Terrorisme kan ikke vinde

Siden 11. September, og igen efter terrorangrebene i London, har der været en del kværuleren om at vi ikke skal fokusere på at nogle galninge slår uskyldige ihjel, men på hvad årsagen er. I Asharq alawshat har Amir Taheri begået en sublim artikel, der kommer med et meget interessant bud på hvad den reelt er:

All this shows that, in the long-run, terrorism does not work.

Terrorism is, in fact, the tool of the intellectually lazy politicians.

Khomeini knew that neither he nor any of his acolytes would be able to challenge Kasravi in the realm of law, history and literature. Khomeini could not write a book as good as any of Kasravi’s. Nor could he compete with Kasravi’s knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence and Iranian history. To be able to do that Khomeini would have needed years of serious study, then unavailable in Qom, and an intellectual discipline that he never acquired. ..

With the advent of globalisation, Islamist terrorism is now able to strike beyond the frontiers of the Muslim world. But the same lazy mentality is at work. The terrorist knows that he is incapable of building an alternative civilisation capable of competing with the one he despises. So he tries to destroy what becomes the cause of his humiliation.

Politics is a serious business which requires hard work. It needs to find ways of keeping society in harmony while meeting its basic needs and creating conditions for economic, social and cultural development. Writing a poem, erecting a building, composing a symphony, painting a miniature, compiling a theological study, and making a film are not easy. But making a car-bomb is. The Taliban Mullah Muhammad Omar’s total work of “scholarship” consists of 30 pages of his ranting against “ the infidel”. But the terrorist operations he has organised and taken part in since 1992, when the Pakistani military intelligence recruited him, run into hundreds.

Terrorists always remind me of a short story by Voltaire in which a bug is angered by the ticktack of a clock on the wall and decides to destroy “ the monster”. It has no time to find out how the clock is made, why it is there, and whether there might not be other ways of attenuating the sound of its ticktack. The bug is a terrorist; it wants instant result from a single effort. So it decides to rush headlong into the clock like one of our suicide-bombers these days.

The hands of the clock stop of a tiny fraction of a second but then continue their relentless counting of time, ticking and tacking as loud as ever. Our martyrdom-seeking bug, however, falls to the floor, crushed and lifeless. A few moments later the cleaning lady sweeps the corpse of the suicide-martyr bug into the dustbin.

Terrorism can never win. It may generate much heat but never produces any light.

Taget i betragtning at islamisterne ikke engang kan samle intellektuel tankekraft til at komme op med egne argumenter for hvorfor de er retfærdige, men bare genbruger argt anti-vestligt venstrefløjsbavl fra de sidste tre årtier lyder den forklaring ikke helt så skeløjet.

Henrik