Liberal leader Justin Trudeau should not be pilloried for remarks he made about the root causes of terrorist acts during an interview with CBC’s Peter Mansbridge about the Boston Marathon bombings. All he did was to ask the question that was on everybody’s minds. Why did they do it?
Trudeau did not say the bombers should go unpunished. Rather, he wondered about the motives for such an act, given the apparently successful lives the two suspects, Chechen immigrants Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tanaev, had established.
Trudeau said: “There is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded, completely at war with innocents, at war with a society. And our approach has to be, ‘OK, where do those tensions come from?’ ”
That same sentiment was expressed by President Barack Obama: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?”
It is simply not enough to say, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper did: “When you see this type of violent act, you do not sit around trying to rationalize it or make excuses for it or figure out its root causes … You condemn it categorically, and to the extent you can deal with the perpetrators, you deal with them as harshly as possible.”
Trudeau was not rationalizing or making excuses. He was saying that if you don’t find out what causes young men who seem perfectly normal, nice guys to turn into jihadists bent on mayhem, then all you end up doing is dealing with them “as harshly as possible” after the fact. And you will keep dealing with them and the fallout of their acts.
The younger Tanaev had won a scholarship to university and was popular at school. His brother also attended a post-secondary school, was a boxer in his spare time and the father of a little girl. It makes one wonder how anybody with a child could do something that would injure and kill other people’s small children. The point the bombers were trying to make with all this carnage is — what?
Why would two bright young guys with promising futures throw their lives away in such apparent madness, and what can be done to prevent others from doing the same? It is important to ask these things, now that Tamerlan is dead and Dzhokar is charged with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. Adding to the mystery is the fact that rebels in Chechnya are fighting the Russians, not the Americans.
The late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who sympathized with the Chechens’ plight, explained it in an article in The Guardian, just months before she was assassinated in 2006: “A war has been raging in the North Caucasian Republic of Chechnya in the Russian Federation since November 1994. Sometimes it is called ‘putting the region in order’; since the beginning of the international ‘antiterrorist’ era, it has become a ‘counter-terrorist operation.’ But it is never called a war, despite the fact that an estimated 70,000-200,000 Russian military personnel are conducting operations as if on enemy territory. The civilian population has taken the brunt of the military impact.”
A common thread running through all these cases is the radicalization of these individuals by fundamentalist Islamists. We need to find out why radicalization is so attractive to these young men, and Muslim leaders in the West need to work to reach out to them and find ways to counter it.
The Toronto 18, whom the National Post labelled “good Canadian boys being radicalized,” were also harshly dealt with in the aftermath of their 2006 plot to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange and a CSIS office, and to blow up Parliament. Eleven went to prison, two of those for life.
Harper may be content to deal with these things after the fact, but if we act on Trudeau’s advice, a lot of lives might be saved — the lives of those who can be deterred from radicalization, and the lives of those who might otherwise end up as their victims.
