Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, pages 16-17

Two Views

The Bombings in Spain: Implications for Islam and the West

Islam vs. al-Qaeda

By John Gee

Spanish girls pay tribute to the victims of the blasts at Calle Tellez near Madrid’s Atocha train station March 14, three days after some 200 people were killed in a series of explosions (AFP photo Javier Soriano).

IT NOW APPEARS certain that the atrocious terrorist bombings in Madrid were the doing of an affiliate of al-Qaeda. The attack was supposedly carried out in response to Spain’s support for the U.S./UK invasion of Iraq last year, but most Spanish people opposed their government’s policy on this issue. In its public statements, al-Qaeda proclaims its supposed sympathy for the Palestinians, but the attitude taken by successive Spanish governments since the restoration of democracy and by most Spanish people toward the Palestinians has been friendly and supportive. In the last 20 years or so, public interest in the nearly 800 years when much of Spain was under Muslim rule has blossomed: positive appreciation of the achievements of that era extends far beyond the academic world and has even been encouraged by the royal family. The killing of innocent civilians would not have been justified in any case, but seems doubly perverse in this instance. It is in keeping with the mentality al-Qaeda has revealed in the past.

The organization first sprang into the international spotlight just over five years ago with its bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. These were conceived as attacks upon the U.S. and are now chiefly remembered as one link in a chain of actions and reactions in a war that has pitted the sole superpower against Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist network. They meant something else to people in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998, however. Of the 220 people killed that day, the vast majority were locals just attempting to get on with their normal lives.

Al-Qaeda’s planners could not have failed to realize that people who had nothing whatsoever to do with U.S. policies toward the Middle East would be killed in the embassy attacks, but they went ahead and expressed no remorse afterward. The rest of the world showed little more than passing interest in the victims’ fate, beyond the initial media coverage: its attention span would probably have been longer if most of them had not been poor and black. Almost immediately, they became statistics instead of individuals with lives they valued and families who valued them.

The 1998 embassy bombings and their aftermath revealed the rottenness at the core of al-Qaeda’s outlook. Its willingness to kill hundreds of innocent people in pursuit of its goals invalidates any claim to be fighting for a just cause. This is why it deserves universal rejection. Such attacks are contrary to humane principles enshrined in all major religions and belief systems, including the very one that al-Qaeda claims to uphold.

Islam does not legitimize wars of aggression by Muslims. Sura 2 of the Qur’an includes the statement that “God has no love for those who embark upon aggression,” but advises Muslims to respond to aggression against them “in the same measure” against those who commit it. Self-defense is a duty, but there is a clear injunction that it must be proportionate.

Al-Qaeda appears to acknowledge this by presenting itself as a defender of Muslims against “the Jews and the Crusaders,” but when it carries out attacks on targets far from the areas where Muslims are facing war and oppression, against people who do not have a direct hand in their sufferings, how can this still be justified as defensive?

A second challenge can be made upon the basis of the principles of Islamic law. Al-Qaeda affiliates call for its enforcement throughout the Muslim world, but appear to be selective in accepting it themselves. Islamic law makes a clear distinction between the guilty and the innocent. It makes individuals responsible for their own conduct: a thief or a murderer is personally responsible for what he has done—not his family or his community. In this, Islamic law is distinguished from the tribal customs that prevailed in Arabia before Islam, and which still exercise an influence today. It follows that, while individuals engaged in making war upon Muslims and those sending them to war may be regarded as justified targets, anyone else is not—including people who share their nationality or religious faith. This attitude was reflected in the conduct of the armies that carried out the early Islamic conquests: they fought against soldiers and were under instructions not to kill women, children, elderly people or other non-combatants.

In the present day, this means that there is no justification in Islam for attacks such as that on the New York World Trade Center or for the bombs in Tanzania, Kenya, Turkey or Spain.

A Moment to Pause and Reflect

By John V. Whitbeck

The gruesome train bombings in Madrid and the stunning regime change which followed should be seized upon to rethink whether the “war on terrorism,” as conceived and conducted since Sept. 11, 2001, is really the most effective way to deal with a problem that shows no signs of going away.

If a patient is ill, a doctor who misdiagnoses the source and nature of the illness and prescribes a course of treatment for a different disease risks killing the patient. After two and a half years of a “war on terrorism” which is widely perceived in the Middle East as an expansion of a long-running Western war against Muslims—or, worse, as a Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam—it is worth reconsidering whether the initial diagnosis and the subsequent treatment are more likely to kill the patient than to save him.

Americans are notoriously ignorant of, and uninterested in, history—even very recent history. Only in America could President George W. Bush say, after the conquest of Iraq and more than once, that he invaded Iraq because it would not let U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country and not trigger any serious questions regarding his fitness for office, even from his political opponents.

