Approved, but if it just becomes a platform for insulting... well, everyone knows the drill.
/Peace To All
Firstly, as brother Muezzin advised in another thread (creating a thread that is exclusively dedicated to non-Muslim terrorism), this threads title is "terror attacks in the EU," but, with the mods permission, I'd like this thread to be a bit more general and encompassing than others.
Meaning: this thread should include all terror attacks that were perpetrated by non-Muslims "Globally", whether they be individuals, groups, organizations, and governments (against their people or other nations), that were under-reported or not reported in the corporate media.
The threads title is Just one example of terror attacks that are committed regionally, specifically in the EU, but there are much more attacks committed around the world by people of other faiths.
And it is in my humble opinion, that they should also be included here.
Jazakum Allah Khair, in advance...
500 Terror Attacks In The EU In 2006, Only 1 Is By Islamists
April 11, 2007
Der Spiegel
There were almost 500 acts of terrorism across the European Union in 2006 -- but only one, the foiled suitcase bomb plot in Germany, was related to Islamist terror, a new EU report reveals. Meanwhile the trial of one of the main suspects in the German plot has been adjourned in Lebanon.
Almost all the terrorist attacks in the European Union in 2006 were unrelated to Islamist terror, a new report reveals -- but the potential impact of an attack aimed at mass casualties made Islamist terrorism a top priority for European investigators nonetheless.
According to a report released Tuesday by Europol, the European Union's law enforcement organization, 498 attacks were carried out in the EU in 2006.
Of them, only one -- the failed suitcase bomb attacks in Germany -- was perpetrated by Islamist terrorists.
The vast majority of terrorist attacks were carried out by separatist terror groups targeting France and Spain. Almost all attacks "resulted only in material damage and were not intended to kill," the report's authors write.
However, Islamist attacks such as the German plot and the foiled airplane mass bomb attacks in the United Kingdom were aimed at mass casualities, the report points out. As a result, "investigations into Islamist terrorism are clearly a priority for member states' law enforcement," the report writes.
Half of the 706 terrorism-related arrests made in 2006 were related to Islamist terrorism, with France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands having the highest number of arrests of Islamist terrorist suspects.
A small number of attacks by left-wing and anarchist terror groups were also carried out in Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain.
The report concluded that France, Spain and the UK are the EU member states "most severely affected" by terrorism.
...Meanwhile a new report by the UK-based think tank the Oxford Research Group has warned that British and American policy towards Iraq has "spawned new terror in the region."
The report, "Beyond Terror: The Truth About the Real Threats to Our World," said that the ongoing war on terror and particularly the war in Iraq were increasing the risk of future terrorist attacks on the scale of those of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Treating Iraq as part of the war on terror ... created a combat training zone for jihadists," it said, and also warned that any military intervention in Iran would be "disastrous."
The report added that the United States is "increasingly viewed as the greatest threat to world peace."
Source:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...476599,00.html
Approved, but if it just becomes a platform for insulting... well, everyone knows the drill.
format_quote Originally Posted by Muezzin
Jazakum Allah Khair for the approval.
Insha Allah, all members will cooperate and only post informative material.
No insults, mockery nor disrespecting other members, please...
I strongly believe that terrorism is like a religion of it's own. A terroist is a terrorist is a terrorist. A terrorist may call himself a Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu, Sikh etc. But the simple fact is he is a terrorist and that supercedes what ever else he may call himself.
Terrorists exist in every country and come in all colors, sizes and shapes. The only things they share in common is an extreme selfishness and arrogance that makes them feel their acts are justified because of their own feelings.
If you are going to be killed by a terrorist the chances are that the terrorist will be a citisen of the country you live in. Here in American we need to fear our own home grown terrorists and learn to let the rest of the world handle their own terrorist within the boundries of their own borders.
The only legitimate need for any other country to be involved would be if it is a legitimate plea for humanitarian help to restore order.
We have plenty of homegrown terror groups that are going to grow in strength as we are too busy poking our noses and resources into places other than our own yards.
As Americans we should fear Mis-Guided Americans much more than we fear possible terrorists from half way across the world. I believe that is true for all nations.
Last edited by Woodrow; 06-02-2007 at 02:51 PM.
Woodrow;format_quote Originally Posted by Woodrow
Your first statement is demonstrably not true in the US, thought it is in Britain based on recent experience. As for the second part re. fearing "our home grown terrorists"...the Weather Underground and the Symbianese Liberation Army are all dead or in jail. Patty Hearst has been reprogrammed and McVeigh is dead. Are you then advocating a crackdown on those with Al Quaeda sympathies within the US?
In regard to "let(ing) the rest of the world handle their own terrorist(s)", we tried that for 30-40 yrs. It didn't work...they came over here.
Here is the "mission statement" of the Oxford Research Group cited in the der Spiegal article.
About Us
Oxford Research Group (ORG) is an independent non-governmental organisation and registered charity, which works together with others to promote a more sustainable approach to security for the UK and the world.
Since 1982, we’ve been building trust between policy-makers, academics, the military and civil society. Along with our internationally recognised consultants, we combine detailed knowledge with an understanding of political decision-making, and many years expertise in facilitating constructive dialogue.
We were awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in 2003 for our work on the promotion of disarmament and non-violent methods for resolving conflict. In April 2005, we were named one of the top 20 think tanks in the UK by The Independent newspaper.
Our work is based on three key pillars:
Analysis
* We identify the root causes of conflict.
* We predict and warn of future threats.
Dialogue
* We foster deep listening and understanding between those who disagree.
* We bring together a broad range of expertise and opinion (political, legal, psychological, military, journalistic).
Practical steps forward
* We recommend workable policies to senior politicians.
* We publish clear, up-to-the-minute analysis for the public and policy-makers.
ORG works closely with other organisations in the UK and abroad, and is an active member of Crisis Action, the NGO Peace and Security Liaison Group, the WMD Awareness Programme, the International Relations and Security Network and the Europe-Latin America Forum.
I am forming a mental image of the ORG get-together on Friday night. Grilled eggplant and tofu for appetizers...perhaps some free-range goat cheese. Hemp clothing abounds. In the corner, a native Incan band plays to raise awareness of Pizarro's crimes.....
This is rich: * We foster deep listening and understanding between those who disagree.
Like we haven't heard that before.
I am pretty sure this is obvious already, but I think the main difference between Muslim terrorists and other terrorist, is that you dont usually hear or read about a man who killed saying God is great or Jesus loves you. Muslims terrorist set themselves apart from other terrorist organizations because of their numbers and because of their tactics. Take the christian terrorist Eric Rudolph for example, he said that abortion clinics were wrong and bombed one, he made references to religion about abortion but he never said, he was killing on behalf of Christianity, or fighting a holy war against infidels. The Muslim terrorist pit themselves against the world, and make everyone their enemies for not sharing in their beliefs.
Good article though
format_quote Originally Posted by Cognescenti
Have you covered all domestic terror organizations in the U.S.? You didn't leave any out?
The Original Shoe Bomber
The following is a new development in the Posada Terrorism case.
Note how he was only being charged for immigration violation, and not terrorism.
Note how the U.S. goverment has harbored, protected and refused to extradite Posada to Venezuela and/or Cuba to stand trial for his acts of terrorism during his years with the C.I.A.
What happened to Bush's: "If you harbor a terrorist, then your are complicit in their actions?"
Note the hidden explosives in the shoes & liquid explosives hidden in bottles on a plane.
Note how he is referred to as a "Militant," and not as a "Terrorist."
Note how WE DO Deal WITH TERRORISTS.
Note the hyporcisy and double standards.
FBI Document Sheds New Light On Posada Link To Havana Bombings
Courtesy Of: KTen
MIAMI--High explosives concealed in shoes and shampoo bottles. Thousands of dollars in wire transfers from New Jersey to a shadowy figure in Latin America. A note in a briefcase saying that "the tyrant has to be eliminated" even if innocent people also die.
An F-B-I document reveals these and other new details about the investigation of Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles and a wave of 1997 bombings in Havana.
Posada is a 79-year-old former C-I-A operative and fierce opponent of Fidel Castro.
He is scheduled to stand trial next week in El Paso, Texas on immigration fraud charges.
Cuba and Venezuela want Posada extradited for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, but the United States has refused to send him to either country.
The federal investigation into Posada's possible role in the Havana bombings is centered on the finances allegedly provided by Cuban-American associates in New Jersey.
The probe could provide an avenue for Posada to be charged in connection with the bombings.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source:
http://www.kten.com/Global/story.asp?s=6473538
The guy is 79 years old. He is already being prosecuted for immigration fraud in the US. He is under Federal investigation over the Cuban allegation which dates to 1976. Allegations by our good buds the Cubans or Hugo Chavez do not constitute proof.format_quote Originally Posted by Zman
The Original Shoe Bomber
The following is a new development in the Posada Terrorism case.
Note how he was only being charged for immigration violation, and not terrorism.
Note how the U.S. goverment has harbored, protected and refused to extradite Posada to Venezuela and/or Cuba to stand trial for his acts of terrorism during his years with the C.I.A.
What happened to Bush's: "If you harbor a terrorist, then your are complicit in their actions?"
Note the hidden explosives in the shoes & liquid explosives hidden in bottles on a plane.
Note how he is referred to as a "Militant," and not as a "Terrorist."
Note how WE DO Deal WITH TERRORISTS.
Note the hyporcisy and double standards.
Seriously, is that really the best you can come up with? I do wonder how many Americans on the board here would be worried about this Posada chap. What do you want us to do...send him to G'itmo?
Christian Terrorist Attempts Car-Bombing In Iowa
2 out of 5 Americans believe Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds sometime in the next 50 years Are you an enemy combatant?
