Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH)
July 26, 2005

The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) is distributing the enclosed articles to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. Unless otherwise noted, all copyright permissions have been obtained and the articles may be reproduced by any news outlet or publication free of charge. If publishing, please acknowledge both the original source and CGNews, and notify us at cgnewspih@sfcg.org.

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ARTICLES IN THIS EDITION:

1. "Battling the cancer within" by Prince Turki Al Faisal and Lord George Carey
Prince Turki Al Faisal and Lord George Carey, co-chair of the Council of One Hundred at the World Economic Forum, condemn the recent bombings in London and reject the politicization of religion, urging the West not to generalize about Islam but to recognize the many Muslim clerics and individuals who believe that terrorism runs counter to their religion.
(Source: The Telegraph, UK, July 24, 2005)

2. "The War of the Worlds" by Fawaz Turki
Fawaz Turki, Arab News senior columnist, seeks a "psychologically, spiritually and culturally informed response" to the root causes of terror and warns that preventing Muslims from living and participating in European or American life only dilutes the values of tolerance and independence that are the cornerstone of Western thought.
(Source Arab News, July 20, 2005)

3. "Reconciling Kurds and Shias" by Eric Hilmo and Samuel Blatteis
Eric Hilmo, M.A. Security Studies, Georgetown University, and Samuel Blatteis, a Fulbright recipient to the Persian Gulf, 2005-2006, believe that Shias and Kurds can be reconciled over specific issues where they have common ground, but warn that this will require that the United States enact financially costly measures to improve the local economy and reduce political inequalities.
(Source: Middle East Times, July 19, 2005)

4. "Lessons from a journey across the Arab world" by Rami G. Khouri
Rami G. Khouri, editor-at-large for the Daily Star, argues that "Based on visits to Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Morocco, along with meetings with colleagues from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Kuwait, I sense a common mood across the Arab world: the prevailing status quo is neither satisfying to the majority of citizens, nor sustainable for the rulers in its current state; but neither is it on the verge of revolutionary or violent change."
(Source: The Daily Star, July 20, 2005)

5." International Terror: Why?" by The Rev'd Canon Andrew White
The Rev'd Canon Andrew White, an Anglican priest, is CEO of the Foundation for Reconciliation in the Middle East. He provides concrete suggestions to fight the "war" we are all facing, Muslims and Christians alike.
(Source: Canon Andrew White's Email Update, July 20, 2005)

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ARTICLE 1
Battling the cancer within
Prince Turki Al Faisal and Lord George Carey

What makes a man take his own life and the lives of dozens of innocent people: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters the heroes and heroines of everyday life?

We should be clear upon one thing, which is that it has nothing to do with any faith. Good people of all faiths, or of none, are united in seeing the London bombings as a terrible act against humanity.

Not to see this is to be inhuman. There is no faith that condones the taking of innocent life and that celebrates suicide. The killing of innocent people is prohibited by all faiths.

"Thou shalt not kill" is one of the 10 commandments passed down to us all from the Prophet Moses in the Bible. "Whoever kills a person has killed the whole of humanity," says one of the best known Quranic verses.

Suicide is a sign of an individual's alienation from God and their alienation from the human family to which we all belong. This shared human bond, on which we are all so widely and clearly agreed is a bond that can transcend other divisions.

Our deeply shared humanity unites us. We serve as co-chair of the Council of One Hundred of the World Economic Forum. In this we are committed to building bridges and to overcoming divides.

One of us has served as a Christian leader in the Britain and the other as a Muslim diplomat, but we share a common goal, which is to build a vehicle and a dialogue that can address this great challenge of our time.

We do this in the belief that it is possible to construct a world built upon cooperation and harmony sustained by meaningful dialogue. We reject the inevitability of a "Clash of Civilisations".

We do not accept the concept of "Islam versus Christianity," or of "the West versus Islam". Differences are real and need to be acknowledged, but the bonds of common humanity and of our being citizens together of one world are stronger.

Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all Abrahamic faiths with the same core values. Yet facts must be faced.

Twisted vision

There are those among our human family who are committing these deeds of horror and devastation and who do not see how evil and terrible they are. They claim to be faithful to Islam and faithful to God but they are not.

This is not Islam and these acts are absolutely not the will of God. Their twisted vision is alien to the healthy body of the faith that holds the world's Muslim community together. It is a wicked perversion of the common values of faith.

The misappropriation of religious labels for violent ends is not a new problem, as past conflicts and experiences in Northern Ireland have made clear, but it is a very urgent one. Politicisation of any faith can be extremely dangerous.