Accordingly, Americans have tended to view the Sept. 11 attacks as a bolt from the blue, inexplicable, based on pure malevolence and carried out by people willing to sacrifice their lives out of an incomprehensible, irrational and incurable fanaticism unconnected to any concrete grievances or goals. Few Americans have dared to suggest that, however awful the attacks were, they might have constituted a response or a reaction to policies which the United States (or Israel, widely viewed by Muslims—and, apparently, by most Americans—as indistinguishable from the United States) has pursued in the region.

The immediate American response to such appalling violence was to resort to superior violence, and the continuing American reaction to the fear instilled by the attacks has been to try to instill a still greater fear in potential adversaries. This has proven to be a “bleeding” cure for an anemic patient.

Viewed from the region, Muslims have been subjected to a century of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation at the hands of Christians, Jews and the West. It started toward the end of World War I with the secret Sykes-Picot treaty, by which Britain and France carved up between themselves the most historic and sophisticated portion of the Arabian peninsula, which they had told their Arab allies they were “liberating” from the oppressive Ottomans, and the Balfour Declaration, by which Britain promised to give away Palestine, which did not belong to it. It has continued with the expulsion or flight into exile of most of the Palestinians in 1948, the catastrophic war of June 1967, the fall of Baghdad last spring and numerous other humiliations along the way.

The Muslims possess no “respectable” or “socially acceptable” way to fight back. They cannot invade, rocket or send their air forces to attack Western countries. The only tactic available is “terrorism.” If such “terrorism” were properly understood to be a brutal (but not irrational) reaction to a century of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation, and if the desire of Western politicians really was to diminish “terrorist” threats to the West—rather than simply to sustain and exploit them for personal political advantage or to faciliate the implementation of pre-existing agendas—then surely the worst possible approach would be (as it has been) to increase and intensify precisely these sources of frustration and fury through further conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation.

Wise and prudent people seek to assuage, not aggravate, legitimate grievances—and even grievances whose legitimacy they may not accept. The instinctive Israeli and American attitude is that halting or reversing the policies of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation would be to “reward terrorism.” Perhaps. If, however, by assuaging grievances, both injustice and terrorism could be diminished and the worldcould be made more livable and less frightening,would this not be the preferable alternative? In current circumstances, doing the right thing, however belatedly and with whatever motivation, simply makes self-interested sense. The Spanish electorate seems to have grasped this.

In this context, the currently proclaimed American intention, potentially to be supported by the Europeans, to “remake the face of the Middle East”—explicitly to make the region less threatening to America and implicitly to make it less threatening to Israel—promises, if pursued, to be spectacularly counterproductive.

Viewed from the region, particularly by those with access to Western media, it is also easy to get the (not irrational) impression that, in Western eyes, Jewish and Christian lives are of infinite value while Muslim lives are of no value whatsoever. It is worth recalling in this regard that, in December 1996, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright stated publicly that she considered the premature, sanctions-induced deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children, as reported by UNICEF, a “price worth paying” for America’s Iraq policy. This statement provoked no outrage in America. Indeed, a month later, Albright became secretary of state.

Needless to say, the deaths of somewhat fewer than 3,000 Americans were far too high a price to pay for America’s entire Middle East policy—an event which “changed the world forever” and has been used to justify the killing of many more than 3,000 Afghans and many more than 3,000 additional Iraqis, as well as the occupation of two more Muslim countries and the destruction of fundamental rules of international law painfully developed over more than a century. This is not a course of action likely to win hearts and minds.

If the West truly wishes to restrain the violent Muslim reaction to Western behavior, the West must change its behavior. It must take seriously the principle for which the United States once purported to stand—that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights—and start treating Muslims (particularly the long abused Palestinians) like human beings entitled to basic human rights.

The problem of “terrorism” can be viewed as amoral issue—a scourge toward which noeffort at understanding is conceivable and the only possible response is shock, awe and overwhelming force. This approach has been tried for two and a half years. It has failed, and there is no reason to believe that “more of the same” will succeed.

Alternatively, the problem could be viewed as a practical one. What is most likely to “work,” to reduce the violence, which can never be totally extinguished, to tolerable levels? The West could make a serious and sustained effort to reduce the injustices which feed the fury which produces the “terrorism,” starting with the cancerous, 37-year-long occupation of Palestine. This approach has not yet been tried. It should be.

Since Sept. 11, the United States has been dragging the world in precisely the wrong direction, one guaranteed to make an already ugly and dangerous situation even worse. Realistically, particularly in an election year, one cannot expect America to take the lead in changing course. Might Europe, which is both more aware of history and closer to the Middle East, take inspiration from the Spanish elections and lead the world in the right direction?

The world is at a crossroads. This should be a moment to pause, to reflect seriously on the abyss which lies before us and to ask with open minds whether there is not a better way forward.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore, and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel, available from the AET Book Club.

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