Jekyll and Hyde Personalities
Here's the ultimate mystery, a puzzle within a conundrum. How to account for the instance of solitudes in tandem through choice, although they share no common ideology, culture, background, tradition and possibly moral determinations. How to figure that a Jew will go out of his way to defend, in a theatre of justice, another individual for whom Jews are anathema, and who has chosen an avenue of revenge against a society he recognizes as being at counter purposes to his own society/culture/religion.Complicated by the very fact that the person standing accused of planning violence against society has been brought up within that very society which guarantees personal freedoms and protection under the law for all ideologies, religions, ethnic groups, recognizing them as equal. That the individual in question is of immigrant stock having been brought up in countries that offer no freedoms, that practise human rights abuses, that adhere to fundamentalist religious practises is part of the puzzle.
While people are individuals, are informed by their experiences, and form their opinions and their allegiances therefrom, they are also, despite the overlay of such experiences, susceptible to the ineffable draw of group identity. And for some individuals the compelling draw of tribal affiliation reflecting an ancient culture and tradition, alongside the religious underpinning that dictates every aspect of that culture and tradition, leads them to shun the more immediately familiar as foreign.
Group identity is vital to the self-recognition, the pride and the place of esteem one finds among co-religionists in asserting the balanced well-being of people. It equates with the fundamental need of people to recognize their roots, their history as a people. Without those roots and the affiliation with others stemming from those same roots, many people feel vulnerable and alone.
And when they have migrated to live within a vastly different society, one for whom elements of that fundamental religion and the culture and traditions it spawned may be viewed with suspicion and even demeaned, the migrants feel offended, defensive, and withdraw into their own self-protective ghetto. Some of them become more devoted to their past and to their religion, as a result. All the more so, when there is actual conflict between the adopted society and the abandoned one.
So here we have a prime example, a young Muslim man, born in Canada, whose parents are well educated and who live a nice middle-class life, enabling the young man to take advantage of all the privileges and rights available to any other young Canadian. His life becomes little different than that of any other young, aspiring Canadian, happy to experience all the good things of life in a liberal democracy.
Yet this particular young man becomes so socially alienated from the social mores, the relaxed attitudes, of the surrounding community that he makes a deliberate decision to shun the values he has been exposed to and assume those of an emerging class of violently disgruntled religious fundamentalists for whom the concept of jihad becomes the over-riding concern of their lives. He becomes an anomaly in his own community, representing an infinitesimally tiny percentage of Muslims representing a dire threat to liberal democracies.
Within the community of Islamists, orthodoxy taken to extremes, a religion subverted from its original purpose toward one of violently settling grievances real or imagined, long tentacles of enticement conspire to conscript angry, confused and militant young men, to bring them into the fold of conspiratorial jihad for the purpose of visiting atrocities on those very societies that have nurtured them. Succumbing to radicalization. Religious lobotomization.
A normal-seeming young man like Mohammad Momin Khawaja is transformed from an ambitious young computer expert to a secretive and determined terrorist determined to teach the "kaafirs" a lesson, that they cannot, with impunity, make warfare on his co-religionists and fellow jihadists. His father, Mahboob Khawaja, had taken his young family to live for a while in Saudi Arabia. His father's website was replete with anti-Semitic commentary.
Momin Khawaja's trial is now underway in Ottawa. His defence attorney is a well-known lawyer, one who enjoys taking unpopular cases, a competitive and energetic man within the community, a Jew. A champion of the disadvantaged, the underdog, the unusual, the eccentric, of social outcasts. He balances his propensity for supporting "unpopular" legal cases by lending his name to community and charity work.
Like the individual whose case and defence he has taken on, he is a bit of an enigma. They are both, on a certain level, individuals with complex and troubling personalities. Exemplifying in certain tendencies, Jekyll and Hyde personalities. They work together at arms-length, respectfully, neutrally. The Islamist jihadist accepting the commitment to his cause of defeating the Crown's case against him, of the aggressive, assured and talented Jewish lawyer.
The Jewish lawyer complacent in laying aside personal loyalties to his own tribe for the purpose of practising his trade, of stroking his professional conceit in pursuing a criminal justice case of unprecedented proportions, staking his own carefully nurtured talents as a lawyer against that of his country's prosecutorial choice.
Defiantly, arrogantly challenging the Crown in its determination to impress upon the presiding judge the unequivocal guilt of a Canadian-born terror suspect.
Labels: Canada, Justice, Religion, Social-Cultural Deviations
posted by Pieface @ Monday, June 23, 2008
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