Twisted motivations and racial tensions

Last week, during an Eid Milan party, I was asked by a dear friend, a Hindu who is secular to the core: “So these guys (IS and other Islamist terrorists) are not going to stop till they have finished off your religion?”

A few other non-Muslim friends looked at me, slightly alarmed and fearing that I would react angrily, but I knew the question was more out of concern and genuine pain at the killings unleashed by the IS and related groups, more recently in Istanbul, the holy city of Madina, which was like striking at the heart of Islam, and then Bangladesh.

“If not Islam, they certainly seem to be in a hurry to ensure that Muslims stand discredited and feared in the world,” was my calm response.

And the very next day, violence, shooting and death hit the headlines again, this time in the US, the country that has been seeing horrendous violence from two sources, or rather three. The Al Qaeda and more recently the IS and its associates; the black versus white racial tension, particularly between black civilians and white officers; and the third from any deranged, disgruntled or enraged individual who find it so easy to pick up a gun in the country where firearms are easily available thanks to its powerful pro-gun lobby.

This time the black-white racial tension was the cause. At a protest rally organised by Black Lives Matter and other black groups, a black sniper, Micah Johnson, shot dead five white police officers and wounded many more before he was killed by the police with a remote-controlled bomb.

The Dallas police chief David O Brown said Johnson had cited to negotiators, before he was killed, recent fatal shootings of black men by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota, which had prompted the protest march in Dallas and many other cities. He had categorically said he wanted to kill white people, mainly white officers.

Incidentally Johnson, who was in the US army, had been sent home from Afghanistan in 2014 after a fellow woman soldier had accused him of sexual harassment.

When his house was raided on Friday, bomb-making material, rifles, ammunition, etc, were found there.

Today the social media gives investigators of crimes many useful pointers.

One of the groups Johnson had “liked” on Facebook was a prominent black group in the US which had recently posted an inflammatory message that read: “The Pig has shot and killed Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana! You and I know what we must do… We must ‘Rally The Troops!’ It is time to visit Louisiana and hold a barbecue.”

In the last couple of years, racial tension has been boiling in the US. One was the acquittal of the police officer George Zimmerman who had fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin; then there was the shooting of nine black parishioners in a church in South Carolina; in one incident black teenage girls were pulled by their hair at a poolside party, and a video shot showed one of them being slammed down on the floor by the officer who shouted: “On your face.”

Such incidents only inflame passions and deepen racial divides and tackling the root causes of inequity in educational, employment and other opportunities for the black will have to be attempted more convincingly by future US governments. And certainly Donald Trump is not the best candidate for that job!

President Barack Obama’s job as the first black American president isn’t simple. Ironically, before retiring for the night in Poland, where had just arrived for the Nato summit, he made a statement on the two recent shootings of unarmed black men and said statistics showed that minorities are more likely to be pulled over, searched or shot by officers. Such deep-seated racial biases would have to be rooted out.

He awoke the next morning to deliver another one on the “vicious, calculated and despicable” shooting of the five white policemen, and said we’d know more about the “twisted motivations” in the coming days.

It might seem unfair to connect or find a link between the racial bias in the US and the IS’s bigoted ideology that draws upon religious beliefs or diktat to unleash unimaginable terror and mass murder.

But beneath the layers there is indeed a link — suspicion, mistrust and hatred — that causes deep fissures between groups, and the blood that is spilled and the lives that are lost are all human.

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