Orlando, Istanbul, Dhaka, Baghdad, Medina...
They just keep coming, one after the other. There's little time to change Facebook profile photos and publish all the opeds, to process the grief, tragedy and, indeed, senselessness of one terror attack before there's another one making headlines. And so it is that since this past weekend, Islamic terrorists have attacked a café in Dhaka, exploded a massive truck bomb in Baghdad, and carried three separate attacks in the Saudi cities of Jeddah, Medina and Qatif. They have also had a suicide bomber blow himself up at a police station in Java, Indonesia and driven a car bomb into a major checkpoint in Thailand's Muslim-majority southern Pattani Province. The factors that spurred each attack, the local conditions that made it possible, the individuals that carried or planted the bombs may be different in each case — in Baghdad, the attacks must be viewed against the backdrop of war and civil unrest, while in Dhaka, the focus has been on radicalisation of educated youngsters. The scale of these attacks is also different: In Thailand and Indonesia, there were no casualties while in Baghdad, the death toll has crossed 200 and is still rising. In the Saudi blasts, there were casualties only in Medina where the bomber and four security personnel were killed though the fact that one of Islam's holiest cities was attacked during the month of Ramzan, is hard to ignore. Indeed, much has been made of terror attacks during this holy period — before this most recent set of attacks, there was the shooting at the Orlando night club in the US and suicide attacks in Jordan, and Yemen and lebanon on the same day. A day later, Istanbul's Ataturk airport was attacked, while in the West Bank, a 13-year-old girl was stabbed and a man gunned down on the road.
Some have suggested a special linkage with or significance of Ramzan and, oddly, jihadi apologists have latched on to this to peddle that meaningless terrorism-has-no-religious line. Two issues need to be pointed out here: First, Islamist terror attacks happen all year round. In fact, some of the biggest jihadi attacks have not happened during Ramzan (think 9/11 or 26/11). Hence, there is nothing to suggest that jihadis have a penchant for Ramzan-special terrorism other than that they abuse the holy month to make their bloodletting that much more glamourous (or grotesque). Second, it doesn't even matter whether there is such a thing as Ramzan-special terrorism or if any of this is in accordance with actual Islamic teachings. What matters is that there are groups of perverted and bloodthirsty killers, who perpetuate a sick ideology in the name of Islam. They enjoy significant support and have spread their poisonous tentacles around the world. Today, they may be called the Islamic State in one part and Boko Haram in another and Hamas in a third; in another era, this plague went by the name of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and lashkar and the Jamaat. The question is what are we doing to contain the rotIJ