Christian terrorist attempts car-bombing in Iowa and gets charged with 2nd-degree arson. Last week, as you may (or may not), have heard, David Robert McMenemy attempted to destroy an abortion clinic in Davenport, IA by dousing his car in gasoline and driving it through the wall of the Edgerton Women’s Health Center.
edit - It’s been brought to my attention that Mr. McMenemy drove through the front doors and not a wall. It has also been claimed by a nearby resident that the gasoline was added after crashing through the doors, although this article disputes that.
Fortunately, no one was hurt because he reconsidered lighting himself on fire for God at the last moment. And laughably, the clinic he attempted to destroy does not even perform abortions.
Schadenfreude aside, this is a terrorist act. He should be tried as a terrorist. (Perhaps we should torture him in a secret prison in case he has friends who are also planning other actions. That is our policy now, right?) Second-degree arson is ridiculous. We lock foreigners (and sometimes Americans) up indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay for the slightest possible connections to Islamic terrorism. Yet, this Christian terrorist is charged with a minor felony? Absurd!
Class C felonies, which 2nd degree arson is in Iowa, are punishable by imprisonment of not more than 10 years and a fine between $1000 and $10,000 under Iowa law. He is getting off easy just because he believes in the right make-believe super hero.
For now, you may also believe in the “correct” deity, and find yourself safe from persecution for those beliefs. But consider what happens if public opinion turns or you have a change of heart, and you find yourself in the future’s minority? As a former President said yesterday, “Democracy is about way more than majority rule. Democracy is about minority rights, individual rights, restraints on power.” Lately, we’ve had far too many failures when it comes to living up to those words.
UPDATE David McMenemy’s case has been moved to federal court. He now faces a charge of “committing arson against a business affecting interstate commerce” which carries a prison term of between five and 20 years and a fine.
Source:
http://jdallen.org/news/christian-te...mbing-in-iowa/
Christian Terrorists Kill 44, Wound 118 in Attacks in Northeast India
GUWAHATI, India (AFP)
October 2, 2004
Some 44 people were killed and 118 wounded in three nearly simultaneous bomb blasts Saturday morning in Dimapur, Nagaland's commercial hub, in what a top official called the "worst ever terrorist strike" in the tiny state's history.
Gunmen in neighbouring Assam state later killed 15 villagers and injured a dozen more, police said.
"There were limbs everywhere and blood was splattered all over," said student leader T. Zheviho who was at crowded Dimapur railway station where one bomb exploded as passengers awaited a train.
Two other bombs went off in the Hong Kong market, which sells Chinese goods, and an adjacent market.
"I had a miraculous escape," Zheviho told AFP by telephone from Dimapur, 70 kilometers (45 miles) east of Nagaland capital Kohima.
Police said the plastic explosive RDX appeared to have been used in the railway blast that created a huge crater beside a platform.
"We found a briefcase with fuse wires... it contained RDX and a timer-device," V. Peseyie, Dimapur additional police chief, said.
Seventeen more people were killed in a wave of attacks in neighbouring Assam, police said.
Unidentified attackers raked shoppers with gunfire at a marketplace in Makri Jhora village, 290 kilometres (180 miles) west of Assam's main city of Guwahati, killing 11 and injuring about a dozen, police said.
The same gunmen later shot dead four more villagers in a nearby forest, police superintendent L. R. Bishnoi told AFP. Two more people were killed and 10 injured in two blasts in the Assamese district of Bongaingaon, 220 kilometres (136 miles) from Guwahati, Bishnoi said.
One person was killed and seven wounded in an earlier bomb blast in Assam.
Police also reported two other bombings in a village on the outskirts of Guwahati in which four people were injured.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the day of bloodshed in the insurgency-infested northeast where some 30 guerrilla groups are battling for greater autonomy or independence.
The attacks occurred as India marked the 135th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi who waged a campaign of non-violence to free the country from British rule.
"It is distressing such violence broke out on the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in the capital New Delhi.
Nagaland's ill-equipped hospitals battled to treat the wounded.
"Many have multiple face and abdomen wounds. They're in a state of trauma. We're trying to cope. We've never had such a devastating emergency," said doctor T. Lotha at a private hospital in Dimapur treating blast victims.
Nagaland Chief Minister Neibhiu Rio said at least 26 people were killed in the Dimapur blasts and another 86 were in hospital. "The death toll may go up as many are in a very critical condition," he said.
"This is the worst ever terrorist strike in Nagaland. People are still dealing with the shock -- they're not yet thinking about who to blame."
Mourners crowded churches across Nagaland, which is mostly Christian, to pray for the victims.
The blasts were the second major burst of violence in the northeast since mid-August. Fifteen people, many of them children, were killed in a rebel attack on an Independence Day parade in Assam August 15 for which the United Liberation Front of Asom claimed responsibility.
The armed insurgency in Nagaland began soon after much of the local population converted to Christianity. Many militant groups, seeking to secede from India to form an independent Christian state, are funded and armed by the Southern Baptist Church.
Some of the groups such as the National Liberation Front of Tripura have been involved in a campaign of “gunpoint conversions” and “ethnic cleansing” of native non-Christians, which has left over 50,000 dead and many more refugees over the past two decades.
Original Source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ortheast_blast
From: http://www.stephen-knapp.com/christi...ts_kill_44.htm
Palestinian Archbishop Tells Christians To Take Part In Suicide Attacks Against Israel
Hamas website (translated by IDF)
Jan 12, 2003 | Allah Hana
Posted on 01/12/2003 12:43:54 PM PST
By Johnathan RGalt
On Jan 10, 2003 the ex spokesman of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Atta Allah Hana, praised the suicide bombings of organized Palestinian terror against Israeli citizens. He also called for the establishment of an Islamic-Christian union that will work together to foil the "American offensive" against Iraq and "to release Palestine from the river to the sea".
The following is a translation of the article as published on the official Hamas website on Jan. 11, 2003:
"He [Attah Allah Hana] indicated [at a convention in Haifa] that when his passport would be returned to him, he would stand at the head of a Christian delegation that will depart for Iraq to act as a human shield facing the American oppression of Iraq.
The spokesman of the Orthodox Church praised suicide activities carried out by Palestinians deep inside the Hebrew State [Israel] in the name of religion (Ist'sh'had).
He emphasized that 'the suicide bombers who carry out their activities in the name of religion are national [Islamic] heroes and we're proud of them. We totally reject the dubious attempts of those who protest these actions. The attackers do not commit in suicide as several claim, nor do they carry out acts of terrorism as others claim, for they are fighters against occupation. Furthermore, we support suicide activities without reservation and without regard to the claims of those who doubt and to those opposed to these heroic activities in the framework of the struggle'.
Archbishop Atta Allah Hana called on Arab and Palestinian Christians to join the struggle against the occupation by employing any means at their disposal, as they too are a part of the Palestinian population".
Note: Israeli police questioned Atta Allah Hana several months ago about his unconcealed backing of the armed Palestinian struggle against Israel. His declarations echo the wide support for suicide bombings on the Palestinian Street. Human rights organizations such as "Amnesty International" and "Human Rights Watch" defined suicide attacks as "crimes against humanity".
The following is the original copy of the article as it appears on the Hamas website:
Source:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/821425/posts
Roots Of Suicide Terrorism
Frontline
Volume 24 - Issue 07
Apr. 07-20, 2007
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
From the publishers of THE HINDU
FlonNet
By A.G. NOORANI
Nationalism, and not religious fundamentalism, drives suicide bombers, as this book shows with the help of detailed research.
A point is reached in the development of any social system where men will refuse to accept longer a burden they find too great to bear; and in that moment, if they cannot mitigate, they will at least destroy.
IT is not fashionable to quote Harold J. Laski but what he wrote in his mini-classic Communism in 1927 remains true. He did not stop at diagnosis. His prescription for justice as a precondition for legitimacy is as valid.
He proceeded immediately to add: "The condition, in fact, upon which a state may hope to endure is its capacity for making freedom more widespread and more intense. It is not easy to achieve that end. Men prefer sacrifice by others to the surrender of their own desires" - and their vested interests, he might have added.
Frantz Fanon's seminal work The Wretched of the Earth (1963) exposed the degradation of imperialism and pointed the way forward - by violence, if necessary, which helps, in turn, to heighten national consciousness and strengthens the resolve to resist and overthrow.
"The repressions, far from calling a halt to the forward rush of national consciousness, urge it on. Mass slaughter in the colonies at a certain stage of the embryonic development of consciousness increases the consciousness, for the hecatombs are an indication that between oppressors and oppressed everything can be solved by force."
In 1978 the United Nations General Assembly recognised: "the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence ... from ... foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle".
Palestinian Arabs see in Israel a "foreign occupation" of a country that was theirs for centuries and was grabbed by Zionists with the help of British imperialism (1919-1948). The conquest was consolidated with the help, mainly, of American imperialism. Six decades are nothing in national consciousness, especially if a people's readiness to accept a state of their own on 22 per cent of their country is spurned with yet greater repression.
Iraqis rightly see the United States and the United Kingdom as foreign overlords. Haifa Zangana, a novelist, was formerly a prisoner of Saddam Hussein. But he loathes the imperialists who came to "liberate" Iraq. His article on the Iraqis' right to rule themselves is a documented indictment of foreign occupation and a powerful endorsement of the Iraqi resistance movement.
(The Hindu, November 21, 2005: "Thousands have been kept for more than a year without charge or trial, including the writer Muhsin al-Khafaji, who was arrested in May 2003. Women are taken as hostages by U.S. soldiers to persuade fugitive male relatives to surrender or confess to terrorist acts.")
"There were no jihadists in Iraq before we invaded," said David Benjamin, who served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council. "There are now thousands, Iraqi and foreign, and they're going to be an enduring problem because many have embraced the global jihadist agenda."
This is typical of Western comment, official, academic and in the media. They do not notice - do not wish to notice - the surge of nationalism, only "jihadism" or "fundamentalism" to which they shut their eyes when they exploited both in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
Jimmy Carter is denounced when he draws attention to the giant walls and fences Israel began building since 2001, cutting deep into the West Bank, grabbing more land in the process, all to defeat the suicide bomber.
