Sepember 1998
ARAB TERRORISM - MORE OF IT MUST BE EXPECTED
What drives
Muslim Arabs in our time into terrorism? Thousands of them have voluntarily and
enthusiastically joined training camps between Afghanistan and Algeria in
recent years. They were taught up-to-date terrorist skills, then sent out on
missions of death and destruction, some including self-destruction. Some had
orders for immediate action, others were put in place as "sleepers",
like spies, to settle and wait for word from their organization.
Why the
Arabs? What does Islam have to do
it? Why the suicides? What are their chieftains' aims beyond the wanton death
of innocent victims, as in in the Pan-Am airliner flight over Lockerbie,
Scotland, in December 1979, in Algeria, Kenya, Tanzania, at the New York World
Trade Center, Is there a way of stopping them? Unless good answers are found to
these and more questions, the plague of terrorism in general, the Arab variety
in particular, cannot be understood and dealt with effectively. Terrorism that
succeeds is likely to self-perpetuate and even to spread.
Terrorists are
fanatics for their causes, whether in Northern Ireland, Basques in Spain, Arabs
even in their own countries, as in Algeria and Egypt. Their motives are
nationalist, religious, social, or a compound of them, all nourished by
discontent. They feel themselves as belonging to and representing a wronged
group, as selfless idealists dedicated to a high-minded mission, religious,
patriotic or social, and their terrorist acts as a way of setting things right
as they define what is right.
They are well
indoctrinated, impervious to rational reasoning, as long experience goes to
prove. When Egyptian terrorists assassinated President Anwar Sadat in October
1981, their shots killed also some people who happened to sit near him. When the killers stated their case in
court they were asked how they could justify the murder of innocent bystanders,
they answered that had these victims been told of the circumstances, they would
have gladly given up their life for so lofty a cause as the assassination of
Sadat.
They are also
impervious to any pangs of conscience, as in the case of Nisaam Hindawi, an
Arab terrorist sent to Britain in the seventies by his organization based in
Damascus. In London he courted an Irish girl for a long time, promised her
marriage, won her trust and made her pregnant. Then he persuaded her to fly to
Israel where he said he would soon join and marry her. He bought her a ticket
for an Israel airline flight and, unknown to her, put into her luggage a bomb
timed to blow up in mid-air. The airline security people, suspicious of a
pregnant young woman
travelling alone,
questioned her, searched her luggage and found the bomb, saving the lives of
some 300 passengers and crew, among them Hindawi’s intended wife and future
child. He is now serving a life sentence in Britain. "How could you do
this to me?" she screamed at him in court. The only true answer he could
have given her is that to terrorists the sacred end justifies all means.
THEN ....
The first
terrorist organization on historic record happens to have been Arab too. A
small, but energetic Ismaeli (Shia) faction of Islam founded such an enterprise
about 900 years ago in a mountain region that is shared by Iraq and Iran today.
Soon after the death of Muhammad (632) the Muslim community split into two
rival camps over the succession to Islam leadership, the "Sunna"
majority and the "Sheea" minority. Much blood was shed in the early days of Islam over this issue, a typically Oriental,
unforgotten, unforgiven split that persists to this day.
From their
bases in the mountains Ismaeli terrorists were sent out to murder leading Sunna
politicians throughout the Middle East. They performed with remarkable
efficiency, the result of superb training, devotion to duty, self-sacrifice and
cunning and soon gained international fame as "hashasheen", Arabic
for hashish addicts. It was widely believed at the time that they were drugged
with hashish to achieve their high level of obedience and discipline. Through
reports of Crusaders returning home they also enriched several European
languages with the new terms "assassin" and assassinate"
(derived from the word "hashish"). for the murder of high-ranking
personalities. Bernard Lewis, the noted Oriental scholar, has written a
fascinating account of the terrorist operations of these Assassins, their
innovative methods and contribution to political action well beyond the
inter-Arab conflict. The bases and operations of the Assassins lasted about 150
years and were eventually wiped out by the Mongols during their sweep into the
Middle East. The Sunna Muslim majority rulers with all their resources were
never able to subdue the Ismaeli determined terrorists. (Today the Ismaelis are
a peaceful, still distinct sect, mainly on the Indian subcontinent).
