For several years now, we have been relentlessly reminded that the threat of terrorism is constant. It could strike like a famous advert once said of a popular drink: Any place, anywhere, any time. And that is exactly what it aims to do: Destroy the “Western way of life” as we know it and replace it, well, with what exactly? That is the part I have never figured out. There are some terrorists — the IRA for instance — who have a clear and well defined cause. You know what they are about and what they want. And then there are terrorists, like Al-Qaeda and their imitators. Their aim is simply to destroy. They have no bonafide cause so they hijack worthy causes, tap into prevalent anger and use it to gain support. And almost everyone helps them achieve this aim.
First, there is the fine mess that constitutes foreign policy in the US and its allies. The Iraq war, the unflagging, indiscriminate support of Israel and so on. It all leads to a heart-breaking drama that plays itself out in an endless loop of carnage on our television screens. The footage may come from Iraq or from Gaza, from Lebanon or Afghanistan, but the images are the same bloody pictures of death and destruction.
Then, there is the highly flammable idea that Islam is somehow under attack. From the Danish cartoons to the recent knighthood given to Salman Rushdie, any excuse will do to ignite Muslims into burning flags and effigies and generally behaving as if the crusades are upon us again when our religion, being the truth and the word of God, cannot be significantly harmed by something as weightless as a cartoon or the fictional world created by a novelist.
Add to the pot the declining standards of living and the declining quality of life of a good proportion of Muslims on the planet and you get a mighty brew of anger and grievance ripe for the terrorists to use to convince impressionable young men to pack explosives and gas canisters into a car and drive it into an airport terminal or park it in front of a nightclub. Or so it certainly seems.
The only common denominator is anger. The only coherent message coming from the terrorists is that they are angry, so angry they want to set the world on fire. After all, let those who live in bliss experience what it is like to live in the burning hell of say Baghdad today. But what exactly does it achieve?
I guess that’s the thing with anger. It may be ignited by a specific event but once it takes, it loses all sense and reason.
I realize also that this analysis is exceedingly simplistic. There are thousands of scholars and experts out there who will delve into the theological raison d’être of Al-Qaeda and the complex historical, economic and political issues and events which have led us to where we are today. But such theories bear little relation to the arguments you hear on the street. Those simplistic extrapolations are the arguments I hear from where I sit, from people who try to justify the actions of the terrorists — and those people exist even among moderate or liberal Muslims like me. There is a thin veil of sympathy, a kind of acceptance that this is a predictable consequence of the state of the world in which we live. And that frightens me far more than the heady rhetoric of OBL and his friends. The attempted attacks in London and Glasgow this week confirm my worst fears. It is too early to tell the exact who and why, but there are certainly a number of worrying factors.
First, there is the fact that the security services had no idea the attacks were about to take place. The intelligence services are faced with a task as vast as looking for a needle in a haystack. Short of taking away all our civil liberties — an erosion of which has already taken place as a direct consequence of the war on terror — and spying on us constantly, there are serious limits to what intelligence can deliver.
Then there is the apparent amateur nature of these latest attacks and the fact that they have switched their modus operandi from suicide attacks to car bombs. I find that quite frightening: In one swoop it dramatically increases the terrorists’ theater of operations. It essentially takes very little in terms of training, organization and resources to make one of these attacks happen. Almost anyone could do it.
There is some solace and reassurance in the fact that the attacks were foiled. It was also a relief not to have Tony Blair as prime minister. The attacks may have been timed to give Gordon Brown a baptism of fire, but Brown and his team have distinguished themselves from their predecessors by not resorting to the dramatic and emotive language favored by Blair et al. Brown chose to be sober and reassuring, he took a firm, measured tone. In his first few days as prime minister he has shown himself to be statesmanlike.
There is also the dogged determination of the British people to continue on as normal. The new prime minister called for the British people to remain united, resolute and strong. He also pledged that they would not allow anyone to undermine the British way of life. And that is the bottom line: The terrorists may succeed in taking lives and destroying buildings and infrastructure, but they cannot succeed in destroying a way of life. And as for us Muslims, maybe we too should take a breath and stop feeling so threatened. Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is: Do we really have so much reason to be angry?