But very few care to ask what it is that drives a human being to give up his own life as a contribution to a political movement.
Since Fanon wrote, the might of the modern state has increased; so have the wrongs.
Terror is the weapon of the weak against the might of the state; the suicide bomber is a terrorist whose desperation and sense of injustice are so great that he is prepared for the ultimate sacrifice.
It is disgusting to read an American columnist - toast of some New Delhi journalists - ask for a "moral surge" among the victim when he lacks the basic sense to identify the root cause of terror and the integrity and courage to denounce it.
"The Arab-Muslim village today is largely silent," he moans. But he does not pause to ask "why"? Accepting the national agenda, his concern is to denounce, not to understand.
Curiously, few in the West care to recall that Israel itself is a product of terrorism; not by the weak against the mighty but by the well-equipped, united Zionists against weak and divided Arabs.
The Hindu reported (March 6, 2006) Richard Norton-Taylor's report in The Guardian on disclosures from declassified MI5 files: Jewish terrorists planned to assassinate members of Clement Attlee's post-War British Labour government. Menachem Begin, then leader of the extremist Irgun Zvai Leumi resistance group and a future Prime Minister of Israel, had tried to trick it by having cosmetic surgery to disguise his identity.
The files include a telegram dated February 12, 1946, from Palestine saying that a reliable source claimed the Stern Gang was: "training members to go to England to assassinate members of His Majesty's Government, especially Mr. Bevin" (British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin).
The Stern Gang, in common with Irgun, was fighting against the British Mandate of Palestine and murdered Britain's Minister Resident in the Middle East (West Asia), Lord Moyne, in Cairo in 1944.
A memo from the Officer Administering the Government of Palestine to the Secretary of State for the Colonies the following day warned: "The Stern Group have decided to assassinate both the High Commissioner and the General Officer Commanding. In addition, a number of CID officers are to be assassinated as well as police officers and any high government officials who are thought to be anti-Semitic."
In 1946, Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and attacked the British embassy in Rome. A year later, MI5 received a report about a rumour that Begin had "undergone a plastic facial operation and that his appearance is totally different from that displayed on police photographs".
In 1948, Begin founded the Herut party. He was appointed Prime Minister in 1977 and was awarded the Nobel Peace prize with Egypt's President Anwar Sadat after signing the Camp David Accords.
The U.N. Mediator Count Bernadotte of Sweden was murdered by Israelis.
Since the West was sympathetic to the Zionist plan to plant a Jewish state on Arab soil, it condoned the wrongs.
In the wake of 9/11, Western discourse was transformed. Not nationalism but "Islamic fundamentalism" was the root of terrorism in Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on August 1, 2006 waxed eloquent on "a clash about civilisation". There is a "Global Islamist network", he said. Scholars like Olivier Roy refute this assertion as false.
To Blair, "This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind. 9/11 in the U.S., 7/7 in the U.K., 11/3 in Madrid, the countless terrorist attacks in countries as disparate as Indonesia or Algeria, what is now happening in Afghanistan and in Indonesia, the continuing conflict in Lebanon and Palestine, it is all part of the same thing. It resembles in many ways early revolutionary Communism."
His recipe is clear. "We committed ourselves to supporting Moderate Mainstream Islam." None so blind as those who refuse to see. The "moderate" Muslim differs with the "extremist" on the techniques of resistance, but neither on his perceptions of injustice nor the need to resist wrong. This perception has influenced the British Muslim and European Muslims also.
Michael Jay, the Foreign Office Under-Secretary to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, warned him in a letter of May 18, 2004:
"Other colleagues have flagged up some of the potential underlying causes of extremism that can affect the Muslim community, such as discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion. But another recurring theme is the issue of British foreign policy, especially in the context of the Middle East Peace Process and Iraq. Experience of both Ministers and officials working in this area suggests that the issue of British foreign policy and the perception of its negative effect on Muslims globally plays a significant role in creating a feeling of anger and impotence amongst especially the younger generation of British Muslims. The concept of the `Ummah', i.e. that the Believers are one `nation', had led to HMG's [Her Majesty's Government] policies towards the Muslim world having a very personal resonance for young British Muslims, many of whom are taking on the burden both of the perceived injustices and of the responsibility of putting them right, but without the legitimate tools to do so. This seems to be a key driver behind recruitment by extremist organisations [e.g. recruitment drives by groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and al- Muhajiroon]."
Blair could not have been ignorant of this professional assessment. But then, more than any predecessor, he has undermined the civil service.
However, one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject holds that "the taproot of suicide terrorism is nationalism" and "at bottom suicide terrorism is a strategy for national liberation from foreign occupation by a democratic state".
Therefore, "the West's strategy for the war on terrorism is fundamentally flawed. Right now, our strategy for this war presumes that suicide terrorism is mainly a product of an evil ideology called Islamic fundamentalism and that this ideology will produce campaigns of suicide terrorism wherever it exists and regardless of our military policies. This presumption is wrong and is leading toward foreign policies that are making our situation worse."
Resistance, Not Religion:
GIL COHEN MAGEN/REUTERS The body of an LTTE suicide bomber a few feet away from the wreckage of a Sri Lankan Airline A-340 Airbus that he blew up, at the Bandaranaike international airport in Colombo.
Professor Robert A. Pape teaches international relations at the University of Chicago and is the Director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. Researching his book, which covered all 462 suicide bombings around the globe, he had his colleagues scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and biographies of the Hizbollah bombers.
"Of the 41, we identified the names, birthplaces, and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamist fundamentalists; 27 were from Leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a woman secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon. What these suicide attackers - their heirs today - shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation."
The author assembled a team of advanced graduate students associated with the University of Chicago who were fluent in the main relevant languages - Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Tamil - for an intensive survey of regional newspapers, broadcast transcripts, and other materials not currently translated into English.
This project also gathered literature documenting individual martyrs from the main suicide terrorist groups themselves - such as Hizbollah, Hamas, and the Tamil Tigers - as well as all publicly available lists of suicide attacks from the main organisations in target countries that collect such data (such as the Israel Defence Forces, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the U.S. Department of State).
In addition, it also amassed all the relevant data that could be found in English. All information is based on public sources and the raw data are available at the archive for the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism housed at the University of Chicago.
Judging by the articles they have written after retirement, alumni of the Intelligence Bureau (I.B.) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) share the "Islamic fundamentalism" phobia of Western hacks, albeit for different reasons, not hard to discern.
They should study those archives and this book, one of the ablest to be published. It covers the Khalistanis as well as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The book demolishes conventional wisdom on the strength of a formidable database, using charts, tables and statistics.
Religion adds fuel to fire but the fire is lit by foreign occupation. Jihad provides a convenient battle cry.
"The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions. In fact, the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more suicide attacks than Hamas."
"Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal; to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations, in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the border strategic objective."
General Patterns:
Three general patterns emerge. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of organised campaigns, not as isolated or random incidents.
Second, democratic states are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists. The U.S., France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and the U.K. have been the targets of almost all suicide attacks of the past two decades.
Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective. "From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign have been terrorist groups trying to establish or maintain political self-determination by compelling a democratic power to withdraw from the territories they claim."
While terrorist incidents of all types have declined by nearly half from a peak of 666 in 1987 to 348 in 2001, suicide terrorism has grown and the trend is continuing. Many Americans hoped that Al Qaeda had been badly weakened by U.S. efforts since September 11, 2001. The data show otherwise. In 2002 and 2003, Al Qaeda conducted 15 suicide terrorist attacks, more than in all the years before September 11 combined, killing 439 people.
"Since September 11, 2001, the United States has responded to the growing threat of suicide terrorism by embarking on a policy to conquer Muslim countries - not simply rooting out existing havens for terrorists in Afghanistan but going further to remake Muslim societies in the Persian Gulf. To be sure, the United States must be ready to use force to protect Americans and their allies and must do so when necessary."
"However, the close association between foreign military occupations and the growth of suicide terrorist movements in the occupied regions should make us hesitate over any strategy centering on the transformation of Muslim societies by means of heavy military power."
"Although there may still be good reasons for such a strategy, we should recognise that the sustained presence of heavy American combat forces in Muslim countries is likely to increase the odds of the next 9/11."
There is another factor. Terrorists, even if aided by a state, perform in their own right. "Modern suicide terrorist groups may receive material assistance from states that share some of their political aspirations, but they are independent actors who rarely follow the dictates of others blindly."
For over 30 years, from 1945 to 1980, suicide attacks had disappeared. Their perpetrators of today have been to college. They are educated ones. Poverty is a poor explanation for their conduct.
It is a three-stage process, which Pape analyses by posing three principal questions:
1. What is the strategic logic of suicide terrorism; its political aim; its social logic.
2. Why does suicide attack receive mass support in some societies and not others?
3. Without social support from the terrorists' national community, suicide terrorist campaigns could not be sustained.
Sri Lanka and Kashmir supports this finding.
Community Support:
"Community support enables a suicide terrorist group to replenish its membership. Other kinds of terrorists can try to husband their human resources by hiding from society, but suicide terrorist organisations cannot operate without losses. Most suicide attackers are walk-in volunteers.
Second, community support is essential to enable a suicide terrorist group to avoid detection, surveillance, and elimination by the security forces of the target society. Given that recruitment needs oblige them to keep a relatively high profile, suicide terrorist groups cannot prevent many members of the local community from gaining basic information that would be useful to the enemy (for instance, the identity of recruiters, common locations for recruitment, and even locations of frequently used safehouses, means of communication, and other logistics).
As a result, without broad sympathy among the local population, suicide terrorist groups would be especially vulnerable to penetration, defection, and informants. They must therefore be popular enough that society as a whole would be willing to silence potential informants. Everyone may know who the terrorists are. No one must tell."
