December 7, 1941 was a day that will live forever in infamy. That was the verdict that President Franklin D. Roosevelt pronounced on the day that the Japanese decided to launch a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the heart of the United States bled for its innocent citizens.
It was an act of war and the country and its leaders treated it as such. It was the beginning of the end of the 2nd World War. While the fortune of that war changed, the world didn’t. And at the end of the war, normalcy returned; and Japan and the United States have remained allies and trading partners for most of the last century to date.
September 11, 2001 (9/11) was a different class in the calendar of days. It was the most appropriate for the title of a Day of Infamy. Fourteen years ago today the world really changed and normalcy has been a mirage ever since. Witness security operations at local and international airports. Though radical Islamists had been a nuisance to the sensibilities of the civilised world for most of the last 40 years or so, 9/11 carried its raging insanity too far, striking the soul of the capital of the industrial world with its mindless fury. And the world appeared to have had more than enough. Or has it, really?
If in fact the world had it on 9/11, the question that cries for an answer is “why hasn’t the world really come together to excise the cancerous mass from its body?” And why has it allowed the malignancy to spread so aggressively?
Further still, from the way in which terrorists have unleashed their murderous venom on innocent human beings in all corners of the world, shall we infer that the rest of the civilised world, from Africa to Asia and Europe to the Americas, cannot combine their forces to defeat and root them out from the face of the earth?
Terrorism is about the use of violence and terror to achieve political change. This is true of religious terrorists as it is of freedom fighters. The purpose is political. ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram all want to have a Caliphate that they control. Boko Haram once insisted that no non-Moslems will be allowed to rule their fold. But they also discriminate between their version of Islam and those they reject. No members of other Moslem sects are also to be trusted to rule over them.
What they want they cannot have by persuasion because they don’t trust their own power to persuade others to their point of view. Rather they will force their creed into the mind, (sorry, make that the flesh), of others. If you cannot persuade by reasoning, you cannot reach the mind of anyone. If you then choose to impose your creed by force, you are capturing the body, the flesh, and not the mind. How deep does that go? That is why Oxford English Dictionary defines a terrorist as anyone who attempts to further his or her views by a system of coercive intimidation.
One is tempted to blame it all on the civilised world itself. Not just because they have proved themselves utterly ineffective in stopping the spread of terror in at least the last 15 years; but also because, as some will argue, they started it all in the first place.
Tracing the history of terrorism in a seminal book, Inside Terrorism, Bruce Hoffman observes that the French Revolutionists designed the “reign of terror” to consolidate the power of the new government they established by intimidating the counter-revolutionaries and subversives who they regarded as enemies of the people.
Robespierre, the Revolutionary leader, defined terror as nothing but justice, prompt, severe and inflexible. He regards it therefore as an emanation of virtue itself. How perverse this must appear to us now if Shekau were to offer himself as the embodiment of virtue. Indeed, hasn’t he taunted and mocked the rest of us as kaffirs, which is another term for vice, the opposite of virtue.
What state terrorists, such as Robespierre started, anti-state and pro-anarchist terrorists took over and ran with in the aftermath of the industrial revolution and the widespread alienation it caused. And of course, the state that never quite abandoned its absolute control over the use of force also found terror handy as an instrument of the totalitarian state. On their part, the oppressed and dispossessed in colonial enclaves, rejecting the title of terrorists, self-identified as freedom fighters. The tactic and outcomes, however, remain identical.
But can there ever be a moral justification for terrorism, which unlike conventional war, makes no distinction against morally justifiable and unjustifiable targets of violent actions? When Shekau and his terror gang send innocent girls and young boys on suicide bombing missions, we cannot assume that those young people know or fully understand what they are being asked to do. Then they die and they kill others who have nothing to do with whatever the grievances of the gang might be.
Or when Chibok girls were herded away in trucks to an unknown destination and forcefully kept against their wish while some were converted to Islam against their wish as the President recently observed, does Shekau consider this act as good-in-itself or as a means to some end that he wants to achieve? If he thinks it is good in itself to abuse and brutalise innocent girls he must be the most perverse and devilish human being. Isn’t it a most bizarre and cruel irony that he would suggest that he is doing whatever he does in the name of God and in obedience to his will?
So we know that it is bizarre. We understand that it is devilish. And we agree that it is evil. What is it that prevents us from not just verbally condemning these mindless violence and others, such as the beheading of innocent men and women by ISIS, but more importantly, combining the forces of the entire world community, which are certainly greater than those of the terrorists to defeat them?
One reason the world has not come together is the perceived dissimilarity of vested interests among the leaders of the civilised world. One props up a regime that gasses its citizens. Another turns a blind eye towards atrocities committed by a friendly regime. A third is inward looking and doesn’t care as long as it is not a target. Yet for another it is the economy that matters and she will enter into trade relations with the devil if it pays. And so with disparate national interests, worldwide terror, even with its limited strength, gets a break that it doesn’t deserve.
With a purposefully united international community AWOL, terrorists are having a field day, and evil is let loose!
African nations cannot afford the devastation, dislocations and the psychological trauma that terrorism is inflicting worldwide. This is why it is important for them to combine their forces to defeat it and erase it from the face of the continent. This is supposed to be Africa’s century. It is its take-off time. It cannot afford to be pulled down by the weight of terror.
President Muhammadu Buhari is on the right path with his shuttle diplomacy to neighbouring states, mobilising his fellow leaders to the theatre of the war against terror. With their arms wide open appealing for support, the West must be ready to lift them up with the resources they need to execute the war to its logical conclusion.
NATION
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