The Root Causes of Islamic Terrorism
Causes are sometimes easy to understand but difficult to resolve. We ask ourselves and political leaders many questions including, what is terrorism? What are the determinants behind their attacks? “Terrorism is an outrageous attack carried out either by individuals, groups or states against a human being’s religious life, intellect, property, and honor. It includes all forms of intimidation, harm, threatening, killing without just cause and everything connected with any form of armed robbery, hence marking pathways insecure, banditry, every act of violence or threatening intended to fulfill a criminal scheme individually or collectively, so as to terrify and horrify people by hurting them or by exposing their lives, liberty, security or conditions to danger; it can also take the form of inflicting damage on the environment or on a public or private utility or exposing a national or natural resource to danger.” The definition, mentioned by the Muslim World League Journal, sounds pretty similar to the most recent attack on the U.S. . On the day of 9/11, Al-Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist organization, hijacked four planes. They succeeded in their mission, putting America in fear and panic, after crashing two planes into the world trade center, one into the Pentagon, and one into a field in rural Pennsylvania. There were no survivors from any of the flights and many more perished after the infrastructures destruction from the crashes. Unfortunately, as Americans, the first idea that comes to mind, and we did, is to wage war against the state that attacked. Although there are many pros and cons to the war in Iraq and sending troops to the Middle East, but what if our government took a different approach? What if they took the time to investigate the origin and root causes of their attack? Our government took little time and lesser thought to do so and in order to reach the root causes of Islamic terrorism; we must rely on history and current