February 22, 2015
It is really difficult to know if this week’s three-day
summit on countering violent extremism that took place at the White House and
the U.S. State Department should be taken seriously, or dismissed as just
another public relations waste of time and feel-good exercise. This is because
the event was defined by a vigorous combination of sensible, mature and
realistic ideas—alongside analyses and approaches that are truly infantile and
irrelevant to the important task at hand.
The focus of the event, of course, was violent
extremism by young Muslims around the world who get so much attention these
days for their ugly deeds. What was not on the agenda was violent extremism
carried out by racist Americans, predatory Russians, criminal Zionist settlers,
Christian killers, or militias, sectarian gangs and many state police forces in
Arab and foreign countries—partly, one assumes, because that kind of violent extremism
is sanctioned or directly perpetrated by the governments whose officials were
sitting around the table.
This is not a throwaway criticism or a secondary
issue; it is a core, structural problem that largely explains why political,
religious and sectarian violence continues to spread around the world, and why
attempts to promote reason and peaceful coexistence mostly fail. So attempts to
counter the problem of political violence and radical ideologies will always
necessarily fail as long as they occur in a political context which prohibits
including in the title “violent extremism” incidents such as the 2003
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq that opened the floodgates to the current waves
of Islamist savagery, systematic Zionist colonization and settler violence in
Palestinian lands, chronic political and physical assaults by Arab security
states against their own citizens, and many other examples.
This is such a profound structural constraint on
making progress in this worthy endeavor because it leaves the struggle lacking
at once the most critical dimensions of legitimacy, mobilizing credibility, and
efficacy. The dilemma here for foreign powers like the United States that cares
so much about this issue that it organizes such high-profile global gatherings
is three-fold: How can the governments that themselves routinely use political
violence or demean their own people be the ones that counter this phenomenon?
How can governments like the United States credibly work to curtail political
extremism when a major and continuing promoter and enabler of such extremism is
American military adventurism and criminality around the world? How can foreign
governments strike a realistic balance between their awareness of the
violence-inducing politics of governments in the Middle East and their own
strategic desire to maintain those governments in place?
Such violent intellectual extremism in the
American-led drive to counter violent extremism such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko
Haram and others should not blind us to the fact that, amidst the usual
hypocrisy and haughtiness, President Barack Obama made some very sensible and
important points in his speech to the Washington gathering on Thursday. These
touched on the local political and socio-economic causes of youth alienation
that help to radicalize some people.
He noted specifically and correctly: “When
people—especially young people—feel entirely trapped in impoverished
communities, where there is no order and no path for advancement, where there
are no educational opportunities, where there are no ways to support families,
and no escape from injustice and the humiliations of corruption—that feeds
instability and disorder, and makes those communities ripe for extremist
recruitment.
“We have to address the political grievances
that terrorists exploit. Again, there is not a single perfect causal link, but
the link is undeniable. When people are oppressed, and human rights are denied—particularly
along sectarian lines or ethnic lines—when dissent is silenced, it feeds
violent extremism. It creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to
exploit. When peaceful, democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the
terrorist propaganda that violence is the only answer available.”
Hallelujah, brother! Unusual for American senior
officials speaking about the Middle East or Arab-Islamic dynamics, this is a
case of refreshingly accurate, honest and relevant talk from a U.S. president.
It is important to acknowledge this, but also to ask how many of those
violence-generating governance problems in the global South occur in part
because powers in the global North maintain those states in place.
How to change this situation has long eluded
both the people of the South who suffer the ills of generational indigenous
oppression and injustices, and foreign powers who now feel the danger of
expanding extremist movements emanating from the Middle East mainly. The answer
will emerge from more honest encounters and analyses that lead to a change in
policies all around. Obama’s comments this week hint that this kind of honesty
is possible, but it remains smothered under much stronger forces of
imperial-vintage dishonesty and a refusal to grasp the collective roles and
responsibilities for the violence that threatens us all.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily
Star. He was founding director and now senior policy
fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs
at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter at: @ramikhouri.
Copyright
©2015 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global