In the aftermath of last week’s attack at Tunisia’s Bardo National Museum, a social media solidarity campaign was started to support the country’s tourism industry. The hashtag, #JeSuisBardo, explicitly referenced the campaign run in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January.
That reference is apt, because the two attacks had much in common. Both were carried out by home-grown attackers and both are part of the same broader battle.
On the day of the attacks, television commentators seemed to struggle to place the Tunisia attack into a clear narrative.
There were suggestions that it reflected internal post-revolution politics, that it was a revenge attack, either by radicals inside the country for the police disrupting a plot weeks earlier, or revenge for the death of a Tunisian militant in Libya.
No such questions accompanied the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack – the working assumption is that it must have been inspired from abroad.
There is a tendency to view attacks in Europe as inspired by a foreign ideology, while those attacks which occur in the Arab world are inspired by a domestic ideology.
But listen to the words of Nicolas Henin, a French hostage held for months by ISIL in Syria: “I noticed that these jihadists have little to do with the local culture – Arab or Muslim culture – they are children of our societies.
“They speak our language, they have the same cultural references we do. They watch the same movies as us, play the same video games our children play. They are products of our culture, our world.”
Many of these jihadis are products of European societies. Yes, critics will point out, there is a common link of religion. But that, as Charles Glass wrote over the weekend, forgets the long history of ideological youth drawn to conflicts they know little about. Faith is only one part of the equation.
Something is drawing young men and women from the cities of Europe to fight jihad. And while it is right to search for the pull factors – and religious justification is important, there’s no doubt about that – it is also right to seek the push factors.
What is it about disenfranchised European youths, in the midst of a post-recessionary period, that makes them search for meaning in the wars of other people? That is a question worth asking and answering, not to deflect blame from any religion or region, but simply to find an answer to a problem that plagues both sides of the Mediterranean, but whose victims are overwhelmingly from Arab societies.
A narrative is growing up in some circles of the West that the root cause of much of the conflicts of our time is religion, and that if only we could tackle the religious aspect, the conflicts would fade.
As tempting as it is to believe that, such a simplistic answer ignores both history and politics. The collapse of the Iraqi state did not come from nowhere. The Syrian uprising did not come out of nowhere. The jihadis did not come out of nowhere, nor did their weapons magically appear.
There is plenty of blame to go around – found in the culture and politics of both European and Arab societies.
It is certainly right that the Middle East takes its share of the blame for what is happening, in Tunisia, in Iraq and Syria and even in Paris. But to imagine that the problem, from a European perspective, is a “foreign” one is to misdiagnose the cause.
In a globalised world, a distinction between home-grown and foreign terrorism is increasingly irrelevant. Just as the battlefield for jihadis is global, so too are the recruiting fields – and there is clearly as fertile a soil in parts of Europe as there is in parts of the Middle East.
The Charlie Hebdo attacks were part of a broader battle, as were the attacks in Tunis, waged by people with a very particular view of the world – a view which, make no mistake, will eventually make targets of us all. Cities such as Tunis and Paris, open, liberal, meeting points of East and West, are at the top of their list.
But to combat it requires facing difficult truths. Recognising that the two French citizens who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo grew out of the soil of France is just as important as recognising the background to the three Tunisians who attacked the Bardo.
They are products of our world, children of our societies. We must ask why.
falyafai@thenational.ae
On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai
