Editor,
Instead of just getting all high and mighty and righteously indignant with all these Muslims among us killing everyday citizenry, we must acknowledge that a big reason they are doing so is that by and large we are bombing their mother countries year after year without interruption. Hence we get the likes of terrorist Ahmad Rahami, who is a naturalized citizen from Afghanistan.
The resulting primordial pain their inner child must feel (say with an innocent aunt in the old country having been blown to smithereens) could well be resulting in what we call “radicalization” and they (using religion as some kind of higher, sublimating explanation in order to deal with the humiliating pain), call “joining the jihad.”
What does not help is they keep their feelings inside because mainstream society here is so hostile to them, just with a Muslim name. Thus their mother countries are being insulted to their face in American classrooms by classmates; it must feel like their own mother is being insulted. All this can cause enough simmering and seething to make a normal Muslim American a lone wolf.
So instead of just tightening up this or that immigration rule (so many of these terrorists are already here as citizens), we must finally see the overkill we are perpetrating with all this relatively indiscriminate, wholesale, wide-angle bombing we are doing as a root cause for this kind of terrorism.
If we therefore stop the bombing once and for all, show a little more respect for their mother countries instead of blanket demonization of them and their religion, and just go after terrorists abroad on an individual basis and capture them instead of reducing entire towns in their old countries to rubble in such knee-jerk manner, a lot of this terrorism by our partially homegrown Muslims is much more likely to stop.
Arun Ahuja
UNM student
