VIII. Study the text carefully, complete the tasks that follow it and retell.

WHAT ARE THE CAUSES
AND ORIGINS OF TERRORISM?

Comparisons are now made to the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But really the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are incomparable. In 1941, the armed forces of the Empire of Japan attacked the armed forces of The United States. On September 11, however, the terrorists did not attack our armed forces, but the American people as such. This is truly an unprecedented crime.

The Al Qaeda terror network is at war with us. These terrorists, quite clearly, hate us and seek to do us harm. Osama bin Laden has called it a holy duty binding on every Moslem to kill every American within reach. In other words, he believes genocide is justified. Such hate is difficult for Americans to fathom for we know ourselves to be a peaceable people. What, then, is the cause of such hatred? What are the grievances of the followers of Osama bin Laden which prompt them to commit mass murder of American civilians? Are they such that they could be appeased?

At a macro-historical level, the terrorists of Al Qaeda see themselves as holy warriors in the long history of conflict between Islam and the unbelievers – in particular, the unbelievers of the West, or Christendom. While we are now taught that the medieval Crusades were in their very nature in crime of intolerance (and it is surely true that the Crusaders committed innumerable shameful atrocities), we would do well also to recall that the Crusades were a belated act of strategic defense. For Mohammed was an “armed prophet”, as Machiavelli put it. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Arab armies swept across the Christian lands of North Africa, converting peoples at the point of the sword. Crossing over into Europe at the Straits of Gibraltar, they conquered nearly the whole of Spain, and their advance into Western Europe was stopped only at the Battle of Tours (in central France) in 732. Spanish Christians fought for centuries to reclaim their country and to defend against successive Muslim invasions, succeeding finally only in the fifteenth century, after hundreds of years. This Spanish victory, the final liberation of Christian Spain from what where, in effect, Muslim imperialists or colonialists, is referred to by Osama bin Laden in his videotaped response to the September 11 bombings as the “tragedy of Andalusia”.

Likewise in Eastern Europe, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the nations of Christendom were threatened in the Balkans by successive Muslim invasions. In 1683, the Turks penetrated as far as the gates of Vienna, where they were defeated by the heavy cavalry of the Polish king Jan Sobieski. Centuries of war and popular uprisings in the Balkans eventually liberated Christian people from the “Turkish yoke.” By the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe”, while Europe reached its imperialist zenith.

These are hardly “current events”, but it is necessary to revisit such history in order to understand the background to the grievances which animate Al Qaeda. Their deepest grievance is the wordly success of the West, or Christendom, and the relative decline in the power and prestige, the splendor and dynamism of Islamic civilization over the past four centuries.

By the First World war, nearly the whole of the Muslim world had fallen under one form or another of colonial administration by Western powers. Since the mid-twentieth century, the Islamic lands have recovered their sovereignty, but there has been little evidence of an Islamic civilizational renaissance. Instead, Islamic (and especially, Arab) societies remain backward, their economies stagnant even when artificially inflated with a glut of oil wealth, their political system corrupt. The seedbed of terror is a profound frustration with this state of affairs. While only a very few respond to this frustration with terrorism, the underlying frustration is widely shared in the Muslim world.

Some academic commentators shift the burden of argument, as it were. They alter the question about the origin and cause of terrorism to ask: Why have we Americans done to bring this hatred upon ourselves? They say that we can never eliminate the terrorist threat until we eliminate the “root causes” of terrorism, and it is suggested that America is complicit in these “root causes”. In this way, the terrorists are relieved of their responsibility for their actions while we are “held responsible” for an imputed complicity in the conditions which generate terrorism.

There is a major problem with such analysis. Osama bin Laden is himself a multi-millionaire, and his closet lieutenants are educated members of the professional classes. Those who fill the rosters of the Al Qaeda terrorist network appear to be drawn not from the “wretched of the earth” in Muslim lands, but rather from the privileged sons of the middle class. In many cases, they have benefited from international travel and Western education. Often, their family backgrounds are relatively secular, even modern. A wholesale redistribution of wealth to the poor of Arab lands would not appreciably affect the life prospects of those who are now drawn into a life of terror. Therefore, it is simply mistaken to view economics as the root cause which has mobilized these terrorists against us.

It is, however, fair to say that the politicalstructures of the Arab world leave much to be desired when judged by our Western standards. Middle Eastern regimes are divided in the main between party dictatorships such as the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria; theocratic oligarchies such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Sudan; military regimes such as Egypt and Pakistan; and hereditary monarchies such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. While the monarchial regimes have made modest experiments in democracy by instituting “consultative councils” rather than parliaments, there is a general – and justified – anxiety among Arab elites about democracy getting “out of hand”.

American academics who argue for more democracy in the Middle East must pause to consider exactly what sort of policies might be instituted by “democratic” regimes in the Arab world. The Taliban in Afghanistan, like the Nazis, also rode to power on popular support – and they at once proceeded to oppress minorities at home and harbor ruthless terrorists intent on murdering Americans abroad. Can America, can humanity, have any interest in seeing such a “democratic” outcome?

Some critics appear to believe that we have the responsibility, and the power, to utterly remake societies about which we obviously know very little. But America has never succeeded in “nation-building”. We were twice successful at what might be called “state-rebuilding” – in the cases of post-war Germany and Japan, but in both cases, unconditional surrender following American victory in total war was the enabling condition for our success. No such conditions now exist or are likely to exist in our dealings with Muslim states, including even Afghanistan. All political action confronts the fact of human free will, and America is not omnipotent; our political leaders know that, but some commentators appear unacquainted with this elementary reality.

Prudence is the first law of international relations, and prudence now dictates that we eliminate the immediate threat to American lives hiding in Afghanistan and in covert cells around the world. It may later prove necessary to widen our war to “end” other regimes that similarly support the terrorist war against us.

(From Rally For America.org)

a) Match the two halves:

Fathom	Wisdom and care
Atrocity	Repayment for damages
Stagnant	To understand
Glut	Having unlimited power
Complicit	Oversupply
Imputed	Involved as an accomplice
Appreciably	Noticeably
Getting “out of hand”	Not moving or growing
Recompense	Extremely evil and cruel action
Omnipotent	Attributed to or credited with
Prudence	Becoming out of control

b) Discuss the following questions:

1. What are the historic grievances between Muslims and Europeans?

2. According to the text, is poverty one of the causes of terrorism?

3. Is “democracy “ a simple solution to the Middle East?

4. What do you think America` s role in the Middle East should be?