In the Middle East, the separation between politics and religion has, by some, been confused, and it is a highly volatile and dangerous confusion that must end.

The fact that the laws of Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, are Islamic laws and that their governance is guided by Islam, does not mean and never has meant that Islam can legitimately be used as a political tool.

Perverting traditional texts

Imams and teachers who have used Islam to bolster and preach their political beliefs have done so by perverting traditional Islamic texts.

Declaring fatwas permitting suicide bombings goes against everything at the heart of Islam. These so-called Muslim scholars must be and are condemned. They are violating the most dearly held principles of Islam.

The terrorists who have been led to kill themselves are the victims of bad teaching, resulting from this twisted ideology subjecting religion to political ends. Al Qaida is not and never has been an Islamic force.

Majority of imams in the Muslim world both since and well before 9/11 have consistently and widely condemned suicide bombings in particular and terrorism in general.

The West does need to understand that while some Islamic scholars may seek to follow a path that goes back to a fundamental view of Islam, they do not accept suicide bombings or the taking of innocent human life.

No one can do this and be a true Muslim.

What then must be done? The Islamic world needs to acknowledge the cancer within its own community and to root it out. Muslim scholars must come out loudly and strongly against suicide bombing regardless of where, when and why they have happened.

We must undertake a global act of collective self-examination. In Islamic terms this is a project of muhasaba, a quest for the authentic Muslim voice that can dissolve the dark forces of destruction and point towards our true human values that cherish life and can bring about true human flourishing.

In the words of the Quran: "God does not change the condition of a people until they change the condition of their own selves" (13:11).

This is happening: there is a deep significance in three declarations made immediately before and after the London (7/7) bombings.

First, more than 170 Muslim religious leaders met in Amman, both Shiite and Sunni leaders as well as Ebadis and Esmailis. They all agreed that only those trained within the traditional eight schools of Islamic jurisprudence have the authority to issue fatwas.

This might seem an academic point, but it is fundamental to undermining the legitimacy of so called Islamist (rather than Islamic) terrorism.

This declaration makes clear that none of these supposed fatwas is legitimate or Islamic: Islam has united and declared the terrorists to be in breach of the Islamic faith.

Peace-loving citizens

Second, immediately after the bombing, the Grand Mufti Shaikh Abdul Aziz Al Shaikh issued a statement condemning the terrorists. He has consistently condemned suicide bombings which have no basis in Sharia.

Last week, 500 British imams put out a fatwa prohibiting suicide bombings and the killing of innocent people. For its part, the West needs to be supportive of the vast majority of Muslims who are peace-loving citizens.

The West also needs to understand the dangers encompassed in the liberal society which it advocates. That liberalism is the very tool used by extremists to foster and spread their twisted ideology.

We appeal to the West and world of Islam not to generalise but to differentiate the minority from the majority. It is time for us all to realise that true freedom is the freedom to live a moral life in fellowship with all mankind as citizens of one precious world. In the name of God we invite everyone to help build it.
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* Prince Turki Al Faisal is the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Britain. Lord George Carey is the former Archbishop of Canterbury. The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2005
Source: The Telegraph, July 24, 2005.
Visit the Telegraph at www.telegraph.co.uk.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained from the authors for publication.

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ARTICLE 2
The War of the Worlds
Fawaz Turki

As commentators, we can deal with evil by simply repudiating it and demonizing those who enact it, then move on. That is not only the easy way out, but is a cop out.

To write meaningfully about evil - and the London bombings are clearly a manifestation of that - we have to comprehend it, to comprehend why its perpetrators do not see the senselessness, the horror, the futility of their acts.

Alas, in these bad-tempered times, an attempt to dispassionately distance ourselves from these people in order to understand them - to transcend our emotions to make room for our intellects - can be construed as an attempt to explain away "evil doers," even to sympathize with them.

Ignorance of the motives, the social forces, the psychology of a terrorist, is the worst possible posture to have here.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair hit the nail on the head, two days after the London bombings, when he described the world, with its diverse communities as subsystems of the same global system. "Where there are appalling forms of poverty in one continent," he said, "the consequences no longer stay fixed in that continent, they spread to the rest of the world."

Add to that appalling form of alienation, the subjugation of one people by another, emotional suffering at the loss of one's sense of worth and sense of place in one's world, and the inability to determine one's personal and national destiny, and you have a deadly brew.

