Quotes about Terrorism

It may seem hard to extend our gratefulness and appreciation to the time in which we live and the challenges it presents-to financial crisis, global climate change, terrorism, wars, energy depletion, and any other disasters looming on the horizon.  It would be much easier to appreciate an era of good feeling, peace and calm stability!  But difficult times are also times of growth, of new insights and opportunities, of creativity, and of emergence.

The hijacking of an American jet in Athens looms larger in our concern than the parent who kills a child, even though the one happens rarely, and the other happens daily.

Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.

There will be no Homeland Security until we realize that the entire planet is our homeland. Every sentient being in the world must feel secure.

Chapter 5

Jihad and Terrorism

Every Muslim must do jihad (struggle).  Must do.  In the literal meaning of the word, they strive in the path of God by observing the five essentials of Islam and trying to be good human beings.

            The Prophet Muhammed, upon returning from one war, said, “We have come from the smaller jihad to the greater jihad.”  Asked what he meant, he replied, “the jihad against oneself.”

            The word jihad strikes fear in the West, where it is understood soley in terms of war, but it is a more benign word for most Muslims.  To them, the first jihad is the struggle against the ego. Then there’s the jihad against the devil.  There’s also the jihad of the tongue to spread the word of Islam.  There’s the jihad of charity.  There’s the jihad of the pen to spread knowledge.  These are all individual jihads.

            Muslims are also sometimes urged to undertake similarly peaceful but collective jihads for the most mundane matters, such as the jihad for cleanliness, once declared by the Egyptian government; the jihad for literacy, initiated by the Tunisian government; the jihad against corruption in government, periodically proclaimed in Pakistan with little or no success; the jihad for water conservation, and so on.

            “Nowadays, jihad is often used without any religious connotation, more or less equivalent to the English word, crusade – ‘a crusade against drugs,’” writes Rudolph Peters, professor at the University of Amsterdam.  “If used in the religious context, the adjective ‘Islamic’ or ‘holy’ is added to the jihad.”

            But in the West where jihad is a highly charged term, especially since 9/11, we have two parallel discourses.  Those looking to discredit Islam insist that it is an inherently violent religion.  “Look, it says right here in the Qur’an,” they say.  Osama bin Laden and other terrorists quote these same Qur’anic passages to justify terrorism.  But most Muslims and many non-Muslims say Islam is a religion of peace, and they resent that both Islamophobes and militant Muslims are twisting it’s meaning to suit their disparate agendas.

            Falling somewhere in the middle is the Western media narrative on holy war.  The American media, in particular, have played hot and cold on the issue.  They were highly critical when Iranians rallied under the Islamic banner for the 1979 revolution that toppled the pro-American dictator, the Shah.  But during the US-backed 1980-89 holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the media glorified the 35,000 Mujahideen (those waging jihad) who had been recruited from forty-three Muslim countries and paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency, and whom President Ronald Reagan called the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers.  Dan Rather, CBS-TV news anchor, proudly posed on the Afghan frontier wearing the local costume of long shirt and pantaloons, as if he had joined the jihad himself.

            The media adopted a more neutral tone during Saddam Hussein’s 1980-88 war on Iran, which he called a jihad and which the United States supported.  The media became hostile when Israel and America were targeted – by the Hezbollah during the 1982-2000 Israeli occupation of Lebanon, by some Palestinians during the second intifadah, by Al Qaeda on 9/11 and by various groups since in occupied Iraq and elsewhere.

            Holy war is good when it suits the West but evil when it doesn’t.

[Paul Berman from a book on totalitarianism...]

What have we needed for these terrorists to prosper?  We have needed immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world.  We have needed an almost willful lack of curiosity about those failures by people in other parts of the world – the lack of curiosity that allowed us to suppose that totalitarianism had been defeated, even as totalitarianism was reaching a new zenith.  We have needed handsome doses of wishful thinking – the kind of simpleminded faith in a rational world that, in its inability to comprehend reality, sparked the totalitarian movements in the first place.... We have needed a provincial ignorance about intellectual currents in other parts of the world.  We have needed foolish resentments in Europe, and a foolish arrogance in America.  We have needed so many things!  But there has been no lack – every needed thing has been here in abundance.

Because they are believed to be nothing less than verbatim translations of God’s utterances, texts like the Koran and the Bible must be appreciated, and criticized, for any possible interpretations to which they are susceptible – and to which they will be subjected, with varying emphases and elisions, throughout the religious world.  The problem is not that some Muslims neglect to notice the few references to nonaggression that can be found in the Koran, and that this leads them to do terrible things to innocent unbelievers; the problem is that most Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God.  The corrective worldview of Osama bin Laden is not to point out the single line in the Koran that condemns suicide, because the ambiguous statement is set in a thicket of other passages that can be read only as direct summons to war against the “friends of Satan.”  The appropriate response to the bin Ladens of the world is to correct everyone’s reading of these texts by making the same evidentiary demands in religious matters that we make in all others.  If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon – because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.

