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ISLAM AND TERRORISM |
September 11, 2001Between eight and nine a.m. Eastern Standard Time on the morning of September 11, 2001, two five-man terrorist teams hijacked two large American passenger jet airplanes. United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 were both seized in mid-air after leaving Logan Airport at Boston. At 8:46 and 9:02 a.m. the hijackers crashed the planes, nearly full of jet fuel, into the two main towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Meanwhile, another five-man terrorist team hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 from Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., and crashed it at about 9:30 a.m. into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Both main towers of the World Trade Center burned and fell down. Tower One, the first to be hit, collapsed within an hour and a half. Tower Two, hit about fifteen minutes after Tower One, collapsed within an hour. Shaken by the rain of debris from the collapsing towers, several of the Center's smaller buildings later that day fell as well. It was thought possible at the time that several tens of thousands of people might have been killed. At about the same time that fateful morning yet another team of terrorists -- this time consisting of only four men -- hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey. Apparently their plan was to crash it into the White House in Washington, D.C. But a number of passengers, after having called their loved ones by mobile phone, attacked the hijackers. The plane crashed instead about 80 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing all aboard, including about 40 or so passengers and flight crew. # # # The events of September 11, 2001 caused a worldwide sensation. They also caused enormous historical events to unfold. Clues found in an FBI security sweep checking into the hijackers' backgrounds quickly led to al-Qaeda ("the base"), a terrorist group associated with Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian in exile in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is multiply related by marriage to the leader, Mullah Omar, of the Taliban (Islamic seminary student) political leadership in Afghanistan; it was therefore no surprise that this group refused to turn Osama over to the United States, which demanded him. (Officially, the Taliban said they had not seen evidence that bin Laden was in any way associated with terrorist activities.) The United States responded by quickly forming a coalition of its allies and friends. This coalition denounced the attacks on America and sent ships and planes to Pakistan and other nations bordering Afghanistan. They bombed Afghanistan for several weeks, beginning in October. The bombing quickly destroyed Afghanistan's infrastructure. The coalition then began pounding the Taliban's entrenched troops. Then the Western coalition sent in commandos and special forces to raid Afghan airports. They hoped to shake loose bin Laden from the fortified mountain caves in which he was believed to be hiding -- probably in the Tora Bora region of south-central Afghanistan -- and to capture him. They hoped also to root out bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network -- and to dislodge his Taliban protectors from power, or to destroy them. By mid-November the attacks suddenly began to bear fruit. Taliban forces began retreating from their trenches under pressure of sustained bombing by B-52 bombers and ground attacks by the United Islamic Front (often called the Northern Alliance), a motley group of Muslims who had formerly been in power in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. The Taliban gave up the northern half of the country and retreated into the south. Later they surrendered there as well. # # # At the first realization that the World Trade Center and Pentagon events were terrorist attacks, the suspicion arose that these attacks must have been launched by Muslims. Why was this? In recent years pundits have prognosticated that the United States, having "won" the Cold War with the Soviet Union, has no more enemies but one: Islam. According to an influential work called The Clash of Civilizations and the Re-Making of World Order by an American professor named Samuel P. Huntington, the sole threat remaining in the world to the United States is the entirely opposed religion of the prophet Muhammed (580?-632 C.E.). Islam is a religion which emphasizes the unimportance of life in this world. Muslims are required to submit (Islam means "peace" or "submission") totally to the will of the One God (Allah: his very name means "the (one) god"). Muslims are required to practise prayer, fasting, and numerous other religious duties. Most Muslims are peaceful and tolerant of other religions. But while the Muslim holy book, the Qur'an or Koran, guarantees freedom of religion (for Christianity and Judaism), it also urges Muslims to spread the religion of Islam. A small minority of Muslims, usually called Muslim fundamentalists or Islamists, believes in a very literal, historically very early interpretation of Muhammed's life and work. According to this interpretation, the reign of Islam must spread from lands currently controlled by Islam (dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam) to all the earth not currently controlled by the religion (dar al-harb, the abode of war). All nations and peoples must either adopt Islam or, in the case of Judaism and Christianity, accept the temporal domination of Islam and pay it the homage of a special tax, the jizyah. Bin Laden's network al-Qaeda believes in this interpretation of Islam. So does the Taliban. The American government claims that bin Laden's network has been tied by definite evidence to the attack on its destroyer USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000. This attack cost seven American lives. It wounded about 50 American sailors. The American government also claims that al-Qaeda has also been linked to the attack on two American embassies in Africa in 2000 that caused over 200 dead (including 12 Americans). [Even as I begin to write this essay (18 October 2001) four terrorists have today been sentenced in New York City to life in prison for their activities in the African bombings.] But bin Laden is also known to have his own special grudges against the United States:
