The two-day anti-terror conference organized in London by Saudi Arabia and the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, which ended last night, may have achieved a lot more than examining how effectively countries are currently working together to fight international terror. The conference title “Transnational Terrorism: A Global Approach” hid an extra text which hopefully will allow a massive effort to combat the terrorist on a third and arguably more effective front. In his keynote opening speech, the Kingdom’s Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal drove home the point that terrorists must be deprived of the opportunity to extort sympathy and support by annexing issues such a the plight of the Palestinians to their own perverted cause.
Hunting down and fighting international terror is of course only a part of the story. As the Islamic world has accepted, it is also important to destroy the poverty and ignorance that have produced fertile fields from which Al-Qaeda and its satraps reap recruits. Following on from the historic agreement at last year’s Organization of Islamic Conference summit in Riyadh, a major effort is under way to alleviate poverty and root out religious teachers who distort and betray the tenets of Islam.
But the third front that must be opened should address the wrongs and injustices against the Arab and wider Islamic world, which have given such a potent source of propaganda to the men of violence. And only America and Europe have the power to achieve this.
The Bush White House, having cast aside all the wise counsel available from professional diplomats in the State Department originally majored on main force to fight terror. Four years on, it is clear that far from working, the US iron fist may have increased the number of opponents. It is certain that every innocent civilian casualty, every operational error made by the Americans, is adding to the general sense of grievance and frustration. If the US really cares about peace and justice, why is it not confronting the injustices and violence visited on the Palestinians by the Israelis? If the US really wants Iran to abandon any idea of nuclear weapons, why does it not force Israel to comply with International Atomic Energy Agency rules? Why does it shelter a state that has already turned the Middle East nuclear?
Unlike the Americans, the Europeans have long recognized the pivotal role that the plight of the Palestinians plays in undermining confidence in the fairness of US Middle East policy. Prince Saud’s British counterpart Jack Straw underlined the problem in his own address to the London conference. However the time has now come for the Europeans to come up with more than words. While America with its annual multibillion dollar support for Israel holds the key to enforcing a just resolution of the plight of the Palestinians, the Europeans can and should be working far harder, politically and economically to promote and sustain a viable independent Palestinian state in order to rob international terror of the easiest excuse for its depravities.
