The Sydney attack was about spiritual — not political — terrorism

From the October 7 massacre by Hamas to the slaughter at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday, Islamists would have the world believe that the cause of all the mayhem is the existence of Israel. For Islamists and their apologists, the problem is simple: are you with the oppressor or the oppressed?

The oppressor is, of course, the “Zionist entity.” The oppressed are the Palestinians. This is an updated version of Marx’s expectation of an apocalyptic final conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

For Islamists, the events at Bondi — 16 killed and 40 more in hospital — express what “globalizing the intifada” entails. The shooters were a father-and-son team. Should a similar event take place in Canada, the meaning for Islamists will be the same.

For more or less commonsensical liberal-democratic journalists and politicians it was the culmination of rising antisemitism in Australia since October 7. True enough, but ask yourself: how did the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack and the Israeli response turn into righteous (or self-righteous) antisemitism in Australia? Again, the commonsensical answer seems obvious: tolerating antisemitism invites terrorism because, where liberals see antisemitism as an embarrassing “prejudice,” Islamists see it as weakness and an opportunity to be exploited.

Critics of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese linked the attack to his government’s intention, announced earlier this fall, to recognize a Palestinian state. The same logic of appeasement would explain something similar taking place here.

Alas, common sense only takes you so far — about as far as the pieties uttered by Canadian politicians. They were appalled, and so on. In the words of the Australian Prime Minister: “the evil that was unleashed at Bondi Beach today,” he said, “is beyond comprehension.” No, sir, it is not beyond comprehension, no more than the Hamas attack that was described in similar language at the time.

To see how comprehensible such events are, one must distinguish between political and spiritual terrorism. Both use violence and terror against civilians, but political terrorists consider their action to be instrumental, a means to effect plausible political change. A Canadian example would be the actions of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) that led to the “October crisis” of 1970 and was ended by negotiation. Or consider the Provisional IRA from the 1970s to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The IRA and their henchmen were terrorists. But they were willing to end their terror in return for some sort of increased British accommodation in Northern Ireland.

In contrast, spiritual terrorists do not negotiate, at least not in good faith. That’s because they do not seek political change but changes to the structure of reality itself.

Thus, members of the FLQ were willing to kill (and did) but they also wanted to continue to live, presumably in a “liberated” Quebec. The Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein, its political wing, were also willing to kill until they received a half-loaf. But what do you do when the terrorists are just as happy dying? At the very least, there is no reason to negotiate.

Islamists’ willingness to die is sustained by promises of posthumous rewards offered by persons who are themselves unwilling to die in a terrorist act: rewards in heaven including 70 virgins and all that, and “martyr” status on earth. The terrorist who expects to get shot by the police after killing as many persons as possible is not necessarily insane, but he (or less likely, she) is certainly spiritually disordered.

In this connection the Victorians spoke of “moral insanity” and political scientists today speak not of a psychopathology but of a “pneumopathology” — a spiritual disease. Psychopaths apparently cannot distinguish between right and wrong; pneumopaths can, but they overcome this awareness by the excitement of direct action and surround their actions with transparently untrue justifications, stories and myths

In reality, nobody knows the fate of a person after death, so those who promise posthumous rewards are lying, and everybody knows it. Those who believe them are precisely in a pneumopathic state, having deliberately altered their own consciousness so they can pretend not to know what they perfectly well know: murder is wrong. Sometimes living in this imaginary world is described as living in a second reality.

Living in this second reality is not confined to Islam. Historically, there have been Christian versions, most of which were suppressed by the medieval Church as heretical or gnostic. There have also been non-Christian versions such as Aum Shinrikyo, the terrorist organization that poisoned thousands of Tokyo subway riders in 1995, or the fantastic realm that Sikh terrorists are seeking to create. The Aum Shinrikyo sought “supreme truth,” while Sikh terrorists seek a “land of the pure.” The second reality within which Marxists even today live is not remotely connected to any religion at all.

But that is hardly the point. It is certainly true that most Muslims are not terrorists. At Bondi Beach in Sydney, this was evident in the heroic acts of Ahmed al-Ahmed, a fruit vendor originally from Syria, who tackled one of the shooters and wrestled his gun from him. But it is also true that many terrorists today not only claim to be Muslims, but to be “original” Muslims, Salafis, genuine, true, “pure” Muslims. Those claims are not just a problem for Islam, but for all of us.

Journalists and politicians know that pretending Islamist terrorism is “beyond comprehension” may be less violent than shooting up Bondi Beach, but it is just as spiritually disordered.

Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. His 2004 book, New Political Religions was later found in Osama bin Laden’s library when U.S. special forces raided and killed him in his lair in 2011.