<<The Taliban's ambassador said that wanted Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden was under the Taliban's control...>>
lol! couldn't be more misleading...it's the other way around! the Taliban are under Osama's control!
here's an interesting view from the Arab world, specifically it is a lecture by Iqubal Ahmad, that was held in 1998, well before the recent tragic events:
Terrorism: Theirs and Ours
By Eqbal Ahmad
(A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12,
1998)
Eqbal Ahmad , Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Middle
Eastern Studies at Hampshire
College in Amherst, Massachusetts, also served as a managing editor of
the quarterly Race and Class. A
prolific writer, his articles and essays have been published in The
Nation, Dawn (Pakistan), among
several other journals throughout the world. He died in 1999.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was
described a "terrorist." Then new
things happened. By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain
liberal sympathy with the Jewish
people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists
of Palestine, who were Zionists,
suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as "freedom fighters." At
least two Israeli Prime
Ministers, including Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the
books and posters with their
pictures, saying "Terrorists, Reward This Much." The highest reward I
have noted so far was 100,000
British pounds on the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist. Then from
1969 to 1990 the PLO, the
Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the
terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat
has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism,
William Safire of the New
York Times, as the "Chief of Terrorism."
That was Yasir Arafat. Now, on September 29, 1998, I was rather amused
to notice a picture of
Yasir Arafat to the right of President Bill Clinton. To his left is
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. Clinton is looking towards Arafat and Arafat is looking
literally like a meek mouse. Just a
few years earlier he used to appear with this very menacing look around
him, with a gun appearing
menacing from his belt. You remember those pictures, and you remember
the next one.
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. These
bearded men I was writing
about in those days in The New Yorker, actually did. They were very
ferocious-looking bearded men
with turbans looking like they came from another century. President
Reagan received them in the White
House. After receiving them he spoke to the press. He pointed towards
them, I'm sure some of you will
recall that moment, and said, "These are the moral equivalent of
America's founding fathers". These
were the Afghan Mujahiddin. They were at the time, guns in hand,
battling the Evil Empire. They were
the moral equivalent of our founding fathers! In August 1998, another
American President ordered
missile strikes from the American navy based in the Indian Ocean to kill
Osama Bin Laden and his men
in the camps in Afghanistan. I do not wish to embarrass you with the
reminder that Mr. Bin Laden,
whom fifteen American missiles were fired to hit in Afghanistan, was
only a few years ago the!
moral equivalent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson! He got
angry over the fact that he has
been demoted from "Moral Equivalent" of your "Founding Fathers". So he
is taking out his anger in
different ways. I'll come back to that subject more seriously in a
moment. You see, why I have recalled
all these stories is to point out to you that the matter of terrorism is
rather complicated.
Terrorists change. The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and
the hero of yesterday becomes
the terrorist of today. This is a serious matter of the constantly
changing world of images in which we
have to keep our heads straight to know what is terrorism and what is
not. But more importantly to
know what causes it, and how to stop it. The next point about our
terrorism is that posture of
inconsistency necessarily evades definition. If you are not going to be
consistent, you're not going to
define. I have examined at least twenty official documents on terrorism.
Not one defines the word. All
of them explain it, express it emotively, polemically, to arouse our
emotions rather than exercise our
intelligence. I give you only one example, which is representative.
October 25, 1984. George Shultz,
then Secretary of State of the U.S., is speaking at the New York Park
Avenue Synagogue. It's a long
speech on terrorism. In the State Department Bulletin of seven
single-spaced pag!
es, there is not a single definition of terrorism.
What we get is the following: Definition number one: "Terrorism is a
modern barbarism that we call
terrorism." Definition number two is even more brilliant: "Terrorism is
a form of political violence."
Aren't you surprised? It is a form of political violence, says George
Shultz, Secretary of State of the
U.S. Number three: "Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization."
