It is too late to indulge in the luxury of saying that terrorism can be contained through negotiations, human rights and fair trials. The time has come to confront these violent individuals with the sword. It is the only language they understand.
I am not a pessimist, but everything has now become clear; how these individuals move, the tactics they apply and their motives. They have left us with no other choice but to use an iron fist.
Some may still wonder who these people are and what kind of philosophy they follow. Violent movements are not something new to the Muslim world. Their twisted ideology can be traced to early Islamic history. They first claimed their goal was to establish the righteous society, only to resort to violent means to achieve their objective. They advocated the shedding of blood and the killing of fellow human beings under various pretexts.
They criticized what they termed secular laws in Muslim countries and declared infidel the governments that apply them as well as their supporters. With the exception of Saudi Arabia, almost every Muslim country was assaulted.
Then they began criticizing the Kingdom’s government by targeting the laws and regulations organizing people’s daily life; municipalities, traffic and even agriculture, considering these secular laws unacceptable under Islam and called for their abolition.
Ulema moved to counter those ridiculous accusations and sought to convince these errant people that there are worldly affairs that Islam has left to the people to organize. Then they started criticizing the presence of foreign troops in the Kingdom during the Gulf War that followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. That was the pretext they long sought: The presence of non-Muslim forces on the land of Muslims. They vigorously campaigned for the removal of the infidels from Arabia.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) stated that this errant sect would appear in the land of Islam and God would reward those Muslims who confront and kill them.
The fourth righteous Caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib, asked his followers to reason with those who opposed his rule and took up arms, but when they started shedding Muslim blood he confronted them with force. It is now too late to reason with the terrorists. The only way left is to fight them and wipe them from the face of the earth.
It is unfortunate that there are some who seek to find an excuse for these violent individuals by talking about corruption and human rights. They want to tell us that a thief should not be punished by amputation if he stole because he was poor. But even if the righteous society had been established, these killers would still find justification to attack it.
