Only Muslims can stop more terror attacks

The targeted assassinations at Charlie Hebdo are triply repellent. Being planned, they are the product of considered decisions, not a moment of folly. Being aimed at journalists, they have deliberately chosen the vulnerable heart of the freedom that is fundamental to our values. Being gratuitously cruel in casually murdering an already wounded policeman, they display a chilling depravity. As such, attacks like this are intolerable: they must be stopped, and therefore they must be understood.

The assassinations follow the random car-crash terrorism of December and the Syrian beheadings of November. All were perpetrated by young Muslim men. But what we are experiencing is not the product of a religion: it does not deserve to be so dignified. Rather, we are in the midst of a new culture of violence. Occasionally, throughout history, such cultures have perpetrated viciousness. Previous European excrescences have been fascism in 1930s Germany, and the Red Brigades in 1970s Italy. A culture of violence is a vile and self-perpetuating belief system, but it can be crushed.

In all societies, a significant minority of young men are hormonally predisposed to violence. A core task for a community is to restrain them by means of its culture. Over the centuries Europe’s communities have succeeded so well that our region has become by far the most peaceful society that has ever been known. Yet against this background of peace, Europe’s Muslim communities have manifestly failed to build sufficiently powerful cultural restraints.

Behaviour of any group is described by a frequency distribution. The Muslim community must take responsibility not just for behaviour in the middle of the distribution, where Muslims are as peaceable as anyone else, but for behaviour at its tail. Those young men predisposed to violence have found in Islam a convenient norm which enables them to reconcile their desires with their conscience: killing infidels for Allah is justified.