View Point                                                                         Abid Ullah Jan

The Terrorists Within

Fallujah streets are littered with blood and the world is silent. Bloodletting is a routine in places under occupation despite the well-known facts that none of the Iraqis, Palestinians or Afghans have been charged or convicted for terrorism related crime in the US. Still killing them in mass is how the “war on terrorism” is thought to be the best way to beat terror.
Last week the British government unleashed a new wave of fear among the Muslim community by arresting eight Muslims allegedly plotting “the largest terrorist plot ever in that country.” The amount of fear such incidents generate is enormous. It scares everyone because the due process of law is not followed and most of the time evidence is not made public, nor any open trials are held so that everyone know the details of the “crime.”
The amount of fear it generates among Muslims can be judged from the fact that a family refused to travel with a book, published in Canada but simply describing the structure of an Islamic state and its comparison with the now dead democracy.
Whatever may be the motive behind such arrests, the most striking aspect of the episode is that the authorities see no involvement by Al Qaeda. In fact, not one of the suspects is foreign-born or had spent any time in the Afghan training camps. These are British, middle-class Muslim suburbanites who the authorities say became terrorists. Let us assume that they are the real terrorists.
Let us also assume that most terror attacks over the past two years have been planned by groups like this one and that the hands of US government and Israeli agencies are clean. If we assume that they are inspired, not directed, by Al Qaeda, we can also question: Why don’t they get inspired by the so fine ideals of freedom and democracy of their “open societies” — the ideals for which the US and UK are ready to wipe the whole Iraqi population in a bid to make a “model” for the rest of uncivilized Muslim countries.
Tackling the threat they pose is not the key to security in this age. Finding why they pose this threat is the key to living in peace.
Terrorism today doesn't need any Muslim government backing because there seems none which is directly or indirectly not installed by the US. It is not fueled by “the openness of free societies, the easy access to technologies of violence and a radical, global ideology of hatred” as Fareed Zakaria of the Newsweek would like us to believe in April 12 edition of the Newsweek.
The first and most important thing to find out is the culprits behind the attacks in the US on 9/11 and other places. Let it be clear that the US has not come up with any bit of credible evidence about any of the “terrorist” acts committed in the last decade that could link Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or Saddam Hussein to it.
Undoubtedly, there is a resistance and rhetoric against the US and its allies’ policies but that is hardly capable of undertaking terror plots of the level we witnessed in the last few years. Rhetoric of these resisting groups is enough to earn them credit for the crimes committed by fully capable forces.
Of course Western societies provide enormous freedoms to people living within them. If the advocates of perpetual war and global domination consider these a threat to their global designs, they may introduce new laws, regulations, national identity cards and biometric identification systems. But this is hardly a solution to the root cause.
The root cause is injustice. The root cause is insensitive policies of the former colonial powers who never gave real independence to the former colonies. They simply made a strategic withdrawal to run these colonies in a remote control manner through local puppets. The root cause is continued direct and indirect interference in local politics to run these countries according to the wishes of the administrations in Washington and London. The root cause is the direct and indirect occupations and perpetuating monsters like, Saddam, the house of Saud, Mubarak, King Hassan, Musharraf and Karzai in power.
Playing a video from Ayman al-Zawahiri, pleading to overthrow President Musharraf might fool people living in the “open societies” but those who suffer under the daily physical and psychological degradation of such US sponsored regimes all around the Muslim world know that it is not Al-Qaeda but the peoples' own agenda to get rid of the blood suckers at the top.
These tyrants at the top are hardly different from Babrak Krarmal or Najeeb Ullah Anjum, whose overthrow was considered legitimate by the Western powers simply because they were installed by the Moscow, not Washington.
The so-called “open societies” will have to learn to bring their governments to some level of commonsense in pursuit of self-interest. They need self-reflection more than pre-emption. They can get all the resources they try to grab by force outside their countries even if they let others live according to their own way of life.
It is not that explosives that used to be difficult to obtain are now a phone call away. It is that the suffering that BBC and CNN could hide and mis-present for years is just one switch away. You put on a switch and you see the dirty games of dirty politicians for their personal gains and direct interest of their corporate terrorist partners.
The information is more readily available to the people grown up in the so-called open societies and they see how the intellectual terrorists, like Friedman, Pipes and Lewis are behind planning and making the dirtiest wars of human history look legitimate.
The corporate and intellectual terrorist can't fight the dispersion of knowledge for their political bosses at Capital Hill, but the people can stop them from being too greedy, insensitive and nervous about transforming even a people’s religion, as suggested by a new RAND Corporation study about Islam by Cheryl Benard — a project that has never been undertaken in the history of mankind.
The lies over Iraq should not obscure the reality that all that we hear about Islam, fundamentalism and factions in Islam are far serious fictions than the lies about WMD. If people are seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and would not hesitate to use them, it is simply because the kind of projects the leaders of “open societies” are undertaking despite their protests.
“ Open societies” seems helpless because no one is able to tell the difference between Kerry and Bush. They do not know what to do when one liar replaces another and the reign of unleashing terror goes on despite the historical level of mass protest in Western history. Bringing Western governments to make sincere self-reflection needs to move to the centre of people’s policy.
What drives terrorism, however, is no longer lies about WMD, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. None of these exists today in the form in which they were presented. What fuels the terrorism are the pervasive lies about “Militant” and “political Islam,” which have brainwashed almost all in the “open societies” and elsewhere around the world who have been made to believe that Muslims consider it their duty to fight against the modern world.
These lies are poorly placed on the foundation of logic that “militant Islam” spreads because there is a lack of economic opportunity. The reality is that there is a lack of political freedom under the regimes directly sponsored and promoted by the US and its allies. Islam is not responsible for it. Nor a people’s right to live by their religion a crime. All attempts to hold a people from living by their religion are based on the policy and philosophy of hatred.
Such ideologies of hate are not caused but powerfully exacerbated by staged events of “terrorism.” Note, for example, how 9/11 triggered anti-Islam —including continued violence — in “open societies” against Muslims. Bush and Blair, perhaps playing to the Western masses, harshly denounced the violence and declared this is not a war on Islam. So, the staged terror attacks and continued violence in the occupied Muslim countries empower radicals, retard progress towards peace and finding the real culprits behind the global violence.
The corporate, political and intellectual terrorists in the West never stop talking about the war on terror. They are wrong even in a metaphoric sense. The roots and magnitude of this struggle merely go beyond self-reflection, let alone law enforcement and pre-emption.
Now that Iraq and Afghanistan is occupied. Musharraf, Mubarak, Karimov, the House of Saud and the junta in Algeria is working on the US mission, whom would the US wage war on now?
No radical ideologies are nurtured anywhere in the Muslim world. What is presented as such in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia is the same ideology which the US used to take the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Those who demand an end to the direct and indirect US occupations use exactly the same ideology which was greatly rewarded and praised at the White House lawn; not in the cave of Osama bin Laden.
The US and UK cases show that once you let the nexus of corporate, intellectual and political terrorists nurture radical ideologies of hate, they become uncontrollable for the people who elect these governments. That's why the only way to combat this new global terror is to force these governments into self-reflection and start looking for the terrorists within.