The West’s Foreign Policy is not the Root of Terrorism

Take away foreign policy and terrorists would still hate our freedom, democracy, rule of law, gender equality and religious pluralism.

The brutal images coming from Woolwich could not have been more surreal. A man with bloodied hands holds a knife and explains he has just hacked a British soldier to death on the streets of London in broad daylight. His declaration of war reads as follows: “the only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers.  An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

Once again, terrorists justified their acts of barbarism under the false premise of challenging the West’s amoral and unethical foreign policy. And yet again too many in the West too readily bought into their narrative.

Michael Moore sarcastically tweeted: “I am outraged that we can’t kill people in other counties without them trying to kill us!” “Those who have sent British troops to wage war in the Arab and Muslim world for more than a decade must share culpability”, ranted Seamus Milne and Glenn Greenwald concluded that “the proximate cause of these attacks are plainly political grievances”. Following their analysis, one could get the impression that Lee Rigby was the perpetrator and not the victim.

The claim that our foreign policy is the root cause or catalyst for terrorism, however, is a logical fallacy and a distortion of the political reality. It must be wholeheartedly and categorically rejected.

Put them to the test and you will find the terrorists’s teaching to be misleading and fraudulent.

Firstly, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were a response, not an initiating provocation to an unprecedented slaughter of civilians on American soil. Despite hundreds of terrorists attacks predated both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. For example, the first World Trade Center bombing, which killed six and injured over 1000 people, was carried out by a coalition of radical Islamist groups in 1993. And ask yourself how wars fought by American and British soldiers justify atrocities in the name of radical Islam in Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, Indonesia or Somalia.

Secondly, terrorists decry neo-imperial aggression and criminal foreign occupations in Muslim countries, yet fight as religious mercenaries all over the world. The Woolwich killers are of Nigerian background. Notwithstanding, one of the men was picked up by police last year on his way to join al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab fighters in Somalia. Take the Syrian civil war as another example. Right now, over 4,000 Hezbollah militants are fighting on behalf of Assad but, apparently, that is not a foreign occupation in the book of jihadists.

Thirdly, radical Islamists ignore the fact that the US-led coalition saved hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Christian Serbs in the Balkan. One reason, of course, is that it does not fit their agenda and directly contradict their propaganda. Even more so, by and large, radical Islamists considered Bosnian Muslims to be too secular and too pro-Western. In other words, they deserved to die. A similar fate awaits Muslims every day across the Middle East if they happen to be of the wrong sect or ethnicity.

None of that can be attributed to the presence of Western troops in Muslim countries.

Our foreign policy should not be restricted by fear of reprisals, nor should we submit our national interests to an ideology of clerical fascism.  Radical Islamists exhibit an undisguised hatred and contempt for life. They hate us not only because of what we do but because of who we are. Take away foreign policy and terrorists would still hate our freedom, democracy, rule of law, gender equality and religious pluralism.

To claim otherwise negates the Taliban’s annihilation of culture, the Wahhabis’ brutal enslavement of women and Iran’s vigilant persecution and killing of homosexuals.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” – Voltaire once said. Terrorist live and breathe absurdities. Let us stop apologising for our own position.

Setting the record straight: The truth behind the “behead Muslim children” tweet

It all began with a tweet I sent on May 22, shortly after the horrendous terrorist attack on soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich.

One reply I got was from tweeter @edininfidel.

Appalled and disgusted by his obnoxious comment, I re-tweeted it to my followers and asked people to report him.

Unfortunately, my tweet was then taken out of context. Suddenly, I got buried under a tidal wave of abuse (some of the “moderate” examples).

This self-made screen-grab was most likely responsible for the confusion.

Countless times I had to explain that the original tweet was sent *to* me, not *by* me. Some people saw the light and deleted their libelous comments. Others, however, have so far failed to do the same. Their false accusations against me are still out there.

I’m not looking for an apology for hurt feelings. But one should think twice before throwing such serious accusations around. Otherwise, people – myself included – will think twice before exposing and reporting similar incidents in the future.