Number four: "Terrorism is a
menace to Western moral values." Did you notice, does it tell you
anything other than arouse your
emotions? This is typical. They don't define terrorism because
definitions involve a commitment to
analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of consistency.
That's the second characteristic
of the official literature on terrorism.
The third characteristic is that the absence of definition does not
prevent officials from being globalistic.
We may not define terrorism, but it is a menace to the moral values of
Western civilization. It is a
menace also to mankind. It's a menace to good order. Therefore, you must
stamp it out worldwide. Our
reach has to be global. You need a global reach to kill it.
Anti-terrorist policies therefore have to be
global. Same speech of George Shultz: "There is no question about our
ability to use force where and
when it is needed to counter terrorism." There is no geographical limit.
On a single day the missiles hit
Afghanistan and Sudan. Those two countries are 2,300 miles apart, and
they were hit by missiles
belonging to a country roughly 8,000 miles away. Reach is global.
A fourth characteristic: claims of power are not only globalist they are
also omniscient. We know where
they are; therefore we know where to hit. We have the means to know. We
have the instruments of
knowledge. We are omniscient. Shultz: "We know the difference between
terrorists and freedom
fighters, and as we look around, we have no trouble telling one from the
other."!!!!!! Only Osama Bin
Laden doesn't know that he was an ally one day and an enemy another.
That's very confusing for
Osama Bin Laden. I'll come back to his story towards the end. It's a
real story.
Five. The official approach eschews causation. You don't look at causes
of anybody becoming terrorist.
Cause? What cause? They ask us to be looking, to be sympathetic to these
people. Another example.
The New York Times December 18, 1985, reported that the foreign minister
of Yugoslavia, you
remember the days when there was a Yugoslavia, requested the Secretary
of State of the U.S. to
consider the causes of Palestinian terrorism. The Secretary of State,
George Shultz, and I am quoting
from the New York Times, "went a bit red in the face. He pounded the
table and told the visiting
foreign minister, there is no connection with any cause. Period." Why
look for causes?
Number six. The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is
selective. We are to feel the
terror of those groups, which are officially disapproved. We are to
applaud the terror of those groups of
whom officials do approve. Hence, President Reagan, "I am a contra." He
actually said that. We know
the contras of Nicaragua were anything, by any definition, but
terrorists. The media, to move away
from the officials, heed the dominant view of terrorism. The dominant
approach also excludes from
consideration, more importantly to me, the terror of friendly
governments. To that question I will return
because it excused among others the terror of Pinochet (who killed one
of my closest friends) and
Orlando Letelier; and it excused the terror of Zia-ul-Haq, who killed
many of my friends in Pakistan. All
I want to tell you is that according to my ignorant calculations, the
ratio of people killed by the state
terror of Zia-ul-Haq, Pinochet, Argentinian, Brazilian, Indonesian
type!, versus the killing of the PLO and other terrorist types is
literally, conservatively, one to one hundred thousand. That's the
ratio. History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power
and not to weakness. Therefore, visibility has been accorded
historically to dominant groups. In our time, the time that began with
this day, Columbus Day. The time that begins with Columbus Day is a time
of extraordinary unrecorded holocausts. Great civilizations have been
wiped out. The Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs, the American Indians, the
Canadian Indians were all wiped out. Their voices have not been heard,
even to this day fully. Now they are beginning to be heard, but not
fully. They are heard, yes, but only when the dominant power suffers,
only when resistance has a semblance of costing, of exacting a price.
When a Custer is killed or when a Gordon is besieged. That's when you
know that they were Indians fighting, Arabs fighting and dying. My last
point of this section: U.S. policy in the Cold War period has sponsored
terrorist regimes one after another. Somoza, Batista, all kinds of
tyrants have been America's friends. You know that. There was a reason
for that. I or you are not guilty. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan,
mujahiddin. El Salvador, etc.
Now the second side. You've suffered enough. So suffer more. There ain't
much good on the other side
either. You shouldn't imagine that I have come to praise the other side.