We will never end terrorism by terrorizing others. Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

Whatever is fine and permanent in human achievement has been realised through individuals courageously facing the circumstances of their being; and a society is civilised to the extent to which it makes this possible.  Terrorism, which aims at putting out thespiritual light, is the antithesis of civilisation.

The central reality of the twenty-first century world, as the spread of terrorism and the vulnerability of the United States to it demonstrate, is that our era is globally interdependent but far from integrated. We learned on 11 September that the very forces of globalisation we helped to create - open borders and commerce, easy travel, instant communications, instant transfers and widened access to information and technology - can be used to build or destroy, to unite or divide.

At the same time, old confrontations have taken on frightening urgency, especially the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir and the violent stalemate in the Middle East. Progress on these and other global challenges requires us to develop a larger strategy for American foreign policy, rooted in a fundamental commitment to move the world from interdependence to an integrated global community committed to peace and prosperity, freedom and security.

At the heart of all these struggles is a global battle of ideas, especially in the Islamic world, where fundamentalist rivalries have twisted religion to justify suicide assassination of innocents as a legitimate political tool blessed by Allah. This epic battle revolves around three very old and fundamental questions: can we have inclusive communities or must they be exclusive? Can we have a shared future or must our futures be separate? Can we possess the whole truth or must we join others in searching for it?

These dilemmas present perhaps the most enduring conundrum of human history: can people derive their identity primarily by positive association or does life's meaning also require negative comparison to others?

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.

  Q. How fundamental is the clash of values in war on terror & how long will it continue?
  A. Well, I think the clash of values is more important than the religious differences. What will they have if they win a war only because they can force both sides into the killing of civilians? That is basically what happened in Lebanon . Hezbollah fired all those rockets and then hid among civilian populations. What kind of world will they be leaving for their children and grandchildren? Do they really believe they have the absolute truth and that they cannot accommodate differences?
  The central question for our time is not how you worship God, or even whether you worship God. It's whether you believe in this life you can be in possession of the absolute truth and you have the right to impose it on others. We need to remember that too, those of us who are the targets of terror. Because we are rich, we are strong, we have sometimes been insensitive to the weak and to the claims of people who couldn't get high enough on our agenda. So if we want to exhort people and persuade them as well as prevent them from engaging in terror we have to act like we believe our common humanity is more important.

Unless one has been caught up in a war and experienced the terror that comes of knowing that thousands of heavily armed individuals are bent on one's annihilation, it is hard to realize that most violence is not primarily motivated by evil, greed, lust, ideology, or agresssion. Stranges as it may seem, most violence is defensive. it is notivated by the fear that if one does not kill one ill be killed. Either by the enemy or by one's own superiors. Against this constant anxiety, and the acute sense of fear and vulnerabilty that accompanies it, one conjures an illusion of power-- torching buildings, shooting unarmed civilians, firing rocket grentades, smoking cannabis, shouting ordrs, changing slogans, seeing oneself as Rambo, taunting, torturing, and abusing the individuals one has taken captive. But all this display of might-- this weaponry, thse medicines and amulets, this noise, these incantations, both political and magical, these Hollywood images, these drug-induced fuges, these rituals of brotherhood and solidarity -- simply reveal the depth of oen's own impotence and fear. This is Hannah Arendt's great insight-- that while military power consolidates itself in numbers, and in coordinated, automatic forms of mass movement, terrorism seeks power in implements, and is driven not by might but by its absence. And so it is that in the auto-da-fe, with explosions and bomb blasts, fire, noise, and mayhem, that the terrorist, like a child, finds his apotheosis, achieving the recognition, presence, voice and potency he has been denied in the real world.

Unless one has been caught up in a war and experienced the terror that comes of knowing that thousands of heavily armed individuals are bent on one's annihilation, it is hard to realize that most violence is not primarily motivated by evil, greed, lust, ideology, or agresssion. Stranges as it may seem, most violence is defensive. it is notivated by the fear that if one does not kill one ill be killed. Either by the enemy or by one's own superiors. Against this constant anxiety, and the acute sense of fear and vulnerabilty that accompanies it, one conjures an illusion of power-- torching buildings, shooting unarmed civilians, firing rocket grentades, smoking cannabis, shouting ordrs, changing slogans, seeing oneself as Rambo, taunting, torturing, and abusing the individuals one has taken captive. But all this display of might-- this weaponry, thse medicines and amulets, this noise, these incantations, both political and magical, these Hollywood images, these drug-induced fuges, these rituals of brotherhood and solidarity -- simply reveal the depth of oen's own impotence and fear. This is Hannah Arendt's great insight-- that while military power consolidates itself in numbers, and in coordinated, automatic forms of mass movement, terrorism seeks power in implements, and is driven not by might but by its absence. And so it is that in the auto-da-fe, with explosions and bomb blasts, fire, noise, and mayhem, that the terrorist, like a child, finds his apotheosis, achieving the recognition, presence, voice and potency he has been denied in the real world.

Terrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the "heroes" underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise.

Everyday I think about dying About disease, starvation, violence, terrorism, war, the end of the world. It helps keep my mind off things.

The essence of terrorism is that one never knows when is the wrong time and where is the wrong place.