Defeating terrorism will not succeed if the vocabulary devised by the President of the United States is made invalid when it comes to places other than America. The U.S. has rightly targeted the heads of Qaeda, using airplanes to bombard their bases, sending incursions into their territory to "smoke them out," cutting off their sources of financing and supplies; but when it condemns the exact replicas of those actions, when pursued by others, as "assassinations of leaders," resorting to "disproportionate force," as "invading others' territory" or as "depriving others of their lawful income," this does not sound like a universal war, launched on universally agreed standards, according to universal criteria. If the war is indeed one of good against evil, then evil cannot be allowed to masquerade as good, nor terrorism as a "war of liberation." If the clear definitions voiced by President Bush are allowed to erode, because of temporary considerations, then the moral basis of the entire American campaign will grow so slim and shaky as to arouse domestic and international opposition to it.

Defeating terrorism will not succeed if the vocabulary devised by the President of the United States is made invalid when it comes to places other than America.

When America searches for allies in its worldwide endeavor, the staunchest among them can only be counted among democracies whose committed leaders have a staying power based on their legitimacy in government. Tyrants, monarchs, military juntas not only cannot pledge a long-standing and unrelenting support to America, but their very collaboration with the West arouses opposition to both their "participation" in the war effort and to their personal hold on government. Instead of President Bush categorizing the countries of the world into "with us or against us," something that caused all of them to scramble for shelter under the wings of the "coalition," he ought to invite all the countries which have fought terrorism to join in, while cautioning the others to straighten up their act or else...There would have been no stronger incentive for them to conform, and to embrace the American definition of terrorism.

The fact that almost all terrorist movements in the world today are Muslim, and all the universal organizations and networks among them are the product of fundamentalist Islamic thought, ought to cause us to review not the "root causes" for this terrorism, as the Saudi Prince suggested to the brave Mayor of New York who refused to sell out his principles; but to review the childish, uninformed and untruthful declaration by many Western leaders that "Islam is a religion of peace." If they knew something about the division of the world into Dar-al-Harb (the Abode of War) and Dar al-Islam (the Abode of Islam) that is brandished by Muslim fundamentalists today to justify their Jihad against the non-Muslims, maybe their spines would shudder at the thought that this core concept is part and parcel of political Islam, not a new invention of the fundamentalists.

Most of the suspects arrested by the FBI are Egyptians and Saudis, from the very countries that are supposed to be the closest allies of the U.S. in the Muslim world.

At the same time that Muslims across the globe trample American flags, long lines form in the Muslim world to apply for student visas in the West or to seek to immigrate there (yes, that hated West). But those who grant the visas are not aware, or pretend not to understand, that those young students and the rest of the migrants, while they may innocently wish to study or to better their lot economically, are the very stuff that will turn its acquired knowledge against the countries that were courteous enough to dispense it to them, and the very masses who will go on the rampage against the democratic governments that gave them shelter. After all, most of the suspects arrested by the FBI are Egyptians and Saudis, from the very countries that are supposed to be the closest allies of the U.S. in the Muslim world.

The fact that America failed to act against Hosni Mubarak when he gave shelter to the terrorists of the Achille Lauro and denied it, or against the Saudis who disburse huge sums of money to support Hamas, could have been interpreted by their citizens dwelling in America and elsewhere as giving license to acts of terror, or at least that the U.S. would look the other way when the terrorists were citizens or came from the "moderate" regimes befriended by America. In the year of the intifada, hundreds of cases were recorded in Western democracies of desecration of Jewish sites, or torching synagogues and destroying cemeteries. These same Muslim migrants, if not checked, will turn against their new governments and compatriots, as the events of September 11th have shown.

Raphael Israeli is professor of Islamic, Middle Eastern and Chinese History at Hebrew University. This article is adapted from his much longer essay "The Terrorist Masquerade" published by the Ariel Center for Policy Research.

Outpost               - 6 -               February 2002