But keep the balance in mind.
Keep the imbalance in mind and first ask ourselves, What is terrorism?
Our first job should be to define
the damn thing, name it, give it a description of some kind, other than
"moral equivalent of founding
fathers" or "a moral outrage to Western civilization". I will stay with
you with Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary: "Terror is an intense, overpowering fear." He uses
terrorizing, terrorism, "the use of
terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government." This simple
definition has one great virtue,
that of fairness. It's fair. It focuses on the use of coercive violence,
violence that is used illegally,
extra-constitutionally, to coerce. And this definition is correct
because it treats terror for what it is,
whether the government or private people commit it. Have you noticed
something? Motivation is left out of it. We're not talking about whether
the cause is just or unjust. We're talking about consensus, consent,
absence of consent, legality, absence of legality, constitutionality,
absence of constitutionality. Why do we keep motives out? Because
motives differ. Motives differ and make no difference. I have identified
in my
work five types of terrorism. First, state terrorism.
Second, religious terrorism ; terrorism inspired by religion, Catholics
killing Protestants, Sunnis killing
Shiites, Shiites killing Sunnis, God, religion, sacred terror, you can
call it if you wish. State, church.
Crime. Mafia. All kinds of crimes commit terror. There is pathology.
You're pathological. You're sick.
You want the attention of the whole world. You've got to kill a
president. You will. You terrorize. You
hold up a bus. Fifth, there is political terror of the private group; be
they Indian, Vietnamese, Algerian,
Palestinian, Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigade. Political terror of the
private group. Oppositional terror.
Keep these five in mind. Keep in mind one more thing. Sometimes these
five can converge on each
other. You start with protest terror. You go crazy. You become
pathological. You continue. They
converge. State terror can take the form of private terror. For example,
we're all familiar with the death
squads in Latin America or in Pakistan. Government has employed private
people to kill its opponents. It's not quite official. It's privatized.
Convergence. Or the political terrorist who goes crazy and becomes
pathological. Or the criminal who joins politics. In Afghanistan, in
Central America, the CIA employed
in its covert operations drug pushers. Drugs and guns often go together.
Smuggling of all things often go
together. Of the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the
least important in terms of cost to
human lives and human property [Political Terror of those who want to be
heard]. The highest cost is
state terror. The second highest cost is religious terror, although in
the twentieth century religious terror has, relatively speaking,
declined. If you are looking historically, massive costs. The next
highest cost is
crime. Next highest, pathology. A Rand Corporation study by Brian
Jenkins, for a ten-year period up to
1988, showed 50% of terror was committed without any political cause at
all. No politics. Simply crime
and pathology. So the focus is on only one, the political terrorist, the
PLO, the Bin Laden, whoever you
want to take. Why do they do it? What makes the terrorist tick? I would
like to knock them out quickly
to you.
First, the need to be heard. Imagine, we are dealing with a minority
group, the political, private terrorist.
First, the need to be heard. Normally, and there are exceptions, there
is an effort to be heard, to get
your grievances heard by people. They're not hearing it. A minority
acts. The majority applauds. The
Palestinians, for example, the super terrorists of our time, were
dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to
1968 they went to every court in the world. They knocked at every door
in the world. They were told
that they became dispossessed because some radio told them to go away-
an Arab radio, which was a lie.
Nobody was listening to the truth. Finally, they invented a new form of
terror, literally their invention:
the airplane hijacking. Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled the world up
by its ears. They dragged us
out and said, Listen, Listen. We listened. We still haven't done them
justice, but at least we all know.
Even the Israelis acknowledge. Remember Golda Meir, Prime Minister of
Israel, saying in 1970, "There are no Palestinians." They do not exist.
They damn well exist now. We are cheating them at Oslo. At least
there are some people to cheat now. We can't just push them out. The
need to be heard is essential.