Obama’s “Red Line” in Pictures: Odyssey of Determined Inaction

Boston: Condolences from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan

Terrorism will never triumph.

IRAQ

SYRIA

AFGHANISTAN

Whatever you think of the Iraq War, for the Kurds it was a liberation

Talk of ‘invasion’ and ‘occupation’ ignores the effect on a long-suffering minority

When I walked towards the memorial in Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan a fortnight ago to attend the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the genocide, I passed by a seemingly endless stream of images. Men. Women. Children. Entire families. All of them victims of Saddam Hussein’s crime regime. The walls inside the monument are engraved with their names – a bridge between the past and the present.

On March 16, 1988, life was forever changed beyond recognition for the people of Kurdistan. In the early hours of Friday evening, a strange smell filled the air over Halabja. It resembled the scent of fresh apples. What actually rained down was a toxic cocktail of mustard gas and nerve agents.

The perfect weapon. The invisible death.

Before they knew the truth, birds were falling from the sky and bodies started piling up in the streets. Some died in their sleep. Others suffocated at work. Still others were found sitting up as if only lost in thought. Some just dropped dead.

Others painfully choked on their own vomit or suffered severe burning and blistering. Children sought the shelter of their mothers’ arms but there was no escape. Two days of conventional artillery attacks had destroyed all sanctuaries. The thanatophoric gas was everywhere, mercilessly and indiscriminately filling the lungs of the infants, young and old.

5000 Iraqi Kurds died within seconds. Thousands more were disfigured. The overwhelming majority of them were civilians. They had attacked no one. Their only “crime” was to be Kurdish.

Halabja became a ghost town and it was as if the human race had been eradicated.

The attack was part of the wider genocidal Al-Anfal campaign, initiated by the Iraqi Ba’athists, which claimed over 182,000 lives. Out of 4,655 villages roughly 90% were destroyed and between April 1987 and August 1988, 250 towns and villages were exposed to chemical weapons. It was the first time a government used such weapons against its own civilian population.

Saddam Hussein was a modern-day Hitler. When I visited one of his concentration camps, the Red House in Sulaymaniyah, it starkly reminded me of Auschwitz. Women were gang-raped for hours in what the prison guards called “party rooms”; men faced mutilation and death in the most barbaric fashion in the notorious torture chambers; foetuses and babies were burnt in incinerators.

The Kurds have experienced their own Holocaust. The crusade against them was not simply a by-product of the Iraq-Iran war but a deliberate act of genocide – the crime of all crimes – the aim to annihilate an entire people.

25 years later, the people of Kurdistan are struggling with their bloody past. It will always be a scar on the soul of the Kurdish nation and will forever be embedded in their collective identity. But there is reason for hope. Their hearts have not been consumed by darkness. While they are still grieving and hurting, they have little appetite for vengeance. The Kurds have learnt an essential lesson: hatred only leads to more suffering and death.

Such spirit was reflected in the motto of the anniversary celebrations – “From Denial To Recognition. From Destruction To Construction. From Tears To Hope”. Kurdistan is now the most prosperous and democratic part of Iraq. As British-Kurdish Member of Parliament Nadhim Zahawi – a speaker at the genocide conference in Erbil – pointed out, Kurdistan has become one of the safest places for Christians in the Middle East. Business is booming. New houses are being built on every corner. The peace is fragile, life is not perfect, but when you talk to ordinary people you realise just how far the region has come.

Whatever you may think of the controversial war in 2003, for the Kurds it came as liberation rather than an invasion or occupation. The vast majority hold no animosity towards America or Britain. In fact, they are grateful for the roles we played in the removal of Saddam Hussein.

To say that he possessed no WMDs is not a popular thing to say with people still suffering from the consequences of the very same weapons; and the argument, made by some of the opponents of the war, that the Ba’athist regime someone provided stability and contained Iran is perceived as a hideous excuse and apology for genocide and ethnic-cleansing.

Ten years later, the opinion of Iraqis is virtually absent from the debate in the West. If we ever want to gain a balanced and nuanced view of the complexities of the lead-up to the war, it is time to give the victims of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror the attention they deserve.

Post was published in The Independent.