Left-right culture fight: Our terrorism blind spot

PHOTO: Men mourn the death of their relatives after a blast outside a public park in Lahore, Pakistan, March 27, 2016. (Reuters: Mohsin Raza) Will we spend as much time analysing the terrorist attack in Pakistan as we have those in Europe? To even ask this seems to be viewed as a political act in a culture war that does nothing to make us safe. Julia Baird writes. Children milling about a park in Lahore, Pakistan, celebrating Easter. The little boys and girls running, laughing, playing, arcing into the air on swings, tugging on their mothers' skirts. Then a sudden blast that saw flames soar higher than trees, bodies blown into the air and limbs
PHOTO: Men mourn the death of their relatives after a blast outside a public park in Lahore, Pakistan, March 27, 2016. (Reuters: Mohsin Raza)

Will we spend as much timeanalysing the terrorist attack in Pakistan as we have those in Europe? To even ask this seems to be viewed as a political act in a culture war that does nothing to make us safe. Julia Baird writes.

Children milling about a park in Lahore, Pakistan, celebrating Easter. The little boys and girls running, laughing, playing, arcing into the air on swings, tugging on their mothers’ skirts. Then a sudden blast that saw flames soar higher than trees, bodies blown into the air and limbs torn from tiny frames then strewn across a parking lot. Exact numbers of deaths and injuries are not yet known; some are still being operated on, but it seems around 70 died; most were women and young children.

As she sat waiting for doctor’s reports on her two-year-old yesterday, a weeping mother, Nasreen Bibi, said: “We were just here to have a nice evening and enjoy the weather. May God shower his wrath upon these attackers. What kind of people target little children in a park?”

The kind of people who have killed many thousands of others in the same brutal, barbaric, grotesque way. Militants, extremists, fundamentalists who take different guises the world over, who have affiliations that shift and warp, and who we are still struggling to understand – and fight.

A faction of the Taliban claimed responsibility for this attack, and claimed they were deliberately targeting Christians.

So will we spend as much time analysing this as we have the attacks in Europe? Or shrug it off as part of the sorry state of conflict-riven Pakistan? How much should the terror in the rest of the world occupy us?

The fact remains that 97.4 per cent of all those lives snatched by the depraved execution of terror have been outside the west.

Last week on The Drum, in a show devoted entirely to the bomb blasts in Brussels, we asked whether it was also time to concentrate on Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East; to recognize that the terror attacks in the west were vastly in the minority.

Using data from the Global Terrorism Index of 2015 to provide context, we cited these facts:

  1. If we exclude September 11, which prompted the beginning of a war on terror, only 0.5 per cent of terror-related deaths have occurred in the West in the past 15 years. Zero point five.
  2. In the west, 70 per cent of all terror deaths* since 2006 have been by lone wolves. Of these deaths*, 80 per cent were attributed to “a mixture of right wing extremists, nationalists, anti-government elements, other types of political extremism and supremacism”. So the greatest number of attacks by Muslims is outside the west.

The reason we did this was to:

  1. Ask if the nature of terror was getting worse, and if so where and how? Since the turn of the century, the number of those killed by terrorists has risen from 3,329 (2000) to 32,685 (2014). The number of countries suffering major terrorist activity (more than 500 deaths) increased by 120 per cent in 2014, from five to 11.
  2. Provide context for what had happened since many in the west declared a war on terror after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
  3. Try to assess where the most dangerous spots are globally.
  4. Ensure we do not continue the undeniable and peculiar media bias of only focusing on tragedies when they happen in the west.
  5. Point to the growing influence of the African-based Boko Haram – now the deadliest group of terrorists on earth, responsible for 6,644 deaths last year – and ask what it might mean if they pledged allegiance to Islamic State (the second deadliest) in March last year.

Yesterday, Miranda Devine asked in the Sunday Telegraph why The Drum excluded the terrorism deaths in September 11 from our figure of 0.5 per cent, and if that was done to pursue an agenda to “deny the threat of Islamic terrorism”.

How would any of this “deny the threat of Islamic terrorism”? What these figures highlight is mostly Islamic terrorism – it’s just that it is outside the west, where it is festering and growing and spreading as a practice.

And while it seems perfectly sensible to exclude the September 11 attacks when you are examining the so-called “war on terror” (which, after all, takes place after those attacks), including those horrible deaths merely raises the percentage of deaths in the west from 0.5 to 2.6 per cent.

The fact remains that 97.4 per cent of all those lives snatched by the depraved execution of terror have been outside the west.

And we have paid them little attention. Even to mention them now seems to be viewed as a political act, as Devine puts it, the acts of “cultural relativists telling us we have no right to feel aggrieved by the attacks in Brussels or Paris or Sydney or Melbourne because there are more terrorist atrocities in the Middle East and Africa.”

No, it was simply to ask, if we are fighting terror, do we also need to be cognisant of the terror carried out by groups like Boko Haram in the rest of the world? If this is growing, where else will it spread? Who is funding it? Do we need to rethink allocation of aid? What can we learn from the patterns of terror in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, which carry the bulk of terror attacks? What will the involvement of our foreign fighters mean there? In, for example, an entire half hour devoted to Brussels, should we not also look at the other multiple attacks and vile death counts since Paris – in Mali, Tunisia, San Bernardino, Istanbul, Jakarta, Burkina Faso, Turkey, Ivory Coast?

In Pakistan this weekend, Christians were targeted, a group whose persecution has been woefully under-reported in the western media. But mostly, the acts of violence are against Muslims, by Muslims.

It’s not about a culture fight, or stoushes between narrowly defined “left” and “right” in western commentary. It’s a call for forensic, rigorous, encompassing analysis of a global pattern of terror: a crucial part of our fight against violent ideas, powerful propaganda and the kind of senseless, relentless murder that sees tiny hands scattered across dusty parking lots on a sunny Easter afternoon.

*Editor’s note (March 28, 2016): An earlier version of this article referred to “attacks” here, instead of “deaths”.