West needs to wake up and help Muslims deal with the terror within

BALI had recovered from the earlier attacks. Tourists were coming back in large numbers to enjoy the beauty of the location and the gentleness of its people.

So, this weekend, the suicide bombers walked into three crowded restaurants in Jimbaran and Kuta with bombs strapped to their waists, killing 25 people and injuring thousands.

Victims came from Australia, America, Britain and elsewhere. The objective: to discourage tourism, thereby removing Western influence on Indonesia.

The bombings were attributed to “Muslim extremists”. The acts, and the attribution, underline a chronic misunderstanding in the West, of the threat to world peace presented by radical Islam.

When we talk about terrorism, we talk about al-Qaida. Al-Qaida, commanded out of a tent in Afghanistan by Osama Bin Laden. Sort of like the IRA, pre-decommissioning: a small militant group expressing at its most extreme the aspirations of a wider group of co-religionists. Fish, in Chairman Mao’s aphorism, swimming in a sea of passive acquiescence.

According to Richard Whelan, this way of thinking about the people who perpetrated 9/11, Bali and the London underground bombings not only makes us underestimate the scale and endurance of the threat, but also misdirects efforts to defeat it and leaves Islam itself exposed to an immeasurable threat from within.

Whelan, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, would prefer us to talk and think about al-Qaidists, a “minority within a minority within a minority” not responding to any military or hierarchical central command structure, conjoined only in belief system and ideology, yet, by virtue of the overwhelming nature of their commitment to that mind-set and ideology, by virtue of the creativity and self-sacrifice characterising their methods, and by virtue of the vulnerability of the developed world’s business, transport, social and communications systems, offering a more profound threat to the world than did the Nazis.

To read Whelan’s book Al-Qaedism, the Threat to Islam, the Threat to the World, published this week, is to be brought sharply up against the reality of how much our time-frames have changed. As recently as 50 years ago, race memory in Ireland ran backward through centuries of resentment and resurgence to the day the Normans landed. Today, our mental clocks operate around connection and download times, around the number of seconds it takes to get a response to a text message, and a programme like RTÉ’s Reeling in the Years rivets younger viewers because it seems so quaintly historic, even though it’s dealing with what is still living memory.

Our timelines may have shortened. Not so the timelines of the al-Qaidists.

Talking to me at the weekend, in advance of the publication of his book, Whelan pointed out that the second in command of al-Qaida in 1996 wrote a treatise called The Cure for Believers’ Hearts, in which he claimed that the West has been involved in a conspiracy against Islam for a thousand years and that because the West, during that period, has become so strong and because his people are so weak, al-Qaidists are entitled to use any weapon against anybody at any time.

“He goes on to say that there are no neutral people in this conflict, there are no innocents, no non-combatants,” says Whelan. “And by the way, if al-Qaida happens to kill Muslim men women or children, that’s too bad.”

The millennium-long ‘conspiracy’ of the West (frequently, in al-Qaida communications, lumped together as ‘Crusaders’) provides divine permission, even instruction, for a kind of warfare which is as destructive of co-religionists as it is of the designated enemy - remember the number of Muslims who died in the attacks on the Twin Towers.

“No previous ideology has ever been so total. Even the Nazis accepted neutrality in the Second World War. These people don’t accept that. There ARE no neutrals, there are no non-combatants. That’s what they’re saying.

“And, if you look at their terrorist actions, that’s what they’re doing.”

WHELAN instances the terrorist actions in East Africa in 1998, when two American embassies were attacked, to support his theory that al-Qaida cares not a jot for followers of Islam. In those attacks, 224 people were killed. Twelve were Americans. The rest were local, many, if not most of them Muslims.

Four and a half thousand people were injured. Fifteen were Americans. The rest were locals. Again, many of them were Muslims.

No apology was ever issued, because, according to Whelan, the entitled, particularly those who perceive themselves to be directly mandated by God, do not need to apologise for collateral damage: the end justifies the means.

“What these people want to do is take the entire Muslim community and put it back to the seventh or eighth century and use modern control techniques to do it. It is the ultimate religious totalitarianism.”

This weekend’s revisitation of terror in Bali came as no surprise to Whelan, who would maintain that Ireland never registered the full implications of the first attacks, one of them on an Irish pub.

For starters, the location, in and of itself, undermines the popular Western myth that al-Qaida aim, first and foremost, at Americans. In fact, the targets were chosen - as happened again on Friday - because the locations involved social interaction: the mixing of the sexes over alcohol. Those who died and were injured were tourists: Swedes, Germans, Dutch, as well as Americans.

While the Americans would seem, through their Homeland Security service, to have prevented some planned attacks post 9/11, Whelan points out that any tourist destination is, by its nature, both a target for such attacks and uniquely vulnerable to them.

Tourism is now the world’s largest earner, ahead of oil, chemicals and food. America earns $66.5 billion from tourism every year. Five percent of the British workforce is employed, directly or indirectly, in tourism. Not only does tourism promote everything the Taliban ideology opposes - alcohol, female body display and indiscriminate sexual activity - but it has the extra advantage, from the terrorists’ stance, of delivering the message of terrorism instantly and globally.

Witnesses in the restaurants in Bali filmed the atrocity on their mobile phones and distributed the footage to television stations throughout the world within seconds.

“The West is going to have to deal with the rage leading to the belief system behind these attacks,” says Whelan.

“The West is going to have to create some kind of Marshall Plan to remove the sources of grievance, to deal with the frustrations and the impact of globalisation.

“But beyond that, we have to help Islam succeed. Islam, outside of the religious area, is a relative failure and has been since it started to decline in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The only way we in the West can eventually defeat the bombers is by helping the Muslim community of the world to defeat them themselves.”