As of writing this, 22 people have been confirmed dead at a terrorist attack in Manchester with 120 more injured.
In the past, I’ve always thought that these types of things were quite far away, having mostly lived in rural areas for most of my life. When 9/11 happened, I was in a small town in the Netherlands. When the plethora of attacks, from Charlie Hebdo to the shootings in Paris to the 2011 Norway attacks, happened in Europe, I was in Canada.
That sense of distance was eradicated during the 2014 shootings at Parliament Hill. I wasn’t close to Parliament Hill myself, working closer to the edge of Ottawa (although to my memory the government buildings around me were on lockdown as well), but my wife was in Chateau Laurier at the time; adjacent to Parliament Hill and the Canadian National War Memorial, where she had walked past Corporal Nathan Cirillo in the morning. She was stuck for most of the day.
That sense of distance, however, has always been a false. Even in B.C., we’ve had experience with these types of incidents. While at Thompson Rivers University in Williams Lake, we were on lockdown once and even just last year schools in Williams Lake were on lockdown following a shooting. Even for an example of a bombing one doesn’t have to look far, as in 2012 a Kamloops hostage-taker died in an explosion where several bombs were present.
These types of local instances, however, are more often gang related as opposed to ISIS or al-Qaeda and we tend to see them in a different light. I’m not sure that they are different. Certainly, the outcome is often very similar. Whether members of the public are dying as a result of gang violence or as a result of terrorism, the outcome is arguably equally devastating.
Furthermore, a brief glimpse at officially designated terrorist organisations by various governments wouldn’t get you a bingo on a single one. al-Qaeda isn’t (officially) designated a terrorist organization by countries including Saudi Arabia, China and the Philipines, while China, in turn (along with the U.N., the U.K. and the U.S.), has designated the East Turkestan Islamic Party as a terrorist organization while Canada hasn’t.
Certainly, many terrorist organizations, much like gangs, also have plenty of financial dealings, such as selling oil in the case of ISIS. Perhaps all many of these terrorist organizations are simply “gangs” that have gotten too large or too much power.
How we look at these instances and organizations matters because it’s going to affect the way we respond to them.
At least for me, whether an organization murders members of the public, like in Manchester this week, it doesn’t really matter if it’s for political gain or financial purposes; they have no part in our society either way.