Bin Laden's Death Won't Kill His Violent Methods or Manner of
Speaking
"It would
be illusory to believe that these al-Qaeda affiliated groups would lay down
their arms because someone who might have great symbolic value, but was no
longer the chief executive of the franchise, has been killed."
I've halted my vacation for a
day because talking of bin Laden's death is inescapable. But then again - not
so much about his death, because everything, or almost everything, has already
been said about it, but about the "day after," or the many "days
after."
My initial feeling was the
same as was expressed by Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib:
"Getting rid of bin Laden is good for the cause of world peace, but what counts
even more is overcoming the way of speaking and violent methods that were
created and encouraged by bin Laden and others in the world."
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
It's obvious that killing bin
Laden neither kills his way of speaking nor his methods, partly because over
time, al-Qaeda ceased to have a highly centralized hierarchy and became sort of
a franchise, with more-or-less loose ties between each of its, say,
subsidiaries.
It would be illusory to believe
that these groups would lay down their arms because someone who might have
great symbolic value, but was no longer the chief executive of the franchise, has
been killed.
It's illustrative to recall
that two of al-Qaeda’s masterminds in Iraq were killed, in 2006 and 2006, and no
one can say that Iraq is now a haven for peace.
It’s not only in the
Arab-Muslim world that terrorist cells exist. Ahmed Rashid, one of the
great experts in the subject, told the BBC's Today show, "In part because
hundreds of Muslims with European passports have traveled to Pakistan's tribal
areas for training and have returned to Europe, every European country has an al-Qaeda
cell" [translated quote].
So, let is return to the
central point raised by Palestinian spokesman Ghassan Khatib:
how to disarm this violent way of expression?
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
A good first step would be to
restore to the Arab world a decent quality of life, what the Arabs themselves
have begun to do in some countries like Egypt and Tunisia. Putting hope on the
horizon help cut the fuel from fanaticism.
But for a generation already
seduced by a way of speaking and violent methods, there seems little reason to
hope. Fanaticism has no cure.
Clovis Rossi is a special correspondent and member of the Folha
editorial board, is a winner of the Maria Moors Cabot award (USA) and
is a member of the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism. His column
appears on Thursdays and Sundays on page 2 and on Saturdays in the World
Notebook section. He is the author, among other works, of Special Envoy:
25 Years Around the World and What is Journalism?
