Getting Confused over Cause and Effect

by John Thompson

04/01/04

By now, the Spanish reaction to the Madrid railway bombing and the killing of Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin are old news. Even so, there is one point that begs for comment.

It is human nature to confuse cause and effect. Many of our superstitions rest on the assumption that there is a deliberate purpose behind every event, and then wondering how one can turn cause and effect to one’s own advantage. Natural phenomenon like lighting was held to be an instrument of divine wrath; or a community that had just seen their crops flooded out might decide that this was a punishment for letting witches be concealed among them. Once the floodwaters ebbed, it would be time to burn some old ladies to make sure it never happened again.

In the past, when the Huns, then the Mongols and then the Turks started ravaging their ways into Europe, there were religious leaders who declared that the barbarian’s pillaging was God’s just and righteous punishment for our evil ways and lack of faith. So, plainly, if we all became more devout, the barbarians would go away… (It is somehow reassuring to note that the modern Liberal has his antecedents). Even nowadays one might hear an opinion a woman who got raped by a criminal might have ‘deserved’ it for dressing provocatively.

Cause and effect get confused in terrorism all the time.

Terrorists do what they do because of a combination of the internal psychological terrain of the terrorists themselves, and the influence of whatever ideology they adapted that allowed them to commit violence. Terrorists commit violence because they want to, because the terrorists themselves are the wrathful, the sullen and the flawed looking for dramatic purpose and a heroic self-identity. What they actually believe doesn’t matter much.

Most terrorists and ideological bully boys don’t really care that much about the cause per se; a point amply demonstrated by the Nazis and the Communists in Germany before Hitler seized power. Much of the violence between the two groups was based on the fact that they were earnestly recruiting the same sorts of people. Twelve years ago in Toronto, the Anarchist goons of Anti-Racist Action and the White Supremacist clowns in the Heritage Front were likewise competing for disaffected street kids in the city.

Israel has suffered the murderous attentions of terrorist groups motivated by Neo Nazism, Militant nationalism, various brands of Marxism and Socialism, and by Islamic Fundamentalism. The United States has been plagued by an equal variety of terrorists.

In the past week, as Spain buried 202 dead commuters in Madrid, the opinion was that the attack was a deliberate attempt to turn the Spanish election and weaken their position as an American ally in the war on terror. This probably untrue, but al Qaeda does read newspapers and the next European ally of the Americans can probably expect a major attack next time they hold an election. However, before the spectacular political fallout of the Madrid attack the real motivation for the outrage was quite simple: Spain is a prosperous and free Western country and, as Osama Bin Laden has mentioned, is ‘guilty’ of ridding itself of Muslim rule over 500 years ago.

The Palestinian Islamic Fundamentalist group Hamas is spitting fury over the death of Sheikh Yassin — although the Israelis were right to target him. Now, of course, Hamas and other Palestinian groups are vowing to revenge his death with even more attacks on Israel. So what? Hamas already has a long history of going after Israeli targets whenever and wherever they can. They are going to get worse? How?

Ordinarily, terrorist groups know or accept no limitations on their behavior other than what they choose to accept for themselves — in accordance with whatever ideology they adopted and within the constrains of the ways and means available to them. However, as limitations on their violence are self-selected, they can be changed anytime the terrorists care to do so.

If Hamas members start blowing up more Jewish cultural centres and synagogues overseas, they might use the death of Yassin as an ‘excuse’ in another tedious self-justification for their outrages. However, even if Yassin was still alive and free, Hamas might undertake the same new aggressive posture anyway, for any number of reasons.

One of the fundamental truths in fighting terrorism is that, invariably, it is the terrorist who has freedom of action and it is the terrorist who controls the initiative. These are his main advantages in his ‘asymmetrical’ war against whomever he is attacking. Trying to guess what might mollify him in the future is like sacrificing a virgin to a volcano — wasteful and useless.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca