The vigil held in Tunis after the assault to the Bardo Museum
We must give a proper name to what is happening today in the Arab and Muslim World, with the advance of the IS and the row of attacks unfolding in those countries, which are hitting European citizens, too.
Unless we clarify things, we will possibly incur in two different sets of mistakes: being caught up in a feeling of fear and anguish, as if it were inevitable for the Muslim reliigion to generate a certain kind of monsters – as Oriana Fallaci wrote a few years ago –, thus conjuring up the idea of building walls between us and them, without even considering any opportunity of change; or being overwhelmed by a feeling of resignation and powerlessness, as if the situation of those countries did not affect us all and did not represent a challenge we are called to deal with. Very often this kind of relinquishment of our responsibility is paradoxically justified with the mistakes of the West.
Everything happens, as writes Massimo Fini, would thus be a consequence of the Arab frustration toward the unfortunate American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or of the shortsighted Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Thus the monsters that inhabit that world today were generated by us ourselves, and thus we are no more morally entitled to raise our voice.
This kind of reasoning, apparently clear after the serious mistakes of US politics, fails to take into account that every violent regime in history has always justified itself by founding its actions on victimhood. Hitler H played deliberately on his country's humiliation under the Treaty of Versailles, and started persecuting the Jews by conveying the image of Germany as the imaginary victim of Jewish conspiracy; the Young Turks justified the genocide against the Armenians by pointing out the sympathy they had shown for Russia during WW1; the hutus massacred the tutsis by remembering the preceding ethnic conflicts. There is no such thing as a country that does not inherit some kinds of injustice, as it happens, by the way, to every human being. Yet if we consider the new evil as a product of the past, we deprive human beings of their room for freedom and responsibility. At that point whoever was humiliated can have the right to do what he can, up to the point of the extreme violence in an endless chain. This is the serious mistake of those who think evil is a byproduct of preceding causes.
I suggest to use the term murderous Islamist fundamentalism to define the new political stream that is crossing the Arab and Muslim world. In fact we cannot compare this kind of fundamentalism with the one that is ruling over Iran or Saudi Arabia, but a kind of fundamentalism that theorizes and preaches the elimination of Christians, Jews and all those who are pointed to as enemies of Islam. The great novelty is that it presents the murder of the so called infidels as a moral virtue to be awarded with great honors, from the possession of women as preys of war to political gratification on earth and the the illusion of guaranteed ascension to paradise. What is most striking in the video posted on the Web is the passion the executioners show in exhibiting their own victims, while historically the genocidal regimes have always tried to conceal the evidence of their crimes. One of the features of such murderous fundamentalism is its presumption of universalism, as it presents itself not only in the form of a unifying proposal for the whole Muslim world, but also as a hypothesis of redemption of the whole West. This is why its militants are called to act in Europe as well as on the frontlines from Iraq to Syria to Libya.
Today its strongholds are not only the places occupied by the IS in the Middle East, but also the Web, where it exerts an extraordinary appeal getting many young Muslim people to dream of an emancipation movement, as it has already happened in Europe with the young people who in 1968 supported the terrorist practices of the Red Brigades or the Baader Meinhof.
Someone could object that such murderous fundamentalism has developed in the shadow of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood or the fundamentalist regimes like Iran or Saudi Arabia, where women surely suffer from inferiority and are oppressed by the laws limiting freedom and crushing diversity. Certainly they have influenced it, and we must critically look at those regimes, but it is necessary to grasp the ideological novelty in such political groups.
To be clear, the difference between IS and the other fundamentalist regimes reminds us, with all due proportion, of what happened to the Jews between the two world wars. Regimes such as the Polish, Hungarian one or Mussolini’s Italy were reproachable because they put forward anti-Semitic legislation to hit the Jewish minority in its professions, but Nazism, who brandished the flag of anti-Semitism, aimed at the final solution. Who then failed to grasp this difference would not be able to understand the genesis of the savagery that would ravage Europe.
If we define this murderous fanaticism clearly, and we understand it is a new phenomenon, we will be able to create a broad front of resistance in the whole Arab world.
It will surely take many years to overcome the different ideas on women and secularism between us and the Arab world, but we can immediately find an immediate convergence to fight against whoever puts forward the elimination of human beings. Europeans and Muslims can march together against this enemy. The mobilization on Tunis squares against fundamentalist terrorism is a great example that makes us hopeful.
