There are times when you work in the (counter) terrorism space that you come across a story and say: WTF?
This is one of those times.
In early January, a Sri Lankan court sentenced a hardline Buddhist monk named Galagodaatte Gnanasara to nine months in prison for insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred. The remarks made by Gnanasara took place in 2016: this may reflect on the slow pace of Sri Lanka’s justice system! This was not his first encounter with the legal system: he received a presidential pardon in 2019 for a previous six-year sentence related to intimidation and contempt of court. At the time the president was Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was later forced to resign and flee abroad following mass protests over the island nation’s economic crisis in 2022. Rajapaska had appointed Gnanasara head of a presidential task force on legal reforms aimed at protecting ‘religious harmony’. It speaks volumes that an avowed hater of Muslims was assigned to a position on interfaith ‘harmony’, doesn’t it?
This ‘religious’ figure belongs to the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS – the Army of Buddhist Power in Sinhalese), a hardline sect that is heavily into trying to paint the island as a solely Buddhist nation. Sri Lanka has a significant Muslim community, constituting about 9.7 per cent of the island nation’s population, but this does not sit well with the BBS which is ‘revising’ the country’s history (for a much more detailed discussion on the BBS check out my 2019 book When Religion Kills).
The reason I am featuring this story is two-fold. On the one hand, it is important to underscore that when it comes to hate and terrorism there are any number of underlying motivations. No one driver is responsible for these violent views around the world, even if when it comes to terrorism Islamist jihadis are by far the most responsible for acts of terrorism (you do not have to take my word for it: check out the highly-regarded Global Terrorism Index).
Secondly, terrorism can come from the oddest sources. While I am certainly no specialist on Buddhism, I would bet the farm that for most people the one word that rises to the surface when they think of this faith is ‘peace’. For a leading figure to harbour such contemptible and visceral views from within a religious system normally associated with harmony and tranquility should remind us that no single faith is immune (again, have a look at When Religion Kills). This should also be seen in the context when we hear that Islam is a religion of ‘peace’: sure, for the overwhelming number of believers, but not for the jihadis.
Some may argue that what Gnanasara is advocating is more ‘ethno-nationalist’ than religious in nature. Fair enough, but one cannot discount the Buddhist overtones, in the same way that the current Gaza conflict is tied both to the ‘nation’ of Palestine as well as the goals of jihadi groups to destroy Israel. This is not an ‘either-or’ situation.
As a former counter-terrorism analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), my job was to look at raw data (SIGINT, HUMINT, etc.), judge it for accuracy, and see where the facts led me. At times, the conclusions I drew were uncomfortable, to say the least (i.e. that a handful of Canadian Muslims, inspired perhaps by jihadi groups like Al Qaeda (AQ), Islamic State (ISIS), or others, justified killing in the name of Islam). We must not kowtow to political correctness for fear of ‘offending’ someone: on the contrary, we must call things what they are (in addition, it is the terrorists who are ‘offending’ the vast majority of their co-religionists who reject their non-normative, extreme views).
If anything, the case of a Buddhist terrorist in Sri Lanka should serve as an important reminder that terrorism is complicated. ‘Buddhist terrorist’: go figure!
