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COVER STORY: NEW
TERRORISM
An Act Of Retaliation
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TERROR UNMASKED: Local ethno-nationalist struggles like
the one in Kashmir may have arisen because of erosion of confidence
in secular politics and politicians. Globalisation has created a
context in which authority is undermined and local forces are unleashed.
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Perhaps it was a
coincidence, but the number of people Abouhalima cited as having been
killed in Hiroshima was exactly the number that would have been killed
if both the WTC towers had collapsed immediately and fallen to the side,
obliterating other buildings as well. The relatively small number killed
in the September 11 attack-less than 6,000-was due to the fact that the
buildings imploded, not falling on adjacent structures, and that most
people in the buildings had sufficient time to escape after the first
attack.
Was the WTC attack a terrorist response to what
was perceived as America's acts of terrorism? When I asked Abouhalima
this question in reference to Oklahoma City, he agreed. "That's what
I'm saying," Abouhalima replied. "If they believe, if these
guys, whoever they are, did whatever bombing they say they did in Oklahoma
City, if they believe that the government unjustifiably killed the people
in Waco, then they have their own way to respond. They absolutely have
their own way to respond," Abouhalima added for emphasis.
"Yet," I said in an effort to put the
event in context, "it killed a lot of innocent people, and ultimately
it did not seem to change anything."
"But it's as I said," Abouhalima responded,
"at least the government got the message."
The message, according to Abouhalima, was that
the government was an enemy, a satanic foe. The point of the Oklahoma
attack-and the assaults on the WTC, for that matter-was to create a graphic
and easily understandable object lesson for everyone to see. These terrorist
acts were performances of war. From Abouhalima's perspective, they succeeded
since they pointed out that there was a great struggle going on. The world
was not as peaceful as it appeared: great issues were at stake, and at
least in the minds of some people the American government was at fault,
a great enemy.
Through interviews with violent religious activists
such as Abouhalima, I have come to see their acts as forms of public performance
rather than aspects of political strategy. Theirs are symbolic statements
aimed at providing a sense of empowerment to desperate people. The collapse
of the twin towers of the WTC must have created a heady illusion of power
for those who conspired to bring them down.
Religion is crucial for these acts as it provides
moral justification for killing and provides images of cosmic struggle
that allow activists to believe that they are waging a spiritual war.
This does not mean that religion causes violence, nor does it mean that
religious violence cannot, in some cases, be justified by other means.
But it does mean that religion often provides the mores and symbols that
make possible bloodshed-even catastrophic acts of terrorism.
Violent ideas and images are not the monopoly
of any single religion. Virtually every major religious tradition-Christian,
Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist-has served as a resource for
violent actors. Perhaps it is not fair to label bin Laden a Muslim terrorist
or to characterise McVeigh a Christian one-as if they were violent because
of their Islamic and quasi-Christian beliefs. But the fact that religion
is in their backgrounds, and behind so many different perpetrators of
public violence, indicates that all religions are inherently revolutionary.
They are capable of providing the ideological resources for an alternative
view of public order.
If this has always been so, why are such violent
assaults on public order occurring now? I have looked for the answer to
this question in our contemporary global milieu. The perception of an
international conspiracy and an oppressive "new world order"
has been explicitly mentioned by bin Laden, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo and
Christian militia groups in the US.
Activists such as bin Laden might be regarded
as guerrilla anti-globalists. Even local ethno-nationalist struggles such
as the one in Kashmir have arisen in part because of an erosion of confidence
in secular politics and politicians. The era of globalisation and post-modernity
creates a context in which authority is undercut and local forces have
been unleashed. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that only globalisation
causes religious violence. But it may be one reason why so many instances
of religious violence in such diverse places around the world are occurring
at the present time.
Thus when bin Laden and those like him appropriate
religion in their view of the world at war, they are not so much politicising
religion as they are religionising politics. They are elevating worldly
struggles to the grand drama of religion.
It is a mark of the uncertainty of the post-modern
world of the 21st century that we do not yet know whether such efforts
to force culture and symbols into contemporary life are ghosts of the
past or harbingers of the future. Either way, they are testimony to the
extraordinary power that the religious imagination still holds in public
life.
As policymakers in the US are discovering in
their attempt to deal with the WTC tragedy, the new terrorism of performance
violence is difficult to deal with. Their cadres are hard to detect, maddening
to trace, and frustrating for those who search for adequate and effective
responses to their acts. The government agency that overreacts may inadvertently
buttress the myth that the government is cruel and heartless, prompting
even more acts of violence in retaliation.
The slow, patient exercise of bringing perpetrators
to justice, and to courts of sanity, may in the long run be the most effective
way of diffusing a Manichaean view of the world and puncturing the illusions
of the new cultures of violence.
The writer is professor of sociology and director
of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. He is also the author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global
Rise of Religious Violence, Oxford 2001.
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