Sunday, January 03, 2010
We must stop the islamists of indoctrinate youth, by Francis Chartrand
Karl von Clausewitz, one of the major theorists of war wrote: "The purpose of all war must be to establish a better situation before the outbreak of hostilities." After a decade of struggle against international terrorism, how can we know if the situation improved?
We could take to measure the frequency of terrorist attacks. Since early 2009, more than 7,500 people were killed in bombings 5.000 on 4 continents. It is much better than last year where over 15,000 people have died in more than 11,000 attacks. Osama bin Laden and his organization al-Qaeda have been unable to organize attacks comparable in importance to those of 11 September against the towers of the World Trade Center. And they have not managed to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. Can we conclude that terrorism has become a less urgent threat and that the situation has improved since hostilities began? The public in Australia think it. A survey of Autralian Strategic Policy Institute conducted last year showed that terrorism had fallen to 13th among the 14 major concerns in the 2007 elections. Two thirds of Australians believe that the terrorist threat is part of everyday life. Climate change is regarded as the new terrorism.
But when asked if the Australian government did everything it could to prevent a terrorist attack, the voter response was unequivocal. Only 50% thought the government controlled the situation. Although nearly 10 billion dollars have been spent since 2001 to improve security measures, 41% of voters said that the government could do better. Because there has been no serious attacks in Australia since the explosion of a bomb at the Sydney Hotel in 1978, some believe that the threat is so low that it could now spend less money national security.
Resources are limited and as there are many other concerns such as cyber crime or organized, it begins to say it would be better to give less importance to the terrorist threat. This is not what I think. The real danger is complacency about the nature and extent of threat nourished by religious ideology.
As stated recently Peter Clark of the British police: "The terrorist threat is of such magnitude and so intractable that we should not just be content to chase those planning attacks. We must find a way to attack the ideas that motivate them to do so."
The number of terrorists in the world may be decreased, but the ideology that fuels international terrorism continues to seduce the minds of Somalia to the southern Philippines. And children are increasingly the target of this ideological indoctrination. In Indonesia, the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir is particularly interested in schools, providing books for teens that encourages them to overthrow the secular democracy and replace it with Islamic law (Sharia) and a caliphate.
While such organizations are careful not to openly promote violence, the link between propaganda, radicalization of minds and terrorism is well established.
And the Internet helps to spread the message of extremists. Hizb ut-Tahrir has launched a website that competes with major international channels of information. Teenagers are the largest users of the Internet and social networking sites provide interactive terrorist groups new opportunities for recruitment and radicalization of minds.
Not surprisingly, a Somali terrorist organization is called al-Shabaad (Youth)
To achieve their goals, the ideologues are constantly finding new recruits. So they're training a new generation of terrorists, the international community seems unable to respond in a coherent and strategic.
Until now, the war against terrorism has been shared between 95% of military intervention and 5% of anti-ideological. This must change, because it is winning the ideological war that we may determine whether we succeeded or failed to stop this wave of religious terrorism.
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Labels: Australia, Francis Chartrand, Islam, Religion and fanaticism, Somalia, Sudan
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 7:12 PM 
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