GENESIS OF TERRORISM

Genesis

Genesis of Terrorism

Introduction

The turn to religion as the main ideological support basis for terrorism since the 1980s did not take place in a vacuum. It has been motivated by a number of factors, among them lack of progress with regard to the widening gap between the West and the rest of the world and the inability of secular organizations to resolve core communal problems, as well as larger issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the overall breakdown of secular ideologies such as Marxism and purely secular nationalism. One of the most important events in this regard has been the Iranian Revolution in 1979, in the sense that it provided evidence of the feasibility of establishing an Islamic state, and also served as a strong support base for violent Shi'a groups such as Amal and Hezbollah in Lebanon or ad-Dawa in Iraq.

Discussion and Analysis

Another pivotal event in the same year was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the resistance to which quickly became the unifying issue for the mujahidin from all over the world. This was important in providing personal contacts and battleground experience for many radicals, and, even more important, the addictive taste of victory. These elements would later form the foundation for the phenomenon we now know as al-Qa'ida. But radical Islam was certainly not the only religion that became used as a terrorist ideology during the early 1980s.

Christianity was represented by the rise of the Christian Identity and anti-abortion movements in the USA, represented by groups such as the Order, the Covenant, the Sword and Arm of the Lord, Aryan Nations and the Army of God; just as radical Judaism became the main ideological foundation for the Gush Emunim terrorist campaign in Israel. Similarly, the Sikh campaign represented by groups such as Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), Dal Khalsa or the Khalistan Commando Force in India became increasingly religious, following 'Operation Blue Star' in which Indian troops violently raided the holiest Sikh temple in Amritsar. The Palestinian and Kashmiri conflicts have also continually transformed from primarily nationalist to dominantly religious ones from about the end of the 1980s, and the same trajectory could be observed during the 1990s in other conflicts, in, for example, the Balkans or the Caucasus. In the 1990s new-age cults, based on eclectic religious ideologies, also arose, such as the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo, whose apocalyptic mix of prophetic cultic practices derived from a wide array of writings, such as those of Nostradamus, the Book of Revelation in the Bible and imagery from Hindu and Buddhist texts, as well as science fiction elements from the novels written in the 1940s by Isaac Asimov. Other influences were an element of Japanese nationalism, anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiments, the Hindu God Siva, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, Jesus, nuclear holocaust and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. As we can see from these examples, no major religion has been excluded from being exploited as a divine justification for terrorist ...