Fighting a Cultural Battle

As this is written, rescue workers are still separating the bodies from the bamboo after the terrorist bombing of a nightclub in Bali. A couple of weeks ago, some Kuwaitis found a way onto a super-secure Persian Gulf island and started shooting at U.S. Marines. Who knows what's happened by the time you read this. While our government is chasing oil-pipe dreams in Iraq and Central Asia, the al Qaeda network still poses an imminent threat to the land and people of the United States. It's a threat that no missile shield will repel. It needs to be met with preventive police work, including perhaps the prudent use of force. But those things by themselves won't be enough. This is also a cultural battle, and on that front radical Islam (which is, for now, enmeshed with violence) seems to touch a real and unmet need, at least among a certain segment of young men around the world. This has also been evident in recent months as cells of American al Qaeda operatives (or sympathizers, or wannabes) were uncovered in Lackawanna, New York, and Portland, Oregon.

It's long been orthodoxy among Third World sympathizers (this one included) that terrorism has its roots in the desperation of poor and marginalized people who decide that their grievances won't be heard any other way. And as long as it was applied to situations of an oppressed, indigenous people fighting the overwhelming power of a Western (or Western-backed) occupier, the doctrine held up. This anti-imperialist orthodoxy didn't excuse violence against civilians, but it did help explain it.

Al Qaeda, however, is something different. Its grievance is global and abstract. And the deprivation that fuels its soldiers seems more cultural than material. This first dawned on me when I watched a PBS Frontline report on the Sept. 11 terrorists. These were affluent young men (middle class or better). They were educated. They had a relatively sophisticated knowledge of Western culture. Some of them spoke multiple European languages. The Lebanese guy who was flying the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was to be married later that year. His father had bought him a new car for a wedding present. None of them grew up in a refugee camp. They seemed more like an Arab version of the Weathermen—the American sect of anti-Vietnam War bombers, the members of which were almost exclusively children of privilege.

Then came the string of Western-reared holy warriors. First there was John Walker, who was acting out what could have been (without the guns) a perfectly sensible rebellion against the moral wasteland of his liberal, New Age-ish upbringing and a poisonous commercial youth culture. Then there was Jose Padilla, a Puerto Rican American who turned to Islam from the nihilism of gang life and, apparently, took his attraction to violence with him. We may never know his story. At this writing, he's still locked up, indefinitely and without charges, in some military stockade. Patrice Lumumba Ford, the alleged central figure among the al Qaeda support group in Portland, is the son of a respected (and secular) radical activist (a former Black Panther, in fact). He is well educated, had connections near the top in local politics, and still went to the Afghan frontier to try and join the Islamic struggle.

BUT THE ONE who really set off the alarm bells for me was Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber of Christmas 2001. Reid was the son of an absentee Jamaican father and a white British mother. He never had a real job. He sold incense on the streets of London and ended up in jail for some smalltime robberies, where he was introduced to Islam. This story of the unemployed and alienated, half-black British street kid was painfully familiar to me. I learned a lot about people like him some 20-to-25 years ago when I was an enthusiastic follower of Britain's punk scene. If Richard Reid had been around back then, he might well have ended up in a punk-rock band instead of a terrorist cell.

Contemporary Britain still has plenty of guys like Richard Reid, but, like America, it presents young people with no constructive path for fighting their way out of alienation. If even a few of those drifting and alienated young men can be attracted to Islamic terrorism, then this thing could go on for a long, long time. n

Danny Duncan Collum, a Sojourners contributing editor, teaches writing at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.