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COVER STORY: NEW TERRORISM
Menace In The Mind
People like bin Laden are not so much politicising
religion as religionising politics, elevating worldly struggles to the
drama of religion
—By Mark Juergensmeyer
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HUNTER AND HUNTED: Posters of bin Laden, suspected to be
behind the World Trade Center attacks, are a common sight in New
York
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Perhaps the first
question that came to mind on September 11 when televisions around the
world captured the horrific images of the aerial assaults on New York
City's World Trade Center (WTC) was why anyone would want to do such a
thing. As the twin towers crumbled in a cloud of dust and the motives
of the perpetrators became clearer, a second question emerged: why would
anyone want to do such a thing in the name of religion?
These are questions that have risen with alarming
frequency in the post-Cold War world. Religion seems to be connected with
violence everywhere-from the WTC bombings to suicide assaults in Israel
and Palestine, nerve gas attacks in Tokyo subways, car bombs in Srinagar
and Chandigarh, unending battles in northern Ireland, abortion clinic
killings in Florida and the bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal
Building.
One of the grim hallmarks of the "new terrorism"
is its almost exaggerated violence. By "new terrorism" I mean
those vicious forms of political expressions that have been conducted
for anti-government, anti-global ideological causes, many of them religious.
Acts such as these are intended not only to destroy but to create bloodshed
in an intense and vivid way. They are designed to magnify the savage nature
of violence and to elicit anger. Who would want to do such a thing, and
why?
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TERRORIST SPEAK
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Mahmood Abouhalima, serving a
prison term for the attack on the World Trade Center in February
1993
"How does the US justify its acts
of bombings, of killing innocent people, directly or indirectly,
openly or secretly? It wants to terrorise nations, obliterate their
power and tell them they are nothing."
"The Oklahoma
bombing was done for a very specific reason. They wanted to reach
the government with the message that we are not tolerating the way
you are dealing with our citizens."
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Questions such as these brought me to one of
the men convicted of the first attempt to destroy the WTC in 1993. I interviewed
Mahmood Abouhalima, a follower of the exiled Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar
Abdul Rahman, whose group of conspirators was said to have been supported
by Osama bin Laden's transnational network. I talked with Abouhalima on
two occasions in a California penitentiary where he was serving a life
sentence for his part in the attack. The tall, red-haired Egyptian's English
was fluid and colloquial, and he leaned over as he spoke, often whispering,
as if to reinforce the intimacy and importance of what he said.
Abouhalima was restricted in what he felt he
could say since he still hoped to be released from prison when his case
was appealed. He was, however, quite eloquent on the general subject of
the public role of Islam and its increasingly political impact. He also
felt free to talk about an incident of which he was not accused-the Oklahoma
bombing by Timothy McVeigh. "It was done for a very, very specific
reason," Abouhalima told me, contradicting any impression I might
have had that the building was bombed for no reason at all.
"They had a certain target, you know, a
specific achievement," Abouhalima said. "They wanted to reach
the government with the message that we are not tolerating the way you
are dealing with our citizens."
Was the bombing an act of terrorism, I asked
him. Abouhalima thought for a moment, then explained that the whole concept
was "messed up". The term seemed to be used only for incidents
of violence that people didn't like, or rather, Abouhalima explained,
for incidents that the media have labelled terrorist.
"What about the United States government?"
Abouhalima asked me. "How do they justify their acts of bombings,
of killing innocent people, directly or indirectly, openly or secretly?
They are killing people everywhere in the world: yesterday, today and
tomorrow. How do you define that?" he asked. Then he described what
he regarded as the terrorist attitude of the US towards the world. According
to Abouhalima, the US tries to "terrorise nations", to "obliterate
their power", and to tell them that they "are nothing"
and that they "have to follow us".
Abouhalima implied that any form of international
political or economic control was a form of terrorism. He also gave specific
examples of where he felt the US had used its power to kill people indiscriminately.
"In Japan, for instance," Abouhalima said, referring to the
atomic blasts, "through bombs, you know, that killed more than 2,00,000
people."
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