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Sinking further in chaos

Jul 01,2015 - Last updated at Jul 01,2015

How much deeper does humanity have to further sink in chaos and bloody violence before we can say we are now at the very bottom, we cannot sink any further?

Apparently, and while witnessing unimaginable crimes unfolding repeatedly, indiscriminately and so callously, the end seems to be a long way to go.

Some 14 years ago, on September 11, 2001, the whole world was shocked by simultaneous terrorist attacks on American targets in New York and Washington that caused massive destruction and huge loss of innocent civilian life.

The attacks were unanimously condemned and strongly deplored by every country in the world, including known opponents of the US, such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba and others.

Unreservedly, everyone at the time committed to join the war on terror and cold-blooded crimes against orderly life and innocent civilians.

The September 11 attacks were too colossal for any human imagination to comprehend. They were alarming, made us all unsafe, revealed the extent to which human brutality can reach, exposed the lethal aspect of technological progress and reminded us that the advantage of fast and easy travel by air is countered by crippling dangers that could as easily undo the entire benefit.

But we also thought that the vast nature of the crime would prompt us all to dig deeper in search for the hidden causes of such weird behaviour so that on the basis of the outcome, effective safeguards would be put in place to make our world more peaceful and safer.

Unfortunately, the decade-long war on terror that was declared and led by the United States in the aftermath of the heinous September assaults has miserably failed.

Rather than address the root causes, the strategy of this war was based on self-serving assumptions and superficial perceptions.

The idea of identifying the root causes of terror was specifically shunned by concerned world powers, as well as by the UN, which would be prevented from such a venture by the said powers anyway, even if this world organisation were ever to contemplate such a course.

The rising trend of suicide bombers, scores of people prepared to take their own lives before murdering their victims, and not just few brainwashed eccentrics, not desperados, not individuals driven by specific personal grudges, not eccentrics, not adventurers seeking wealth and better fortunes, but often educated people with university degrees, even men with families and decent positions, has not been reason enough to investigate and have its deeper roots exposed.

How could any approach to such an existential threat to our societies, our values and our very daily routines be effectively addressed if not based on a comprehensive diagnosis of every aspect of the criminals’ motives?

Without using that as justification, we need to see what prompts any normal human being to so easily decide to destroy his own life in such a ghastly manner, and to kill scores of other innocent unrelated humans with him.

It is certainly not unawareness of the value of radical diagnosis of the underlying origins of terrorism. It is actually the fear of reaching undesirable conclusions.

Not just experienced analysts, but many political, military and highly respected world figures, including in the US, have also been repeatedly warning that the main source of instability and rising violence, first across the Middle East and now spreading further beyond, is the undue negligence of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Those figures and most people in the region believe that the deeper cause for rejecting any objective diagnosis of the terrorists’ motives was the concern over the possibility of such search leading to the mounting injustice, accumulated over the years, and the impact of the ongoing Zionist aggression and expansion in the heart of the Arab region, taking Palestine as its starting point.

No one was prepared to recognise that the failure of the so-called international community in resolving this historic conflict on the basis of international law, related UN resolutions, justice and fairness has allowed the conflict to engulf most of the wider world and to, particularly and systematically, destroy the relations between the Arab and Muslim world with the Western world.

Neither the US nor many other Western powers that continue to protect Israeli aggression against any possible UN action, as well as remain committed to Israel’s aggressive and unlawful policies despite claiming to support the two-state solution, are prepared to admit their own responsibility, indeed their complicity in allowing Israel’s constant excesses and violations of international law, deteriorate the situation in the region that far, hence the easy way: Deal with the symptoms, ignore the root causes and blame the victims.

It is not possible any more to deny that one major international blunder in the Middle East paved the way for endless complications and elaborate consequences.

Neither in Iraq nor in Syria, let alone Libya, Yemen and others, where individual and despotic dictators ruled the land for years, was the situation normal.

But the American war on Iraq, which was an inexplicable deviation from the war on terror, only made things worse in every possible way.

The worst is the Sunni-Shiite schism that is now threatening religious wars all over the Muslim world. 

Liberated Iraq has been deprived of the stability, security and indeed the better services that existed under the dictatorship.

One state after the other in this region is disintegrating and descending into total chaos. The lethal seeds the war planted in Iraq are now growing all over the area.

However, many Arab and Muslim political and religious leaders take a large share of the blame for allowing the great and the steady decline.

Similarly, the immediate deep involvement and large-scale foreign interventions in Syria, when a peaceful popular uprising started four years ago, messed up the situation to a point where, ironically, anyone would yearn for the four-decade-long Assad family dictatorship.

Does that mean that a man who walks into a Kuwait City mosque packed with worshipers at midday Friday in the holy month of Ramadan, wrapped up with explosives, with the intention of killing himself, wrecking the holy site and murdering many innocent Muslim believers in cold blood is trying to redress injustice in Palestine?

Certainly not, and it would be foolish at this late stage of metamorphosed terror to see any direct link between attacks on tourists in a Tunisian museum or on the shore, on mosques in Kuwait and Iraq, or any other similar horrifying atrocities and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

What I am simply trying to say is that this region has been subjected for decades to too much international and foreign meddling, mainly to protect Israel and to enable it to consolidate its illegal territorial gains not only at the expense of the Palestinians’ rights and destiny, but at the expense of regional stability and peace as well.

Accumulated injustice and frustration in this region has led, over the years, to the prevailing chaos we are witnessing now.

This chaos is the perfect environment for the rise of extremist groups who espouse extremist ideologies and murderous agendas against anything and everybody.

Their heinous crimes and barbaric atrocities are in fact feeding the slanted propaganda that terror and violence are intrinsic features of Islam and Arab culture. They also help distance Israel’s role in precipitating regional instability.

It will take years of intensive damage repair to clear the image of Islam from the indelible smears extremists such as Daesh are attaching to it.

I fully agree that what we are witnessing (the Daesh attacks on non-Muslims and Muslims alike, the taking of women as sex slaves, the illegal looting of private belongings, the destruction of antiquities and monuments, the burning alive of war prisoners and the murdering of hostages) could not be linked to any logic, even absurd.

Not even Al Qaeda’s, which at one point was thought to be the ultimate case of terror and extremism, and which claimed it was fighting to liberate Muslim lands from foreign “infidels”, presenting some baseless and absurd arguments. 

The crimes of the current terrorists seem to essentially be committed for their own sake.

Some analysts link Daesh and the huge supply of manpower it is easily recruiting, even from European countries, to harsh living conditions, poor quality or misguided education, deprivation, exclusion and injustice in some countries in the region, but mainly in Iraq.

Others talk of a grand conspiracy woven in the West to replace the Anglo-French Sykes Picot lines drawn secretly during World War I with new ones dividing the region into much smaller entities along ethnic and sectarian lines to accentuate Israel’s distinguished prominence as the only stable, democratic, civilised and progressive state in a perpetually troubled region.

Unfolding events attest to such a gruesome reality, although one should not succumb to such conspiracy theories. 

Still, Israel must be delighted to see the Arab world so divided and politically paralysed. 

Did we think to revise our tactics in confronting terror?

Let us hope the alarm of the wave of horrifying attacks last week in Kuwait, Tunisia and France is loud enough to do that.

Regardless of what the root causes are, the responsibility to face the lethal challenge should be unanimous and global.

 

We are all responsible. We are all targeted. In this region, as well as in the rest of the world, we share the blame for allowing the situation to reach this far. A global strategy against terrorism is urgently required.

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