One motivation there. Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to
strike out. You are angry. You
are feeling helpless. You want retribution. You want to wreak
retributive justice. The experience of violence by a stronger party has
historically turned victims into terrorists. Battered children are known
to become abusive parents and violent adults. You know that. That's what
happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back.
State terror very often breeds collective terror. Do you recall the fact
that the Jews were never terrorists? By and large Jews were not known to
commit terror except during and after the Holocaust. Most studies show
that the majority of members of the worst terrorist groups in Israel or
in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs, were people who were
immigrants from the most anti-Semitic countries of Eastern Europe and
Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the lestinians from
the refugee camps are battered people. They become very violent. The
ghettos are violent internally. They become violent externally when
there is a clear, identifiable external target, an enemy where you can
say, "Yes, this one did it to me". Then they can strike back. Example is
a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized Beirut
hijacking of the TWA plane. After that hijacking, there were hijacking
attempts at nine different American airports. Pathological groups or
individuals modeling on the others. Even more serious are examples set
by governments. When governments engage in terror, they set very large
examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they engage in other
sets of examples. Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim
terrorism. Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror.
Those of you who are familiar with revolutionary theory know the
debates, the disputes, the quarrels,
the fights within revolutionary groups of Europe, the fight between
anarchist's and Marxists, for example. But the Marxists have always
argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be
sociologically and psychologically selective. Don't hijack a plane.
Don't hold hostages. Don't kill children, for God's sake. Have you
recalled also that the great revolutions, the Chinese, the Vietnamese,
the Algerian, the Cuban, never engaged in hijacking type of terrorism?
They did engage in terrorism, but it was highly selective, highly
sociological, still deplorable, but there was an organized, highly
limited, selective character to it.
So absence of revolutionary ideology that begins more or less in the
post-World War II period has been
central to this phenomenon. My final question is – These
conditions have existed for a long time.
But why then this flurry of private political terrorism? Why now so much
of it and so visible? The
answer is modern technology. You have a cause. You can communicate it
through radio and television.
They will all come swarming if you have taken an aircraft and are
holding 150 Americans hostage. They
will all hear your cause. You have a modern weapon through which you can
shoot a mile away. They
can't reach you. And you have the modern means of communicating. When
you put together the cause,
the instrument of coercion and the instrument of communication,
politics is made. A new kind of
politics becomes possible. To this challenge rulers from one country
after another have been responding with traditional methods.
The traditional method of shooting it out, whether it's missiles or some
other means. The Israelis are
very proud of it. The Americans are very proud of it. The French became
very proud of it. Now the
Pakistanis are very proud of it. The Pakistanis say, "Our commandos are
the best." Frankly, it won't
work. A central problem of our time are the political minds, rooted in
the past, and modern times,
producing new realities.
Therefore in conclusion, what is my recommendation to America? Quickly.
First, avoid extremes of
double standards. If you're going to practice double standards, you will
be paid with double standards.
Don't use it. Don't condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan
terror, El Salvadoran terror, on
the one hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or Palestinian
terror. It doesn't work. Try to be even-handed. A superpower cannot
promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage
terrorism in another place. It won't work in this shrunken world. Do not
condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them.
Fight them. Punish them. Please eschew, avoid covert operations and
low-intensity warfare. These are
breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and drugs are bred there.
The structure of covert
operations, I've made a film about it, which has been very popular in
Europe, called Dealing with the
Demon. I have shown that wherever covert operations have been, there has
been the central drug
problem. That has been also the center of the drug trade. Because the
structure of covert operations,
Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Central America, is very hospitable to
drug trade. Avoid it. Give it up.
It doesn't help. Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes. Try
to look at causes and solve problems. Do not centrate on military
solutions. Do not seek military solutions.
Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy
works. Take the example of the last
attack on Bin Laden. You don't know what you're attacking. They say they
know, but they don't know.
They were trying to kill Qadaffi. They killed his four-year-old
daughter. The poor baby hadn't done
anything. Qadaffi is still alive. They tried to kill Saddam Hussein.
