Siege Mentality

One consequence of the hysteria attending the war on terror is that even when a moment of genuine threat is encountered, the rhetoric of fear must make more out of it than is really there.

A CBS/AP article about the recent terror arrests in Canada illustrates this quite nicely. As noted by Wonkette, “officials” in the article (who remain unnamed) are not only convinced that an attack is imminent, but that it will differ in its fundamental ethos from 9/11. According to the article, in the coming attack, “[t]he casualty toll will not be that high, the target probably not that big. We may not even recognize it for what it is at first…”

What accounts for such forecasting? What, after all, does it mean that we might not recognize an attack for what it is at first? Perhaps it has something to do with this Christian Science Monitor piece, also on the fallout from the arrests. Apparently, Canada is facing something new - “the jihadi generation.” Five of the suspects, you see, are juveniles, and there seems to be no connection with Al Qaida. What, then, can account for these activities? John Thomas, from the Mackenzie Institute, a think tank in Toronto, puts it this way: “These are kids at a transition, between Islamic society and Western society. A lot of people will get militarized if they’re unsure of their own identity. They’re just young and stupid. If you’re 17, bored, restless, you want to meet girls – hey, be a radical.”

If the search for the roots of terror are to extend into the minds of Canada’s bored and restless 17 year olds, then the situation must indeed seem a bit hopeless. What’s more, the CSM article quotes a Canadian government report on “homegrown” terror from 2005 which concludes that there “does not appear to be a single process that leads to extremism the transformation is highly individual (sic).” In other words, it could be anyone, and for any reason.

This is a dangerous beginning for the dialogue over these arrests in Canada. Organizing society on the basis of distrust will not solve the problems of estrangement and alienation to which these teenagers have ostensibly reacted. But solving such problems is hardly a priority in the war on terror. The siege mentality, which will find an enemy lurking no matter what, has its own interests to serve, and must go beyond the arrests themselves and weave a much more oblique narrative for these events. To begin with, you likely will not know who it will be, and you might not even know when it happens. But, in case of the latter event, the siege mentality will alert you.