Facing up to unholy terror
Roots of rage. We don't know when this new terribleness was ushered into the world of Islam. But we know that at its roots lie the forces of envy and resentment, an attraction to the emancipated ways of an encircling global culture that Muslims can neither master nor reject. The young homicide bomber walking into a Tel Aviv discotheque has come to serve a warrant of death on people his age whose ways he yearns for yet cannot have. Cunning in their reading of the bewildered and the vulnerable, the preachers and the entrepreneurs of death have given this terrible rage sanctity. In the safety of England, a Syrian-born preacher, Omar Bakri Mohammad, recently opined to the Sunday Telegraph that he would support hostage-taking at British schools if carried out by terrorists with a "just cause." With the heartbreak of Beslan in the background, this man said that "if an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain, it would be justified because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq."
In our innocence, we think that a battle ought to be waged for Muslim hearts and minds, that perhaps if we refined or amplified our message, this hate would be driven away. It is in this spirit that the 9/11 commission recently recommended the launching of a campaign of public diplomacy in the Muslim world. But this is illusion. For at heart, this war for Islam is one for Muslims to fight. It is for them to recover their faith from the purveyors of terror.
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