It is infantile, not to mention egregious and fallacious, to say that there is something in the religion of the Other - in this case, Islam - that propels an individual to commit acts of terror. On the contrary, a man of faith, any faith, is a man whose life is inspired by the desire to help the poor, by contemplation of the wondrous nature of creation, by generosity, by love for those less endowed, by strong moral values, by a sense of direction in one's life and, above all, by respect for those People of the Book other than one's own.

I am a Muslim who grew up in the Palestinian refugee camps, those putative "enclaves of hatred." An uncle would often visit and would recite and interpret passages from the Holy Book.

How come, we the children sitting around him would ask, you want us to love the Jews, to respect them as a People of the Book, when they have dismembered our homeland and expelled us?

His answer was always the same: They have gone astray, they have departed from the Book, and it has not always been like that between us and them.

Moreover, he would add, our struggle against the Jews of Palestine does not derive from their being Jews, but from the injustice they have perpetrated against us. We are all God's creatures, he would say over and over again. We have our Book, and they have theirs, reminding us of how in the Hadith we are enjoined by the Prophet (pbuh) against hurting those of another faith.

Uncle Omar, a true Muslim, instilled in us, at an impressionable time in our lives, a benign, as opposed to a sinister or racialist, view of the Other, and an intellectual inquisitiveness about the Other's faith and view of the world.

I have studied the Bible, not because I'm becoming an apostate, and I have explored and continue to enjoy African-American Gospel music and Gregorian chants by the Trappist Monks of the Abbey of Gethsemani, not because I prefer them to the Mowashahat, but because I enjoy them and because nowhere in Islam does it say that the artistic, or for that matter theological, effusions of other faiths should be avoided or denigrated.

In like manner, nowhere in Islam does it say that a Muslim's grievance, no matter how compelling, justifies killing innocent people.

Evil is universal; men of all races and creeds have been seduced - and reduced - by it.

In the Holy Books, Cain murdered his brother out of envy. In literature, Macbeth killed the king for naked power, and Marquis de Sade's characters inflicted pain on their victims in pursuit of pleasure. In Germany, Nazis committed unspeakable crimes in the name of a venomous ideology of racial purity.

In the US, fanatics have committed murder in synagogues and churches (Kerry Noble, leader of a violent cult in the 1980s, comes to mind) to facilitate the advent of the Apocalypse and the return of the Messiah. The Belgians worked millions of Congolese to death in the mines - literally worked them to death for the inferior species of men they were considered. And closer to home, Al-Qaeda sent terrorists to New York and Washington allegedly to destroy the instruments of American domination in the Muslim world.

So if you can pull rank on anyone here, my friend, throw the first stone.

We need a psychologically, spiritually, and culturally informed response to understand the kind of violence - senseless and banal - that is pursued by Muslims wrapping themselves in the mantle of their faith, in reality a nihilistic form of unfaith.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of prominent, albeit clueless, voices being raised about how to deal with the issue: Deal with them harshly, limit their entry into the country, deport the bums, whatever, unless you want the US and with it the rest of the "free world" to get rolled over by Islam.

Take the recent book, "The Cube and the Cathedral," by George Weigel, who argues that Europe cannot remain Europe if it allows itself to become "full of Muslims," just as Samuel P. Huntington (of the "Clash of Civilizations" fame) argues in his new book, "Who Are We," that America cannot remain America if it is full of Hispanics.

That, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, who reviewed both tomes in the Washington Post, "betrays the deepest values of the Enlightenment and the tolerance and individualism that are the West's greatest strengths." And, heck, that includes a betrayal of the American way as well.

Where's Uncle Omar when you need him to put in his two cents worth of thoughtful and compassionate observations about what the issue is really all about.

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* Fawaz Turki is an Arab News senior columnist.
Source: Arab News, July 20, 2005.
Visit the Arab News at www.arabnews.com.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
This article has been edited for length. Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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ARTICLE 3
Reconciling Kurds and Shias
Eric Hilmo and Samuel Blatteis

Despite the new Iraqi government's democratic founding, the governing coalition is still held together largely by the self-interest of the two dominant parties, the Kurds and the Shias.

While they presently cooperate to quell the domestic Sunni insurgency and develop the legal framework for Iraq's permanent constitution, these parties still cannot agree on what form the future government will take. Their conflicting interests stem directly from social, political, and economic inequalities, many of which existed before the US invasion two years ago. To date, attempts to address these inequalities have been the main sticking points for these groups.

