إجازة الأستاذ أحمد لبن مدير المنتدى بقراءة الإمام عاصم الكوفي

موضوع: Combating Terrorism الثلاثاء 19 ديسمبر 2017, 7:45 pm

Combating Terrorism
By: Dr. Ali S. Awadh Asseri
(Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon)
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TERRORISM IN THE NAME OF RELIGION
     Never before had religion become the principal source of terrorism at the global scale as it has since the beginning of the 1990s. The 11 September terrorist attacks against the United States allegedly carried out by those who deviated from the path of Islam and joined the al-Qaeda terror network under the misguided leadership of Osama bin Laden thus far represent the optimal stage of trans-national terrorism.

     These and a number of other successive attacks against Muslim and Western targets claimed by al-Qaeda and other deviant religious outfits reflect the likely enormity of this form ot terrorism in the twenty-first century.

     Given the severity and volume of attacks carried out around the world by the deviant admirers or followers of Laden, the Western world seems to be preoccupied with Muslim fundamentalists or Islamic groups. We should not forget, however, that adherents of other religious traditions have been responsible for a significant number of terrorist attacks in recent years. In Israel, for instance, followers of the late Rabbi Meier Kahane were responsible for the execution of terrorist attacks or acts of ‘vigilante justice’ against Palestinians on the West Bank.

These include the 1994 gun attack by Baruch Goldstein, a member of the right-wing Jewish group Kach, at the Al-Khalil Mosque in Hebron that killed thirty Muslim worshippers and injured dozens more. Extremists belonging to religion outside of the Abrahamic faiths have also practiced religious terrorism. In retaliation for what was perceived as desecration of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikhs resorted to assassinating the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that led to a wave of violence claiming more than 35,000 lives.
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http://www.islamunveiled.org/node/22229

Combating Terrorism
By: Dr. Ali S. Awadh Asseri
(Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon)
==========================
     The involvement of non-state groups in terrorism that emerged in the wake of the Second World War is an open reality. The immediate focus of such activity shifted from Europe to that of the continent’s various colonies. Spread across the Middle East, Asia and Africa, nascent nationalist movements resisted European attempts to resume colonial business after the defeat of the Axis powers. What triggered these indigenous movements was the recent quashing of the myth of European invincibility.

Quite often, these nationalist and anti-colonial groups conducted guerrilla warfare that differed from terrorism as it tended towards larges bodies of ‘irregulars’ operating along more military lines than their terrorist counterparts. They also did so in the open from a defined geographical area over which they held sway.

Such was the case in China and Indochina where such forces conducted insurgencies against the Kuomintanq regime and the French colonial government respectively. Such campaigns were also fought in the rural and the urban areas by terrorist or guerrilla groups as against the French in Algeria.[1]

     More such struggles were launched against the occupiers as in Kenya, Malaysia, Cyprus and Palestine that, by some critics, are construed as ‘terrorist’. These groups quickly learned to exploit the burgeoning globalization of the world’s media.

As Hoffman puts it, “They were the first to recognize the publicity value inherent in terrorism and to choreograph their violence for an audience far beyond the immediate geographical locations of their respective struggles.’[2] In the 1960s and 1970s, the number of these groups that may be described as ‘terrorist’ swelled to include not only nationalists, but those motivated by ethnic and ideological considerations. The former included groups such as the Basque ETA and the Provisional Irish Liberation Army while the latter comprised organizations such as the Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades.[3]

     Following the Second World War, Latin America saw the emergence of a number of guerrilla organizations, from the Shining Path in Peru to FARC in Colombia, who were driven by communist-socialist revolutionary causes and, as part of their guerrilla campaign, committed acts of terrorism. The successful communist revolution in Cuba had encouraged revolutionary guerrilla campaigns across the region.

However, with the death of the charismatic guerrilla leader Che Guevara in 1967, the revolutionary guerrilla campaign in Latin America died down in the 1970s. During the 1980s, revolutionary and ethno-nationalist motives of non-state terrorism gave way to terrorism in the name of religion.

The 1979 Iranian revolution, the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and the fall of the Soviet communist ideology are usually mentioned as the main reasons why religious terrorism came to dominate the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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[1] Weinberg, op. cit., pp. 29-30.
[2] Ibid., p. 65.
[3] Ibid., pp. 34-35

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إجازة الأستاذ أحمد لبن مدير المنتدى بقراءة الإمام عاصم الكوفي

Combating Terrorism