Humiliation is the Root of All Terrorism by Peter Gabel

The recent killings in Paris and San Bernadino have many people at once scared for
themselves and their families, angry in a way that makes some susceptible to antiMuslim rhetoric, and also utterly shaken that people in our own midst can be drawn to
ISIS and others who want to do us great violence for seemingly no reason. How could
anyone wish to start shooting and killing large numbers of innocent, anonymous people
in the name of restoring a patriarchal Califate from a thousand years ago? Syed
Farook was a seemingly normal county employee, an environmental specialist earning
$77,000 per year living in relative economic comfort in southern California, recently
married, and the father of a six-month old daughter. How are we to make any sense
of his and Tashfeen Malik's secret devotion to ISIS and their decision to suddenly
become mass murderers who simultaneously effectively committed suicide, leaving
their little child with her grandmother? And how could tens of thousands of such
people like these two be massing in Syria and Iraq, ready to become martyrs for such
a cause?
As compelling as these questions are, one would have to infer from the public
discussion of these killings and from the mass media that we do not really want to
know the answers. The idea that ISIS and other radical jihadis are simply "evil," or
that they "hate freedom" or are simply incomprehensible purveyors of a "hateful
ideology" (to quote the repeated formulation of Barack Obama) just begs the
question of why they are the way they are and why they believe what they believe. To
actually understand Farook and Malik and those who engage in violent terrorism, and
based on that understanding begin to do something to change the conditions that have
produced and will likely continue to produce so much human suffering and loss, we
have to attempt to grasp the terrorists' experience of life from the inside, to see
them as human just as we are, and to see what shaped them such that their thoughts
and actions make sense to them.
Only then can we develop a course of action to alter the future that is more effective
than the plan to "defeat and destroy" a large and scattered population in a decadeslong, diffuse war that will involve our children and grandchildren. Thus please consider
the following:
All human beings are born seeking love and affirmation from others and every child
manifests this longing in a way that he or she expects to be reciprocated. We know
this from the new-born child's search for eye contact, from the fullness of the
child's vulnerability as he or she extends him or herself to mother, father, to all
others whom he or she first comes in contact with.
But up to the present time, the world that children enter is not only suffused with
love and generosity and care, but is rather also corroded by fear and doubt, and by
violence, rejection, and what we might call "non-recognition."

When a child extends him or herself toward the other with a new-borns open heart
and encounters the trauma of non-recognition of his or her humanity, often
manifested as open rejection, indifference, or even violence, the child suffers a
profound humiliation. Instead of the world being the embracing and loving and
affirming place that the child had been born anticipating and fully expecting, the
world becomes a traumatic environment of never-being-seen and never-beingembraced.
Although every child begins his or her life inside the small cocoon of a family of some
kind, he or she immediately encounters in every adult the legacy of the wider world
that has shaped each adult's being and that expresses the wider world's "quality of
life," its interhuman essence. Although every child is born to one or two or a few
people, that child very quickly becomes enmeshed in a vast network of social
structures and social relations, interhuman patternings that manifest either the love
and affirmation carried by true recognition and embrace, or the humiliation and pain
carried by interhuman patternings of non-recognition, rejection, the mutual distancing
of the rotating fear of the other.
In today's world, some sectors of the world's population have spent decades or
perhaps centuries impoverished and demeaned by the world's dominant groups.
Although these dominant groups have themselves acted, often unconsciously, out of
fear of the other, accumulating wealth and power to protect themselves against
others and displacing that process of self-aggrandizement onto the supposedly
neutral effects of a globalized economic market, they have in so doing created
pockets of humiliation, in which whole communities and peoples have experienced life
as discarded, unseen, uncared about, and often on the verge of starvation. This is
true of whole sectors of the Middle East, where the rooted lives of whole
communities of people were destroyed and demeaned by, for example the imperialist
carving up of the region by Western powers following World War I, by the imposition
upon them of inauthentic puppet governments, by the rise of internal dictatorships
resulting from the hierarchical and alienating distortions of these earlier
interventions.
Furthermore, to the extent that members of these humiliated communities have
sought escape in Western countries, they have often found themselves ghettoized
and disappointed, in a sense re-humiliated refugees who were thrown into supposedly
"free" societies, but where there was no plan for integrating them as fully human and
for connecting them with others in a way that would have provided for them a sense
of recognition, of being seen and embraced.
Against this background of profound and diffuse non-recognition and humiliation, it is
not surprising that people from these marginalized and demeaned communities would
be drawn to narrative interpretations of the world that would address and explain