Why do Kashmiri women wail at the windows as funeral processions of slain militants pass by? The individual logic is important. What drives the individual action?
These questions are answered in detail in each chapter with the support of massive data.
The suicide terrorist is the weaker actor, a desperate one who uses the weapon of last resort. His target is far stronger; but is vulnerable if it is a democracy. Hence the gains reaped by the bomber. It pays.
Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, a spiritual leader of Hizbollah, stressed the coercive value of suicide attack:
"We believe that suicide operations should only be carried out if they can bring about a political or military change in proportion to the passions that incite a person to make of his body an explosive bomb."
Abdel Karim, a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, said the goal of his group was:
"to increase losses in Israel to a point at which the Israeli public would demand a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip".
Or, as a Hizbollah leader in Lebanon, Daud, said: "Since we cannot fight the enemy with weapons, we have to sacrifice our lives."
An LTTE leader put it tersely: "to ensure maximum damage done with minimum loss of life".
It is dramatic; causes panic in the state; and raises the morale of the movement.
Nationalism, Not Religion, Is The Recurring Thread.
"Comparison of target selection for Hamas and al-Qaeda shows that combating foreign military occupation is more central than religious motives for both groups.
If religious hostility were paramount, one would expect both Hamas and al-Qaeda to attack both Christians and Jews.
Similarly, if revenge for perceived injuries were a central motive, one would expect both groups to attack both the United States and Israel.
However, each group in fact concentrates its efforts against the opponent that actually has troops stationed on what it sees as its homeland territory.
Hamas concentrates almost all of its effort against Israel and has not attacked the United States or American citizens outside of Israel and Palestine.
Al-Qaeda's main effort has been against the United States and against American allies that have deployed troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; al-Qaeda has never attacked Israel and has rarely attacked Jewish targets elsewhere."
Why did Hamas and al Jihad adopt this desperate course? Palestine provides a good case study.
In the June 1967 war, Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. East Jerusalem was immediately annexed to Israel, while the West Bank and Gaza have remained under Israeli occupation since then.
As of 2001, there were about 2.7 million Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. Although the overwhelming majority of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories detest Israel's occupation, and although strikes, protests, and other forms of non-violent resistance began as early as 1972, for many years most of the Palestinian population preferred to accept the benefits of the economic modernisation that occurred under Israeli rule rather than support violent rebellion.
Beginning in 1987, however, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation grew progressively from violent (but unarmed) rebellion in the first Intifada from 1987 to 1992, to protracted guerilla war and suicide terrorism in the 1990s, to large-scale suicide terrorism since the start of the second Intifada in September 2000.
During the first 13 years of the occupation (1967 to 1980), only about 12,000 Jewish settlers resided in the Occupied Territories.
From 1980 to 1995, this number increased more than tenfold, to 146,000 and by a further 50 per cent from 1995 to 2002, to 226,000.
The growth of Jewish settlements not only consumed more land and water, but also required progressive expansion of the Israeli military presence in the West Bank and Gaza, including more and more checkpoints that made it difficult for Palestinians to travel or even carry out ordinary business.
The second Intifada was a response to the failure of the Oslo peace process to lead to full Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, and especially the failure of the Camp David negotiations in August 2000.
The growing number of Jewish settlers contributed to this sense of failure.
Palestinian suicide terrorist attacks began in April 1994 and continued at a rate of about three a year until the start of the second Intifada, when the number rose to over 20 a year.
Although two Islamist organisations, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, have conducted the majority of Palestinian suicide attacks (79 out of 110 attacks between 1994 to 2003), there is strong evidence that Islamic fundamentalism has not been the driving force behind Palestinian suicide terrorism.
GIL COHEN MAGEN/REUTERS Israeli rescue workers remove bodies from the scene of a Palestinian suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem in November 2002. The suicide bomber killed at least 10 people when he blew himself up in a crowded bus.
It was nationalism; the deep sense of frustration, the sheer desperation that explains the popular support for Hamas, which won the elections last year.
The Oslo Accords of September 13, 1993, are a wreck. They bound Israel to withdraw its military forces from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, beginning from December 13, 1993, to April 13, 1994.
Both deadlines were missed. Hamas launched suicide attacks on April 6 and 13. The Knesset voted to withdraw on April 18.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said on April 13:
"I can't recall in the past any suicidal terror acts by the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation]. We have seen by now at least six acts of this type by Hamas and Islamic Jihad... The only response to them and the enemies of peace on the part of Israel is to accelerate the negotiations."
On April 18, 1994, he went further, in a major speech in the Knesset explaining why the withdrawal was necessary:
"Members of the Knesset: I want to tell the truth. For 27 years we have been dominating another people against its will. For 27 years Palestinians in the territories... got up in the morning harbouring a fierce hatred for us, as Israelis and Jews. Each morning they get up to a hard life, for which we are also, but not solely responsible. We cannot deny that our continuing control over a foreign people who do not want us exacts a painful price... For two or three years we have been facing a phenomenon of extremist Islamic terrorism, which recalls Hizbollah, which surfaced in Lebanon and perpetrated attacks, including suicide missions. ... There is no end to the targets Hamas and other terrorist organisations have among us."
Each Israeli became a target. It was a new game, altogether different from the PLO's tactics.
The survey in Lebanon identified 38 of the 41 attackers. Thirty of them were affiliated to groups opposed to Islamic fundamentalism. Three were not clearly associated with ideology. All 38 were native Lebanese.
The book contains pictures of four women suicide attackers; all are dressed in Western clothes with stylish haircuts and even make-up.
One was a Christian highschool teacher. Nothing bound them together but a common and deep commitment to end Israeli occupation.
Role Of U.S. Military Policy:
Al Qaeda also comes in for detailed analysis. It does not act in concert with Hamas or Hizbollah. "Each is driven by essentially nationalist goals."
In Pape's view, "American military policy in the Persian Gulf was most likely the pivotal factor leading to September 11. Although Islamic fundamentalism mattered, the stationing of tens of thousands of American combat troops on the Arabian Peninsula from 1990 to 2001 probably made al-Qaeda suicide attacks against Americans, including the horrible crimes committed on September 11, 2001, from ten to twenty times more likely. This finding also sheds new light on al-Qaeda's mobilisation appeals."
Examination of Al Qaeda's mobilisation rhetoric suggests a picture of the organisation that is at variance with the conventional wisdom.
"Al-Qaeda is less a transnational network of like-minded ideologues brought together from across the globe via the Internet than a cross-national military alliance of national liberation movements working together against what they see as a common imperial threat. For al-Qaeda, religion matters, but mainly in the context of national resistance to foreign occupation."
Pape adds: "Overall, examination of the nationalities of al-Qaeda's suicide terrorists from 1995 to 2003 shows that American military policy in the Persian Gulf was most likely the pivotal factor leading to September 11.
This is not to say that al-Qaeda is not committed to Islamic fundamentalism or that it draws no important transnational support. The fact that we can assume that al-Qaeda's suicide attackers have been committed Islamists is sufficient reason to think that Islamic fundamentalism is at least a weak force driving the movement, even if this is not borne out by the statistics.
However, it is important to recognise the fundamental role played by American military policy."
There is a most informative chapter on suicide terrorist organisations around the world; the LTTE receives detailed study. The U.S.' strategy is self-defeating.
"Proponents claim that Islamic fundamentalism is the principal cause of suicide terrorism and that this radical ideology is spreading through Muslim societies, dramatically increasing the prospects for a new, larger generation of anti-American terrorists in the future. Hence, the United States should install new governments in Muslim countries in order to transform and diminish the role of radical Islam in their societies. This logic led to widespread support for the conquest of Iraq and is promoted as the principal reason for regime change in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf states in the future."
There is a subtext - U.S. policy would help Israel to crush Palestinians; another reason for domestic public support in U.S. elections.
The author's policy prescription is withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire Gulf while ensuring the maintenance of the "critical infrastructure" for their rapid return, if need be.
The name of the game is "off-shore balancing" - alliances plus troops deployment on the seas to facilitate return. It is doubtful if this will suffice given the inflamed wrath in the region.
Besides, as the author hints, amends are called for in Palestine. Unless the peace process is invigorated, there is little hope for peace.
The Palestine question has an appeal that moves the entire West Asia and spreads far beyond it.
Source:
http://freethoughtmanifesto.blogspot...terrorism.html
A tortured soul who didn't even identify himself as Christian (though he might have been) drives his Saturn into a medical clinic and then lights it on fire. Nobody is hurt. Yes, I can see that is a threat which all Americans should put at the top of their list.format_quote Originally Posted by Zman
Christian Terrorist Attempts Car-Bombing In Iowa
2 out of 5 Americans believe Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds sometime in the next 50 years Are you an enemy combatant?
Christian terrorist attempts car-bombing in Iowa and gets charged with 2nd-degree arson. Last week, as you may (or may not), have heard, David Robert McMenemy attempted to destroy an abortion clinic in Davenport, IA by dousing his car in gasoline and driving it through the wall of the Edgerton Women’s Health Center.
edit - It’s been brought to my attention that Mr. McMenemy drove through the front doors and not a wall. It has also been claimed by a nearby resident that the gasoline was added after crashing through the doors, although this article disputes that.
Fortunately, no one was hurt because he reconsidered lighting himself on fire for God at the last moment. And laughably, the clinic he attempted to destroy does not even perform abortions.
Schadenfreude aside, this is a terrorist act. He should be tried as a terrorist. (Perhaps we should torture him in a secret prison in case he has friends who are also planning other actions. That is our policy now, right?) Second-degree arson is ridiculous. We lock foreigners (and sometimes Americans) up indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay for the slightest possible connections to Islamic terrorism. Yet, this Christian terrorist is charged with a minor felony? Absurd!
