GLOBEANDMAIL

POSTED AT 12:02 PM EDT Saturday, September 15

Gee: Stop making excuses for terrorism

By MARCUS GEE From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Before we can fight terrorism with any success, we have to change the way we think about it.

People in the West often assume that terrorists must be driven to it by some burning grievance. If the men of the Irish Republican Army bomb a pub in Belfast, it must spring from their anger over the British occupation. If a Palestinian suicide bomber blows himself up outside an Israeli disco, it must spring from his frustration over the harsh Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Call it the "root causes" theory. What terrorists do may be despicable, goes the argument, but they did it because their grievances had been ignored by a brutal occupier, an oppressive government or an indifferent world. It follows that the only way to end terrorism is to address the "root causes."

Serious students of terrorism rejected the "root causes" theory long ago. Terrorism does not spring spontaneously from social deprivation or political oppression. If it did, then every poor and undemocratic country would be a hive of terrorists. Soviet dissidents never resorted to murdering innocent civilians, nor did the opponents of Nazism -- though they were fighting some of the worst forms of oppression ever seen.

Terrorism is a deliberate form of political or ideological warfare waged by fanatics with a disposition for unlimited violence. In the case of extreme religious terrorists, whether Islamic or Christian or Sikh, they are engaged in a holy war, a struggle for the fate of the world that justifies any amount of bloodshed.

Addressing "root causes" will not stop people like that. Even if Israel pulled out of the West Bank tomorrow, Islamic terrorist groups would keep trying to kill Israelis. To them, it is not the Israeli occupation that rankles. It is the very existence of Israel. It is pure hatred, more than grievance, that drives them.

Yet the "root causes" notion lives on. We have seen it twice this week on these very pages. The day after Tuesday's attack, University of Toronto scholar Thomas Homer-Dixon argued that the root cause of terrorism was the growing gap between rich countries and poor ones.

"These differences breed envy and frustration and, ultimately, anger," he wrote. "The problem will never go away if we don't address the underlying disparities that help motivate such violence."

Then, in yesterday's paper, columnist Rick Salutin said that the key to defusing support for terrorism was "eliminating the worst cases of wretchedness that sustain it." His suggestion: End Western sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq and get Israel to pull out of the West Bank.

No doubt both writers abhor what happened this week as much as everyone else. But by making excuses for terrorism, even qualified excuses, they give the perpetrators what they crave most: legitimacy. Worse, they acquit them of responsibility for their own actions.

If terrorism springs from their frustration over unanswered grievances, then it is not really their fault. It is merely a disease and they are simply the carriers, "rather in the way that innocent animals might be the carriers of rabies" (as the conservative U.S. author Midge Decter once put it).

That not only gives comfort to the terrorists, it hurts the effort to fight them. If terrorists are not morally responsible for their own actions, then it frees the rest of us from the burden of taking them on.

Well, that freedom just ended. We now know we must confront terrorism face to face. Before we do that, we must learn to see it as it is -- not as the product of "root causes" but as the result of a deliberate decision to kill in the name of hate.

-- Anonymous, September 16, 2001

Answers

The problem of terrorism is a very complex one. As the Brits have found out, it doesn't stop no matter how you try to contain it or wipe it out. Every generation of newborn has within it the seeds to perpetuate terrorist tactics. And when you add religion to the mix, as is the case in the Middle East, it becomes *very* potent.

The solutions are both very complicated and very simple. But the solutions are being ignored or misrepresented, the way I see it. In the end, we come down to that age old choice about the lesser of two evils. Unfortunately, we often are not too good about making that choice. Witness the current situation with "illegal" drugs.

-- Anonymous, September 16, 2001

Terrorism is a deliberate form of political or ideological warfare waged by fanatics with a disposition for unlimited violence. In the case of extreme religious terrorists, whether Islamic or Christian or Sikh, they are engaged in a holy war, a struggle for the fate of the world that justifies any amount of bloodshed.

...we must learn to see it as it is -- not as the product of "root causes" but as the result of a deliberate decision to kill in the name of hate.

That be some holy war. Does this shed some light on the question of whose side they are on?

-- Anonymous, September 16, 2001