Ending Religious Terror and Sustaining Peace by CF

     I woke up late on Tuesday morning, September 11th 2001. So late in fact that I decided not to go to class that day. So instead I turned on the morning news and began to make my breakfast. I never finished it. Instead I stood in awe as I watched a live feed of one of the burning twin towers in New York. My first thought was that there had been a terrible fire, but then my awe turned to horror as I watched a commercial plane fly straight into the other tower and explode. What had the world come to was my only thought for the next 16 hours. That has been the thought on most Americans minds since the terror attacks of September 11th. Since the fall of the Soviet Union religious terrorism has been the greatest threat to not only our national security, but to world stability at large. Fear and violence have threatened every nation of the world and has come from every great religion; not only Islam, but Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and even a new and extreme form of Buddhism. In the “Post 9/11 world” our government has mad it their sole goal to eradicate and protect the United States from religious extremists who would threaten our interests both foreign and domestic. But, is a “War on Terror” really the way to go about it, is religion really the problem, and should religion be the main focus of our government’s efforts in wiping out global terror? These are very difficult questions to answer, and there may net even be a complete answer. The current administration seems to think this is the best course of action, but I feel very differently. The only way to truly rid the world of religious terror is through international cooperation, teaching of global tolerance and relying on the worlds religions to help teach their parishioners that violence in the name of religion is a deplorable act.
Just a few weeks after the September 11th attacks the United States had officially declared war on Terror. Such s declaration sounded very good, and let the American people know that our government and our President were not going to stand for global religious terror any longer. Unfortunately the only way our government knew how to physically go about this was by declaring war on an actually nation, which at first was Afghanistan. This worked in practice and, according to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on The United States, was the best way to attack and pursue the al Qaeda and punish the government that harbored and supported the terrorists. Military action against terrorist harboring nations is an active way to begin a war on terror, but it should not be relied upon as the only way to fight terrorism. Religious terrorism does not conform to conventional warfare. It does not stay behind any one boundary or with in any one country. The use of massive armies and expeditionary forces no longer works in the twenty first century. In fact, rolling a battalion of tanks and a full regiment of infantry into a capital city will only further infuriate terrorist organizations and breed insurgents. Terrorist organizations recruit in every country and rely on taking fairly educated lower middle class youth from poor nations and teaching them about the evils of the western world. Even the best military intelligence cannot counter this. To truly declare war on terror our government must link and communicate with small international military strike forces, the countries security and intelligence agencies (the CIA and NSA), and law enforcement agencies not only here in the US but also in other countries, like Interpol.
     The use of force is only one aspect of a war on terror. Terrorism is an idea, a taught philosophy that instructs young impressionable men and women that it is ok to forfeit their lives for an ideal that deliberately causes death, pain and suffering to millions of people. The only way to counter such ideologies is through change. As a country we must first analyze why some people in these nations hate and fear us. Is it simply a feeling of emasculation felt by males in the developing world as one writer has posed it, or does the western world have to reevaluate the way it does business with the developing world? This can be done with the aid of the United Nations and other NGO’s through out the world. Fighting violence with violence will only cause more hatred. As Gandhi said, “does not an eye for an eye make the world blind?” The nations of the world must also work to educate their own citizens and not to frighten them into anti-terrorist rhetoric. This nation has used scare tactics to try and frighten its citizens into wanting to further the out dated methods of fighting a war on terror. Rather than using a color coded terror alert system, our Department of Homeland Security, and the similar departments and ministries in other nations should only put alerts out when credible intelligence has been analyzed and acted upon to prevent a terrorist act. Scaring the general public will do nothing more than cause panic.
     Now to the question of religion, does religion breed such violence in thought and deed, or is religion the victim in all this? According to our government, Islam is not the cause of terrorism and no one should blame the Muslim people as a whole for the acts of a few extremists. Our government has come to the conclusion, however, that Islamic extremism and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda pose a clear and present danger to our national security. They ignore the fact that the most numerous of the recent acts of terrorism in the United States has come from Christian fundamentalists living in the country. Terrorists like Timothy McVeigh used books like The Turner Diaries to attempt to rally white Christian Protestants in the US to rebel against the nation in some sort of race war. There are also groups in Asia, such as the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Buddhism in Japan who teach apocalyptic rhetoric to their followers with the aid of hallucinogens. They were the terrorists responsible for releasing serine gas in a Tokyo subway in the mid 1990’s. Religious terrorism is a global problem and needs to be looked at, by each nation, on a global level. Religion influences billions of people around the world because of its claim of providing a viable answer to the great questions of life. It forms the structures of morality and ethics that many countries are governed by. It is an extremely powerful tool that has been used to both better and degrade humanity. I still genuinely believe that the basic teachings of the world’s major religions are good and morally just. It is up to the religious leaders of the world to help in the teaching of global tolerance to maintain any peace that could be established once the hearts and minds of those prone to terrorist errors of thinking have been won.
     The post 9/11 world is a truly scary place, but it doesn’t have to be. If we apprehend the terrorists where they are, prevent the spread of terrorist ideals, Use the United Nations to amend our ways of dealing with developing nations and have the world’s religious leaders try to help teach tolerance to the believers all over the world. It’s not a short order and an extremely hard goal to accomplish, but not an impossible one. All it would take is for the leaders of the world to step back and reevaluate the way they have been doing things for the past 60 years. Hopefully, if things progress in the fashion I have just described, no one else will have to wake up to planes crashing into tall buildings, or worse.