If the United States wants to preserve Iraqi stability, it must give the Sunnis more specific financial stakes in the process and political incentives among the Kurdish and Shia leaders to make concessions to develop more common ground between all the main factions to what form the future government will take.

US policymakers often overlook two core elements of formulating a strategy toward Iraq: (1) the difficult political questions the future Iraqi government must contend with to establish itself as the country's central governing agent and (2) they underestimate the real threat to future stability these issues entail.

The inequalities found among the Shias, Kurds, and Sunnis could erode tenuously stable relationship between Iraq's leading political parties. The United States should distribute more economic resources to reduce these inequalities and minimize the prospects of future violence.

The deteriorating security situation bleeds into all facets of daily economic life and magnifies local inequalities. Security took hold slower in central and southern Iraq, and health care workers and financial investors could not do their job while in the northern region humanitarian organizations were already established and security began to take root.

Moreover, due to the ongoing insurgency within Sunni-run regions, reconstruction in central Iraq has lagged behind southern and northern efforts. International aid organizations report there has been almost no rise in diseases in northern Iraq, and the World Health Organization has developed a track record of restocking local clinics with medical supplies.

On the whole, the northern provinces controlled by the Kurds are financially better off than southern (Shia) and central (Sunni majority) Iraq. Baghdad itself is predominantly Shia, especially the slums of East Baghdad. These economic inequalities heighten the tension between Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias that manifests itself in targeted violence. These attacks, particularly sensational Sunni attacks on Shia mosques and ongoing fighting in Kirkuk, contribute to a sense of continued Kurdish and Shia victimization.

Consequently, the Kurds and the Shias, the two most powerful communities in the new Iraqi government, still feel victimized by Sunni aggression. It is unclear to what extent they may utilize this perception of victimization to justify punitive action against Sunnis.

Economically, the Sunnis will have to contend with the reality that the financial prospects in the country are against them because the bulk of the country's oil reserves are in the Shia South or the Kurdish-dominated region of Kirkuk in the North, much less so with the Sunnis.

Militarily, the inequalities are far worse. The Peshmerga (Kurdish militias) forces are estimated to be around 80,000 strong and battle-hardened after a decade of resisting the Saddam regime. By contrast, the US-trained forces in Iraq are newly trained and of questionable reliability. Most of these troops are trained for policing action with only few able to perform conventional military operations. The entire force is also expected to undergo significant restructuring under the new assembly government with the removal of former Baathists and Sunnis currently serving in senior officer positions.

Given these factors, the Kurds have political levers to push for the acceptance of semi or full autonomy and will likely be able to extend that autonomy to the disputed region of Kirkuk as well. Shia efforts to oppose these moves could lead Iraq to civil war.

The Shias and Kurds have some common ground. They both were betrayed by the White House and both have track records of coordinating and cooperating with Iran. The problem is a fundamental disagreement between leading Shias and Kurds on core political issues: Kurdish authority over the Peshmerga, the extent of Kurdish control over Kirkuk, and the role that Islam will play in Iraqi law formation.

In order to ease the resolution of these issues, the United States must undertake actionable measures to improve local economic and political inequalities that will be financially costly. The high financial costs that Washington must expend will be more palatable than the long term threat of ethnic and religious violence that can be avoided in the future.

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* Eric Hilmo has a Masters in security studies from Georgetown University. Samuel Blatteis is a Fulbright recipient to the Persian Gulf, 2005-2006. Acknowledgement to United Press International.
Source: Middle East Times, July 19, 2005.
Visit Middle East Times, www.metimes.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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ARTICLE 4
Lessons from a journey across the Arab world
Rami G. Khouri

In the last seven weeks I have had the opportunity to make working visits to seven Arab countries and to engage in political and other discussions with local officials, academics, journalists and opposition activists. The experience has been instructive, and simultaneously
heartening and depressing, suggesting obvious opportunities and dangers in the dual quest to respond to the rights of Arab citizens and defeat the global terror plague.

Based on my visits and discussions in Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Morocco, along with meetings with colleagues from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Kuwait, I sense a common mood across the Arab world: the prevailing status quo is neither satisfying to the majority of citizens, nor sustainable for the rulers in its current state; but neither is it on the verge of revolutionary or violent change.

