Author: William_Johnson wjohnson@globeandmail.ca
Publication: Globe and Mail, Canada
Date: October 11, 2001
In Afghanistan, the attack is under
way. Where does it all end?
George W. Bush laid
out an ambitious program on Sunday, as he announced that
strikes against the Taliban had begun. "If any government
sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have
become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely
path at their own peril."
Jean Chrétien, though,
evoked a more modest objective on Tuesday before the NATO Parliamentary
Assembly: "This is a struggle against a cadre
of extremists, whose goal is to terrify and disrupt
nations. . . . Our dispute is with the terrorists, and with
the Taliban regime that insists on
giving them safe harbour."
The gap is continental between
those two statements of war aims. Mr. Bush proposes to "relentlessly"
coerce all governments that sponsor terrorism until
international terrorism has been eradicated --
a victory to be the trophy of his presidency.
To conquer terrorism,
military action will not suffice. That requires
striking the root and changing the culture that
is terrorism's breeding ground.
Only the naive believe that poverty
is the root. Ideology is what arms terrorists. The most pervasive
doctrine breeding terrorism was developed in the 20th century to
fight colonialism. It holds the West responsible for all Third World ills.
"When the British go,
there will be no more communal trouble in India," Jawaharlal Nehru
declared in 1946. Two years later, the British went -- and
hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in communal strife between
Muslims and Hindus. It continues.
Frantz Fanon, theoretician of the
anti-colonial armed struggle in North Africa, asserted as axiomatic
that, when the colonizers departed, Africa would be democratic and
just.
The Third World is born
good, but is corrupted and plundered by the West. That doctrine
was consecrated at the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung,
Indonesia. It inspired a whole generation of tyrants and terrorists.
And it dominated the recent Durban conference on racism. Slavery
was not slavery, except on Western shores. Racism couldn't be racism, except
in the West and Israel.
The doctrine inspired the
anti-American rants of Sunera Thobani, of Arundhati Roy in
The Guardian, and of Concordia University's Student Union in
a publication titled Uprising. In much softer terms, it animates
Naomi Klein's book, No Logo. It arms much of the indignation of the anti-globalization
movement.
A more specific proneness to violence
is manifest in large Muslim populations -- in their culture,
not the religion. This was demonstrated persuasively
by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in his 1996 book, The
Clash of Civilizations.
>From his research and
that of others, he shows that violent clashes
in different parts of the world preponderantly involved Muslims.
For instance, of six major wars in the 1990s that each killed
more than 200,000 people, "three (Sudan, Bosnia,
East Timor) were between Muslims and non-Muslims, two (Somalia, Iraq-
Kurds) were between Muslims, and only one (Angola) involved only
non-Muslims."
Whether as
majorities or large minorities, Muslims
have disproportionately been involved in violence, in
wars between Pakistan and India, rioting against the affluent Chinese
minority in Malaysia and Indonesia, against a
Buddhist government in Thailand, against Catholics in
the Philippines and East Timor, against Russia in Chechnya,
against blacks in Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Kenya and Tanzania.
"Islam's borders are
bloody, and so are its innards," Prof. Huntington
concluded.
More specific, still, is the violence-prone
culture of the Middle East and its antagonism toward
Israel. But that must be the subject of another column.
