On Tuesday, reactionary French historian, writer and former militant Dominique Venner made a figurative and presumably literal splash by shooting himself “through the mouth” in Notre Dame Cathedral. The media were quick to note that he’d recently fulminated against government recognition of gay marriages, which France has just brought in following bitter controversy, and against Muslim immigrants from Africa. An explanatory letter that Venner punctiliously placed on the altar indeed alluded to threats to the family and to “our identity”, but seemed to suggest that his fundamental objection was to “the metaphysics of the unlimited, the baleful source of all modern excesses”. A French intellectual’s suicide note would pretty well have to include a few lines like that, I suppose.

National Front leader Marine Le Pen promptly took to Twitter to announce her “respect” for Venner, but this verdict was hardly unanimous. Even one of the leading lights of the French anti-gay-marriage movement, who for some reason calls herself Frigide Barjot, was disapproving. An anonymous source who “knew” Venner said that he was dying anyway, and “wanted to give meaning to his death”. A Femen activist mimed suicide in the same cathedral, with “MAY FASCISM REST [not ROT?] IN HELL” written on the front of her bare and rather fetching torso. Even if Venner’s ghost was still flitting around the precincts of Notre Dame at the time, his stern rejection of individualistic hedonism may have prevented him from enjoying the show in the way that the more cynical and worldly Vladimir Putin did when confronted with a similar protest back in April.

On Wednesday, a Muslim of African descent teamed up with a “much more shy” accomplice to chop up British soldier Lee Rigby in the London district of Woolwich, as if to underscore Venner’s misgivings about a certain type of immigration to Europe. However, there are significant complications in that the assassin is thought to be Michael Adebolajo from Essex, who was born on British soil to Nigerian Christian parents and then converted to Islam as a young man. He is a Muslim and, in ethnic terms, an African, but not exactly an African Muslim of the kind that Venner seems to have been worried about.

They say that converts are more zealous than those who learn faith at a maternal knee. Whether that’s true or not, the Woolwich jihadist clearly became fairly radical at some point. After hacking Rigby to death, he was quite happy to explain his motivations to bystanders while waiting for armed police to arrive so that he could attack them too:

We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth.

 

We must fight them. I apologise that women had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.

That seems clear enough to make London mayor Boris Johnson’s comment “that it is completely wrong to blame this killing on the religion of Islam and it is also equally wrong to link this murder to the actions of British foreign policy” seem more than a little suspect. I think the killing happened precisely because of the way particular aspects of British foreign policy intersect with particular strains of Islamic thought. Given the recent deployment of British soldiers in predominantly Muslim countries, and the presence in the UK of Muslims who see themselves as members of a global ummah that must defend itself more or less by any means necessary, shit like this is going to hit the fan occasionally. Why wouldn’t it?

The jihadist’s apparent urge to protect women from sights that might disturb them seems misguided in the light of what followed. First a passing former teacher called Ingrid Loyau-Kennett had a civil but hardly obsequious conversation with him over Rigby’s body while waiting for armed police to arrive, quite unfazed. She apparently loves the queen and thinks “everything is going downhill”, characteristics that might endear her to the ghost of Venner.

When the armed police finally did show up, however, the poetic justice in the air became even more palpable. A rapper called Boya Dee, on Twitter, possibly said it best:

Oh my God!!!! The way Feds took them out!!! It was a female police officer she come out the whip and just started bussssin shots!!

Out the whip? Bussssin? Anyway, she evidently shot the jihadist bastards, if “jihadist” isn’t too respectful a term given their shambolic efforts – and better yet, she incapacitated them without killing them, so that it might eventually be possible to question them about their motivations and associates. Boya Dee also claimed that one of the jihadists tried to fire a gun at the police, but that “it just backfires and blows mans finger clean off”.

Venner, with a sniff and a Gallic shrug, would probably have said that that moment encapsulated the whole history of modern confrontation between Islam and the West. A faulty weapon and all the help Allah can provide is no match for a well-oiled gun in competent hands.

The National Post and the Toronto Star don’t agree on much, but the apparently pressing need to convince the public that Islam could not possibly have anything to do with terrorist attacks either planned or committed by highly religious Muslims has brought them together like circling celestial bodies that come into conjunction every few generations or so. Better yet, the unimaginative apologists recruited by the two newspapers trot out, among other things, exactly the same tired and remarkably dishonest little talking point in favour of the essentially humane and compassionate nature of Islam.

It came up tails, so I’ll let the Star’s Faisal Kutty go first:

The vast majority of Muslims condemn terrorism because even classical Islamic law explicitly classifies hirabah (terrorism) as a serious sin. In fact, indiscriminate killing and attacks are prohibited. Indeed, the Qur’an proclaims: “Anyone who kills a person it is as if he has killed the whole of humanity.”