Class C felonies, which 2nd degree arson is in Iowa, are punishable by imprisonment of not more than 10 years and a fine between $1000 and $10,000 under Iowa law. He is getting off easy just because he believes in the right make-believe super hero.
For now, you may also believe in the “correct” deity, and find yourself safe from persecution for those beliefs. But consider what happens if public opinion turns or you have a change of heart, and you find yourself in the future’s minority? As a former President said yesterday, “Democracy is about way more than majority rule. Democracy is about minority rights, individual rights, restraints on power.” Lately, we’ve had far too many failures when it comes to living up to those words.
UPDATE David McMenemy’s case has been moved to federal court. He now faces a charge of “committing arson against a business affecting interstate commerce” which carries a prison term of between five and 20 years and a fine.
Source:
http://jdallen.org/news/christian-te...mbing-in-iowa/
What, sir, is your point? Is the point that there exist kooks all over the world? If that is your point, I will stipulate that. Please feel free to continue posting your fascinating infromation, however.
Last edited by Cognescenti; 06-02-2007 at 09:47 PM. Reason: Most of sarcasm redacted...lauditory comments added
I seem to recall stipulating that this thread would stay open providing there was a distinct lack of insults, including mockery, hostility etc...
There's more than enough of that to go around in the World Affairs forum already.
Last edited by Muezzin; 06-02-2007 at 05:46 PM.
Terrorism Defined: The Terrorism Industry
By STEPHEN LENDMAN
June 1, 2007
CounterPunch
Probably no word better defines or underscores the Bush presidency than "terrorism" even though his administration wasn't the first to exploit this highly charged term. We use to explain what "they do to us" to justify what we "do to them," or plan to, always deceitfully couched in terms of humanitarian intervention, promoting democracy, or bringing other people the benefits of western civilization Gandhi thought would be a good idea when asked once what he thought about it.
Ronald Reagan exploited it in the 1980s to declare "war on international terrorism" referring to it as the "scourge of terrorism" and "the plague of the modern age." It was clear he had in mind launching his planned Contra proxy war of terrorism against the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua and FMLN opposition resistance to the US-backed El Salvador fascist regime the same way George Bush did it waging his wars of aggression post-9/11.
It's a simple scheme to pull off, and governments keep using it because it always works. Scare the public enough, and they'll go along with almost anything thinking it's to protect their safety when, in fact, waging wars of aggression and state-sponsored violence have the opposite effect. The current Bush wars united practically the entire world against us including an active resistance increasingly targeting anything American.
George Orwell knew about the power of language before the age of television and the internet enhanced it exponentially. He explained how easy "doublethink" and "newspeak" can convince us "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." He also wrote "All war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from (chicken hawk) people who are not fighting (and) Big Brother is watching...." us to be sure we get the message and obey it.
In 1946, Orwell wrote about "Politics and the English Language" saying "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible" to hide what its user has in mind. So "defenseless villages are bombarded from the air (and) this is called 'pacification'." And the president declares a "war on terrorism" that's, in fact, a "war of terrorism" against designated targets, always defenseless against it, because with adversaries able to put up a good fight, bullies, like the US, opt for diplomacy or other political and economic means, short of open conflict.
The term "terrorism" has a long history, and reference to a "war on terrorism" goes back a 100 years or more. Noted historian Howard Zinn observed how the phrase is a contradiction in terms as "How can you make war on terrorism, if war is terrorism (and if) you respond to terrorism with (more) terrorism....you multiply (the amount of) terrorism in the world."
Zinn explains that "Governments are terrorists on an enormously large scale," and when they wage war the damage caused infinitely exceeds anything individuals or groups can inflict.
It's also clear that individual or group "terrorist" acts are crimes, not declarations or acts of war. So a proper response to the 9/11 perpetrators was a police one, not an excuse for the Pentagon to attack other nations having nothing to do with it.
George Bush's "war on terrorism" began on that fateful September day when his administration didn't miss a beat stoking the flames of fear with a nation in shock ready to believe almost anything - true, false or in between. And he did it thanks to the hyped enormity of the 9/11 event manipulated for maximum political effect for the long-planned aggressive imperial adventurism his hard line administration had in mind only needing "a catastrophic and catalyzing (enough) event - like a new Pearl Harbor" to lauch. With plans drawn and ready, the president and key administration officials terrified the public with visions of terrorism branded and rebranded as needed from the war on it, to the global war on it (GLOT), to the long war on it, to a new name coming soon to re-ignite a flagging public interest in and growing disillusionment over two foreign wars gone sour and lost.
Many writers, past and present, have written on terrorism with their definitions and analyses of it. The views of four noted political and social critics are reviewed below, but first an official definition to frame what follows.
How The US Code Defines Terrorism
Under the US Code, "international terrorism" includes activities involving:
(A) "violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;"
(B) are intended to -
(i) "intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States...."
The US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37, 1984) shortens the above definition to be "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature....through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear."
Eqbal Ahmad On Terrorism
Before his untimely death, Indian activist and scholar Eqbal Ahmad spoke on the subject of terrorism in one of his last public talks at the University of Colorado in October, 1998. Seven Stories Press then published his presentation in one of its Open Media Series short books titled "Terrorism, Theirs and Ours." The talk when delivered was prophetic in light of the September 11 event making his comments especially relevant.
He began quoting a 1984 Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz speech calling terrorism "modern barbarism, a form of political violence, a threat to Western civilization, a menace to Western moral values" and more, all the while never defining it because that would "involve a commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of consistency" not consistent with how this country exploits it for political purposes. It would also expose Washington's long record of supporting the worst kinds of terrorist regimes worldwide in Indonesia, Iran under the Shah, Central America, the South American fascist generals, Marcos in the Philippines, Pol Pot and Saddam at their worst, the current Saudi and Egyptian regimes, Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and for the people of Greece, who paid an enormous price, the Greek colonels the US brought to power in the late 1960s for which people there now with long memories still haven't forgiven us.
Ahmad continued saying "What (then) is terrorism? Our first job is to define the **** thing, name it, give it a description of some kind, other than (the) "moral equivalent of (our) founding fathers (or) a moral outrage to Western civilization." He cited Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as a source saying "Terrorism is an intense, overpowering fear....the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government." It's simple, to the point, fair, and Ahmad calls it a definition of "great virtue. It focuses on the use of coercive violence....that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce" saying this is true because it's what terrorism is whether committed by governments, groups, or individuals. This definition omits what Ahmad feels doesn't apply - motivation, whether or not the cause is just or not because "motives differ (yet) make no difference."
Ahmad Identifies The Following Types Of Terrorism:
* State terrorism committed by nations against anyone - other states, groups or individuals, including state-sponsored assassination targets;
* Religious terrorism like Christians and Muslims slaughtering each other during Papal crusades; many instances of Catholics killing Protestants and the reverse like in Northern Ireland; Christians and Jews butchering each other; Sunnis killing Shiites and the reverse; and any other kind of terror violence inspired or justified by religion carrying out God's will as in the Old Testament preaching it as an ethical code for a higher purpose;
* Crime (organized or otherwise) terrorism as "all kinds of crime commit terror."
* Pathology terrorism by those who are sick, may "want the attention of the world (and decide to do it by) kill(ing) a president" or anyone else.
* Political terrorism by a private group Ahmad calls "oppositional terror" explaining further that at times these five types "converge on each other starting out in one form, then converging into one or more others.
Nation states, like the US, focus only on one kind of terrorism - political terrorism that's "the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property (with the highest cost type being) state terrorism." The current wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine underscore what Ahmad means. Never mentioned, though, is that political or retail terrorism is a natural response by oppressed or desperate groups when they're victims of far more grievous acts of state terrorism. Also unmentioned is how to prevent terrorist acts Noam Chomsky explains saying the way to get "them" to stop attacking "us" is stop attacking "them."
Ahmad responded to a question in the book version of his speech with more thoughts on the subject. Asked to define terrorism the way he did in an article he wrote a year earlier titled "Comprehending Terror," he called it "the illegal use of violence for the purposes of influencing somebody's behavior, inflicting punishment, or taking revenge (adding) it has been practiced on a larger scale, globally, both by governments and by private groups." When committed against a state, never asked is what produces it.
Further, official and even academic definitions of state terrorism exclude what Ahmad calls "illegal violence:" torture, burning of villages, destruction of entire peoples, (and) genocide." These definitions are biased against individuals and groups favoring governments committing terrorist acts. Our saying it's for self-defense, protecting the "national security," or "promoting democracy" is subterfuge baloney disguising our passion for state-sponsored violence practiced like it our national pastime.
Ahmad also observed that modern-day "third-world....fascist governments (in countries like) Indonesia (under Suharto), Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo - DRC), Iran (under the Shah), South Korea (under its generals), and elsewhere - were fully supported by one or the other of the superpowers," and for all the aforementioned ones and most others that was the US.
Further, Ahmad notes "religious zealotry has been a major source of terror" but nearly always associated in the West with Islamic groups. In fact, it's a global problem with "Jewish terrorists....terrorizing an entire people in the Middle East (the Palestinians, supported by) Israel which is supported by the government of the United States." Crimes against humanity in the name of religion are also carried out by radical Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and others, not just extremist Muslims that are the only ones reported in the West.
In August, 1998 in the Dawn English-language Pakistani newspaper, Ahmad wrote about the power of the US in a unipolar world saying: "Who will define the parameters of terrorism, or decide where terrorists lurk? Why, none other than the United States, which can from the rooftops of the world set out its claim to be sheriff, judge and hangman, all at one and the same time."
So while publicly supporting justice, the US spurns international law to be the sole decider acting by the rules of what we say goes, and the law is what we say it is. Further, before the age of George Bush, Ahmad sounded a note of hope saying nothing is "historically permanent (and) I don't think American power is permanent. It itself is very temporary, and therefore its excesses have to be, by definition, impermanent."
