Recently I read the text of a speech delivered by Ambassador Fawzi Abdul Majeed Al-Shubokshi, the Kingdom’s permanent representative to the United Nations. In the speech, the ambassador expressed the Kingdom’s uncompromising stance against terrorism, noting that the problem is not the concern of Saudi Arabia alone but of the entire world.
However, I was surprised by a passage in the speech in which the ambassador observed "extremism, violence and terrorism spring from extreme injustice and also the denial of freedom and justice."
It is true that every disease has a cause. Injustice, however, is not the cause of the terrorism we see nowadays. It is not confined to oppressed people nor is it absent from those people who enjoy prosperity and justice. The menace of terrorism has spread beyond all borders to every part of the inhabited world. Unlike some officials, who explain matters ambiguously, I prefer to put them in clear and straightforward language.
Terrorism means resorting to violence to get into positions of power, to remove someone from power or to make authorities change their policies and decisions. At the same time, the violent struggle by a people to liberate their land is not terrorism; it is a basic human right. The Palestinian struggle to free their lands from an occupier is completely legitimate. The United Nations and the accepted ideas of justice recognize a people’s right to defend the freedom of their land. The Arabs thus do not need to be apologetic about what the Palestinians do as long as their land is occupied by Israel which remains uncompromising in its refusal to withdraw.
On the other hand, there are international groups which use terrorism on various pretexts: to establish peace, protect animals or close abortion clinics. Their actions are terrorism just as the violence of the Basque separatist ETA or the Muslim Al-Qaeda organization is. It is obviously unfair to compare the freedom struggle of the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers by Al-Qaeda.
Most of the terrorist movements are driven by the personal ambitions of individuals seeking power and influence who know how to exploit popular sentiments. The terrorists invariably resort to unjust methods which are basically no different from the unjust acts of the authorities the terrorists want to remove. The violence of various groups in Middle Eastern countries is reminiscent of terrorist acts in Latin American countries.
In fact, I don’t know what the ambassador meant when he described terrorism as the wages of injustice. This statement is like saying poor people resort to stealing because of their poverty while police officers know that the poor are the least inclined to theft. The hypothesis that injustice begets terrorism lacks concrete evidence.
On the other hand, the cause of this modern problem and terrorism is the culture of violence some people adopt these days. This culture tries to justify itself with false affiliations to Islam while they reject all the noble Islamic values and follow only those which direct believers to fight in war situations.
This kind of terrorism is selective in its nature and its roots can never be accurately traced to injustice and repression. It is a course chosen by the perpetrators, not one forced on them by circumstances.
