The attack by gunmen of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) on a bus carrying Coptic Christians in central Egypt, killing at least 28 people and wounding 25 others, was the second terrorist attack in the world since the Arab-Islamic-American summit in Riyadh in which US President Donald Trump cast the challenge of extremism as a “battle between good and evil.”
The Minya attack came on the heels of the Manchester concert bombing that killed 22 people and injured dozens more.
So in just five days following the summit, two major terrorist attacks were launched by the same group in two countries on two continents. That is not a coincidence but a direct reply to the summit’s centerpiece address that urged Muslim-majority countries to redouble their counterterrorism efforts.
In return, Trump made a statement of his own, saying that these acts of depravity were directly contrary to the spirit of Ramadan.
Saturday was the start of the holy month, a time when the 1.8 billion Muslims around the world - making up about 24 percent of the world population - reject violence and seek to pursue peace. Sadly, the 30-day period of fasting and reflection in the Islamic world has in recent years seen an increase in terror attacks as Daesh exhorts its followers to rise up in an “all-out war” on «infidels”.
However, acts of terrorism in Britain, for example, have not increased because of Britain’s involvement in military action abroad, as Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested. To claim that Britain›s foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria had fuelled terror attacks like the Manchester suicide bombing has been rightly condemned as twisted reasoning and categorically rejected.
No one is to blame for the actions of terrorists but the terrorists themselves. The veteran left-winger is buying into the terrorist narrative; attacks by terrorists long pre-dated the military campaigns. No rationale based on the actions of any government can excuse the massacre. There should be no attempt to justify or legitimate the actions of terrorists in the way Corbyn has described.
The likely explanation of this terrorist surge is that having lost its strongholds as well as its strangleholds in Iraq and Syria, Daesh urgently needs to find new battlegrounds where it can start to proclaim victory again. There are endless spots that can be hit, which is the reason why we are currently living through a full blown terrorist insurgency being fought in our own streets, in major capitals, in big cities and in deserts, in buses, trains, airports, airplanes, cafes and pop concerts.
In retaliation for the Minya attack, Egyptian forces struck terrorist training camps in the town of Derna in neighboring Libya. But the fight against terrorism is not all about brute force. No terrorist insurgency can exist within any society without a level of complacency toward the extremist ideas it rests on. We are all responsible for fighting extremism. This is what Trump meant when he called on the public to drive terrorists out of their societies.
At this time, calls for unity and calm are needed. But the call at this time is for things not to simply return to normal. Such attacks may well be the new normal, but this must not be accepted as the status quo. If normal means regular attacks by terrorists against men, women and children at the dawn of their lives, then this “normal” must not be allowed to continue. New thinking needs to emerge in the corridors of power as well as in communities that sympathize with and insulate deviant ideologies.