In addition, he added, "America is a troubled country" for many reasons. It's "economic capabilities do not harmonize with its military (ones and) its ruling class' will to dominate is not quite shared by" what its people want.
For now, however, the struggle will continue because the US "sowed in the Middle East (after the Gulf war but before George Bush became president) and South Asia (signaling Pakistan and Afghanistan) very poisonous seeds. Some have ripened and others are ripening. An examination of why they were sown, what has grown, and how they should be reaped is needed (but isn't being done).
Missiles won't solve the problem" as is plain as day in mid-2007, with the Bush administration hanging on for dear life in the face of two calamitous wars the president can't acknowledge are hopeless and already lost.
Edward S. Herman On Terrorism
Herman wrote a lot on terrorism including his important 1982 book as relevant today as it was then, "The Real Terror Network." It's comprised of US-sponsored authoritarian states following what Herman calls a free market "development model" for corporate gain gotten through a reign of terror unleashed on any homegrown resistance against it and a corrupted dominant media championing it with language Orwell would love.
Back then, justification given was the need to protect the "free world" from the evils of communism and a supposedly worldwide threat it posed. It was classic "Red Scare" baloney, but it worked to traumatize the public enough to think the Russians would come unless we headed them off, never mind, in fact, the Russians had good reason to fear we'd come because "bombing them back to the stone age" was seriously considered, might have happened, and once almost did.
Herman reviews examples of "lesser and mythical terror networks" before discussing the real ones. First though, he defines the language beginning with how Orwell characterized political speech already explained above. He then gives a dictionary definition of terrorism as "a mode of governing, or of opposing government, by intimidation" but notes right off a problem for "western propaganda."
Defining terrorism this way includes repressive regimes we support, so it's necessary finding "word adaptations (redefining them to) exclude (our) state terrorism (and only) capture the petty (retail) terror of small dissident groups or individuals" or the trumped up "evil empire" kind manufactured out of whole cloth but made to seem real and threatening.
Herman then explains how the CIA finessed terrorism by referring to "Patterns of International Terrorism" defining it as follows: "Terrorism conducted with the support of a foreign government or organization and/or directed against foreign nationals, institutions, or governments."
By this definition, internal death squads killing thousands are excluded because they're not "international" unless a foreign government supports them. That's easy to hide, though, when we're the government and as easy to reveal or fake when it serves our purpose saying it was communist-inspired in the 1980s or "Islamofascist al Qaeda"-conducted or supported now. Saying it makes it so even when it isn't because the power of the message can make us believe Santa Claus is the grinch who stole Christmas.
Herman also explains how harsh terms like totalitarianism and authoritarianism only apply to adversary regimes while those as bad or worse allied to us are more benignly referred to with terms like "moderate autocrats" or some other corrupted manipulation of language able to make the most beastly tyrants look like enlightened tolerant leaders.
In fact, these brutes and their governments comprise the "real terror network," and what they did and still do, with considerable US help, contributed to the rise of the "National Security State" (NSS) post-WW II and the growth of terrorism worldwide supporting it. In a word, it rules by "intimidation and violence or the threat of violence." Does the name Augusto Pinochet ring a bell? What about the repressive Shah of Iran even a harsh theocratic state brought relief from?
Herman explained "the economics of the NSS" that's just as relevant today as then with some updating of events in the age of George Bush. He notes NSS leaders imposed a free market "development model" creating a "favorable investment climate (including) subsidies and tax concessions to business (while excluding) any largess to the non-propertied classes...." It means human welfare be ****ed, social benefits and democracy are incompatible with the needs of business, unions aren't allowed, a large "reserve army" of workers can easily replace present ones, and those complaining get their heads knocked off with terror tactics being the weapon of choice, and woe to those on the receiving end.
The Godfather in Washington makes it work with considerable help from the corrupted dominant media selling "free market" misery like it's paradise. Their message praises the dogma, turning a blind eye to the ill effects on real people and the terror needed to keep them in line when they resist characterized as protecting "national security" and "promoting democracy," as already explained. All the while, the US is portrayed as a benevolent innocent bystander, when, if fact, behind the scenes, we pull the strings and tinpot third-world despots dance to them. But don't expect to learn that from the pages of the New York Times always in the lead supporting the worst US-directed policies characterized only as the best and most enlightened.
At the end of his account, Herman offers solutions worlds apart from the way the Bush administration rules. They include opposing "martial law governments" and demanding the US end funding, arming and training repressive regimes. Also condemned are "harsh prison sentences, internments and killings," especially against labor leaders. Finally, he cites "the right to self-determination" for all countries free from foreign interference, that usually means Washington, that must be held to account and compelled to "stop bullying and manipulating....tiny states" and end the notion they must be client ones, or else.
Referring to the Reagan administration in the 1980s, Herman says what applies even more under George Bush. If allowed to get away with it, Washington "will continue to escalate the violence (anywhere in the world it chooses) to preserve military mafia/oligarch control" meaning we're boss, and what we say goes. Leaders not getting the message will be taught the hard way, meaning state-sponsored terrorism portrayed as benign intervention.
Herman revisited terrorism with co-author Gerry O'Sullivan in 1989 in their book "The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror." The authors focus on what kinds of victims are important ("worthy" ones) while others (the "unworthy") go unmentioned or are characterized as victimizers with the corrupted media playing their usual role trumpeting whatever policies serve the interests of power. The authors state "....the West's experts and media have engaged in a process of 'role reversal' in....handling....terrorism... focus(ing) on selected, relatively small-scale terrorists and rebels including....genuine national liberation movements" victimized by state-sponsored terror. Whenever they strike back in self-defense they're portrayed as victimizers. Examples, then and now, are legion, and the authors draw on them over that earlier period the book covers.
They also explain the main reason individuals and groups attack us is payback for our attacking or oppressing them far more grievously. As already noted, the very nature of wholesale state-directed terror is infinitely more harmful than the retail kind with the order of magnitude being something like comparing massive corporate fraud cheating shareholders and employees to a day's take by a local neighborhood pickpocket.
"The Terrorism Industry" shows the West needs enemies. Before 1991, the "evil empire" Soviet Union was the lead villain with others in supporting roles like Libya's Gaddafi, the PLO under Arafat (before the Oslo Accords co-opted him), the Sandinistas under Ortega laughably threatening Texas we were told, and other designees portrayed as arch enemies of freedom because they won't sell out their sovereignty to rules made in Washington. Spewing this baloney takes lots of chutzpah and manufactured demonizing generously served up by "state-sponsored propaganda campaigns" dutifully trumpeted by the dominant media stenographers for power. Their message is powerful enough to convince people western states and nuclear-powered Israel can't match ragtag marauding "terrorist" bands coming to neighborhoods near us unless we flatten countries they may be coming from. People believe it, and it's why state-sponsored terrorism can be portrayed as self-defense even though it's pure scare tactic baloney.
The authors stress the western politicization process decides who qualifies as targeted, and "The basic rule has been: if connected with leftists, violence may be called terrorist," but when it comes from rightist groups it's always self-defense.
Again, it's classic Orwell who'd be smiling saying I told you so if he were still here. He also understood terrorism serves a "larger service." Overall, it's to get the public terrified enough to go along with any agenda governments have in mind like wars of aggression, huge increases in military spending at the expense of social services getting less, and the loss of civil liberties by repressive policies engineered on the phony pretext of increasing our safety, in fact, being harmed.
The authors also note different forms of "manufactured terrorism" such as inflating or inventing a menace out of whole cloth. It's also used in the private sector to weaken or destroy "union leaders, activists, and political enemies, sometimes in collusion with agents of the state."
The authors call all of the above "The Terrorism Industry of institutes and experts who formulate and channel analysis and information on terrorism in accordance with Western demands" often in cahoots with "Western governments, intelligence agencies, and corporate/conservative foundations and funders."
It's a "closed system" designed to "reinforce state propaganda" to program the public mind to go along with any agenda the institutions of power have in mind, never beneficial to our own. Yet, their message is so potent they're able to convince us it is. It's an astonishing achievement going on every day able to make us believe almost anything, and the best way to beat it is don't listen.
Noam Chomsky On Terrorism
In his book "Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy," co-authored with Gilbert Achcar, Chomsky defines terrorism saying he's been writing about it since 1981 around the time Ronald Reagan first declared war on "international terrorism" to justify all he had in mind mentioned above. Chomsky explained "You don't declare a war on terrorism unless you're planning yourself to undertake massive international terrorism," and calling it self-defense is pure baloney.
Chomsky revisits the subject in many of his books, and in at least two earlier ones addressed terrorism or international terrorism as those volumes' core issue discussed further below. In "Perilous Power," it's the first issue discussed right out of the gate, and he starts off defining it. He does it using the official US Code definition given above calling it a commonsense one. But there's a problem in that by this definition the US qualifies as a terrorist state, and the Reagan administration in the 1980s practiced it, so it had to change it to avoid an obvious conflict.
Other problems arose as well when the UN passed resolutions on terrorism, the first major one being in December, 1987 condemning terrorism as a crime in the harshest terms. It passed in the General Assembly overwhelmingly but not unanimously, 153 - 2, with the two opposed being the US and Israel so although the US vote wasn't a veto it served as one twice over. When Washington disapproves, it's an actual veto in the Security Council or a de facto one in the General Assembly meaning it's blocked either way, and it's erased from history as well. Case closed.
Disguising what Martin Luther King called "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," referring to this country, a new definition had to be found excluding the terror we carry out against "them," including only what they do to "us." It's not easy, but, in practical terms, this is the definition we use - what you do to "us," while what we do to you is "benign humanitarian intervention." Repeated enough in the mainstream, the message sinks in even though it's baloney.
Chomsky then explains what other honest observers understand in a post-NAFTA world US planners knew would devastate ordinary people on the receiving end of so-called free trade policies designed to throttle them for corporate gain. He cites National Intelligence Council projections that globalization "will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide....Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it."
