What the Texas attacks tell us about our era

HA Hellyer asks: Do we want societies where all feel safe, secure and free from the machinations of violent extremists and bigotry?

Political blogger Pamela Geller was one of the organisers of the Texas event. (Mike Stone / Reuters)

There are many questions after the attack in Texas, where armed assailants fired upon an event held by a lobby group. Why did the gunmen fire? Are those who held the event heroic? How are our societies best placed to react – not only today, but tomorrow?

There are a few items to unpack here. There is the legal arena, the moral question and the political one. Let’s first put the cartoon competition into context.

The event was clearly designed to offend Muslim sensibilities by caricaturing the Prophet Mohammed. This was not, it should be noted, an event that was aimed at aggrandising against a particular political ideology, or a certain group of Muslims. Rather it was aimed at all Muslims, everywhere, regardless of their stances. The event was led by Pamela Geller, who is described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an NGO that was founded 44 years ago in the birthplace of the modern American civil rights movement, as the “anti-Muslim movement’s most visible and flamboyant figurehead”.

Another piece of context to keep in mind: the attackers were the latest in a line of, as far as can be told at this time, “lone wolves”, who seem to have been radicalised in a discreet manner. The common pattern would point to the internet, but that is still unclear. Their criminal actions are not the first – and won’t be the last. The radical ideology of groups like ISIL has gained hundreds of recruits in the West. One can only guess at the numbers who sympathise. The West must be prepared. The question is how.

On the legal level, there are two clear points. The first is that Ms Geller had the legal right to hold the event in Texas. Muslim-American community organisations in Texas knew this well – and while they too had the legal right to protest and picket the event, they preferred, sensibly, to ignore it. The second point is that there is no justification for the gunmen’s response – their terrorism requires condemnation and a full investigation by law enforcement.

Was Ms Geller morally courageous in holding the event, as her supporters argue? The answer is no. Courage in the context of any public display relates to speaking truth to power. In this event, Ms Geller was representing power. She and her group are part of a powerful network in the United States and Europe that promotes anti-Muslim bigotry. They are well-financed and many of them served as the intellectual inspiration for the radical Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in the 2011 terror attacks in Norway.

Ms Geller’s opponent in this contest was not another powerful group – it was, in the immediate sense, Muslims in Texas, and Muslims more broadly in America. In both cases, those communities are hardly powerful compared to Ms Geller or who she represents.

Had Ms Geller’s event been focused on ISIL, there might be an argument that she was speaking truth to power. But her event was about far more than a marginal fringe group that Muslim communities the world over have condemned – it was about a faith group of more than a billion people.

On the political level – can one argue that events such as the one Ms Geller held aid recruitment to ISIL and radical extremism? That is a slippery slope.

Do such competitions contribute to the sense of alienation among Muslim American communities? Certainly. But is that sufficient for a successful recruitment drive from ISIL and their propagandists? That is far more of a jump – and the road to Raqqa, ISIL’s headquarters in Syria, may be paved with many different things for different people. But there is another political and moral element here. In 2015, many countries are tackling the scourge of radical extremism. It’s likely that we will still be doing so in 2020. But there will be a time, and hopefully not in the distant future, when that battle will be over –and we will have won.

At that point, we run the risk of dealing with the ramifications of our response to radical extremism long after it has ended as a threat to our societies. The societies that our children grow up in ought to be better than the ones we live in.

They can be, if we learn from the challenges of this age. Do we want societies where all feel safe, secure and free from the machinations of violent extremists and bigotry? Or ones where we sink into narrow identities that simply drive our societies apart? The choice is ours.

Dr HA Hellyer is an associate fellow in International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, and the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC

On Twitter: @hahellyer