The Post’s Zijad Delic relies on the same Koranic passage, though he paraphrases rather than quotes:

At the heart of Islamic logic and ethics — a logic and ethics inseparable from true faith — is the sanctity and dignity of human life. God Almighty says in the Qur’an that to kill one human being (a nafs, or soul) is tantamount in sin to killing all of one’s human brothers and sisters. (Qur’an 5:35) [sic – it's actually 5:32, or thereabouts] God upholds the sanctity of life as a universal principle, as He says in the Qur’an: “Do not kill one another, for God is indeed merciful unto you” (4:29).

 

Could the Divine voice be any clearer than that? Any opinion that contradicts this core Qur’anic logic has no value to Islam whatsoever.

Maybe it couldn’t be any clearer, but that’s a moot point because the “Divine voice” didn’t say that at all. My Koran (translated by Tarif Khalidi for Penguin Classics) uses somewhat different wording: “he who kills a soul, it is as if he killed the whole of mankind”. Except – and stop me if you’ve heard this one, because that widely used but heavily redacted quotation has been debunked in many corners of cyberspace – I seem to have left out a few words, just like Faisal Kutty did. Here’s the whole passage, in context:

It is for this reason [some nonsense about Cain not having successfully concealed Abel's corpse – I kid you not] that We decreed to the Children of Israel that he who kills a soul neither in revenge for another, nor to prevent corruption on earth, it is as if he killed the whole of mankind; whereas he who saves a soul, it is as if he has saved the whole of mankind. Our messengers came to them bearing clear proofs, but many of them thereafter were disobedient on earth.

 

In truth, the punishment of those who make war against God and His Messenger, and roam the earth corrupting it, is that they be killed, or crucified, or have their hands and feet amputated, alternately [verily, Allah is a micromanager], or be exiled from the land. This would be their shame in the present life, and in the next a terrible torment awaits them – except those who repent before you gain mastery over them. Therefore, you must understand that God is All-Forgiving [!], Compassionate [!!!] to each [except perhaps the poor bugger whose appendages got lopped off].

Doesn’t sound quite so warm and inspiring and no-man-is-an-islandish now, does it?

I haven’t read that much of the Koran, but most of the parts I have read have been sort of like this – replete with hostility to unbelievers, full of non-sequiturs and half-connected thoughts, spouting risible threats of hellfire and damnation. If you think I’m exaggerating, take a look for yourself. It might not be a problem, of course, if Muslims didn’t take the damn thing so seriously. Koran recitation contests are a big deal in the Muslim world, or at least significant parts thereof, and a person who has memorized the whole Koran is known as a hafiz or hafiza.

I don’t think that Islam is uniformly awful – in fact, there are some rather praiseworthy things about it, such as the emphasis on charity – or doubt that the vast majority of the world’s Muslims are peaceable and productive members of the societies they inhabit. A good case, though not one I happen to agree with, can be made that Islam is no more likely to beget violence than other religions. However, Kutty and Delic aren’t even attempting to make such a case in an intellectually honest way. Instead, they’re dodging and obfuscating, chopping out inconvenient bits of Koranic verses and evidently hoping no one will notice. An undergraduate who tried that kind of thing on a term paper would probably get a zero. In the unlikely event that the gods exist, and give a damn about honesty, “a terrible torment awaits them” in the next life.

P.S. Wondering about that 4:29? Here it is, in context:

O believers, consume not the wealth you trade among yourselves dishonestly, unless it be a commercial deal resulting from mutual agreement [dishonesty is acceptable provided you can get the poor sap on  the other side of the negotiating table to mumble "yes"?]. Do not kill each other [note that this only applies to "believers"], for God is always Compassionate [heard that one before!] to every one of you. Whoever does so, aggressively and unjustly [ there always seems to be a certain amount of hedging when the matter of unlawful killing comes up, doesn't there?], him We shall scorch at a raging flame [yawn], a thing easy for God [sure, if the bastard existed]. If you shun the major sins you have been forbidden to commit, We shall expiate your misdeeds [thanks!] and lead you through an honourable portal [sounds exciting].

In America, surviving Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (it’s probably a sign of immaturity that I keep wanting to pronounce his first name as “Joker”) is reportedly answering interrogators’ questions in ways that suggest that he and his older, seemingly more zealous brother Tamerlan were motivated by what the BBC calls “jihadist ideology”. In Canada, Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier were arrested on Monday on suspicion of plotting to derail a train, supposedly with guidance from al-Qaeda members based in Iran. Both are Muslims, and Esseghaier at least is particularly hardline in his religious views. The Tsarnaevs are ethnic Chechens who lived in Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan before moving to America when one was a child and the other was a teenager. Esseghaier is a Tunisian who came to Canada four years ago, as an adult, and Jaser is a Palestinian who has been in Canada for at least a couple of years.