They killed Laila Bin Attar, a
prominent artist, an innocent woman. They tried to kill Bin Laden and
his men. Not one but twenty-five
other people died. They tried to destroy a chemical factory in Sudan.
Now they are admitting that they
destroyed an innocent factory, one-half of the production of medicine in
Sudan has been destroyed, not
a chemical factory. You don't know. You think you know. Four of your
missiles fell in Pakistan. One was slightly damaged. Two were totally
damaged. One was totally intact. For ten years the American government
has kept an embargo on Pakistan because Pakistan is trying, stupidly, to
build nuclear weapons and missiles. So we have a technology embargo on
my country. One of the missiles was intact. What do you think a
Pakistani official told the Washington Post? He said it was a gift from
Allah. We wanted U.S. technology. Now we have got the technology, and
our scientists are examining this missile very carefully. It fell into
the wrong hands. So don't do that. Look for political solutions. Do not
look for military solutions. They cause more problems than they solve.
Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international law.
There was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn't they go to it first to
get their warrant against Bin Laden, if they have some evidence? Get a
warrant, then go after him.
Internationally. Enforce the U.N. Enforce the International Court of
Justice, this unilateralism makes us
look very stupid and them relatively smaller. Q&A. The question here is
that I mentioned that I would
go somewhat into the story of Bin Laden, the Saudi in Afghanistan and
didn't do so, could I go into some
detail? The point about Bin Laden would be roughly the same as the point
between Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was accused and convicted of
encouraging the blowing up of the World Trade Center in New York City.
The New Yorker did a long story on him. It's the same as that of Aimal
Kansi, the
Pakistani Baluch who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA agents.
Let me see if I can be very
short on this. Jihad, which has been translated a thousand times as
"holy war," is not quite just that.
Jihad is an Arabic word that means, "to struggle." It could be struggle
by violence or struggle by
non-violent means. There are two forms, the small jihad and the big
jihad. The small jihad involves
violence. The big jihad involves the struggles with self. Those are the
concepts. The reason I mention it
is that in Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon
had disappeared in the last four hundred years, for all practical
purposes. It was revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When
the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the military
dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity
and launched a jihad there against godless communism. The U.S. saw a
God-sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what Reagan
called the Evil Empire. Money started pouring in. CIA agents starting
going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the great
jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was not only an
Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not only a Saudi. He was also a
multimillionaire, willing to put his own money into the matter. Bin
Laden went around recruiting people for the jihad against communism. I
first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official
of whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I was talking
to him and said, "Who are the Arabs here who would be very interesting?"
By here I meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan He said, "You must meet
Osama." I went to see Osama.
There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria, from Sudan, from
Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul
Rahman. This fellow was an ally. He remained an ally. He turns at a
particular moment. In 1990 the
U.S. goes into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the holy place
of Muslims, Mecca and Medina. There had never been foreign troops there.
In 1990, during the Gulf War, they went in, in the name of helping Saudi
Arabia defeat Saddam Hussein. Osama Bin Laden remained quiet. Saddam was
defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land of the kaba (the
sacred site of Islam in Mecca), foreign troops. He wrote letter after
letter saying, Why are you here? Get out! You came to help but you have
stayed on. Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His
mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier
mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan. See what I was
saying earlier about covert operations? A second point to be made about
him is these are tribal people, people who are really tribal. Being a
millionaire doesn't matter. Their code of ethics is tribal. The tribal
code of ethics consists of two words: loyalty and revenge. You are my
friend. You keep your word. I am loyal to you. You break your word, I go
on my path of revenge. For him, America has broken its word. The loyal
friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood loyalty has
betrayed you. They're going to go for you. They're going to do a lot
more. These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to
roost. This is why I said to stop covert operations. There is a price
attached to those that the American people cannot calculate and
Kissinger type of people do not know, don't have the history to know. |
