Terrorism works - are YOU part of the problem?
I am frankly disapointed and sad. Not by the fact that there was terrorist attacks in London last week. It was just a matter of time. The thing that horrifies me is how well terrorism works. Let me explain what I mean.
To judge how successfull something is, we have to meassure it up to it's goals.
If the goal of the terrorists is in the number of dead and wounded, the terrorist attacks last week can't be said to have been very successfull. I mean no disresspect for the victims or the families and friends off those, but the amount of "enemies" the terrorists managed to kill or hurt, is in the large picture diminishingly small.
More success can be said that the terrorists had in sake of generating attention, and the spreading of fear and uncertanty in the world. Terror allerts are reported by the dozens, and in interviews we see people saying they will never ride the subway etc. But even though most newspapers in the world have contributet their war-head frontpage storries, and TV stations dedicating most of their news programs to this happening, for the most part life goes on as normal around the globe.
But where I sadly see the terrorists being LARGELY successfull is in dividing the people of the world. All over the internett there are blogs, articles and comments that in various degrees argues for "fighting back", "throwing out" or just "f**k" them. The thing is that this attacks are targeting not only the few individualt responsible for the terrorist acts, but they target groups like all muslims, all religous people, all foreigners, all different races and so on. Racism and disrepect for "others" is noticeably increasing. And even more sadly this is not only happening in cyberspace. In London several mosks have been set on fire. In the whole western world there is is reports of more agresivenes and intolerance, both in actual physical acts (beatings, vandalism, etc.) and general attitude, towards muslims and other obvius "different" people.
In my humble understanding, one of the reasons terrorists do what they do is their incredible lack of tollerance and respect for people, beleifs and lifestyles different than their own.
The question you need to ask your self is if they have managed to recruit you to the same patterns of mind.
I'm sorry for the OT rant, but I see to many people lashing out at the problem, not realicing that they are part of it themselves.
1) Unequivocally denounce International Terrorsim as a tool of Islam.
2) Issue a Fatwah against Bin Laden and/or any other Muslim from preaching that Allah wants "infidels" dead.
3) The greater Muslim population start and manage a grass-roots effort to remove those who are determined to hijack Islam for violent purposes.
While we, meaning "westerners/non-mulsims" are supposed to have compassion and understanding, the followers of said Religion do NOT want to take responsibility for their own member's actions.
That is my own translation from a norwegian article - so bad spelling and wrong use of words are of mine and not the quoted person.
From the leading islamic website in Norway we can read (again my own translations):
"Now I am really pissed of over these bandits that use the name of islam to carry out their gruesome acts."
"I see al qaude taking the blame. The prophet Muhammed did not kill women, children, inocent, this is extremism. I got really sick..."
These are just a few quotes I dug up in some minutes, but in earlier reading, programs on tv, and personal meetings/talks with muslims I'm very confident that the vast majority of muslims are strongly against terror, and means that this has nothing to do with real islam, and is hurting the islam comunity as a whole. And that is part of the tragedy, a few extremists are able to create this global misconseption - and thereby divert people. This is the real threat, this is their real weapon.
This is not a conflict between muslims and others. It's a conflict between those who want to divert and those who want to unify. Would be interesting to know the percentage of people belonging to either side among the muslims and among us "westerners/non muslims". We might get suprised by where the diverting terrorist have the most support.
It will never end, not in my life time that is :(
I live in Australia, and we are a pretty cruisy country (small in the overall picture) eventually they will hit us, most likely Sydney or some other major capital, some soft target - we will be shocked, outraged and mourn the innocent but they will then move on to the next iconic attack and so on..
I doubt there is a defintive answer that could end it all as how do you attack/kill an enemy without a flag/nation (although they may be spread out through "back-door" nations around the world..still no official nation..all they can do is breed hatred towards Muslims...
All they have to do now is bomb the wrong place with the wrong technology and then, maybe this planet will cast their eyes fully and with absolute co-operation onto those responsible - we are simply still blind at present.
Scott - I totally agree that finding and putting to responsibility those who actually stand behind these terrorist acts is extremly dificult. As you say they are not a nation, they are not even one group. They are several small, sly and sneaky groups spread around the globe, and often well integrated into scociety where they live.
The one thing we can and should do (I would go as far as to say it's our responsibility) is to make sure we do not strenghten their cause.
A population tends to prefer an illusionary existence rather than the realities of an unsafe world. Having to deal with extra security at an airport, metal detector's at building entrances, and a big brotherish set of laws causes a grumbling undercurrent with the way things are and a longing to return to the way things were.
You see, the oposition agains terrorism among muslims is, and has been all the time, present. Granted they do not get an much news coverage as the terrorists do, but the information is out there for those willing to look past their prejudice against muslims as a whole.
However we have priests that molest kids and they get moved to other parishes, no one reprimands them beyond moving them to another parish.
When the KKK went on their reign of terror they put it in the name of religion, we never heard denunciations from the church and neither did we look for it.
The vatican wasn't too opposed to the Nazi party so on and so forth.
Its a whethered, tired, futile and quite pointless argument really and i think we're laying the blame for it in the wrong people.
I would also like to point out that London has been through alot with in the last century, including germanys Blitzes and the IRA, the london attacks were upsetting but for a transport system that carries 20 million a day, they didn't do that good of a job.
Oh and also the americans had been donating to the IRA for a long time, and it took 18 months for the US to put them as a terrorist network that they were to cut funding to.