The Arab people who have been largely accused of acts of terrorism and all the ugly nuisance the world currently faces in terms of bombings, suicide or otherwise, are part of the group of believers of the “house” of Abraham whom religious scholars call “Abrahamic religion” meaning they all believe and see the role of Abraham played as paramount to their beliefs.
These groups of believers some scholars say include the Christian, Moslem, Jews and Bahai faith. Their teachings takes its roots from abraham. They have lived side by side through out history with intermittent show of power and military might or who has the lawful right to which shrine, mosques, holy cities ornaments or artifacts of historical importance.
These have largely been what has been responsible for the divisions and difference between these groups. A critical example is the the problem between the Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank that has for a long time threatened the peace of the entire middle east leading to occasional wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and so on. That conflict has been described as “the most intractable conflict of the world”
The religious differences of these believers of the Abrahamic religion is not what causes the troubles between them but rather where to live, call shrines, holy sites or worship grounds.
The worse failure of diplomacy in the world can be traced to where these people of Abraham live.
They all claim title and rights to all the historical and religious sites of importance which they all claim was handed over to them by their forefathers. And here one may ask who their forefathers or forefathers as it were is.
To get this answer simply, one will have to address his mind to what abraham stood for and who abraham was and you can glean from that and understand why their beliefs are referred to as people of the Abrahamic religion.
Central to these troubles as earlier on indicated, is land and holy sites. But that does not make those exclusive as the causes of these troubles. Also central to this is the unnecessary interventions and invasions of the lands and internal affairs of the Arab interest of these group known as the Abrahamic religion.
The Arab people throughout history have never believed in the western type of democracy. Their understanding of democracy is totally different from what the west believes in. They are usually regarded as people who believe in a monarchical and patriarchal forms of government whereby when an individual ascent to a throne, he becomes the sole occupant of the throne till death. And even in death, he still wishes to have interest in who becomes the leader after him.
When these invasions happen and the leaders or leader is killed, you will often find out that these countries never know peace after the leaders who have been branded as tyrants and wicked leaders are overthrown, killed or exicuted after a politically motivated trial.
Examples of such abound in many Arab nations ie Libya, Egypt, Iraq , Syria, and many other places.
The big question that comes is that; is Libya better now after French secret agents masterminded the killing of Gaddafi?
Is Iraq better now than it was under Saddam Hussein who was falsely accused of stocking and piling up weapons of mass destruction which was later found to be a false alarm by George Bush to teach Saddam a lesson his father Bush one failed to achieve during his failed war with Saddam in the late 80s and early 90s?
Under the guise of Arab Spring, many Arab leaders were overthrown or killed under the tutelage of the western countries and today, it has become too clear that those countries were better under those leaders than today.
When these leaders and many in the Arab countries were clandestinely removed over one accusation or the other can we say with certainty that the world is a safer and better place today?
Have we asked where all the soldiers and intelligence chiefs who worked with these leaders have gone?
Have we asked ourselves whether they have not been hurt so much so that they can plot revenge?
Have we asked ourselves whether they have not formed ,joined or acted as sponsors to terrorist organizations?
So really was it worth invading and or killing these people?
Terrorism hasn’t got a clear academic nor accurate legal definition. In fact there hasn’t been a clear consensus as to what definition should be accepted universally for terrorism. Various individuals, organizations and states have defined terrorism differently using various terminologies leading to governments around the world trying to formulate an agreed upon, acceptable and legally binding definition for terrorism.
These difficulties in finding appropriate definition arises out of the fact that the term terrorism is politically and emotionally charged.
This far, until the world reaches a consensus on a legally acceptable definition of terrorism, the international community has adopted a series of conventions that define and criminalize the various acts of terrorism activities. In addition, since 1999, the UN General Assembly has condemned terrorist acts using the following political description of terrorism ” Criminal acts intended to or calculated to provoke a state in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious, social and any other nature that may be invoked to justify them”
Various terrorist activities have occurred in our history as humans and these acts depending on where one stands, may decide to call them terrorism , defense , acts of war or otherwise depending on the lenses a person puts on. For instance, when America bombed hiroshima and Nagasaki it wasn’t called terrorism. When America invaded Iraq under false claims of weapons of mass destruction, it wasn’t called terrorism. When Russian forces pound their neighbors Ukraine it is not terrorism but something else.
The genesis of terrorism despite the historical antecedents going back into prehistoric times , started in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the cold war was at its peak, and the Soviet Union had taken control of Afghanistan.
From this point and the subsequent lines of ink, I will urge readers to follow closely what or who the cause agents of our modern day terrorism are. This will primarily give readers a clue as to who and what actually started or caused terrorism to fester and go out of control today and the bigger the fight against terrorism becomesthe more terrorist attacks we have.
