Surely,the most important,interesting and,yes,heroic figure in the whole Christmas Day Northwest airliner affair was the would-be bombers father,the Nigerian banker Alhaji Umaru Mutallab.
Mutallab did something that,as far as we know,no other parent of a suicide bomber has done: He went to the US Embassy in Nigeria and warned us that text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent,and possibly dangerous,radical.
The Times,quoting a cousin,said the son had sent the father a text message from Yemen in which he declared that he had found a new religion,the real Islam and that he was never coming home again.
Finding people with the courage to confront that breakdown the one identified by the father,the one that lures young Muslims away from the mainstream into a willingness to commit suicide against innocent civilians as part of some jihadist power fantasy is what matters most right now.
Yes,we need to fix our intelligence. Yes,we absolutely must live up to our own ideals,as President Obama is trying to do in banning torture and closing Guantánamo Bay. We cant let this war on terrorism consume us. We cant let our country become just The United States of Fighting Terrorism and nothing more. We are the people of July 4th not Sept. 11th.
But even if we do all that,no laws or walls we put up will ever be sufficient to protect us unless the Arab and Muslim societies from whence these suicide bombers emerge erect political,religious and moral restraints as well starting by shaming suicide bombers and naming their actions murder, not martyrdom.
I keep saying: It takes a village. The father,Alhaji Umaru Mutallab,saw himself as part of a global community,based on shared values,and that is why he rang the alarm bell. Bless him for that. Unless more Muslim parents,spiritual leaders,political leaders the village are ready to publicly denounce suicide bombing against innocent civilians theirs and ours this behavior will not stop.
Just last Friday,for example,a suicide bomber set off an explosives-laden vehicle in the midst of a volleyball tournament in the Pakistani village of Shah Hassan Khel,killing more than 100 people. Most were youngsters. No surprise. When suicide bombing becomes legitimate to use against non-Muslim infidels abroad it becomes legitimate to use against Muslim opponents at home. And what becomes legitimate and illegitimate in a community is so much more important than any government regulation.
All too often,though,Arab and Muslim governments arrest their jihadis at home,denounce them privately to us,but say nothing in public. The global leadership of Islam rarely take on jihadist actions and ideology openly with the kind of passion,consistency and mass protests that we have seen them do,for example,against Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Obama should not hesitate to call for it respectfully but publicly. If he only presses for more effective airport security,which he must,its a cop-out.
When you want to foster more responsible behavior in people,you cant just legislate more rules and regulations, said Dov Seidman,the CEO of LRN,which helps companies build ethical cultures,and the author of the book How. You have to enlist and inspire people in a set of values. People need to be governed both from the outside,through compliance with rules,and from the inside,inspired by shared values. That is why shame is so important. When we call a banker a fat cat for taking too big a bonus,were actually being inspirational leaders because we are telling them,You are behaving beneath how a responsible human being should behave.
Every faith has its violent extreme. The West is not immune. Its all about how the centre deals with it. Does it tolerate it,isolate it or shame it?