their humiliation and offer a way out, however pathological, however much such
interpretations may involve substituting for their experience of humiliation an
imaginary vision of the world that can seem to restore each person's sense of
recognition and value, channel the rage resulting from the long legacy of collective
humiliation into purifying violence, and bring into imaginary being the "perfect"
society that once existed until being destroyed and defiled by "unbelievers," by those
who might prevent the vision from being realized by denying or opposing it.
When terrorists engage in mass murder, they seek to reverse the dehumanization
that was done to them by dehumanizing their imagined oppressors while seeking to
bring about the redemption of an imaginary world in which they will become healed,
become recognized, become finally included and loved as they anticipated they would
be from their earliest days.
To summarize this in a simple formula: longing and vulnerability when met with nonrecognition leads to humiliation, which leads to substitute imaginary visions that
resolve the pain of non-recognition through prideful grandiosity, perfect unity, and
dehumanization of those who dehumanized you.
How should we respond to this situation?
First and in the short run, we must defend ourselves against harm and violence, since
there is no instantaneous way of rectifying a psycho-social problem of this magnitude.
Defending ourselves means not only engaging in whatever physical struggle is
necessary against those determined to kill us, but also finding rational ways of
protecting ourselves at home, in restaurants, in concerts and other public gatherings.
But second and most important, we must develop an approach to the problem of the
legacy of non-recognition that seeks to heal the wounds that we ourselves are partly
responsible for. This means transforming our policy toward those who have felt
humiliated by us, by our imperialist forefathers, and by our existing institutions like
the world market in such a way that we begin to truly recognize their humanity. We
should seek to eliminate hunger among the impoverished and demeaned populations of
the Middle East; we should help to rebuild their roads, their bridges, their mosques;
we should begin to relate to these humiliated populations of the world as we always
should have, with empathy and compassion and generosity and care. We should see
them as our fellow human beings and offer them the recognition and affirmation and
respect that they were always entitled to, but which has been systematically and
often ruthlessly denied to them for decades, or even centuries, from the Crusades to
World War I to the Iraq War to the present-day exploitation for our benefit of
their oil reserves. In repair of disrupting, destroying and demeaning their historical
communities, we should enter into present community with them.
This approach will not work with the most violent of our adversaries or with those
most committed to a delusional end-of-days Armageddon, but it will begin to have an

impact on those widespread communitiesin the Middle East and in our own Western
citiesto whom the most violent and apocalyptic currently appeal. It will begin to
provide the "alternative ideology" that President Obama is constantly calling for but
seems unable to find. And it will gradually undermine the appeal of the most delusional
and most violent by healing the conditions that produce their charismatic power.
The United Nations Security Council could, if it grasped the truth of what I have
written here and wanted to address it, call a meeting tomorrow and begin.
Peter Gabel is editor at large of Tikkun and the author of The Bank Teller and Other
Essays on the Politics of
Meaning and Spiritual Activism: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture .
If you find this analysis compelling, help us spread the message. Join our interfaith
and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives
www.spiritualprogressives.org/join or donate to Tikkun at www.tikkun.org/donate.
Read our proposed Global Marshall Plan which would be a massive step toward
implementing what Gabel calls for in this article. Don't just read and love this
article--join us in making it happen!!!
Thanks to TruthOut which published our Tikkun editor at large's article
at http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/34062-humiliation-is-the-root-of-allterrorism

Click here to unsubscribe

if you are having trouble unsubscribing Click here
Copyright 2015 Tikkun Magazine. Tikkun is a registered trademark.
2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200
Berkeley, CA 94704
510-644-1200
Fax 510-644-1255