What can we say about this? There is a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between a totalitarian version of Islam that seeks world domination for its interpretation of Islam, and a world of pluralist secular states allowing many religions to dwell in peace and equality under them. We in the West are not going to give up our vision of how things should be. We will not tolerate the visionaries of extreme Islam (sometimes called Islamists) in their violent acts. Once before the United States faced a challenge in some ways similar. This was the challenge of world (Marxist) communism in the 1950s. At that time the United States responded by McCarthyism. It held Congressional investigations of socialists, Marxists, and so-called fellow travellers (occasionally imprisoning those who refused to testify) and instituted blacklists. Some of the accused sought to escape blacklists by informing on their friends. I think the error the United States made at that time was to worry too much about communism. True, some communist spies were in the United States, and some gave important information to the Soviet Union. But many devoted Marxists, though nasty people perhaps in some respects, committed no violence. The hunt sent some of these to prison and deprived others of their livelihood. The United States should have discriminated between spies disloyally betraying sensitive information to an enemy country (like Julius Rosenberg and his brother-in-law Hank Greenglass) and non-violent loyal non-spies who were communists by conscience. Now we are at war. As I write it is just into November. Interestingly, polls reveal that some people in America and Britain -- the two most determined parties in the Western Coalition against bin Laden -- are already turning against the war. This appears to be because of television coverage of Afghan civilians maimed or killed because of bombing errors. The United States is already showing signs that it wishes to use proxies for the ground fighting (and thus reduce untelegenic casualties); namely, the forces of the United Islamic Front (also called the Northern Alliance), a group of mostly Persian-speaking Afghans who formerly controlled Afghanistan but were driven out of Kabul about five years ago by the Pushtun-speaking Taliban. The United Front now controls about 15% of the eastern portion of Afghanistan. The American plan seems to be to supply, liase with, and aid the United Front, put together some kind of popular government, and thrust it into power when the Taliban is gone. To put it mildly, this looks difficult. Afghanistan was a quagmire for the Soviets, who managed to control it, sort of, from about 1979-1989. Then they bugged out, having lost at least 13,000 dead at the hands of the mujihadeen (Islamic holy warriors). Now the Americans and British are having a shot. Can they uproot and capture bin Laden? Can they take out his network of terrorists? Can they find some sort of (slightly) more civilized popular government to replace the Taliban, and lead Afghanistan out of its medieval hellishness? Can they somehow convince world Islam that they are not leading an anti-Islamic "crusade," but a war against terroristic evil? Not to be negative, but -- probably not. Maybe the Coalition will accomplish one or two of these things, but probably not all or even most. Still, they have to try. No western democratic country can accept a terrorist attack on its largest city, and the death of 4000 of its citizens at a whack, and not retaliate. # # # NOTE: It is now January 28, 2002. The United States and Britain, the two main partners in the coalition, have, principally by aerial bombing and the use of their proxies the United Front on the ground, defeated the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Neither Osama bin Laden nor Mulllah Omar the Taliban leader have been taken prisoner. It is possible, though unlikely, that they are dead. Probably bin Laden escaped to Pakistan. The first official estimates of victims in the World Trade Center attack were in the vicinity of 6,000 people. Over succeeding weeks the numbers gradually lowered as they were carefully checked. By January 1st, 2002, the official number was just under 3,000, with about 180 dead in Washington. Evidence in the form of discovered videos has emerged showing bin Laden was aware exactly when the World Trade Center attacks were to occur. Evidence has also emerged that al-Qaeda planned numerous, numerous similar horrific attacks worldwide -- in Paris, in a Jewish district of Montreal, against cathedrals and monuments in Europe. Personally, I'm glad the Taliban and al-Qaeda are smashed. I'm glad the West went after them. Controversy has arisen over the treatment of Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners as "battlefield detainees" and "unauthorized combatants" rather than as prisoners of war. About 120 have been moved to cages at the United States base in Guantanamo, Cuba. A new temporary government has been formed for Afghanistan. It is making all the right talk. But it is unlikely to be able to hold together. Afghanistan is a country of warlords and, like China in the 1920s, is likely to have no powerful central government for a while. Mopping-up operations remain underway in Afghanistan. Just today seven wounded al-Qaeda diehards holding out for weeks in a hospital in have been killed. # # # The situation as of May 26, 2002 is as follows. The new government of Afghanistan continues to make good noises. Kabul and major cities in Afghanistan are freer than they were, the ordinary person happier. Coalition forces continue to carry out sweeps on suspected al-Quaeda terrorist bases in the mountains. Few additional al-Quaeda forces haves been found or killed in Afghanistan; the remainders seem to be lying in hiding. Osama and Mullah Omar have not been captured or killed; there is some evidence that both are still alive. Canada is removing its troops in Afghanistan in July. The tiny Canadian Armed Forces are overstretched by being both in Afghanistan and in Bosnia. The Americans are acting around the world to combat "terrorism"; for example, in the Philippines and Colombia. But the world's attention has largely shifted to Israel and the Palestinian suicide bombers there, about 57 of them, who have killed themselves and over 200 Israelis. Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States and prime minister of Israel, is maneuvering trying to become prime minister again. He is taking a hardline position against the Palestinians, even more hardline than prime minister Sharon's. Sharon believes the Palestinians must be "badly broken" (an approximate quotation) before peace can be achieved. For years Netanyahu has been campaigning against "terrorism". He even created an institute against it. (His brother Jonathan, an Israeli commando, died during Israel's daring and successful raid to recover a hijacked El AL passenger jet in Entebbe, Uganda, in, I think, 1982.) Defining TerrorismBut one of the main problems with terrorism is to define it. One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Noam Chomsky, the American linguistics scholar and policy critic, argues that the United States has a hypocritical definition. It defines terrorism as the activities of American opponents, and its own activities as "counter-terrorism." (Interview with Evan Solomon on Hot Metal, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Newsworld television network, broadcast May 2002.) I have argued elsewhere that the United States through its armed forces and its Central Intelligence Agency has acted many, many times to support dictatorships and powers convenient to the interests of influential American ruling groups and corporations. Usually these actions are unknown to the broad mass of the American public, and would be unsupported by them if known. Some secret American actions are righteous, but many are not. [To Be Continued and Revised] SourcesHuntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Touchstone Books (Simon & Schuster). 1997. Home | About Grant | What's New | Links | Coming Soon | Send E-Mail Last modified: 5:52 PM 8/27/2002 |