by Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi

The history of terrorism and its essence can be encapsulated in a single sentence.  Terrorism has always been the barbaric ideology of tiny psychopathic minorities possessed by xenophobic hatred toward any concept of normalcy and peace.  Accordingly, the more a terrorist movement has degenerated into irrationally destructive violence, the less relevant it has become for any future development. Correspondingly, terrorists who have been characterized throughout history by their  death-defying courage to an exclusively held idea or illusion, have been proven to be hapless in solving problems against which they rose and also against those which they have created.  The necessarily ensuing multiple crises have been impossible to be solved by tyrannical means.  Thus, terrorism and its standard bearers, as a rule, have always lost any right to political as well as democratic legitimacy.  The propagation of the false claims about the innocence of the instigator terrorists and the equally untrue accusations of the guilt of the victims by all useful idiots, have only encouraged the former to increase their violent destruction. Equally, presenting the aggressors as victims must remind everybody of President Lincoln’s famous definition of a hypocrite:  The man who murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy on the ground that he was an orphan.   

The barbaric attack on the State of Israel by Hamas, the Gaza based terrorist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, on October 7, 2023, has not been merely a new episode in the centuries-old saga of “cycle of violence” between Jews and Arabs.  On the contrary, it has been a politically tainted pseudo-Islamic  element  introduced in 1979 by the then leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Mostafavi Khomeini, with the objective of exploiting the anti-Judaism sentiments of the Arab masses to bring about the Shi’a destruction of the Sunni domination in the World of Islam.  While preaching the eternal desire to exterminate all Jews like Adolf Hitler and his pawn in the Middle East, the Mufti of Jerusalem under the British Mandate Haj Amin al-Husseini did, Iran facilitated the occupation of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by the Juhayman terrorists on November 20, 1979 until December 4, 1979.  The siege only ended when all the terrorists were physically annihilated.  

In this sense, blaming Israel as an “occupier,” or as an “apartheid state,” or in a more “sophisticated” manner by allocating blame to “both sides” as even Pope Francis has done, does not do justice to a thus far insoluble regional  as well as future global catastrophes.  Denying that the terroristic Islamism of the present is one of the most destructive ideologies in world history, or attempting to defend it as a just response to its alleged oppression, is nothing but the hypocritical legitimization of uncivilized barbarism.  Unequivocally, Islamic terrorism represents a culture of blind hatred and ruthless destruction.  There is nothing positive, nothing constructive, nothing creative, nothing humanistic, or nothing even remotely resembling faith-based morality in the terrorism practiced by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hetzbollah, ISIS, or any other like minded group.  Clearly, people are massacred simply for what they are.  Twisting oneself into knots by trying to prove the opposite, as politicians, academics, journalists and influencers of all ethnicity and religion do, could not transform evil into noble kindness.

In Israel as well as in the countries where Islam is the dominant religion, the never ending internal and external searches for past, present and future identities have been materialized in different narratives generally directed against individuals or groups of people, or actions and reactions by politicians or governments.  Predictably, these searches have led to more and deeper divisions between secular and religious as well as politically conservative and liberal groups.  Again, not surprisingly, these divisions have first mired both worlds in passionate political crises and then have pushed them down the abyss of deep existential crises.  Exacerbating all these crises, Russia’s and the People’s Republic of China’s joint quest to challenge the United States of America’s and its allies’ global dominance has been forcing more and more vulnerable regional governments and beyond to give in to the pressures of these two tyrannical powers.  The former’s disregard for the constraints on their strategic and tactical powers, combined with Iran’s ambition to dominate the greater Middle East, have spread to the destructive empowerment of tyrannical and corrupt regimes.  In today’s misinformation and disinformation age and in societies where independent thinking is either nonexistent or weak, people with sheep-like mentality will only strengthen the nefarious powers of the totalitarian minority.  The imbecile reactions throughout the Muslim world of the hospital hoax perpetrated by the authorities in Gaza are the best manifestations of the gullibility of the uneducated masses. 

The inescapable conclusion of all this is that strategies full of ambivalence, equivocation and contradictions will always surely fail.  What is needed is a clear understanding of the very essence of the Jewish-Arab conundrum.  Its reality is that the United States of America and its allies must assist individuals to be empowered to make independent decisions and not shower money on the governments and a variety of groups with questionable identity that make every effort to prevent the education of and the free flow of unbiased information to their citizens.  Only when education could be extended to all people from kindergarten to universities would the Middle East and beyond become the global domain of intellectual freedom.  By striving to that end, this long suffering region could become the new engine of universal peaceful progress.