When the Soviet force took over Afghanistan, the whole Islamic world, from Pakistan to the Middle East joined the Mujahideen ie the rebel group which was fighting the Soviets inside Afghanistan. This fight was called “the jihad” since the men we seen to be defending an Islamic country against an alien power ie the Soviet Union. And it must be noted that the Arab world sees any intrusion or if you like an invasion into any Arab nation as an act of war which requires a jihad from other countries of like minds to defend their own.
Whilst the Soviets were doing their own thing in Afghanistan, big brother America who had no interest in Afghanistan whatsoever at that time, felt that they needed to teach their arch rivals in world politics a bitter lesson. So they decided for obvious reasons, to directly or indirectly aide the rebel group so that they could fight and win the war against the Soviet Union.
After a decade of struggle inside Afghanistan , the Soviet forces failed to establish a peaceful stable regime in Afghanistan and decided it was time to leave Afghanistan.
Now that the Soviets were gone, and eventually disintegrated, the USA had no interest in Afghanistan but mind you, they had succeeded in training a lion(Bin Laden ) and many others in the fight against the Soviet Union who will on turn their guns against them. These mujahideen rebels soon made Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan a lawless state where they operated safely from. The rebels eventually broke into factions and engagedin turf war in Afghanistan.
Soon the lion ( Osama bin Laden ) a Saudi born dissident from a rich family who was part of the people America trained and sponsored to sack the Soviets from Afghanistan, turned his guns against his masters and declared war against America and all its interest. Bin Laden’s anger stemmed from his belief that the stationing of American forces in Saudi Arabia the land of his birth, represented an abomination to the kind of Islamic State he believed should exist in the Arabian penunsula and that singular act by the man bin Laden and his anger thereof marked the beginning of terrorism.
Bin Laden knowing what it took around that time to get support for his war against America, started a propaganda war against America and its allies by playing on the psychological keyboards of the Arab nations using land and religion as his tool.
And as most academics have indicated, all terrorist acts are motivated by two things;
1. Social and political : people choose terrorism when they are trying to ” right ” what they perceive to be a social or political or historical wrong against them and that they have been stripped of their land or rights or denied of these.
2. The belief that violence or its threats will be effective and usher in change. Another way of saying this is the belief that violence means justifies the end. Many terrorist in history are reported to have said sincerely that they chose violence after long deliberations, because they felt they had no choice.
Remember, Osama bin Laden, as learned as he was, knew all of these and decided to use it to his advantage.
Our people say that both bad and good leaders leave their footsteps wherever they have been. And as we are all aware, Bin Laden spent some time on the African soil notably in Sudan and as expected, he left some bad footprints for Africa to deal with. He left with Africa in his short stay in Sudan, Al Qaeda in the Arab Magreb, Tuareg rebels and terrorist groups in Mali, Boko Haram in Nigeria and so on.
When Osama Bin Laden was killed, America and the world thought that the end of terrorist was near little did we address our minds to comments attributed to the man bin Laden himself that “when you kill one bin Laden, you should expect a thousand more bin Ladens” and true to these words ISIS an of shoot of the failed war on terror is threatening the peace of the entire world.
Now, alongside ISIS, is another deadly group known as Boko Haram arguably the most deadly terror group today, has pledged allegiance to ISIS , is wrecking havoc in Nigeria, killing innocent people and gradually bringing the Nigerian nation to its knees.
By all intends and purposes, it appears that diplomacy has failed to bring politically sustainable end to these acts of terrorism and to root out for discussion the underlying and underpinning causes of these troubles.
It is not enough to always pin it down to moslems and moslems fundamentalists, radicalization and radicalists , Islamic idealogist ,sectarianism and all that and forget about the things that gives these terrorist groups free recruits without toil.
We need not forget the unconstitutional and unnecessary interventions , distabilization in Arab individual states an Arab affairs , overthrow and killing of Arab leaders and imposing of allies.
The solution that’s not lie in ramping all moslems and branding them terrorist. It is actually terrorism to label an innocent moslem or Arab as a terrorist. It is terrorism because such acts rather alienates these people and make them easy candidates for the terrorist to recruit.
Remember , these and many acts give the terrorist free agents.
Isis for instance, has mastered such crucial tactics of recruitment no terrorist group had ever conquered.
They have succeeded just like their idol Bin Laden, mastered the craft of radicalizing young moslems into becoming terrorist and joining Islamic State terror group in large numbers. In most cases leaving their homes to travel to the Middle East to join ISIS like it was recently reported in the media in Ghana where a young Ghanaian university student left home to join Isis.
What we need to do now after diplomacy has failed, is to employ efficient counter terrorism strategies, techniques, tactics permanent military and police units dedicated to the fight against terrorism. Also, we should form special investigative branches capable of breaking into the inner circles of the terrorist groups.
The units we form to fight terrorism should be a mixed elites and regular stream of officers who knows what the dealings of these terror networks. These units should not have tribal, political or religious colorations but should be one that will be loyal to the state.
source- Abdul Hanan Mohammed El-Saeed
