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When help begets terrorism by Abid Ullah Jan French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin offered Pakistan help to fight terrorism.(1) The help package consists of high-tech gadgets and fingerprint-collecting equipment. The US is also helping Pakistan through sending agent after agent and assisting Musharraf’s regime in holding ground and rounding up people without due process of law. Is this an appropriate way to help us stem the yet-to-be-defined terrorism? America and its Allies must reassess their policies to see if their help is failing or fanning “terrorism”. For the first time in the history of Pakistan, we are witnessing attacks on Western interests and Christian institutions alike. It is utterly misleading on part of the government of Pakistan to claim that a group of twenty or so terrorists are behind these attacks. This amounts to ignoring too many fingers in our pie. Too many conflicting interests are now at stake in Pakistan. In the wake of the US war on terrorism, which the American analysts, such as Daniel Pipes, have admitted to be a disguised war on Islam,(2) religious organizations are the natural scapegoats. But it is naïve to hold a single group responsible for such acts of terrorism. We must keep in mind that attacks on churches and schools cause more damage to Pakistan and Islam than the US and its Allies. Persons responsible for attacks on American interests would never attack churches, schools and hospitals. If religious-minded groups are prime suspects in attacks on Western interests, secular agents of American, Indian or some other government are the actual culprits behind attacks of Christian institutions. Their motive is very clear: presenting Muslims as barbarians and justifying further tightening of the Western noose around their neck. Attacks on US interests are a clear sign of rage – rage of the silent majority suffering at the hands of US-led policies. These attacks are translation of a fraction of this rage into practical action. Fareed Zakaria asked in his Newsweek column: “Why do the terrorists hate us?” (3) Many would know only if the question is rephrased as: What turns innocents into terrorists in the first place? The answer is oppression. The oppressed know their enemy. They do not need Washington to define their liberation. Rumsfeld glamorises liberation of Iraq but ignores 3 million Palestinians choking under the 37-year Israeli occupation.(4) The liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban’s alleged oppression was a ruse for occupation with other motives. The Afghan people never resorted to attacking the Taliban’s interests because they were, in fact, not oppressed. The proof lies in the fact that despite being far better equipped, the US forces are coming under regular attacks even within Kabul because they are considered as a real oppressive occupation force. Oppression breeds violence of a proportion that cannot be contained with cosmetic gestures of help. Palestinian reaction to Israel’s use of force is a good oppression-meter. Violent reactions and their intensity are good indicators for judging who are really oppressed and to what degree. Not a single Afghan attack on Pakistan’s interests for its support to the allegedly oppressive Taliban government compared to countless attacks on US interests for its sponsoring oppressive regimes show who is at fault and who needs to be liberated. What is happening to the Palestinians is happening to all Muslims in their respective occupied lands. Of course, anger is not enough to get us through – as some marginalised elements think – what is going to be a long struggle against global apartheid, but that is a natural reaction to interventions and occupations. American agents and French gadgets will only help exacerbate this situation. Muslims do not envy the US because it is rich and strong. There are billions of poor and weak people around the world. Why do they not attack American interests? Actually, they need not blow themselves up to make the rich and mighty hear a protest. If envy were the cause of terrorism, less secure places such as Geneva, Brussels, and Toronto would have become morgues long ago. If misinterpretation of Islamic teachings were the cause of terrorism, the strains would not have waited to appear only after the fall of Soviet Union. What happened to the Muslims all of sudden? Didn’t Jews and Christians live peacefully under the Muslim rule until the 1950s? Did not the pre-eminent historian, Bernard Lewis, testify that for much of history religious minorities did better under Muslim than Christian rulers? All that cannot change in the course of 10-12 years without any reason. We are in this particularly difficult situation because the Western analysts, particularly the Americans, started presenting the world of Islam as a threat. Those who are genuinely interested in helping us fight terrorism must consider that there is something stronger at work in the West than deprivation and jealousy in the Muslim world. It is something that not only moves Muslims to kill but also to blow themselves to countless pieces. It is something, which Western analysts, such as Pipes and Friedman, have been proposing over the years – promotion of a war within Islam to dilute the Islamic threat and impose secularism in the name of modernization. We have just started reaping the fruits of their fear mongering translated into unjust foreign policies. For most Western capitals, this is a holy mission against the “evil of Islam”. Most westerners disagree. They are, however, marginalised. Bush heads a long line of extremist leaders who are invoking democracy and freedom to promote the exact opposite of these values: intervention, occupation and gross HR violations. Unabomber, Aum Shinrikyo and Baruch Goldstein are only different because they had no opportunity to lead governments like Bush, Blair, Sharon and Vajpayee. Together they have equally placed their own twisted morality above mankind’s. Unfortunately, Bush, Blair and Sharon’s followers are not an isolated cult like the Branch Davidians. They come out of an indoctrinated culture with a mainstream media that reinforces their hostility, distrust and hatred of Muslims. This culture does not condemn Israeli and American terrorism but fuels the fanaticism that is at its heart. To say that the US government is not promoting a war on and within Islam may be reassuring, but it is false. Even long before September 11, commentaries in the mainstream American media carried a not-so-hidden admiration for dictators who could help divide Muslims. To understand how genuine grievances of the Muslims masses are labelled as religious terrorism, one needs to refer to Fareed Zakria’s column in Newsweek (Oct. 15, 2001, part IV). Like other American analysts, he rightly describes that there is a “sense of humiliation, decline and despair that sweeps the Arab world… Arabs feel that they are under siege from the modern world…” But in the very next sentence, he switches gears to propaganda notions to avoid the root causes and blame religion for it: “America must now devise a strategy to deal with this form of religious terrorism.” Help through French gadgets and American agents is useless. Just let Muslims live by their centuries of religious and social experience under the governments of their own free choice. They would love to live in a hell of their own creation than a world turned into hell with safe heavens by the West for the so-called moderates. The more there is an effort to split them through war within Islam, the greater will be instability and uncertainty. There is no terrorism – there is only a reaction to the imposition of a way of life on the Muslim world through bombing, invasion and support to pro-US dictators. Stop it and we all will have the long awaited peace in the world. Concluded References (1) Dawn, August 4, 2002. Abid Ullah Jan is a columnist for The Statesman, The Nation, and the Pakistan Observer (Pakistan). He is also sub-editor for the Tribune International (Sydney, Australia), and is the Executive Director of the Integrated Regional Support Programme (IRSP). He can be reached at abidjan2@psh.paknet.com.pk
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