Fundamentalism – what does it do?

The September 11 Tragedy: A Strategic Blitz

     The tragic events of September 11, 2001-the hijacking of passenger planes in the United States and attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, in which thousands were killed-shocked the world, especially the United States, as the most destructive terrorist incident in contemporary history

 Even if there are doubts about the identities of the perpetrators of this tragedy, there is no doubt that they all belong to one camp: Islamic fundamentalism. They dare to use the name of God and Islam to step on all values and to cross any lines in order to advance their evil intentions. In his address to the U.S. Congress on Thursday, September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush described the perpetrators as radical Muslims and extremists who stand shoulder to shoulder with fascism, nazism, and totalitarianism. If we want to bundle all these descriptions into one name, none can be more expressive than Islamic fundamentalism

     It is a deadly mistake if, in a search for a response to the September 11 incident, we lock ourselves in a technical, tactical, and informational labyrinth, attempting to analyze the personalities of the direct perpetrators of this incident. Beyond all the analysis, the past twenty-two years have taught us that in today’s world, terrorism is the other side of Islamic fundamentalism and is in fact needed for its existence. When you confront such a dreadful enemy but you try to handle it with friendship and compromise, you certainly will be blitzed.

 Islamic Fundamentalism-Based Terrorism

     Terrorism is a tactic, a function, and a method whose driving force is an ideological and political goal. Without such a driving force, terrorism would dry up and fail. In the 1960s and 1970s, terrorism was based on nationalist, secular views and in many cases was chauvinistic. For reasons that we will not discuss here, it started to decline in the second half of the 1970s. Despite the fact that reactionary religious movements existed throughout the twentieth century, they were never in a position to engage in terrorist activities until recently.

     The roots of Islamic fundamentalism go back to the first centuries of Islam. But Islamic fundamentalism in its current context, theory, and power emerged after Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979. The Khomeini regime transformed the idea of creating a global Islamic rule from an unachievable ideal to an achievable goal by many fundamentalist groups, and it also gave these groups global backing.

 In a historical example, in the second half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, more than a few Marxist parties existed in Europe. But the October revolution victory of Russia’s Bolsheviks, who were much younger than many other European parties, made that movement a global one. Until the demise of the Soviet Union, even those Marxist parties that had ideological differences with Moscow used to get their credibility from it.