What the Terrorists Want - @MidEastTruth
 
MidEastTruth Forum Index
  Home | Cartoons | Videos | Presentation | Flyers | Forum | UN vs ISRAEL | Links | Update List  

MidEastTruth Forum Index  

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube/Diller distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. His bi-weekly column appears regularly in newspapers around the globe. His website, DanielPipes.org, is one of the most accessed internet sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Islam.


Help us stay online!
donate

Jump to:  
RSSTwitterFacebookYoutube

Post new topic   Reply to topic    MidEastTruth Forum Index -> Daniel Pipes
Reply to topic View previous topic  •  View next topic Reply to topic 

Posted by Mladen

  
Subscribe to our mailing list
Subscribe to our mailing list

MidEastTruth.com - the first 13 yearsMidEastTruth.com
How it all started

 

What is Palestine? Who are the Palestinians?
What is Palestine?
Who are the Palestinians?


See Also:

 


PostTue Jul 26, 2005 8:34 am     What the Terrorists Want    


Reply with quote

 
What the Terrorists Want

By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
July 26, 2005


What do Islamist terrorists want? The answer should be obvious, but it is not.

A generation ago, terrorists did make their wishes very clear. On hijacking three airliners in September 1970, for example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demanded, with success, the release of Arab terrorists imprisoned in Great Britain, Switzerland, and West Germany. On attacking the B’nai B’rith headquarters and two other Washington, D.C. buildings in 1977, a Hanafi Muslim group demanded the canceling of a feature movie, Mohammad, Messenger of God, $750 (as reimbursement for a fine), the turning over of the five men who had massacred the Hanafi leader’s family, plus the killer of Malcolm X.

Such “non-negotiable demands” lead to wrenching hostage dramas and attendant policy dilemmas. “We will never negotiate with terrorists,” declared the policymakers. “Give them Hawaii but get my husband back,” pleaded the hostages’ wives.

Those days are so remote and their terminology so forgotten that even the American president now speaks of “non-negotiable demands” (in his case, concerning human dignity), forgetting the deadly origins of this phrase.

Instead, most anti-Western terrorist attacks these days are perpetrated without demands being enunciated. Bombs go off, planes get hijacked and crashed into buildings, hotels collapse. The dead are counted. Detectives trace back the perpetrators’ identities. Shadowy websites make post-hoc unauthenticated claims.

But the reasons for the violence go unexplained. Analysts, including myself, are left speculating about motives. These can concern the terrorists’ personal grievances – such as poverty, prejudice, or cultural alienation. Alternately, they can respond to international politics:

* Pulling “a Madrid” and getting governments to pull their troops from Iraq.
* Convincing Americans to leave Saudi Arabia.
* Ending U.S. support for Israel.
* Pressuring New Delhi to cede control of all Kashmir.

Any of these motives could have contributed to the violence; as London’s Daily Telegraph puts it, problems in Iraq and Afghanistan each added “a new pebble to the mountain of grievances that militant fanatics have erected.” Yet none of these issues is decisive to giving up one’s life for the sake of killing others.

In nearly all cases, the jihadi terrorists have a patently self-evident ambition: to establish a world dominated by Muslims, Islam, and the Shari’a (Islamic law). Or, again to cite the Daily Telegraph, their “real project is the extension of the Islamic territory across the globe, and the establishment of a worldwide ‘caliphate’ founded on Shari’a law.”

Terrorists openly declare this goal. The Islamists who assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 decorated their holding cages with banners proclaiming “The caliphate or death.” A biography of Abdullah Azzam, one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of recent times and an influence on Osama bin Laden, declares that his life “revolved around a single goal, namely the establishment of Allah's Rule on earth” and restoring the caliphate.

Bin Laden himself spoke of ensuring that “the pious Caliphate will start from Afghanistan.” His chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also dreamed of re-establishing the caliphate, for then, he wrote, “history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.” Another al-Qaeda leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, publishes a magazine that declares, “Due to the blessings of jihad, America’s countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon,” to be followed by the creation of a caliphate.

Or, as Mohammed Bouyeri wrote in the note he attached to the corpse of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker he had just assassinated, “Islam will be victorious through the blood of martyrs who spread its light in every dark corner of this earth.”

Interestingly, Bouyeri was frustrated by the mistaken motives attributed to him, insisting at his trial: “I did what I did purely out of my beliefs. I want you to know that I acted out of conviction and not that I took his life because he was Dutch or because I was Moroccan and felt insulted.”

Although terrorists state their jihadi motives loudly and clearly, Westerners and Muslims alike too often avert their eyes. Islamic organizations, Canadian author Irshad Manji observes, pretend that “Islam is an innocent bystander in today’s terrorism.”

What the terrorists want is abundantly clear. It requires monumental denial not to acknowledge it, but we Westerners have risen to the challenge.

Comment on this article using the "Post Reply" button


Facebook

 

Back to top  




Dear friends, we need your help!

If you find our work meaningful and useful,
please consider making a small donation
and help us stay online and grow.
Thank you for your support!



Posted by Nice

  
Subscribe to our mailing list
Subscribe to our mailing list

MidEastTruth.com - the first 13 yearsMidEastTruth.com
How it all started

 

What is Palestine? Who are the Palestinians?
What is Palestine?
Who are the Palestinians?


See Also:

 


PostTue Jul 26, 2005 10:35 am        


Reply with quote

 
Terrorists kill for a number of reasons. One is that they like the idea of killing Westerners. Pure and simple. It is a form of political sadism of the extreme. Most suicide bombers actually have very little experience with violence. They have no idea of what a bomb does.

After the Allied armies liberated the death camps in WW II local citizens were brought to the camps and forced to witness the bodies of the Jewish victims. Often they were forced to bury them. Many fainted and threw up. Maybe jihadists in prison in Israel or mullahs who incite others to commit these acts should be forced to come to the scene of a bombing and help pick up human body parts. Maybe the efficient Jewish religious organization which cleans a bomb site so well that little is left of the act is not altogether a good thing. Maybe BBC and Rueter and AP and NY Times correspondents should be rushed to the place and forced to observe the horror before any work is done. Let them see decapitated heads and limbs. Let them see bodies covered in blood - bodies that minutes ago were commuters going to school or work. Then let them write that "militants carried out an attack". Hopefully one of them will have some vestige of humanity that local citizens had in Europe upon seeing the Holocaust up close, and will throw up.


Facebook

 

Back to top  



Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    MidEastTruth Forum Index -> Daniel Pipes All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Page 1 of 1

 



RSSTwitterFacebookYoutube






The MidEastTruth.com Forum | Powered by phpBB