The two pairs of men perhaps occupy different points on the continuum between “homegrown terror” and, well, the imported kind. The Tsarnaevs, especially Dzhokhar, were partly raised in America and seemingly radicalized there. I don’t know at what point Jaser and Esseghaier came into contact with al-Qaeda, if indeed that part of the story is true (the Iranians have been issuing firm denials). Even if they came to Canada only to attack it, however, they had plenty of time to change their minds about Canadian society – and evidently didn’t.

Jaser and Esseghaier, allegedly, were rude enough to plot an attack on Canadian soil. Plenty of other would-be mujahedeen, however, have gone to fight their wars abroad. An article published last year estimated that between 45 and 60 Canadians “had traveled abroad to join al-Qaeda affiliates”, and Canada is hardly the only Western country to export Islamic militants. Hundreds of Europeans have gone to fight in the name of Islam in Syria alone. The numbers are minuscule as a percentage of the Canadian or European population, but they’re large enough to indicate that Western countries really do harbour a substantial contingent of Islamic militants who are “homegrown” to varying degrees. There are people like Jaser and Esseghaier, who came to Canada from the Muslim world as adults and never became citizens. There are also people like Xristos Katsiroubas (Jesus H. Xrist, one is tempted to say) who was born in Canada to ethnically European, non-Muslim parents and somehow ended up dying for Allah outside an Algerian border town whose name apparently means “place of camel drivers”.

Whether the issue has more to do with the nature of Islam itself or geopolitical factors such as external attempts to bully and dominate oil-rich Muslim countries (personally, I think it’s a bit of both), reluctance to admit that the West faces a specific kind of threat from Islamic militancy is beginning to seem as ridiculous as an alcoholic’s reluctance to admit to a drinking problem. However, some alcoholics are functional, and some threats are less than debilitating. Jaser and Esseghaier were under surveillance for quite a while before they were arrested, and probably never had much hope of bringing their plans to fruition. The Toronto 18 were equally hapless. Sooner or later a punch will get through our guard, but life will go on – as is happening in Boston, and as happened in London and Madrid and elsewhere following jihadist ructions.

More important, I think, is what the phenomenon of homegrown and semi-imported Islamic terrorism reveals about Western and particularly North American myths surrounding assimilation and cultural integration. Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Guardian, does a good job of summarizing the issues involved. He notes that the line between domestic and international terrorism is now “unnervingly fuzzy” and that the process of “transforming onetime outsiders into loyal citizens” sometimes simply fails. A further problem is that failure can be subtle. One wonders how many Canadian Muslims would never dream of derailing a train, but would vote in favour of blasphemy (or “hate speech”, if that proved more constitutionally acceptable) laws, tighter restrictions on alcohol and pornography, harsher penalties for drug users, less sex education and evolutionary biology in schools, and so on and so forth. The Tsarnaevs’ mother was no terrorist, but a woman who used to visit her for facials (full disclosure: the most precise definition of “facial” that I can manage to come up with, in my ignorance, is “a cosmetic treatment applied to the face”) reports that she thought 9/11 was an American government conspiracy aimed at Muslims. Fighting attitudes like that seems far more difficult, and yet in some ways far more important, than fighting terrorists.

One of the most simplistic but intuitively satisfying approaches to justice is the principle of lex talionis, the law of retaliation. If Adam hits Suzy and breaks her nose, then perhaps the law should punish Adam by giving him a broken nose as well. It’s hardly surprising that this rather obvious concept occurred to the inhabitants of ancient Israel:

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:24-25)

However, this rule proved too simplistic to apply to all situations. The text goes on to list special cases:

And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake. And if he smite out his manservant’s tooth, or his maidservant’s tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake. (Exodus 21:26-27)

In other words, be careful about which body parts you smite, because excessively forceful smiting of eyes and teeth is an HR issue. Also, be careful about your ox:

If an ox gore a man or woman, that they die; then the ox shall surely be stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit. But if the ox were wont to push with his horn in time past, and it hath been testified to his owner, and he hath not kept him in, but that he hath killed a man or woman; the ox shall be stoned, and his owner also shall be put to death. (Exodus 21:28-29).

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French President François Hollande recently visited Mali, basking in his military’s success in driving Ansar Dine and other Islamist militants out of the northern cities of Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal. Apparently there was relatively little fighting, as the militants sensibly decided that going toe-to-toe with the Foreign Legion while simultaneously being pounded by French air power and trying to keep control of largely hostile urban populations was not exactly a winning strategy.

