I have industriously been searching for the type of terrorism that the West associates with Islam; the type of terrorism that is considered the greatest danger threatening the future of Western civilization. As a result of this erroneous concept, Islam has become known as the religion of blood and violence. Jihad which represents the most sublime values of defense has become synonymous in Western thought with terrorist attacks, and fatwa, which simply means religious ruling, has come to mean death sentence.
The information I came across was reported by MI5 in Britain last year stating that 60 percent of the messages they intercepted in 2007, and whose plans they were able to abort belonged not to Islamic terrorists, but rather to radicals from Northern Ireland.
The paltry existence of this terrorism that is associated with Islam is not limited to the UK alone. Interpol statistics have indicated that Islamic terrorism is even poorer in Europe. Of the 543 terrorist operations that occurred that same year, 89 percent were executed by dissident groups from Corsica and Basque in France and Spain respectively.
The same statistics reveal that of 1,044 people arrested in various European countries on terrorism charges, only 19 percent belonged to Islamic groups. Furthermore, the percentage of those arrested who belong to Islamist movements has unmistakably dropped by 22 percent compared to previous years in major European countries like France, Germany and Italy.
These startling figures, sourced from European security bodies, made me wonder about that widespread Islamic terrorist threat which has prompted the US to wage a relentless war against a sovereign state like Iraq in defense of Western civilization.
We don’t need to repeat the proven fact, which is not discussed in the West, that the Iraq war, not only wrought destruction in the country, but has also opened the door to so-called Islamic terrorism there. There was no such thing before the war, but now analysts say that Iraq had become a hotbed for Al Qaeda, thanks to the “creative chaos pioneered by former US President George W. Bush. It has also opened new grounds for Iranian influence that the United States had always attempted to contain.
If we scrutinize statistics regarding terrorism inside the US itself, we will come across what is even more startling. FBI statistics, in a report issued in 2008, indicate that the percentage of those who were arrested on charges of “Islamic terrorism in 2007, did not exceed 15 percent of the total of those arrested nationwide in the US. Those who were proven to have connections with terror organizations did not exceed 1 percent.
There is no doubt that terrorist operations take place everywhere under the guise of Islam, though Islam has nothing to do with them. But in light of these figures, one cannot help but wonder about that Islamic terrorism whose diminishing power and significance barely compares to other terrorist operations motivated by different ideologies around the world.
If we consider the ratio of so-called Islamic terrorism compared to the total number of terror operations, we will find that the real danger to the world does not spring from the religion of mercy and tolerance that we know in this part of the world but from other dark nooks against which the US has not chosen to wage war.
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
