Reflection on the roots of terrorism

Stephen Harper has said — as had George W. Bush and as does Barack Obama — that we are in Afghanistan to ensure that the terrorists don’t come here. The counter-argument has been that they might come here precisely because we are there.

It has turned out worse. Terrorists don’t have to come here to attack us. Their sympathizers here will. They may act for Al Qaeda and the Taliban or act on their own. Some may go to Pakistan for military training but many may assemble a bomb from a manual downloaded from the Internet.

Some may be religious, many not. Some may invoke Islam but many act out of solidarity with Muslims. They may be immigrants or, more likely, second-generation Canadians, as Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said Thursday.

They may be “the most unlikely individuals” — engineers, doctors, hospital technicians, seemingly well integrated, such as the pathologist Khurram Sher, a product of and participant in the popular culture of NHL hockey and Canadian Idol. Or they may be uneducated, unemployed, troubled, disaffected.

All this refutes the clichés we have been fed for the last nine years about terrorists:

They are all “Islamic radicals” nurtured in madrassas or mosques, brainwashed into jihad by antediluvian imams. If only the madrassas could be shut down, the imams made to shut up, and “moderate” Muslims rise up against “radical Islam,” the danger would disappear.

This fantasy had a purpose.

If Islam could be made the issue, writes Ron Paul, a Republican congressman, then “radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11,” and not “a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation.”

Not only do these wars and occupation make us broke, they are going to backfire big time.  They are highly immoral.  The information in this article applies to the USA even more.

The full article is here.