From Sydney to Peshawar: The biggest casualty of Islamic terror are Muslims themselves

On January 30, 1948, when Louis Mountbatten reached the Birla House on hearing of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, he heard a man shriek, ‘It was a Muslim who did it.’ Mountbatten shouted back, “You fool, don’t you know it was a Hindu?” When his ADC asked him how he could be sure it was a Hindu, Mountbatten replied, “I don’t, but if it really was a Muslim, India is going to live one of the most ghastly massacres the world has ever seen.” A few hours later, the radio announced, ‘Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi…His assassin was a Hindu.” On Monday, the Sydney police exercised similar caution when they came to know the identity of the man behind the attack near Martin Place. For hours, even the media kept it a secret at the behest of government agencies to ensure there is no backlash against Muslims. It is a sad yet terrifying truth that terror is now a word that is predominantly identified with jihadists and radical Islamists. Whenever somebody mentions terror, the first mental image of the perpetrator is of a radical jihadist. [caption id=“attachment_1853951” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A child injured in the Peshawar school attack. AFP.[/caption] Who is responsible for this stereotyping of Muslims across the world? Who is making it difficult for Muslims across the world to be a Muslim? It is obviously a pain that has been inflicted on Islam by members of its own community. Islamic terror, apart from being a global menace, has become the biggest threat to the people it claims to represent. When outfits like Tehreek e Taliban carry out inhuman, barbaric attacks on innocent children, they contribute to the growing fear that the M word has now become associated with. They end up creating an environment in which even criminals like Man Haron Munis are able to cloak their self-serving crimes in jihad. On Tuesday, the Sydney Morning Herald argued that Munis was perhaps a disturbed individual consumed by personal crises looking to end his life in a blaze of publicity. “This is a person in personal crisis, at the end of his tether. He was looking for attention and a way out,” terrorism analyst Adam Dolnik told the SMH. Munis was an Iranian Shia, who had taken refuge in Australia after claiming that he was hounded out of his native country by its government. He converted to Sunni Islam and pledged support to the Islamic State’s Caliphate—whose leaders consider Shiites their biggest enemies— only a week ago. According to another report in the Guardian, Munis was more like a self-starter, who had attached himself to the virulent worldviews of the Islamic state. His decision to self-radicalize may have been rooted in his criminal past—he was accused of being an accomplice in his wife’s murder, was charged with 40 other offences and was convicted of writing offensive letters to families of Australians who lost their lives in Afghanistan. Munis had many grievances against the Australian government. He was unhappy also because of increasing marginalization among his peers, who questioned his claim of a leading cleric. Even the Sunnis had ignored him completely. Munis was a drifter, he had no well-defined ideology, no affiliation to a sect or a fundamentalist group. Still, he ended up putting Muslims in Australia at great risk, a trend highlighted by the hashtag, ‘I’ll ride with you.’ Munis isn’t the first person in the history to turn into a lone-wolf. In 2011, Norwegian fundamentalist Anders Breivik bombed government buildings and opened fire on a camp on an island, killing 77 persons, most of them teenagers. Breivik was a proponent of the far-right militant ideology and was trying to propagate Islamophobia and end of multiculturalism. Psychologists who had initially evaluated Breivik had concluded that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. This was later overturned by another group of jurists who said he was not psychotic, implying that he had carried out the act of terror fully in control of his senses because he wanted to spread his radical ideology. But there was no widespread panic or hysteria after Breivik’s act of terrorism that was much larger in terms of impact and scale. But Munis spooked the entire world; he forced everybody to be wary of attacks from lone wolf’s inspired by jihadist ideology. One man’s terrorist, we often argue, is the other person’s martyr. But Munis has added a new dimension to the debate: one nation’s criminal can be the entire world’s jihadi. He just has to carry an Islamic flag with his gun. Terrorists should know this: their own faith is now their biggest casualty.