Madness out of control

The massacre of 14 innocent civilians in San Bernardino, California, last week is yet another development in the lethal tactics extremists are deploying far beyond the lands their attacks would be expected most.

Within the last few weeks, the same group, Daesh, attacked in Lebanon, France, Tunisia and Nigeria, and now in the US.

It also claimed responsibility for the mid-air explosion of a Russian passenger plane departing Egyptian territory at the end of October, which left all 220 passengers dead and boasted 65 suicide-bombing attacks in Iraq and Syria during the month of October. 

The nature of the San Bernardino attack, however, sounds particularly alarming.

For Daesh to be able to recruit thoughtless men and women, mercenaries, religious zealots, extremist ideologues, opportunists or adventurers, to brainwash or to entrap by various means to tread the trail of violence and murder is not novel anymore. This has been the mission of this terrorist gang that set no boundaries for its barbaric conduct and savagery.

What sounds frightening, though, is to have people living oceans apart from “Daesh-land”, in a totally different kind of world and cultural environment, and yet so deeply radicalised that they voluntarily commit to destroying others’ as well as their own lives with extreme ferocity and sickening thirst for innocent blood, for no reason.

While counterterrorism efforts could deal, with some measure of success, with the phenomenon of practical recruitment that involves movement of willing volunteers across international borders to reach Daesh, it sounds extremely difficult, in the short run at least, to detect cases of radical infestation in remote areas without direct indoctrination contact, in good time, before the self-made killers decide to act.

The case of the two San Bernardino killers is typical. It raises a stunning alarm as to the limitless effect of the “religiously based” Daesh ideology on young innocent men and women anywhere in the world. It also tells us that no matter how tight and comprehensive security restrictions can be, they offer no guarantee that suspects can be intercepted before they strike.

Apparently, Syed Rizwan Farouq, the 28-year-old US citizen who was born in the US to Pakistani parents, and his 27-year-old wife Tashfeen Malik, who stormed a holiday party last week in the Inland Regional Centre in San Bernardino, a state-run facility for individuals with developmental disabilities, killing 14 people and injuring 21 more, were not acting as an organised Daesh cell, but fulfilling what they must have believed a Daesh religious duty.

Being Muslims, their crime adds substantially to the damage caused to the noble image of Islam, presenting it as an exclusionist, intolerant faith that condones violence, promotes hatred, disrespects life, harbours extremist ideas, denies civilised human values, encourages aggression and rejects social harmony and diversity.

The crime also paints every Muslim, wherever he lives, as a dangerous element in his community, as well as a potential time bomb.

That does not help integration and togetherness in our modern world where it is not possible anymore to separate people from each other in any country on the basis of faith, race or cultural affiliation.

The big question, however, relates to the power of an ideology that haunts young men and women, driving them blindly to abandon their normal peaceful lives in their countries to surrender willingly, instead, to the terrorists, the merchants of death, to the outright criminals and to the killing fields in remote and dangerous lands.

The married couple, which stormed the centre with machine guns and pipe bombs, (luckily the bombs did not detonate) was only married late last year; they have a six-month-old daughter.

If they were already planning to engage in such criminal suicidal conduct, and to premeditate mass murder within their very community, why did they envisage, at the same time, family life and children, unless, and that is sheer insanity, they believed they would embark on routine jihadist missions of murdering innocent people in their neighbourhood and return upon completion to their home to feed their baby and resume normal life.

There is no question that Daesh is a major contributor to this fast-spreading madness, using Islam as the inspiration for every evil that the essence of the mission of Islam opposes, deplores, bans and rejects.

It is absolute madness, not religious inspiration, not even radicalisation, that makes a man and his wife turn against their own community, the community that embraced them, with machine guns to spray the party attendees with bullets with the intent to take lives in cold blood.

It is reported that Farouq, who worked as a health inspector for the San Bernardino County Health Department was actually in the party before he suddenly left to return soon after with his wife, both armed, to murder his own co-workers, peaceful families and happy people celebrating a holiday.

This group, Daesh, and any other similar terror organisations, must be destroyed before poisoning more minds. This is a priority that should not be debated any further, as every day of delay would put more people, however remote, at risk and would claim additional victims.

We may agree or disagree with the military measures taken so far to attack Daesh in Syria and Iraq. The “war on terror” has undoubtedly been counterproductive and the risk of further war on terror without giving adequate consideration to other unlimited related factors responsible for the creation of an environment conducive for incubating all forms of extremism and violent lawlessness, eventually terrorism, is a foregone certainty. 

But the physical existence of Daesh as an organisation ought to be finished so that its ideology can be next dealt with, and that will take ages.

Any effort to liberate Islam from the damage caused to its noble mission by those who murdered and blundered in its name will take ages too.

And equally hard and painstaking is going to be the task of mending fences between Muslim communities, Muslim families and individuals with their foreign hosts, as the perception that every Muslim individual can be a threat is being further enforced with every fresh atrocity. 

It is a long way to go and therefore there is no more time to waste.