In the aftermath of the Nov. 5 tragedy at Fort Hood, many people once again held up radical Islam as the evil force behind the atrocity.
Why is it that we must always attribute such tragedies to some grand, overarching problem that tends to ignore the part our society plays in creating such depressing and terrifying tales? Like Victor Frankenstein, we have brought our hideous progeny to life and now suffer the consequences of our actions. Once again, I suggest we look beyond the obvious “causes” and consider taking a closer look at American society.
For starters, it’s detrimental to the conversation to immediately say that “extremists” from a school of radical Islam are to blame. There are extremists from all religious orders, from the Christians who bomb abortion clinics to the Muslims responsible for 9/11. Do we blame the Catholic Church and the various other Christian denominations for the acts of the rare extremists who resort to violence against abortion clinics and providers? No, we don’t. Likewise, we should be as reasonable when it comes to our perceptions of Muslim-Americans in light of the actions of a few insane extremists.
We also have to look at our own actions in the creation of the “evil” of Muslim extremists. We’ve illegally detained a number of innocent Muslims in secret prisons where they are tortured. We’ve supported Israel and the Zionist state for decades, explicitly in the political arena and implicitly with billions of dollars in direct support and military hardware. Meanwhile, we have almost completely ignored the Palestinians.
Americans have created a culture where paranoia and hyperbole rule instead of reason and discussion. It’s even spread to Switzerland, historically a bastion of equality and tolerance, where some politicians are looking to ban the construction of minarets, the towers that usually stand next to mosques. Our own actions help provide the very evidence extremists can use against us — how is it foolish or unpatriotic to point this out?
And the ghastly, titanic “evil” of religious extremists isn’t the first time Americans have sought a simple answer to explain a terrible tragedy. Recall the school shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech: we blame each atrocity on a single, disturbed individual, without stopping to consider the role we as a society played in creating this person.
This is disturbing, because we once again fall victim to what social scientists call the Fundamental Attribution Error, in which we attribute certain outcomes or events to the individual behind them while ignoring environmental or situational factors. Thus, instead of considering the possibility that our society creates barriers to success and sometimes isolates certain individuals from popular society for no reason, we blame it all on the crazy person.
Similarly, with Islamic extremists, we take the actions of an insane extremist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, out of the context of our actions within the international arena, mix it with some stereotyping and create the illusion in which all Muslims are secretly plotting our death. Yet we ignore the fact that we have launched countless bombing campaigns and opted to start a war of choice in Iraq, all in the name of bringing democracy and freedom to the Muslim world.
Creating these imaginary archvillains may help us sleep at night, but it doesn’t solve the real problem.
To me, this problem is simple. Americans in general need to turn a critical eye on themselves and ask some serious questions about the state of our nation. The hardest person to blame is oneself, and we have put off such self-criticism for far too long. Until we can identify our own shortcomings and take the appropriate actions to correct them, expect things to get worse before they get better.