The people of Timbuktu, at least, seemed prepared to welcome Hollande with open arms. This city on the southern fringe of the Sahara has a distinguished centuries-old heritage of scholarship and culture, on which the Islamists had been trampling with an iron heel. In a final outrage they set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute, a storehouse of priceless ancient manuscripts, before retreating. Hundreds of the manuscripts were apparently destroyed, but hundreds of thousands had been safely hidden by the families who had looked after them for centuries. Several of these documents are available for viewing in an online exhibition: most are works of Islamic theology or jurisprudence (the Islamists apparently wanted to destroy a decent slice of the heritage of their own damn religion) but the exhibition also includes other interesting tidbits such as medical and astronomical texts, a document of manumission for a slave woman, and even a copy of an elementary math primer that was “used extensively by students in Timbuktu and North Africa”. To call the Islamists vandals would be an insult to Genseric and Gunthamund.

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As the French make slow progress against Islamist militants in Mali, and Muslim hostage-takers that may include a Canadian continue to hold out at a gas plant in Algeria, Syria is of course suffering through a separate civil war in which the armed partisans of radical Islam are major participants. The BBC was enterprising enough to secure an interview with a high ranking member of what seems to be the leading jihadist faction in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra.

The objectives of the group are rather unpleasantly clear:

“In the name of God, praise is to God and peace upon our Prophet Muhammad,” he began, “the people in Syria are religious by nature.”

“They like Islam. People here are fed up with socialist and secular regimes. They are all looking forward to an Islamic state. It is impossible there could be anything else in Syria.”

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Events are moving quickly in Mali, but it’s clear that the French are finding the battle against the Islamist insurgents to be tough going. Their combination of air power and a few hundred pairs of “boots on the ground”, along with the efforts of the Malian army, has inflicted casualties but has not entirely halted the Islamist advance into southern Mali, let alone reversed it. The French are sending in more troops, as are some of the neighbouring African countries, and other Western governments are helping with intelligence and logistics. The Guardian has a long but seemingly worthwhile and well-informed summary of some of the latest developments in Mali itself, and one of the points that emerges clearly is that the French intervention is very welcome at least among the people of southern Mali. Although they are predominantly Muslims, their brand of Islam is traditionally rather relaxed, and they have an uneasy relationship with the Tuareg people who live in northern Mali and dominate at least one of the major insurgent groups (Ansar Dine).

Canada, so far, has agreed to lend France the use of one “heavy-lift” C-17 aircraft for transport purposes, for one week.  This isn’t just a token contribution, since France must have a genuine need to move troops and equipment into Mali. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to suspect that we could do a little more. Roméo Dallaire and Kyle Matthews, writing in the National Post, suggest that Canada should send in the troops. After all, we have high-quality soldiers who can speak French, which happens to be Mali’s official language. As one would expect from Dallaire (I don’t know anything about Matthews), there’s a fair streak of humanitarian idealism in their argument that we should “support the Malian government, instead of abandoning its citizens to extensive retributions and abuses”. They even trot out the poor old sacred cow of the Responsibility to Protect, as if that could still be taken seriously following events in Syria and any number of other places.

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Despite the “surrender monkeys” canard that our American neighbours have been known to toss around, the French have emerged as the most pugnacious Western nation in dealing with the fallout of the Arab Spring. Last year they led the charge against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, for better or for worse, and now they’re cheerfully taking on the jihadists who have seized control of the northern half of the west African country of Mali:

France’s defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said hundreds of French troops and aircraft had been involved in fighting at three locations in the centre of Mali, including against an Islamist command centre.

A French army unit also attacked a column of rebels heading towards the town of Mopti. He insisted that France was compelled to act quickly to stop the Islamist offensive, which he said could allow “a terrorist state at the doorstep of France and Europe”.

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I suppose it might have been agreeable to find an upbeat and cheerful topic for my first post of 2013, but what happened to catch my eye was a slightly grim article on religious conflict in the more-or-less central Nigerian city of Jos, where the Muslim north of the country bumps up against the Christian and animist south. There has been a pattern of sectarian violence in the city over the past several years, including a particularly devastating set of bombings in a Christian neighbourhood late in 2010:

The blasts, which killed at least 32 people and injured another 74, were later claimed by Boko Haram, the Islamic armed group operating in northern Nigeria. The group’s name translates as “Western education is sinful.”

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What is the worst religion? What is the most vile of beliefs. What is the crime of crimes, that condemns belief in god and leads us to atheism?

According to various sources, Sheikh Mohammad Al-Arifi stated that foreign fighters in Syria had the right to engage in short-term marriages to satisfy their sexual desires and boost their determination to fight against the Assad regime. Syrian girls and women from age 14 upward were considered fair game and apparently secured their own place in heaven if they participated in these “intercourse marriages.”

Only, he didn’t. Never happened.

There was also skepticism from many quarters about the veracity of the report, particularly among savvy Mideast experts. Rightly so. The story, much like one a few months ago about Egyptian Islamist MPs proposing laws that permitted sex with a deceased spouse up to six hours after his/her death, turned out to be a gross lie.

Oops. Confirmation bias, and what happens when we starting thinking the worst of each other…. without bothering to check facts.

Let’s be careful out there.