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Brussels bombing reveals the real radicals: Burman
4-24-2016
So down which road will this menacing 21st century take us?
Will it be the breakthrough in Cuba or the bombings in Brussels that will shape our future?
That fateful choice was there for the world to see on Tuesday, a day of drama and dread. It was captured on TV split-screen broadcasts on news channels throughout Europe, Asia, Canada and the United States.
On one side, we saw the U.S. president invoking “a future of hope” in his historic address to the Cuban people and to the wider world. “I know the history, but refuse to be trapped by it,” said Barack Obama. “I have come to bury the last remnants of the Cold War.” On the other side of the screen, there was the carnage of the suicide bombings in Brussels that killed more than 30 people. That was followed by the panicked reaction of politicians in Europe and the United States, talking of “war” and “revenge.”
Perhaps the most extreme response came from Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
In an effort to outflank rival Donald Trump, who wants to ban all Muslims from the United States, the Texas senator proposed that American police increase vigilance of U.S. Muslims: “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighbourhoods before they become radicalized.”
Obama was direct in his rebuke of Cruz, focusing on a reality that is often lost in the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the toxic Republican presidential nomination race: “In the United States, we have an extraordinarily successful, patriotic, integrated Muslim community. They do not feel ghettoized. They do not feel isolated.”
That is what is so striking about the Muslim community in the United States — and in Canada, too. Their experience has been far different than that in Europe. Muslims in Europe, including in Belgium, are often isolated from the wider community, with unemployment rates for young Muslims hovering around 50 per cent.
American surveys indicate that Muslims are as fully integrated in the wider community as are other Americans, and they not only emotionally identify with the country as a whole but are largely embraced by their fellow citizens.
The same pattern is evident in Canada. There are approximately one million Muslims in Canada. Half of them are immigrants, and most of them arrived in the last 25 years.
In 2006, a major Environics survey of Muslims in Canada — the first of its kind — indicated an extraordinary degree of integration. An updated study just completed will be released next month in partnership with the CBC.
The 2016 survey is expected to provide an even more positive picture than in 2006. Muslims in Canada largely embrace the idea of being Canadian. They share with the wider community what being a Canadian means and are as concerned, if not more so, about the radicalization of some Muslim youth.
For Canadians, this positive story needs to be remembered as the political poison spreads.
In the end, the bombings in Brussels will leave a scar that may never heal. After all, they are part of a history of criminal intolerance in many parts of the world that we all need to confront and defeat. But they didn’t just happen.
Even though their impact is heightened in today’s high-octane, 24/7 media world, their roots are deeply embedded in history. Do you remember the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995?
On Thursday, as Belgians mourned the bombing victims, an aging former Bosnian Serb leader on trial in The Hague was finally convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. After a four-year trial that was compared with the Nuremberg trials of former Nazi leaders, a UN tribunal sentenced Radovan Karadzic, now 70, to 40 years in prison.
So, with his war crimes in mind, let’s return to the question: “Down which road will this menacing 21st century take us?”
The answer, of course, is not only up to us. But this week’s events are a reminder that a distinctly Canadian answer — in a world that sometimes seems to be going mad — will require increasing amounts of tolerance, intelligence and courage.
Tony Burman, former head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, teaches journalism at Ryerson University. Reach him @TonyBurman or at tony.burman@gmail.com .
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