Pentagon projections agree with plans set to savagely suppress expected retaliatory responses. How to stop the cycle of violence? End all types of exploitation including so-called one-way "free trade," adopting instead a fair trade model like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's government follows that's equitable to all trading partners and their people. The antidote to bad policy, brutal repression, wars and the terrorism they generate is equity and justice for all. However, the US won't adopt the one solution sure to work because it hurts profits that come ahead of people needs.
Chomsky wrote about terrorism at length much earlier as well in his 1988 book "The Culture of Terrorism." In it he cites "the Fifth Freedom" meaning "the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate society, to undertake any course of action to insure that existing privilege is protected and advanced." This "freedom" is incompatible with the other four Franklin Roosevelt once announced - freedom of speech, worship, want and fear all harmed by this interloper. To get the home population to go along with policies designed to hurt them, "the state must spin an elaborate web of illusion and deceit (to keep people) inert and limited in the capacity to develop independent modes of thought and perception." It's called "manufacturing consent" to keep the rabble in line, using hard line tactics when needed.
"The Cultural of Terrorism" covers the Reagan years in the 1980s and its agenda of state terror in the post-Vietnam climate of public resistance to direct intervention that didn't hamper Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. So unable to send in the Marines, Reagan resorted to state terror proxy wars with key battlegrounds being Central America and Afghanistan. The book focuses on the former, the scandals erupting from it, and damage control manipulation so this country can continue pursuing policies dedicated to rule by force whenever persuasion alone won't work.
A "new urgency" emerged in June, 1986 when the World Court condemned the US for attacking Nicaragua using the Contras in a proxy war of aggression against a democratically elected government unwilling to operate by rules made in Washington. In a post-Vietnam climate opposed to this sort of thing, policies then were made to work by making state terror look like humanitarian intervention with local proxies on the ground doing our killing for us and deceiving the public to go along by scaring it to death.
So with lots of dominant media help, Reagan pursued his terror wars in Central America with devastating results people at home heard little about if they read the New York Times or watched the evening news suppressing the toll Chomsky reveals as have others:
-- over 50,000 slaughtered in El Salvador,
-- over 100,000 corpses in Guatemala just in the 1980s and over 200,000 including those killed earlier and since,
-- a mere 11,000 in Nicaragua that got off relatively easy because the people had an army to fight back while in El Salvador and Guatemala the army was the enemy.
The tally shows Ronald Reagan gets credit for over 160,000 Central American deaths alone, but not ordinary ones. They came "Pol Pot-style....with extensive torture, rape, mutilation, disappearance," and political assassinations against members of the clergy including El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero gunned down by an assassin while celebrating mass inside San Salvador's Hospital de la Divina Frovidencia.
His "voice for the voiceless" concern for the poor and oppressed and courageous opposition to death squad mass-killing couldn't be tolerated in a part of the world ruled by wealthy elites getting plenty of support from some of the same names in Washington now ravaging Iraq and Afghanistan.
Chomsky cites the Reagan Doctrine's commitment to opposing leftist resistance movements throughout the 1980s, conducting state-sponsored terror to "construct an international terrorist network of impressive sophistication, without parallel in history....and used it" clandestinely fighting communism.
With lots of help from Congress and the dominant media, the administration contained the damage that erupted in late 1986 from what was known as the Iran-Contra scandal over illegally selling arms to Iran to fund the Contras. Just like the farcical Watergate investigations, the worst crimes and abuses got swept under the rug, and in the end no one in the 1980s even paid a price for the lesser ones. So a huge scandal greater than Watergate, that should have toppled a president, ended up being little more than a tempest in a teapot after the dust settled. It makes it easy understanding how George Bush gets away with mass-murder, torture and much more almost making Reagan's years seem tame by comparison.
Chomsky continued discussing our "culture of terrorism" with the Pentagon practically boasting over its Central American successes directing terrorist proxy force attacks against "soft targets" including health centers, medical workers and schools, farms and more, all considered legitimate military targets despite international law banning these actions.
Latin America is always crucial to US policy makers referring to it dismissively as "America's backyard" giving us more right to rule here than practically any place else. It's because of the region's strategic importance historian Greg Grandin recognizes calling it the "Empire's Workshop" that's the title of his 2006 book subtitled "Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism." In it, he shows how the region serves as a laboratory honing our techniques for imperial rule that worked in the 1980s but now face growing rebellion providing added incentive to people in the Middle East inspiring them to do by force what leaders like Hugo Chavez do constitutionally with great public support.
But Washington's international terror network never quits or sleeps operating freely worldwide and touching down anywhere policy makers feel they need to play global enforcer seeing to it outliers remember who's boss, and no one forgets the rules of imperial management. Things went as planned for Reagan until the 1986 scandals necessitated a heavy dose of damage control. They've now become industrial strength trying to bail George Bush out his quagmire conflagrations making Reagan's troubles seem like minor brush fires. It worked for Reagan by following "overriding principles (keeping) crucial issues....off the agenda" applicable for George Bush, including:
-- "the (ugly) historical and documentary record reveal(ing)" US policy guidelines;
-- "the international setting within which policy develops;"
-- application of similar policies in other nations in Latin America or elsewhere;
-- "the normal conditions of life (in Latin America or elsewhere long dominated by) US influence and control (and) what these teach us about the goals and character of US government policy over many years;
-- similar matters (anywhere helping explain) the origins and nature of the problems that must be addressed."
It was true in the 1980s and now so these issues "are not fit topics for reporting, commentary and debate" beyond what policy makers disagree on and are willing to discuss openly.
The book concludes considering the "perils of diplomacy" with Washington resorting to state terror enforcing its will through violence when other means don't work. But the US public has to be convinced through guile and stealth it's all being done for our own good. It never is, of course, but most people never catch on till it's too late to matter. They should read more Chomsky, Herman, Ahmad, and Michel Chossudovsky discussed below, but too few do so leaders like Reagan and Bush get away with mass-murder and much more.
Chomsky wrote another book on terrorism titled "Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World." It was first published in 1986 with new material added in more recent editions up to 2001. The book begins with a memorable story St. Augustine tells about a pirate Alexander the Great captured asking him "how he dares molest the sea." Pirates aren't known to be timid, and this one responds saying "How dare you molest the whole world? ....I do it with a little ship only (and) am called a thief (while you do) it with a great navy (and) are called an Emperor." It's a wonderful way to capture the relationship between minor rogue states or resistance movements matched off against the lord and master of the universe with unchallengeable military power unleashing it freely to stay dominant.
The newest edition of "Pirates and Emperors, Old and New" explores what constitutes terrorism while mainly discussing how Washington waged it in the Middle East in the 1980s, also then in Central America, and more recently post-9/11. As he often does, Chomsky also shows how dominant media manipulation shapes public perceptions to justify our actions called defensible against states we target as enemies when they resist - meaning their wish to remain free and independent makes them a threat to western civilization.
Washington never tolerates outlier regimes placing their sovereignty above ours or internal resistance movements hitting back for what we do to them. Those doing it are called terrorists and are targeted for removal by economic, political and/or military state terror. In the case of Nicaragua, the weapon of choice was a Contra proxy force, in El Salvador, the CIA-backed fascist government did the job, and in both cases tactics used involved mass murder and incarceration, torture, and a whole further menu of repressive and economic barbarism designed to crush resistance paving the way for unchallengeable US dominance.
The centerpiece of US Middle East policy has been its full and unconditional support for Israel's quest for regional dominance by weakening or removing regimes considered hostile and its near-six decade offensive to repress and ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinians from all land Israelis want for a greater Israel. Toward that end, Israel gets unheard of amounts of aid including billions annually in grants and loans, billions more as needed, multi-billions in debt waved, billions more in military aid, and state-of-the-art weapons and technology amounting in total to more than all other countries in the world combined for a nation of six million people with lots of important friends in Washington, on Wall Street, and in all other centers of power that count.
It all goes down smoothly at home by portraying justifiable resistance to Israeli abuse as terrorism with the dominant media playing their usual role calling US and Israeli-targeted victims the victimizers to justify the harshest state terror crackdowns against them. For Palestinians, it's meant nearly six decades of repression and 40 years of occupation by a foreign power able to reign state terror on defenseless people helpless against it. For Iraq, it meant removing a leader posing no threat to Israel or his neighbors but portrayed as a monster who did with Iranian leaders and Hugo Chavez now topping the regime change queue in that order or maybe in quick succession or tandem.
It's all about power and perception with corrupted language, as Orwell explained, able to make reality seem the way those controlling it wish. It lets power and ideology triumph over people freely using state terror as a means of social control. Chomsky quoted Churchill's notion that "the rich and powerful have every right to....enjoy what they have gained, often by violence and terror; the rest can be ignored as long as they suffer in silence, but if they interfere with....those who rule the world by right, the 'terrors of the earth' will be visited upon them with righteous wrath, unless power is constrained from within." One day, the meek may inherit the earth and Churchill's words no longer will apply, but not as long as the US rules it and media manipulation clouds reality enough to make harsh state terror look like humanitarian intervention or self-defense by helpless victims look like they're the victimizers.
Michel Chossudovsky On "The War On Terrorism"
No one has been more prominent or outspoken since the 9/11 attacks in the US than scholar/author/activist and Global Research web site editor Michel Chossudovsky. He began writing that evening publishing an article the next day titled "Who Is Osama Bin Laden," perhaps being the first Bush administration critic to courageously challenge the official account of what took place that day. He then updated his earlier account September 10, 2006 in an article titled "The Truth behind 9/11: Who is Osama Bin Ladin." Chossudovsky is a thorough, relentless researcher making an extraordinary effort to get at the truth no matter how ugly or disturbing.
