Shannon Corregan: It’s critical to question terrorism stories

Stories, stories, stories. It all comes down to stories. This month, we’re hearing the story of Amanda Korody and John Nuttall, a couple who are on trial after being charged with trying to set off bombs at the legislature on Canada Day 2013.

Is it the story, as Nuttall’s lawyer first suggested, of police entrapment? For Korody, is it the story of a woman dealing with addiction and mental-health issues?

But the story we’re most likely to hear is of a couple who converted to Islam as a road to violence.

As citizens of a town where not much bad ever seems to happen, we’re largely insulated from the implications of a terrorist plot. No matter how many times we’ve watched V for Vendetta, it’s hard to imagine anything like that happening here.

I remember feeling completely unfazed by the whole thing. This is because a) the alleged plot was unsuccessful and b) reporting in the immediate aftermath painted Korody and Nuttall as amateurish incompetents.

Now that we’re at the trial stage, however, the language has become a lot more serious.

Much of the media attention has focused — as media attention is wont to do — on post 9/11 buzzwords and phrases such as “jihad” and “holy war.” And to be fair, that’s the rhetoric that Nuttall and Korody used themselves. They said as much in their own video recordings played during the trial. They identified openly with Islam and seem to have thought that they were on a kind of holy mission.

But we wouldn’t be doing our job as thinking individuals if we didn’t question this connection between Islam and violence that our narratives keep insisting upon.

Just as we know that the rise of al-Qaida and ISIS has more to do with post-Cold War, post-colonial geo-political realities than it does with religion (though fundamentalism is a powerful galvanizing tool), we should be careful enough to distinguish between religion and a confused person’s struggle for an anchor in reality.

“Because jihad.” “Because Islam.”

That’s not a good enough explanation. We know it’s lazy, but I don’t think we’ve fully grasped how dangerous it is.

North America still hasn’t kicked its post-9/11 anti-Islamic backlash, and Islamophobia is on the rise in Europe now, too. Anti-Islamist parties are gaining strength in France and Germany, and Islamophobia is (distressingly, but unsurprisingly) linked to rising rates of anti-Semitism and xenophobia more generally in Europe.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we heard a lot about the radical brothers who resorted to violence in a misguided attempt to defend their faith. We heard less about Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim police officer who was slain in a confrontation with the gunmen.

We heard even less about the 21-year-old pregnant woman attacked by Islamophobes in the aftermath of the massacre, who was beaten so brutally that she miscarried.

Who would be barbarous enough to do something like that?

Meanwhile, American drone attacks are estimated to have killed more than 2,400 civilians (civilians!) in the Middle East, and that’s a low-ball figure. We don’t bat an eye at that. Because that kind of violence is justified, right?

My point is that the news media have a tendency to flatten out our stories, so it’s up to us — it’s always up to us — to fill them back in again, to resist the temptation to fall into easy answers for complicated situations.

Here is an example: A few weeks ago in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Yusor Barakat, her husband Deah and her sister Razan were murdered, execution-style, over an alleged “parking dispute.” Really?

The stories we tell have consequences.

That Korody and Nuttall began to identify as Muslim as part of the trajectory that took them to the B.C. Supreme Court might say more about the stories we tell ourselves about Islam than what Islam actually is.

Stories are more powerful than pressure-cooker bombs. We need to pay attention to which stories we absorb without thinking, and which stories we choose to challenge.

shannon.corregan@gmail.com