The obvious overarching trend throughout the Arab world is that of citizenries and ruling elites that are both worried by the status quo, but unsure of how to change it. In every Arab society, demons from the past - a harrowing litany of excesses and errors - now haunt the rulers and the ruled alike: Tens of millions of educated but underemployed, unemployed, restive and frustrated young men and women have given unnatural birth to thousands of active terrorists and anarchists, targeting our own and foreign lands. A deep distortion of traditional Islamic and Arab values is manifested in a desperate, violent, criminal search for revenge against the domestic and foreign forces that have degraded the last three generations of Arabs. Urban environments are exploding in uncontrollable spontaneous growth, with increasingly negative impacts on water, arable land and other vital natural resource bases. Drug- and corruption-based criminality is our new pan-Arab growth industry, expanding on a regional and global scale. Tens of millions of armed men and women in official military, police and
security establishments have brought neither palatable security nor even the more modest goal of honorable national self-respect to the Arab region as a whole. Some desperate lands in our midst are ruled like private fiefs by thugs, killers, former cops and men of very limited abilities, in some absurd cases men who have remained in power for three or four decades without interruption - and in all cases without any formal, credible ratification by their own citizens.

Everywhere in the Arab world the calm on the surface is tenuous and vulnerable. Pressures for change emanate from within the Arab countries, and equally from external pressures. This is driven by economic stress and a deeper sense of the average citizen's indignity at living in societies where power is neither accountable nor contestable, and where citizen rights are neither codified nor respected.

But these are visceral not constitutional societies, and verbal not digital or parliamentary societies. Body language rules here more than the eloquence or principles of national founding fathers. So do not look for signs of stress or change in polling data, legislative votes or political party activity. Those superficial imports from retreating colonial European powers three generations ago have little anchorage or meaning in most Arab societies. Here, power relationships are negotiated over coffee, meals, chance encounters and leisurely chats - and they are constantly, perpetually renegotiated and reaffirmed, day after day, year after year, generation after generation.

This is what is going on now in every Arab country. Arab rulers and ruled alike fervently but quietly search for the mechanisms of orderly change, aware that the traditional social contract and power equation that have defined this region since the 1920s are on their last legs. The common phenomenon I have witnessed around the Arab world is that growing majorities of ordinary citizens seek peaceful but effective ways to challenge, and change, state structures and the use of power - because these state structures mostly do not offer their people sustainable security, expressions of their real identity, freedom of choice and speech, relevant education, or minimally attractive job prospects.

A very small minority of violent Arab men and women have turned to terror as an instrument that expresses their demented frustrations and desperation; more significantly, the vast mass of Arabs has learned the lessons of the mistakes of the secular and religious political movements that challenged the modern Arab security state using violent means starting in the late 1970. Citizens throughout this region now challenge their ruling elites and foreign interference more peacefully, but also more directly and vocally.

They demand more equitable treatment by their own ruling authorities, less corruption and abuse of power, and a more clear sense of equal opportunities for all citizens, rather than privileged access to power and wealth by a small, often family-, tribe-, ethnic-, or sect-based elite that often includes a criminalized component.

Citizens nonviolently but explicitly challenge the legitimacy of their rulers in some cases, and the conduct of their own security services in others. The first wave of responses from the befuddled Arab security state - a thin sliver of reforms dressed up in limited media liberalization - has been unconvincing to savvy Arab citizenries that expect a much more significant acknowledgement of their humanity, and of their human and civil rights.

The opportunity and the danger for the Arab world both seem rather clear.

The opportunity is to engage and empower the vast majority of Arab citizens who actively and peacefully seek a better, more humane and accountable, political order, through orderly and incremental change. Several hundred million upright, wholesome, ordinary men and women throughout the Arab world cry out for decency in their political order, inspired by the deep righteousness of their faiths and the strong moral values of their cultural and national traditions.

The parallel danger is that Arab and foreign officials will allow themselves to be so mesmerized and distracted by the criminal antics of a few terrorists out there that we end up perpetuating the four basic mistakes that have plagued Arab, American, British and other anti-terror policies in recent years: misdiagnosing the root causes of terror; exaggerating the religious and minimizing the political dimensions of terror; and responding mainly with heavy-handed political and military policies that, astoundingly, only fuel the criminal hormones of the terrorists themselves and also further alienate the hundreds of millions of already fearful ordinary Arabs whose demand to live as dignified, respected citizens of humane and responsive modern states is, in the end, the only sure way to defeat terrorism.

This is the simple but profound lesson that I have learned in my travels and conversations across the Arab world in the past seven weeks. If you seek stability and an end to terror, mobilize the Arab masses through democratic transformations that respect their rights as citizens, rather than alienate them through American, British and other military fantasies in foreign lands that only degrade the Arab people's already thin sense of self-respect in the face of their own bitter modern legacy of homegrown autocrats and Western armies.