Here's a summary of what he wrote that was included in his 2005 book titled "America's War on Terrorism (In the Wake of 9/11)" he calls a complete fabrication "based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden (from a cave in Afghanistan and hospital bed in Pakistan), outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus." He called it instead what it is, in fact - a pretext for permanent "New World Order" wars of conquest serving the interests of Wall Street, the US military-industrial complex, and all other corporate interests profiting hugely from a massive scheme harming the public interest in the near-term and potentially all humanity unless it's stopped in time.
On the morning of 9/11, the Bush administration didn't miss a beat telling the world Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center (WTC) and Pentagon meaning Osama bin Laden was the main culprit - case closed without even the benefit of a forensic and intelligence analysis piecing together all potential helpful information. There was no need to because, as Chossudovsky explained, "That same (9/11) evening at 9:30 pm, a 'War Cabinet' was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. At 11:00PM, at the end of that historic (White House) meeting, the 'War on Terrorism' was officially launched," and the rest is history.
Chossudovsky continued "The decision was announced (straightaway) to wage war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in retribution for the 9/11 attacks" with news headlines the next day asserting, with certainty, "state sponsorship" responsibility for the attacks connected to them. The dominant media, in lockstep, called for military retaliation against Afghanistan even though no evidence proved the Taliban government responsible, because, in fact, it was not and we knew it.
Four weeks later on October 7, a long-planned war of illegal aggression began, Afghanistan was bombed and then invaded by US forces working in partnership with their new allies - the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan or so-called Northern Alliance "warlords." Their earlier repressive rule was so extreme, it gave rise to the Taliban in the first place and has now made them resurgent.
Chossudovsky further explained that the public doesn't "realize that a large scale theater war is never planned and executed in a matter of weeks." This one, like all others, was months in the making needing only what CentCom Commander General Tommy Franks called a "terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event" to arouse enough public anger for the Bush administration to launch it after declaring their "war on terrorism." Chossudovsky, through thorough and exhausting research, exposed it as a fraud.
He's been on top of the story ever since uncovering the "myth of an 'outside enemy' and the threat of 'Islamic terrorists' (that became) the cornerstone (and core justification) of the Bush administration's military doctrine." It allowed Washington to wage permanent aggressive wars beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq, to ignore international law, and to "repeal civil liberties and constitutional government" through repression laws like the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts. A key objective throughout has, and continues to be, Washington's quest to control the world's energy supplies, primarily oil, starting in the Middle East where two-thirds of known reserves are located.
Toward that end, the Bush administration created a fictitious "outside enemy" threat without which no "war on terrorism" could exist, and no foreign wars could be waged. Chossudovsky exposed the linchpin of the whole scheme. He uncovered evidence that Al Queda "was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afghan war" era, and that in the 1990s Washington "consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at the same time placing him on the FBI's 'most wanted list' as the World's foremost terrorist." He explained that the CIA (since the 1980s and earlier) actively supports international terrorism covertly, and that on September 10, 2001 "Enemy Number One" bin Laden was in a Rawalpindi, Pakistan military hospital confirmed on CBS News by Dan Rather. He easily could have been arrested but wasn't because we had a "better purpose" in mind for "America's best known fugitive (to) give a (public) face to the 'war on terrorism' " that meant keeping bin Laden free to do it. If he didn't exist, we'd have had to invent him, but that could have been arranged as well.
The Bush administration's national security doctrine needs enemies, the way all empires on the march do. Today "Enemy Number One" rests on the fiction of bin Laden-led Islamic terrorists threatening the survival of western civilization. In fact, however, Washington uses Islamic organizations like Islamic jihad as a "key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union" while, at the same time, blaming them for the 9/11 attacks calling them "a threat to America."
September 11, 2001 was, indeed, a threat to America, but one coming from within from real enemies. They want to undermine democracy and our freedoms, not preserve them, in pursuit of their own imperial interests for world domination by force through endless foreign wars and establishment of a locked down national "Homeland Security (police) State." They're well along toward it, and if they succeed, America, as we envision it, no longer will exist. Only by exposing the truth and resisting what's planned and already happening will there be any hope once again to make this nation a "land of the free and home of the brave" with "a new birth of freedom" run by a "government of the people, by the people, for the people" the way at least one former president thought it should be.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at: [email protected].
Source:
http://counterpunch.org/lendman06012007.html
format_quote Originally Posted by Muezzin
You are right. I believe that certain individuals are attempting to derail the thread and forcing the mods hands into closing it, thereby, denying the members additional information.
IMHO, I believe the better path would be to punish the individual, rather than the entire forum. Maybe you can revoke a persons posting privileges for a certain amount of days, instead.
That would be an alternative to closing the thread.
Their actions remind me of an Aya which roughly translates: "they attempt to dim Allah's light..."
That's what they're doing in their efforts to close the threads. Deny us further knowledge. Because knowledge is power...
Asia’s Islamic extremists add beheadings to their arsenal
Friday, June 1, 2007 - Updated: 11:40 AM EST
A Thai police officer examines a plastic bag containing the head of a man in Yala province, southern Thailand, May 14, 2007. (AP)
NA PRADU, Thailand - It took two days for the young Muslim assassin to calm his nerves before the slaying.
Then, Mohama Waekaji says, he walked one cool morning to a rice mill, carrying a knife and following orders from a guerrilla commander to behead the 72-year-old Buddhist owner.
He asked the elderly man, Juan Kaewtongprakam, for some rice husks. As he turned to collect them, Waekaji says, he slashed the blade through the man’s neck.
"I didn’t dare to disobey," the 23-year-old Waekaji said in an interview with The Associated Press _ the first time a Thai militant accused of a beheading has spoken to the Western media. "I knew they would come after me if I did not do what I was told."
The killing in February was one in a spate of beheadings that has shocked Thailand, a nation with no past history of the practice, and fueled fears that the brutal terrorist tactics of the Middle East are spreading in Asia.
Twenty-five beheadings _ including 10 already this year _ have been reported in southern Thailand since an Islamic-inspired insurgency erupted in 2004, claiming more than 2,200 lives. Militants in the heavily Muslim region seek independence from mostly Buddhist Thailand.
"Beheadings are certainly on the rise outside of the Middle East proper," said Timothy Furnish, professor of Middle Eastern history at Georgia Perimeter College. "These groups do take their cues from ... hardcore Islamic thought coming out of the Arab world. Beheading infidels not only shocks, but also demonstrates Islamic bona fides to other groups."
Thai authorities say jihad videos from the Middle East, captured from rebel training camps, may be inspiring young men like Waekaji. One clip said to have come from Iraq shows a woman lying on her side on a patch of grass as a man slowly cuts her throat with a long knife. Blood spurts from the wound, the screaming finally stops and her head is completely severed.
"The inspiration is clearly coming across the Internet or through DVDs clips," said Zachary Abuza, an expert on terrorism in Southeast Asia at Simmons College in Boston.
"Islamist militants in Southeast Asia are very frustrated that the region is considered the Islamic periphery," Abuza added. "... Militants of the region are actively trying to pull the region into the Islamic core. They want people to understand that their jihad is a part of the global jihad."
Beheadings have been linked to other militants across Asia, including groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indian-held Kashmir and Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. In the mostly Roman Catholic Philippines, at least 37 people have been decapitated in the last decade by the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf.
Beheadings are not solely a tool of guerrillas. Its imposed as punishment under some strict interpretations of Islamic law such as in Saudi Arabia and under the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Waekaji’s account of his journey _ from quiet, average student to a confessed killer _ offers insights into how young Muslims fall under the influence of militant Islamic thinking
He was attending a private Islamic school in Pattani province when a school buddy persuaded him to join a religious event at a mosque. There "ustad," or teachers, told him about an organization to liberate southern Thailand, asking him to take an oath to become a servant of Allah, obey the teachers and take the secrets of the organization to his grave.
Although confused and with little knowledge of politics, he took the oath and began secret training at age 19.
His teachers stressed the sufferings of Muslims in Palestine and Afghanistan and also in Thailand, where many Muslims feel they are second-class citizens in a Buddhist-dominated land.
The teachers detailed the Tak Bai tragedy of 2004 when Thai security forces confronted Muslim protesters, resulting in the deaths of 85. The victims died of suffocation when authorities arrested 1,300 people and stacked them on top of each other in trucks.
"I was shaken when I heard the story. I was revengeful and I did hate them, those who did this to us Muslims," Waekaji said at the prison in Na Pradu, about 680 miles south of Bangkok.
His story could not be independently confirmed, but Waekaji has made a formal written confession and the police have filed a case against him in criminal court.
During rigorous training, he learned how to do knuckle push-ups, wield knives, swords and guns and how to take a life by squeezing an opponent’s Adam’s apple with his hands or breaking a victim’s neck.
After two years, he was sent out to burn tires and spread nails on roads to puncture tires and distract police before attacks staged by his comrades.
"They recruit responsible, tight-lipped and trouble-free teenagers ... people who can carry out orders and who don’t attract attention to themselves," said Thai army Col. Shinawat Mandej. "They train their minds before training their bodies. They get them at the most vulnerable age when they need something to believe in and turn them into cold-blooded killers."
When the order came to slay the mill owner _ a person he had seen but didn’t know _ Waekaji said he was frightened, both by the orders and what his leaders would do to him if he failed.
"It was too late to want out," he said, his eyes closed and his head downcast. "It was either me or him."
Police found the man’s headless body at the rice mill and his head in a nearby field that separates Muslim and Buddhist villages. Waekaji was arrested and charged with the killing about two months later.
Leaflets left in mailboxes and motorcycle baskets in Pattani the day of the beheading warned: "We will give Thai Buddhists three days to leave our land. Otherwise, we will kill you and burn your houses. ... Thai Buddhists will never live peacefully. You will be killed cruelly."
http://news.bostonherald.com/interna...format=&page=1
Aaron, if they're not doing an Islamic act, how can they be Islamic Extremists?Call them something else maybe?
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