AND NOW ....
Strong collective
frustration pervades the Arab nation by seeing itself disadvantaged in its
political relations with the West. The Arabs believe that the West is abusing
its military and industrial super-iority to deny the Arab nation its rightful
rank and influence in the hierarchy of international power; that it is
exploiting the natural resources of the Arab nation, mainly oil, for the
benefit of Western capitalism; that it is corrupting the traditional standards
of morality in Arab society through its permissive and intrusive TV programs,
films, literature, and now also through Internet.
These secular
grudges are nourished by a collective consciousness of the superior religious
values of Islam compared with those of Christianity. One of the basic doctrines
which Islam has implanted in the mind of the believers is that Allah has made Muhammad his
ultimate messenger; that the Koran is Allah's final revelation to humanity,
complementing all previous revelations;
and that since then Islam has become the only true religion on earth.
Only a Muslim is a "true believer", ranking above others, even above
Christians or Jews though these too acknowledge the unity of God, but not Allah
and Muhammad as his messenger.
Most Muslim
Arabs respect, and will certainly not disclaim, this belief in the superiority
of Islam even if not themselves strictly observant of religious duties in their
daily life. For Muslims anywhere - not only for the Arabs - the Koran is not
merely a book teaching them the true faith, but governing conduct of all
private, social and public life, and an unalterable code of law. The Koran's
impact on Muslims is far stronger than that of the Bible and the New Testament
on most Jews and Christians today. The Muslim faith is like a dormant volcano,
intermittently sending up hot smoke of fanaticism when not active, but now and
then erupting into fierce flames of violence, especially in places where
Muslims and others live side by side in tense relationships as in India,
Indonesia, China, Iran (which persecutes the Bahais), in Iraq (where Assyrian
Christians were massacred by the tens of thousands in the mid-thirties), in
Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, etc.
THE BURDEN OF PAST GLORY
Each
nation stores on its memory shelf some treasures of the past on which it looks
with lasting pride. On that of the Arabs shine two ancient crowns which they
regard with veneration: the Koran and the glory of the short-lived Arabian
empire it created. The first endures and dominates the minds and life of over a
thousand millions around the globe today;
the second, founded by the sword of the original desert Arabians and
larger in area than the Roman empire, lasted barely 120 years under their rule
. The male members of the Omayyad dynasty which supplied the early Arab khalifs
soon after Muhammad's death were murdered by the rival Abbasid dynasty of Egypt
in 750. These too were still regarded as Arab, but gradually more recent
converts to Islam of various non-Arab nationalities, eventually the Turks, came
to rule over the Muslim empire, amid continuous strife and bloodshed.
Already under the third Caliph, Othman (644 - 661) the capital of the
empire was transferred from Medina to Damascus in 661, the year in which he was
assassinated. In the 11th century a dynasty of a militant Turkmanic people, the Seljuks, converts to Islam,
became the rulers of most of Western Asia and the empire. They spoke a
different language, differed from the Arabian founding fathers in character and
lifestyle and treated the Arabs, once the imperial ruling class, as their subjects.
Another branch of the same Asian people, named for their leader Othman
(Ottoman) succeeded them about 1300 and remained in power until l917. The Arabs
have never forgotten the loss of their leadership of the Islamic world.
In
Arabia, Muhammad ended the internecine strife of the numerous tribes and turned
their aggressive energies outward. But not for very long. In the tenth century
they were back at robbing and fighting each other, this time as Muslims, and
remained at it until the present century when Ibn Sa'ud defeated his rivals and
established his Islamic kingdom just in time before oil was discovered there
and made the people of the barren desert fabulously rich.
In the 20th
century the Muslim Arabs, burdened by memories of past glory, find themselves
in the category of Third World Countries, lagging in economic, political,
military power and influence, find relief from their resentment in terrorism,
the typical weapon of the weak against the strong. Most industrial states,
Western Europe, the U.S.A. and Japan, are reluctant to take strong measures
against Arab rulers tolerating, supporting, financing or providing bases to
terrorist organizations, because of their dependence on Arab oil and the
impressive purchasing power of the oil exporters among them. The crescendo of religious-national
passion in the East will soon make Western indulgence an international
problem.
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