When the chief of the United Nations said of the sickening Paris massacre last week, “It should never be seen as a war of religion, for religion, or on religion,” it sounded like a predictable platitude. Kind of like the Pope on Christmas calling for peace in the Middle East. I mean, of course that’s what they’d say!
The fact is, any of us who believe we accurately understand what motivates Muslim madmen to murder innocents ought to cover our keyboards, mute our microphones, and zip our lips.
As I wrote in a Denver Post column only last month, “There are so many behaviors in the Middle East today that we just can’t explain, no matter who we are.”
But this time, the U.N.’s Ban Ki-Moon might have gotten it right. Because from my experience, many of the acts allegedly executed in the name of religion — indeed, some of the wars fought between members of different faiths or different sects of the same faith — do not in fact have much if anything to do with religion at all.
Probably the best example is what we’ve witnessed for more than a decade now in Iraq. When the U.S. invaded, we lifted the lid off a long-repressed rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites. While we fought a war against terrorism, they fought a war against one another.
But were their nasty battles really based on the ancient debate about which of Muhammad’s descendants were entitled to lead Islamic society, which has had the two sects at each other’s throats for more than 1,300 years?
I’m afraid not. They were based on the haves and the have-nots. Under Saddam Hussein, who was Sunni, almost all positions of power (which also made them positions of wealth) were in the hands of his Sunni brethren; call it his tribe.
Shiites could hardly even get a private’s position in the Iraqi army, let alone the stripes of an officer. In almost every way, Shiites in Iraq were second-class citizens.
So when Hussein was upended, so was his tribe. And then the Shiites did to the Sunnis what the Sunnis had done to them.
It was about ranking, not religion.
Likewise, the revolution in Iran. I spent the better part of two years covering that chaos, and when asking people why they wanted to oust the shah, the word “religion” never came up.
A brutal secret police force, corruption with the profits from oil, and distaste for the Western culture the shah was introducing to his people were the root causes of their revolt.
And when it comes to hatred cloaked in the cloth of religion, we can look well beyond the Middle East. In the 1970s and ’80s, I covered “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland.
Catholics and Protestants ambushed one another and blew up each other’s pubs; 3,000 people died.
But just a couple of years ago, when I was back in Belfast and wrote a column referring to “religious warfare” there decades ago, a local friend said to me, “It was never ‘religious warfare.’ Most of the terrorists on both sides never darkened the door of a church.”
His point was, it was a clash between Catholics and Protestants, but only because the majority there, the Protestants, had long oppressed the minority, the Catholics, who couldn’t get a well-paying job anyplace important, from the shipyards to the police force. Sure, religion was in the background there, as it has been in Iran and Iraq and Syria and Israel and so many other troubled nations, but religious inequality breeds resentment, which breeds terrorism.
Which can have nothing to do with religion.
I don’t know what mad notions led the murderers in France to their rampage. We may never know. But if we automatically pin it primarily on religion, we might miss signs of more madness in the future.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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