Terrorism

From all I’ve read in newspapers, popular books, and magazines of the past twenty years, from all the interviews I’ve heard, from all the images and political analyses I’ve seen on television, from what I know of history and the psychology of man and society, here is my take on what drives the terrorist acts that have disrupted our world. 

 

Terrorism is not a nation—not necessarily even a people; it is not Islam.  Terrorism is a tactic, a weapon, an approach, a means to an end.  Josef Stalin in the last century stated it succinctly: “Shoot one, and intimidate a thousand.” For America on September 11, 2001 it was ‘Destroy 3,000 (in the Twin Towers) and intimidate 300 million.’ As a continued reminder it is ‘behead one or a few, flog one, blow up a few in a suicide bombing or shoot up a school or marketplace—it is coming to you.’  The battles we read about in the newspapers or see on CNN are just skirmishes in the great global combat to come in which the believers (they) will prevail against the unbelievers (us). Or so they think.  As yet, the terrorists view themselves as ‘Davids’ supported by God against the larger Goliaths. 

   

Why? Those who use terror as a weapon are driven, as is all behavior, by motives, as perverse as these motives may seem to us. It is their revenge—a paying back for what they perceive we have done to them.

Having said that terrorism as a tactic is not the exclusive purview of Islamic nations it must yet be said that Islam has historically had more than its share of radical extremists notwithstanding its claim as a peaceful religion.  From Muhammad on, the religion spread rapidly via conquest and intimidation.  In Arabic you don’t convert to Islam, you “submit” to it.  ‘Infidels’ (non-believers) are not treated with a whole lot of tolerance by the extreme believers.  Consider a few quotations from the Islamic holy book, the Qur’an:

“Fight in GOD’s name those who fight you, and do not transgress, surely God does not love the transgressors. And kill them whenever you come upon them and expel them from where they expelled you, as persecuting people to sway them from GOD’s religion is graver than killing . . . kill them, this is the recompense of the unbelievers.”  “And continue fighting them until there is no more persecution and GOD’s religion prevails, but if they desist from unbelief, then there should be no hostility except to the evildoers.” “The unbelievers, they are the evildoers.” “Grant us victory over the unbelievers.”(Surah 2: 190, 191,193, 254, 286) “ “Fighting has been ordained for you, and you are averse to it, but you may be averse to a thing while it is good for you and you may like a thing while it is bad for you.”  (Surah 2: 216) “Fight in the cause of GOD….” (Surah 2: 244) “Oh you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends.  They are friends one to another.  And whoso among you takes them for friends is indeed one of them.”

Let us take the Islamic, or more accurately, Jihadi fanatics from Osama bin Laden to the present.  What is their motive?  It is their war against Western influence on the minds, hearts, lands (and resources of the land, i.e., oil) and religion of those who have a completely different world-view than ours—or what we project on MTV.  Their atrocities may be, as Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, says,  “the fuse for a much larger war of civilizations.” We have, they believe, defiled and disrespected their most cherished places and values.  They not only want us out of their lands, they want to supplant us and again become the dominant force in the world as they were in the approximately 1000 year period from A.D. 622 to their humiliation in the late 1,600’s.  If and when the inter-Arab struggles between the various factions of Islam resolve themselves and Muslim jihadists become united against the West, today’s Middle Eastern based terrorism will look like just a warm-up.  Having the sanction of what they believe is holy scripture tips the scale for many who will be the fighters in that jihad in pursuit of a Qu’ranic dispensation. 

   

Although the Islamic resurgence poses the largest threat to the Western civilization and its values, extremist terrorists (mujahid, or 'Fighters on the Straight Path of God,' as they call themselves) are not restricted to Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Shia Houthi or any of their other splinter groups.  We, sadly, have our own terrorists because alienated and misguided people world-wide have now seen a weapon that they can use that works. 

I will treat that reality in my next essay.