BEIRUT — Four separate events in different parts of the world — Pakistan, Israel, the United States, and wherever Osama Bin Laden makes home these days –provide a gloomy but instructive start to the New Year, in the matter of the threat of Al-Qaeda-linked terrorism. The events are: the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, a new audio tape by Osama Bin Laden, Israel telling the world that Al-Qaeda is making inroads in Palestine, and the American presidential candidates wildly riding their horse race campaigns like performing drunks and clowns at a rodeo.
Bin Laden’s new audiotape shows his resilience and durability, but also his profound political weaknesses in connecting with public opinion in the Middle East. His policy of provoking ethnic strife among Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq is widely rejected throughout the region; and his promise to strike against Israel is a desperate attempt to anchor his rejected terrorism in the more legitimate popular Arab anger against Israel and its continuing brutal, colonial policies. He and his sidekick, Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, have tried this several times before, always falling flat on their faces. In the past seven years since September 11, 2001, the overwhelming majority of Arabs and Middle Easterners have repeatedly rejected Al-Qaeda’s philosophy and tactics, especially when they see the damage it does to their own societies.
The few small groups of terrorists that have sprung up in the Arab region, Western Europe and elsewhere are just that — a few small, isolated groups of disaffected, socially marginalized, and politically confused individuals who would have found a bizarre cult to join in earlier days. Their solitary status and the deviant nature of their appeal makes them freaks, not a global movement.
Israel tries to promote a totally different and dishonest version of this truth. Its efficient disinformation and propaganda network spreads the word that Al-Qaeda is making inroads into Palestinian society, without clarifying that: a) this is part of a global dynamic; and, b) it is mostly a consequence of Israel’s own debilitating policies that have turned much of Palestine into a haven for extremism.
By continually speaking in the same breath about Al-Qaeda terrorism and the threats from Hizbullah, Hamas, and other essentially nationalist resistance movements, Israel wishes both to de-legitimize these local groups that fight it, and to exaggerate the real reach of Al-Qaeda.
Not surprisingly, most of the American presidential candidates — especially hormone-heavy Republicans — have bought this Israeli-inspired package of lies, distortion and exaggeration, and regurgitated it in their own made-in-America nonsense. A few candidates whose electoral zealotry occasionally transforms them into intellectual vagabonds on this issue — like Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney — stress that Islamic terror or Islamo-fascists are the defining threat of this century, or this generation, or something equally cosmic and frightening. Most candidates avoid such dishonesty and fearmongering, and simply waddle into the more comfortable political wastewater of vacuous generalizations about how the Bhutto assassination highlights the ever-present threat of terror, the turmoil in the Middle East, and the dangerous world we live in.
These men and women are running for the American presidency? Indeed, our world is ever more dangerous, when the potentially most powerful individuals in the world address a serious global challenge with a disappointing combination of political dishonesty, lack of intellectual rigor, and an almost absolute analytical vacuum.
The truly dangerous terrain we approach is that where political-intellectual charlatanism and violent state policies generate strategies that make the Al-Qaeda threat much greater than it really is, or that promote new recruits for terror groups. Such an approach substitutes ignorance-based fearmongering for the precise, realistic, and proactive policies that could manage the terror threat as the political problem that it is, rather than the cultural, religious or societal menace that is exploited — and sometimes manufactured — by American, Israeli, Arab, and other merchants of deceit.
We now all experience the deadly consequences of the criminal combination of Western-Israeli officials who constantly harp about Islamo-fascists and Islamic terrorism, and Arab-Asian political elites who use authoritarian police methods to control and degrade their own people. Asia, Arabia, and America are equally to blame for the incremental numbers of dehumanized young men and women in Arab-Asian-Islamic societies who finally give up on honest pubic policy-making and rational discourse, and mostly turn to nonviolent Islamist, tribal and other mass movements. A very few fall off the edge and gravitate to Al-Qaeda-inspired terror.
Our collective failures in assessing and addressing the global terrorism threat become clearer every year, in a world increasingly run by political charlatans and vagabonds. We should summon the honesty and courage to address a globalized cycle of predatory extremism, militarism, and terror that nourishes itself, rather than create a simplistic world of Islamic terrorist-fascists who unilaterally assault innocent Israelis, Europeans and Americans.
If you want entertainment, stay in this political rodeo. If you want a better, safer world, get out of it as fast as you can.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2008 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 03 January 2008
Word Count: 817
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