If one was to seek out an exemplar of christian charity and forgiveness, it would be difficult to better the effort made outside court yesterday afternoon by Father Paul Murphy, defence forces chaplain, after the teenager who attempted to murder him in the name of the Islamic State was sentenced to eight years of detention:
Outside court, Fr Murphy made a brief statement in which he said it was “very easy for us to fight hatred with hatred and the world just becomes entrenched in hatred and that is the way the world is at the moment”.
“St John said that God is love and if we believe God to be love, then we know that love is stronger than hate and so to respond to hate with love will hopefully bring a different world for us all,” he said.
“This young boy is going to prison for a few years and my only hope is that he will return to society better able to manage his own life and also to make a more positive contribution to society.”
The basic problem here – if Christian readers will forgive me for indulging in some borderline heathenry – is that the claim that “God is love and if we believe God to be love, then we know that love is stronger than hate” is exactly what it sounds like: An expression of religious faith, rather than an expression of empirical evidence.
It is entirely possible that expressing love and forgiveness for the person who tried to take your life is a christian virtue that will be rewarded in heaven. The problem is that it makes for a relatively poor policy choice for the sustenance of human life here on the mortal plane.
Consider the basic facts of this case: The attacker, a 17-year-old boy, tried to kill Father Murphy in order to advance the glory of his own religion. When Gardai visited his home to search for evidence, they found a giant Islamic State banner, and large tracts of extremist material. There is no doubt in this case as to motive. The young man wanted to kill an Irish soldier – any Irish soldier would have done, the fact that Father Murphy is a cleric was apparently incidental – in order to strike a blow for Islam against the west. How many more young men there are in Ireland currently being radicalised into Islamic extremism, we do not know. But we do know that alleged extremism is an apparent factor in the current closure of the Clonskeagh Mosque, which is the single largest religious space for Muslims in Ireland.
We further know from the experience of other European countries – think in particular here of Belgium and France – that the radicalisation of young Muslim men in Europe is not a new phenomenon. Not only is there no reason to think that it couldn’t happen here – we now have explicit evidence that it is happening here, albeit perhaps not yet on so wide a scale.
If one was to take Father Murphy at his word, then our collective response should be to meet hatred with love. What that actually means or looks like in state policy terms is hard to define, but I’m guessing that it wouldn’t look vastly different from the state’s current policy framework as it relates to migration and integration. States are not capable of love, hate, or any other emotion – but the Irish state has made just about every effort possible to make people feel at home here, whether they have a right to be here or not. If you are a Muslim, then our political leaders cannot wait to take to social media to wish you a happy Ramadan or a peaceful Eid.
Indeed on the international stage, this country has been an almost unqualified friend to the Muslim world – opposing at every turn the various American, British, European, and Israeli wars on Islamic extremism in the middle east, and fostering closer ties with Iran and Egypt and other middle eastern Islamic powers than any other EU country.
None of that saved Father Murphy from a brush with death.
The irony here is of course that while he is being perfectly consistent in applying Christian values to his own attacker, his attacker’s entire raison d’etre was the rejection of those very same values. This fits the pattern of most European interactions with radical Islam: The idea that the obvious superiority of our own value system and culture would work as a civilising and converting force for those in our midst drawn to the black-and-white value system of radical Islamic groups.
In the one of the greatest pieces of fantasy literature of our time, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, there exists a group of people whose response to the existential evil facing their civilisation is a complete rejection of violence. When faced with those who want to kill them, they simply refuse to fight. Jordan presents this as noble, but he does not shy away from the consequences: Ultimately, the Tuatha’an (based, incidentally, on Irish travellers) are all but wiped out by those who wish to destroy them. Those who assert their own values and respond to a challenge forcefully, by contrast, manage to survive.
Father Murphy’s words yesterday were noble indeed. They point us to an example of how to be good Christians. They do not, however, necessarily point to an example of good policymaking for a secular state interested in its own security.