'Blood of Terror' by Li Li Tan (2005)
Robert Kennedy said after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968: "It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it is not the end of disorder."
Terrorism did not end
with an attack in the village of Bosso situated in the Republic of Niger. It
did not end with the bombings in Sinai or Beirut, and it will not end with the
carnage inflicted in Paris.
The terrorist has
objectives ranging from the psychological to the political. And whether you consider
them 'terrorists' or 'freedom fighters', their
trade is death: death to the innocents. To ruminate about how humanity can for
want of a better phrase 'sink so low' is to embark on an exercise in utter
futility.
Granted, each
historical and geographical setting provides an array of rationales for the
nurturing of the terror merchant, but there is something to the argument
proffered by the historian Niall Ferguson that "terrorism is the original
sin of the Middle East".
The tragedy in Paris is
not the first, and presumably, will not be the last time that the fight is
brought to Europe because of the involvement of European powers in that part of
the world.
A bomb planted in the
heart of Whitehall in April of 1947 by the Stern Gang narrowly failed to
explode and would have caused a level of carnage to rival that which occurred
when the Irgun murdered just under a hundred people in the King David Hotel
attack in Jerusalem the previous year. That outrage along with other
'successful' bombings and assassinations aimed at the British-ruled UN Mandate
of Palestine sapped the will of Britain.
When the United States
of America aided by its NATO allies illegally invades Iraq, then utilises the
'Salvador Option' to enable Shia militants to murder Sunni insurgents, then
bombs Libya to smithereens and into lawlessness, then oversees the arming of
Sunni extremist militias to overthrow the government of Syria - all at a
tremendous cost to innocent human life running into the hundreds of thousands if
not into the millions – it would be naive to assume that there will not be
painful and tragic consequences for innocents to bear.
Today, a Muslim Jihadi
whether born and bred in England or Tunisia feels that the land of Syria
belongs to him by the will of Allah as much as the Zionist believes that
Palestine was bequeathed to him by the God of Israel.
And the means by which each
set out to achieve their ends are not constricted by conventional morality.
For Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the deceased leader of the Mujahideen Shura Council, the umbrella
organisation which preceded its successor organisation, the Islamic State in
Iraq, the concept of ‘Offensive Jihad’ entailed “going after the apostate
unbelievers by attacking (them) in their home territory, in order to make God’s
word most high and until there is no persecution.”
Six decades earlier,
the Stern Gang, which was committed to taking over Eretz Yisrael by armed force proclaimed the following in an article
titled “Terror” in the underground newspaper He Khazit
We are
very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have
before us the command of the Torah whose morality surpasses that of any other
body of laws in the world: “Ye shall blot them out to the last man.” But first
and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being
conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play:
speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched
brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier. We are
particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral
perversion is admitted by all.
To Robert Kennedy's
words, the following may be soberly added:
"There is no end
to fanaticism. There is no end to terror."
(c)
Adeyinka Makinde (2015)
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in England.
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