The following are some notes on the nature of terrorism. A number of crucial points can be made.
1. Terrorism and terrorist acts are by no means specific to the Arab World. European history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed wave upon wave of terrorist acts, mainly assassinations, by radical groups. The most well-known are Russian Nihilists (who succeeded in assassinating a Tsar) and anarchists in Spain, France, and the United States (the last in the 1920s, leading to precursors of draconian legislation further developed during the Mc Carthy Era, and reinstated in the books in the Patriot Act). All these acts of terror cultivated the myth that exemplary acts of violence will lead to the mobilisation of the masses and to insurrection which will yield utopian political results.
2. There were in these acts fairly well-defined targets and enemies, usually particular social groups and persons and institutions in authority. Acts of violence by Hamas and Hezbollah equally have well-defined enemies in the context of well-defined political and national conflicts. In some contrast, and this is an aspect shared by the Oklahoma attack, the acts of violence perpetrated in New York, Madrid, London and elsewhere by radical islamist groups target enemies which are metaphysically and not politically conceived. The definition of friend and foe involved are largely apolitical, and involves a division of the world between a Realm of Islam and a Realm of Infidelity. This is a general characteristic shared by the so-called war against terror.
3. Acts of spectacular violence by radical islamist groups seem also to seek the precipitation of a general world conflagration, couching their acts in terms that might appeal to masses in the Arab world and beyond, such as conjuring up the dismal situations in Palestine and Iraq. These are real conflicts but the aims of radical islamists are far broader, and instrumentally use these issues, sometimes successfully, for their own utopian ideals. The conditions that give rise to support for such acts, and to the successful recruitment of willing self-sacrificers, are real, and are aided and abetted by US policies which allow these situations to fester. Of these real circumstances one might mention principally two: the occupation of Iraq and of Palestine, and the alienation of certain sectors of the Arab and Muslim population, alienation in North American and European cities, and alienation in countries of origin, most particularly countries that have severe social inequalities and structural and political impasses (such as Syria and Morocco), countries that suffer from marginality and that have areas of rural marginality where recruitment takes place (Yemen and Afghanistan for instance), and countries that have jihadist public cultures, like Saudi Arabia.
4. It must be stressed that radical islamism, like the wave of islamism now called “moderate” which came before it, was nurtured quite deliberately and given financial and infrastructural support, for obvious political reasons, by the United states, against whom they have now turned, and by allies of the United States, most particularly Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, Egypt. It is now manifestly clear that the “war on terror” is creating fertile grounds for the recruitment to radical islamist groups: not only because barbarism in Iraq and Palestine naturally provokes counter-barbarism, but because, the enemy in "the war on terror" being ill-defined and, and the occupation of Palestine and of Iraq having nothing to do with terror and the war against it, large sectors of the Arab population feel themselves directly targeted, by occupation, by islamophobic propaganda, and by overwhelming and overweening force clearly displayed and used.
5. That the “war against terror” has a phantom enemy is clear from the lack of forthrightness by statements made by President Bush. But an important complement to deciphering his references are supplied by others, in the main by Evangelists. General Bykin (to date not subject to any acts of discipline) could declare that “his God” is “bigger” than that of Muslims. Pat Robertson and others speak of islam as terrorism, and an American congressman recently called for Mecca and Medina to be bombed. A television announcer, Michael Graham, declared that Islam was “a terrorist organisation”.
6. The “war against terror” therefore seems to take on the aspect of a “war of civilisations”, and is in this respect a mirror-image of the war desired by radical islamism, although it must be stated that in the US administration not everyone is given to thinking in terms of this phantasmagoria, and that secularist neo-cons are more generally given to thinking concretely in terms of the imperial interests of the US and of Israel. This war devolves, primarily beyond the rhetoric, to a war for the subjugation of the Arab World, in tandem with Israel, and control over its resources. In the realm of fantasy, it is a war against islam, declared or undeclared, as is clear from the ambiguity and indirectness of its official expression.
7. But there is little that is indirect or ambiguous on the ground. In the Iraq we have a situation where deliberate state collapse, and the deliberate nurturing of the old imperial dream that the Arabs are less a nation and more a mosaic of sects, put into effect with tremendous violence and with the withholding of public services. It is no wonder that this encourages self-seeking, and sometimes genuine, sectarian fanaticism, war over resources in situations of general immiseration and disorder, and the marriage of sectarianism with gangsterism attendant upon the collapse of order and the depletion of resources generally available. Combined with foreign occupation and the politics of humiliation (Islamophobia, and the notion of Arab sects and a Kurdish Nation) which finds counter-expression in fanatical islamism, the mixture is incendiary, and might not be containable within the national boundaries of Iraq