It’s always a mistake to comment on terrorist atrocities before all the facts are clear. Last summer when news emerged of a bomb attack in Norway, a country embroiled in the 2005 cartoon saga and with troops serving in Afghanistan, many assumed that the perpetrators must be Islamic.
Seven years earlier the murderous attack on Madrid was at first blamed on ETA, and the Spanish government’s wrong call helped lose them the election. Further back the Oklahoma bombing of 1995 was initially thought to be the work of Islamic radicals, who had bombed the World Trade Centre just two years earlier.
It’s easy to get it wrong because so many of the world’s varied extremists, whatever their motivation and however much they might hate each other, focus their anger and loathing on similar targets – the state, the city, modernity, capitalism, and the one group who embody all these complicating, unsettling changes in the minds of lonely, failed young men – Jews.
People often make the wrong call because that’s what they want to believe, because it fits into their narrative. The recent shootings in Toulouse are a case in point. Today’s Guardian editorial, for example, draws from this tragedy the following conclusion:
Campaigning has been suspended, but the shooting has already sent tremors through France's presidential election. The first to say what was on everyone's mind was not the Socialist challenger François Hollande but the centrist François Bayrou. He said the killings were the product of a sick society, with politicians who pointed the finger and inflamed passions. No prize for guessing whom he was talking about. Nicolas Sarkozy's lurch to the right has included such claims as there being too many immigrants in France, and that the French were secretly ingesting halal meat. Alain Juppé, the foreign minister, fought back by declaring that Bayrou's statement was ignoble. But it is must already be clear this part of the incumbent's re-election campaign is dead. Currying votes from the extreme right is a two-edged sword, and Sarkozy could be about to feel its blade. The minister who has been most shamelessly xenophobic, Claude Guéant, is now the man in charge of the manhunt.
They are not the only ones. Yesterday’s Independent posed the question: “Did Sarkozy’s far-right rhetoric fan flames of ethnic hatred?”
No. So rather than these killings being a spur to countless reports on white terror by the BBC, always keen to warn of the dangers of xenophobia, state media is now quoting various Muslim leaders saying that this has nothing to do with Islam.
I agree. Many people kill in the name of jihad but they do not represent Islam or Muslims, the vast majority of whom will be horrified by the Toulouse killings. It is not religion that turns some young Muslim men in the West violent, but the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant. Confused and angry young men easily attach themselves to something greater than themselves, especially a strong, confident inter-national identity historically opposed to the West from which they feel so rejected.
Many of the campaigners who earlier blamed these attacks on a xenophobic atmosphere across Europe are now very keen to point out that they are nothing to do with Islam. Not because they care about Islam, but because their faith is “diversity”, the catchy term for universalism, the idea that all limits to human altruism are immoral.
Universalism is the basis of the post-war European moral settlement, and it has motivated two of its great revolutions – European integration and the creation of multi-ethnic societies. This followed two appalling nationalist-fuelled wars, and Europe’s universalist leaders believe that nations “lead to war”, in the words of EU President Herman Van Rompuy. Any opposition to universalism, whether to trans-national governments or open borders, is therefore racism, xenophobia or “far-Right rhetoric”.
And yet, as GK Chesterton put it, to condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons, is like condemning love because some love leads to murder.
Islam is not to blame for the Toulouse killings. But had it been the work of white extremists, neither would patriotism have been the problem.
The European elite still uses the word patriotism, of course, but they mean patriotism for an idea – tolerance, fair play or other supposed national values – rather than in its truer sense of an exclusionary love of one's homeland and a wish to be around people like ourselves.
This feeling, shared by almost all of humanity and most certainly ingrained, Western metropolitan elites cannot comprehend – which is why they take such joy when its more extreme adherents prove to be violent, hate-filled psychopaths. It is easier to see those aberrations as the norm, rather than recognise their views as being the pathological variation of a healthy, universal human need for “discriminating altruism”.
You cannot buck human nature, and universalism is an unsustainable, unworkable idea based on a utopian vision of humanity. One of the sadder ironies is that it is motivated partly by our revulsion over the Holocaust, yet this idea has helped to introduce Middle Eastern anti-Semitism into Europe (although I should add a caveat, that this may be exaggerated in some people’s imaginations. Jews and Muslims rub along perfectly well in north London, where I live, and it’s wrong to see European Muslims as raving anti-Semites).
But at the same time this universalism has become the moral basis for a worldwide intellectual assault on the state of Israel, whose citizens are charged with the crime of wishing to form a separate, Jewish state, an idea called “apartheid” by Europeans who have the moral good luck to be able to voice such absurdities without facing any consequences.
People should reconsider this idea, but as for the tragedy in France, it does not say anything about Islam, only of human nature and its potential for evil. All that matters ultimately is that three innocent children, a father and three young soldiers are now dead.