Terrorism can’t be a response to any issue

Last week’s terrorist attack in the French city of Nice in which three people were killed and many others injured deserves the strongest condemnation, without any reservation. The knife attack happened a fortnight after the beheading of a schoolteacher in Paris. A Tunisian youth was the attacker in Nice and a Chechen was the killer in Paris. The incidents are the latest in a series of terror attacks that have rocked France after the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo republished caricatures of Prophet Muhammad. Hebdo was provocative in its decision, but it was completely wrong to react to it with violence against innocent persons, randomly chosen for killing. The attackers are immigrants who came into the country recently and seem to have been radicalised.

French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to fight terrorism resolutely. The fight against terrorism is always joined at different levels, with the right security and legal measures and in terms of ideas. Every country’s response to terrorism is different, shaped by its social and political traditions, laws, historical experience and the nature of the attack on it. France has a vaunted liberal and laicite (secular) tradition and Macron has sought to formulate new laws and implement public policy in that light. He has gone to the extent of defending Charlie Hebdo’s freedom of expression. No freedom is absolute and deliberately insulting a religion cannot be a form of its expression. The dividing line between freedom and intent to hurt in specific contexts should not be lost sight of even in liberal societies where freedom and expanding its frontiers is an ideal. On the other hand, modern democracies are based on the idea of correcting prejudices and wrongs by debate and argumentation, and even peaceful protests, within the bounds of national constitutions, laws and values, not by acts of violence and terrorism.

India has expressed solidarity with the people of France and extended support to Macron in the fight against terrorism. But leaders like former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who said Muslims have the “right to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past,” and others like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has launched a personal tirade against Macron, are not serving the cause of peace and amity, nor even of Islam. Protests by Muslims worldwide against Macron, instigated in many places by local politicians or clerics, have the effect of setting up a global ‘Muslims vs Others’ clash of civilisations. That is dangerous. Only a minuscule minority of Muslims the world over follow the creed of al Qaida or the Islamic State. They should not be justified and need to be isolated and fought.