The war that is coming -- and it will be a war, violent and bloody and deadly -- will be like no previous one. Though no one can yet guess its form, one thing should be remembered: this is not a war against Islam, nor is it a war against the Arab world. It will, however, be a war against Muslim fundamentalists who happen to be Arabs -- if the current indications and emerging evidence about the perpetrators of the terrorist acts in New York and Washington are correct.
More to the point, this is not a new war. Terrorism has existed as a political tool in the Middle East for a long time -- and it has been used not only against Israel or the US. It was Syrian agents who assassinated Lebanon's President-elect Beshir Gemayel in 1982. Kurdish terrorists have been active in Turkey for decades; Islamic terrorists assassinated President Anwar Sadat in l981 and later tried to assassinate President Mubarak.
This is not a fight against Western imperialism or globalization. Nor is it a response to the present violent deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations: some of Osama bin Laden's terrorist acts against US targets in the mid-1990s, it should be recalled, occurred at the height of the Israeli-Palestinian honeymoon that followed the Oslo agreements of l993.
Instead, we are witnessing a much deeper phenomenon, which is as much cultural as political and economic. Islam as a religion can be tolerant as well as triumphalist -- as its sister world religion, Christianity, can be. But there is a strain in extremist Islam that sees modernity -- the whole Enlightenment project -- as its enemy. For it democracy, equality, political liberalism, separation of state and church, equality between the sexes, secularism -- are all the work of the Devil. Just like the Anabaptists of Minster, they see themselves as God's agents in a world corrupted by the sins of materialism and faithlessness. Such a Manichaean world legitimizes terrorism as the will of God. For people like Bin Laden -- and it appears that it is his version of Islamic fundamentalism which is behind the terror acts in New York and Washington -- even the Saudi monarchy is evil, because it has facilitated a US presence in the Middle East. For years, some versions of such terrorism have received tacit support from some Arab states. Even some European countries, for causes deeply rooted in a Machiavellian raison d'etat, have sometimes closed their eyes when confronted with terrorist behavior. Syria -- a prime source of state-sponsored terrorism -- is now even considered a candidate for a seat in the Security Council. But just as there could be no moral neutrality in the war against Nazism and Fascism, so the coalition the US is now trying to build will begin to take as a root assumption that, if the war against terrorism is to be serious, tolerance of terror-supporting regimes cannot go on.
Some terrorists are, no doubt, motivated by legitimate concerns and have legitimate grievances (the Kurds and the Palestinians come to mind). Yet legitimate goals do not legitimize evil means. The kind of terrorism which we saw in the l970's and l980's -- airline hijacking, the murder of Israeli athletes in the l972 Munich Olympics -- has now mutated into the Islam-inspired Palestinian suicide terrorist, and finally into the Armageddon-like landscape we now see in New York and Washington.
The war ahead will be difficult. The war against Iraq of a decade ago, and the "virtual" war without casualties that NATO waged in the skies over Kosovo, offer no precedents. Indeed, they deluded us for too long into thinking that the war against terrorism was a police matter -- that investigators and indictments were the way to fight fanatical terrorists, not a relentless, painstaking armed struggle. Those delusions were smashed by the New York and Washington massacres.
No clear strategies now exist for how the war is to be waged. Strategies, however, will be found. What would be a tragic is if this struggle against terror became a war of civilizations, of the West against Islam. For the terrorist vision of Islam is a perversion of it. But collaborators with terrorism should, and will likely be viewed with the same severity as the terrorists themselves. Only in this way can this war against the world of the Enlightenment, which is the modern world that stretches across all the oceans and, yes, embraces all its faiths, be won.
Shlomo Avineri is a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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