Atrocious acts of terror occurred during the last decades of the 20th century, from hijackings of airplanes to kidnappings of civilians to blowing up of buildings, airplanes, trains and buses to attacks by gunfire on individuals and groups. First practiced in, around and about the Middle East, they soon spread to other areas of the world, until no continent or country was immune.

But although the groups and organizations involved in terror often collaborated and aided each other (like the Baader-Meinhof involvement in the hijacking of the Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976 or the Japanese role in the rampage at Ben Gurion Airport in 1972) they were never considered branches of the same international networks. Moreover, while the acts of terrorism were often daring and sophisticated, they had always been the business of small groups, calculated to extract a demand or to inflict pain and damage on the enemy, while the perpetrators were planning and hoping to get away.

In the past two decades, a new type of terrorism has emerged, triggered and nurtured by a certain interpetation of the creed of Islam, usually dubbed "fundamentalist." Now it was no longer the followers of an ideological splinter group who purported to produce "revolution" by terrorist means, but the adepts of one of the largest and most successful universal religions, which is the established faith in some 56 Islamic countries across the world, one third of the total, spanning mainly the continents of Asia and Africa, but also counting among its 1.2 billion membership (one fifth of the world population) large minorities in the rest of the globe.

The "fundamentalist" Muslim groups and countries that have embraced this way prefer the language of "victory" over "compromise," Holy War (jihad) over negotiation, rejection over acceptance, exclusion over tolerance, the absolute Truth of Allah over human reasoning, and zeal over accomodation. In this state of affairs, terrorism, in the name of Allah, becomes not only permissible due to the unmatchable forces of the Western Satan and his underlings, but indeed inevitable. When conventional terrorism is no longer efficient enough to deal the enemy painful blows, then "suicide bombers" move into the picture, not to commit suicide, but to annihilate the enemy in earnest.

This mode of terrorism is not unique to Islam -- the Japanese Kamikaze at the end of the Pacific War acted likewise and there have been a number of isolated cases where the perpetrator was courageous/desperate/motivated enough to lose his life in the process of eliminating his target. But it is in Shi'ite Islam, from the precedent of the 'Assassins' of the Middle Ages, that this form of self-sacrifice has taken root. It is no coincidence that it was among the Shi'ites of Lebanon that this lethal tradition surfaced once again in the 1980s, in the context of the Lebanese War, first against the American marines who landed in that quagmire to guard the peace, and then against the Israelis. Few in the West suspected that a generalization of this method would soon drag into the fray the Sunni Hamas and Islamic Jihad and that Western civilization in general would become its prime target.

What dramatically changed on September 11 was that it suddenly dawned on people that this ill-understood "suicide bombing" was not reserved for the Jews and Israelis only, nor limited to the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli dispute, but a well-thought out, cunningly devised form of all-out war against the West, the Great Satan, for its 'corrupting' effect on the youth of the world, notably the Muslims, who are led astray by the glamor of American material culture. Furthermore, the tragedy of the World Trade Center attested to the new reality where the "suicide bombers" are not individuals, but a coterie of determined people who act in unison to carry out a simultaneous series of hijackings for which they have been groomed for years.

What dramatically changed on September 11 was that it suddenly dawned on people that this ill-understood "suicide bombing" was not reserved for the Jews and Israelis only.

What characterizes the latest wave of Islamic terrorism in America is that no specific demands were attached to it, like the payment of ransom, adoption of a certain policy, relinquishing a certain territory or releasing hostages. It was not unleashed as a warning or a bargaining position, or as a list of demands, the fulfillment of which would resolve the crisis and avert the horror, but as an irreversible punishment to be meted out, an expression of anger to be vented.

We have repeatedly heard the argument that these are 'un-Islamic' deeds performed by 'un-Islamic' zealots, and yet they all say and write, and are indoctrinated to believe, that they act in the name of Islam, for the sake of Allah. Are we then talking about a different Islam? If so, then how do we explain the vast popularity of the deeds and their perpetrators among the Muslim populace?

Unlike their governments which lack legitimacy for the most part and do not reflect their public opinion,

February 2002               - 3 -               Outpost