The United States as a whole – citizens, government, media and academia – broadly has had a difficult time coming to grips with the terrorism phenomenon that struck its shores so traumatically on Sept. 11, 2001. A two-week journey throughout the United States this month left me with the sense that American society is more polarized on the issue.
Some Americans have generated some first-class analysis on why various groups around the world use terrorism more frequently as a means of political expression, resistance or offensive warfare. Others – especially in the media and politicians – have slipped into panic and racism mode. They focus almost exclusively on terror committed by Arab Islamist groups, and wildly tar all Islamist political groups as mortal threats that have stealthily penetrated American society, without differentiating between criminal terror, legitimate resistance, and peaceful political action.
The worst news is in the public arena – at airport and center-city bookshops, in the mass media, and in conversations with officials and ordinary people. Here the prevalent image is of evil Islamic and Arab terrorists who work hard to undermine and destroy American and Western civilization (or “the civilized world, which is contrasted with a supposedly barbaric Arab and Islamic realm).
The proliferation of books and television specials with this theme is particularly worrying. They build expansive, frightening scenarios on the basis of small facts or the deeds of a handful of individuals. Of course, there are individuals and small groups of Arabs and Muslims who speak evil of the United States, and a few have attacked American targets. Rather than being treated as exceptions to the non-violent Arabs and Muslims who make up the vast majority of Middle Eastern societies, these handfuls of freaks and criminals are often blown up into a global conspiracy seen as a direct, immediate, mortal threat to the US.
Such scare-tactics journalism and political nonsense allow otherwise reasonable people and rational institutions to dwell in a manufactured world of fear, ignorance, hysteria and racism. This is not new. The same ugly side of American culture did this in the early 20th century, when the target of their ignorance and hatred was the Jews, who were portrayed as planning to control American society and then the world.
The good news in the US is that more thoughtful individuals and institutions have started to generate some high-quality, accurate research and analysis about terror groups. I was fortunate to absorb some of this at a two-day conference last week at the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. Excellent papers were presented by a range of mostly American scholars and analysts, including Robert Pape, Peter Bergen, Fawaz Gerges, Steven Simon, Mia Bloom, Ian Lustick, Richard Shultz, John Esposito, Ayesha Jalal, and Sumantra Bose, Asaad Abu Khalil, Hisham Melhem, and others. I mention many of the authors simply to highlight the availability in the US of many good, honest scholars and journalists who can grapple with this important issue.
The main conclusion of their presentations was that there was no single theme or causal reason explaining the different kinds of terrorism around the world. Nuanced, comprehensive and fact-based analyses of the individual, social, and strategic motivations of terrorists provided a clear picture of a movie made up of many individual frames. Understanding the individual frames allowed us to make sense of the entire movie.
Terrorists are variously motivated by many different issues that often mesh together in varying patterns across the world – in sharp contrast to the simplistic, quasi-racist narrative about America-hating hostile Islamic terrorists that dominates popular and political culture in the US.
Some of the motivators of terror groups that emerged from the Tufts conference were: foreign military occupation of their homeland, domestic political repression and humiliation, revenge, religious interpretations, social prestige and status, alienation at home and in Western societies, aggressive foreign policies of Western powers, the “civil war within Islamic societies, charismatic leaders like Osama bin Laden who mobilize their followers, temporal political concerns perceived through the lens of religious obligations, issues of lack of dignity and hopes for a better future, and the weaving together of national, historical and emotional narratives while appealing to domestic, regional, and global audiences simultaneously.
The more honest debate about America’s actions in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East seems now to be joined in places by a deeper, more analytical examination of why terrorism has expanded around the world. Let’s hope the policy-makers in the US, Russia, Israel, the Arab world and Europe read and absorb some of this material, so that we can start to wind down the terror cycle that has only grown in recent years.
Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