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* Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for The Daily Star
Source: The Daily Star, July 20, 2005.
Visit the Daily Star, www.dailystar.com.lb
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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ARTICLE 5
International Terror: Why?
The Rev'd Canon Andrew White

The 7th July will remain in our minds for many years as the day that international terror came to London. British Muslim suicide bombers targeting the heart of London. I first learned of the incident when I was phoned from Gaza by two former Hamas leaders. They, having now taken the difficult road to peace (people can change), were terrified that one of their partners in peace may have been caught up in such terrorist activity at home. Yet almost daily in Iraq I view the clouds of ascending black smoke as the latest suicide bomber commits his final act of violence. In Baghdad and the rest of Iraq this is a daily occurrence. In the last few days alone there have been over thirty-five suicide bombers and nearly 300 people killed by them, since the war ended over 25,000 people have been killed. It was only a matter of months ago that I witnessed the regular bombing of Israel and, as if to remind us of the continuing terror there, another suicide bomber exploded himself last week in the Northern Israeli city of Netanya. This time five people were killed.

Such devastation in a region holy to all three monotheistic faiths. Yet there have been constant pronouncements that what happens in this area has nothing to do with the atrocity on the streets of London. Sadly this is not the truth and to deny the linkage is to prevent the possibility of dealing with this highly complex issue. It is fine to identify the fact that the atrocities of 9/11 happened before the war on Iraq but even before the war the effects of sanctions on Iraq were a major issue to much of the Islamic community. Even our own Prime Minister, speaking to the House of Commons on 13th February 2003, stated that the people of Iraq had suffered enough as a result of sanctions and the previous regime.

Those who deny the linkage have clearly not spoken with the terrorists themselves. Sadly too often I have. I have met them in Israel/Palestine, Iraq and even London. They were all young men, all Muslims and all of them were certain that the "immoral West" was waging a war on the "Islamic East". When asked why, the answer was always the same; it was the atrocities that the Palestinians and Iraqis were suffering, a few mentioned Afghanistan and Chechnya. These atrocities were always seen as being caused by the West and Western imperialism. This imperialism was signified by the attitude of the USA and the UK. The UK was seen as simply being the "lap dog of America" and as such complicit in most of its decisions. Often the further one moves from the region the greater the blame against the US and UK. Within Palestine the attitude is often different. Amongst the Hamas and Islamic Jihad their problem is purely with Israel thus that is who they target in their attacks.

In Iraq the situation is very different, there the target is the "occupying Multi National Forces" and those who are seen as collaborating with them. Who are the supposed collaborators? They are the normal Iraqi people in search of stability and work. It is these people who join the police or new Iraqi army; it is these people who daily are killed as they stand in line for selection. Another group of supposed collaborators are those involved in the Government of the emerging nation. This includes not just the Government ministers and the Transitional National Assembly (including Sunni members) but also those who work for them. The final group targeted is the Shia majority; they are seen as being complicit in supporting the takeover of the nation and the following oppression of the Sunni minority. In essence the so called war on terrorism is being fought right in the heart of the Middle East. In Iraq, the cradle of civilization has become the cradle of terrorism. Here dozens are killed each day by the now all familiar suicide bombers. Here young disillusioned men are drawn, to vent their anger and be trained in a most terrible and absolute manner. Here they are learning not just how to kill others but also themselves. Here they are entreated to make the final sacrifice.

So what can be done to confront this war we are facing?

- We must not give in
- We must not think that only the moderate Muslims can win this war, they are the majority but are not the problem.
- We need to realize that the two issues of Iraq and Palestine are paramount in the minds of young potential suicide bombers. All effort must be made to resolve these issues.
- We need to engage not just with the nice people but also the radicals who have the respect of the instigators of terrorism.
- The Islamic leaders from the Middle East need to be involved in the education of young Muslims in the West and engage with Western Governments.
- We need to establish relationships with these people so that they will be a positive influence for peace amongst young Muslims.
- For this to happen we need to listen to the leaders respected by the terrorists. The majority moderate Islamic leaders need to listen to the demands of the young in their communities, and have a proper channel to the government to allow these voices to be heard.

Only if all of these issues are taken seriously is there a chance of us winning this battle against an abstract noun called terrorism.

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* The Rev'd Canon Andrew White is CEO of the Foundation for Reconciliation in the Middle East & Anglican Priest in Iraq.
Source: Canon Andrew White's Email Update, July 20, 2005
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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Posted by Evelin at July 27, 2005 01:01 AM