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By Joe Hung

September 11, 2005

Original Article (English)

On Sunday the world remembered the thousands of people killed in a terrorist attack on New York. It was the suicidal assault orchestrated by Osama bin Laden four years ago that prompted the United States to declare a war on terrorism, and then to invade Iraq in March 2003. The war, which is still going on, aims at making the world safe from terrorism. Three years on, do the peoples of the world, particularly those of the West, feel any safer?

Osama bin Laden is still at large and his fanatical disciples are ready to strike London, Madrid and elsewhere. In the case of the July 7 suicide attacks on London, none of the terrorists who blew themselves up were Shiite assassins brought into the United Kingdom from the Middle East. They were all homegrown Muslim fanatics. As a matter of fact, British police believe there are many other indigenous potential assassins prepared to strike, and the prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs of London (Chatham House) has concluded that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, in which the United Kingdom took part, has put Britain at much greater risk of terrorist attack.

It is certainly true that the Western world has long been under threat from terrorism. Years before the invasion of Iraq, attacks on Westerners by - or inspired by - al-Qaeda, occurred in Kenya, Tanzania, New York and Bali. With or without the Iraq War, the terrorists have targeted the Western "infidels, who have tried to annihilate the Muslim Arabs."

The fact is, however, is that the war has only deepened the xenophobia  of fundamentalist Islamists, which results more in more fanatical recruits, many of them non-Arab, for the "army of jihad." The war seems only to have stoked terrorism around the world. Peace is not possible in Iraq, where civilians die every day from suicide bombings similar to the Japanese kamikaze attacks on American warships toward the end of World War II. Iraq today resembles a terrorist training school, drawing jihadists from around the Middle East.

The root cause of all the trouble is vendetta. An eye for an eye. It was so for the Crusades against the Muslims in the Middle Ages. So it was in the Thirty Years' War. So is it in the wars in the Middle East, which started with the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel in 1948. Displaced Arabs killed Israelis, who retaliated in kind. Both Arabs and Jews – both which claim to have descended from Abraham - believe there should be an eye for an eye. Retaliation breeds more retaliation. It is a vicious cycle.

The West argues that there would have been no Iraq War if the September 11 attacks had not occurred. That may justify the war against terrorism, albeit that there is still no evidence that Saddam Hussein was in command of a worldwide terrorist campaign against the West, or that he was hiding weapons of mass destruction. The West can claim that the terrorists started the whole mess and blame them for causing the war, but that war is unlikely to end the threat from terrorism anytime soon.

Terrorism must be condemned, and every effort must be made to root it out. Retaliation in kind, however, which only leads to a mutual escalation of violence, is not the only way. This cycle of death will do nothing to rid the world of terrorist attacks.

Mohandas K. Gandi

Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of modern India, long ago provided an option. The Mahatma, or the Great Soul, spoke words that the world’s people had better remember: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Like Jesus Christ, who taught Christians not to “turn the other cheek,” Gandhi proclaimed his satyagrapha (holding fast to the truth), the method of non-violence,  non-cooperation and civil disobedience that managed in the end to win Indian independence from British colonial rule.

The movement was launched to counter a 1921 jihad declared by the Muslim Moplahs in Malabar in order to establish a new khilafat or caliphate, killing Europeans and wealthy Hindus wherever they found them and forcibly converting Hindu peasants to Islam. The bloody riots of the khilafat movement continued for years until practically all Indians, Hindu as well as Muslim, were fed up, and converted to satyagraphis.

More recently, Martin Luther King and Yitzhak Rabin displayed the unparalleled courage of great men risking the hatred and opprobrium of those who prefer the cycle of revenge, violence and death.

Both were, like Mahatma Gandhi, assassinated. But King and Gandhi were able to bring peace in their respective tormented societies. Rabin, however, gave his life in vain, seeking an end to the long Arab-Israeli feud, which remains at the root of conflict in the Middle East, and to which the Iraq War is related. That feud, another which pits the West against the better part of the Muslim world, is yet another that is fed by mutual retaliation in kind.

The Arab-Israeli feud will only be disarmed by Israeli leaders willing to come right out and say that when Arab suicide bombings occur against Jews, they will not retaliate. They will have to declare, like Rabin, that the killing must stops there.

There should be no revenge. God, according to Christ, declared "vengeance is mine."

That does not mean the world must condone in any way the psychopathic mindset of those who have twisted murder, torture, killing and hatred into virtues with the horrendous results in New York, Bali, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Madrid and London. They have to be brought to justice.

But it is time for American neo-conservatives and Israeli leaders to change their vengeful mentality to give the world a chance to live without fear of kamikaze attacks.