terrorist

Thank you for your question.

In order to make a balanced evaluation of issues in international relations as well as in inter-cultural communication, one has to bring a frame of mind capable of understanding and accommodating differences. Prejudices die hard, and world media are bent on feeding them, no matter the terrible cost the world is made to pay.

Your question is about what causes some Muslims to act violently. I hope you will agree that some non-Muslims also act violently. Ours is a world where all sections of people — no matter they are Muslims, Christians, Jews or Hindus — have a tendency to resort to violence when there is enough provocation. But at present, there is a general perception particularly in the West that Muslims are more prone to this weakness than others, especially since September 11, 2001. But violence was not born on 9/11.

Violence has always been present in the human psyche since time immemorial. The two world wars that killed millions of humans had little to do with Islam or Muslims. Even today, the most horrible weapons of global destruction are made, put on sale, and tested on defenseless masses by the "civilized nations" of the world. And when we think of the reasons why some Muslims act violently, we cannot ignore the wars of invasion and occupation waged by the big powers.

Let's consider two Muslim countries where Muslims "act violently": Iraq and Afghanistan. It is claimed that the US invaded Afghanistan because they wanted to destroy the terrorists behind 9/11. But we know that none of the "19 hijackers" came from Afghanistan. And yet the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has continued for the last nine years.

It is now commonplace that the reasons given by the US government for invading and occupying Iraq were baseless: Iraq had no Al-Qaeda link, and it had no weapons of mass destruction. The UN weapons inspectors had certified this repeatedly, but the Bush administration wouldn't pause to listen to them. They sent their terrible war planes to pound the cities and villages of Iraq; and the mindless destruction continued day after day, night after night for about seven years from 2003 to 2010. The occupation of Iraq continues to this day.

The people of Afghanistan and Iraq confront the machine-gun-toting troops of the occupying powers of the West almost on a daily basis; and if they yearn for freedom from the occupiers, and resort to what they consider the most effective means, namely insurgency, are we justified in placing the blame for their violence squarely on their shoulders alone?

Consider the Palestinian question, which is central to the Middle Eastern quandary. Palestinians are both Christians and Muslims who had been living in Palestine for several centuries; and they are the descendents of the Patriarch Abraham through his sons Ishmael and Isaac. There were Jewish people too — who are also called Old Yishuv by the Israelis — among them.

But soon after the Zionist movement began in Europe as a result of the terrible ghettoization and persecution the Jews of Europe had been subjected to, a good number of the European Jews immigrated to Palestine, claiming the land exclusively for themselves.

And this movement was supported by the same countries that persecuted the Jews of Europe and sent them even to the gas chambers. But it is with their help and support that the extremist Jewish organizations drove out most of the original Arab inhabitants of Palestine from their homeland.

As a consequence of the fighting in Palestine between 1947 and 1949, over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs (Christians as well as Muslims) became refugees. More than 75 percent of the refugees left due to Zionist or Israeli military actions and psychological campaigns aimed at frightening Arabs into leaving, besides direct expulsions. The best-known instance of mass expulsion is that of the 50,000 Arabs of the towns of Lydda and Ramle. The most infamous atrocity occurred at Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem, where Menachem Begin's "Irgun" gang killed over 400 unarmed Arabs in cold blood. (El-Khatib, 113)

In 1948, with the recognition of the UN, the Jewish state of Israel was instituted in the same land from where most of the Palestinians were expelled. Butafter all this, about a million Palestinians are citizens of Israel today, living inside the country's 1949 armistice borders. The largest Palestinian diaspora community, approximately 1.3 million, is in Jordan. Many of them still live in the refugee camps that were established in 1949, although others live in cities and towns. Lebanon and Syria also have large Palestinian populations, living in refugee camps. (Peteet)

The Palestinians in Israel are second-class citizens, since Israel defines itself as the state of the Jewish people, and Palestinians are Muslims and Christians. All of Israel's governments have discriminated against the Arab population by allocating far fewer resources for education, health care, public works, municipal government, and economic development to the Arab sector. (Cattan, 241-255)

In the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government inflicts collective punishment on the Palestinians, such as curfews, house demolitions, and closure of roads, schools and community institutions. Since 1967, over 300,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned without trial, and over half a million have been tried in the Israeli military court system.

In short, what we see in Palestine is the systematic occupation of more and more Arab land by Israel. It has been made easy for Israel to do this by the United States.The Israelis, aided, armed, and bankrolled by the US and other powerful countries of the West, goes on inflicting indescribable pain and suffering on the Palestinians. And the latest in a series of assaults on them was the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Today the Gazans are being subjected to a slow genocide by denying them food, shelter, medicine, and even water.

The promise made by the world bodies to Palestinians that they would be given a part of their native land as their own free country remains to this day an empty promise. And Israeli forces continue to ravage what remains of Palestinian homes, farms, schools, and hospitals. In this dire situation, any uprising from the Palestinian side is described by world media as "terrorism" and "extremism". And we hear almost nothing by way of condemnation, or even criticism, of the terrible war crimes committed by the Israeli forces on a defenseless people.

The foregoing I suppose, gives you some idea as to why some Muslims at the end of their tether are driven to act violently, even by imperiling whatever help and support they are getting from outside.

I hope this answers your question. Please keep in touch.

Salam.

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