraq — provoked and continue to provoke a violent push-back. It’s frightening and horrible and totally unjustifiable. But it’s also somewhat predictable and understandable. You just can’t dismiss a history of provocation as unimportant and lay it all down to religious fanaticism. Or, okay, maybe you can. But I can’t.

As long as we insist on seeing all this as a spontaneous combustion of sorts, totally unpredictable, we won’t be able to consider what steps we need to take to turn it around.