The Future of Collective Punishment
2nd January 2015
Modern terrorism is in many ways just a revival of customary tribal retaliation or the application of ‘guilt by association’. The September 11 hijackers had no particular beef with the individuals in the World Trade Center. They were out to slaughter anyone in New York. None of the people in New York had to be individually guilty of anything. They were simply the most handy targets available to expiate the collective Western guilt for its real or imagined offenses against Islam.
The participants of the Jihad see it as a matter of “them” against “us”. Even though Western politicians are at pains to deny there is any “them”, “they” know who “they” are, despite the fact that “we” do not acknowledge who “we” are. ’Us’ versus ‘them’ pervades everything. When the Taliban could not strike at the Pakistan military directly it struck at the Pakistani Army Public School in Peshawar. The hand-wringing articles asking why innocent children were attacked miss the point completely. To the Taliban there are no “innocent children”. In a world of collective guilt there is naturally only collective punishment.
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In the Western legal model it is illegitimate to impose “collective punishment” and being unable to do so, nothing is done. There is a strict injunction against profiling Muslims and other groups precisely because group guilt is forbidden. And that is as it should be, if the taboo is to be maintained. Collective punishment is a very destructive and blunt model which arises from a lack of information and a conviction that discrimination is a hopeless task.
But the prohibition does not run the other way. There is no strong taboo among ISIS or al-Qaeda, for example, against punishing individual Jews for the collective guilt of Israeli existence. It is enough to kill a Jew, any Jew. It doesn’t matter who. Their model of punishment doesn’t require detailed information.