A rchive Date
[ 27-10-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Terrorism ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/byfield.html
Enemies exploit our vulnerability
By TED BYFIELD -- Edmonton Sun
October 27, 2002
The first significant discovery of the third millennium is that our supposedly super-safe modern world, where miracle drugs cure disease, where firemen and police are at the door in minutes, where food and all life comforts are lavishly available, has one yawning vulnerability.
It requires the unanimous support of everybody who lives in it. If one tiny fraction of the inhabitants, say one in a million, decide they don't like what it stands for, it's altogether possible for any determined individual to disable it.
Thus, a relatively tiny group of fanatics are able to blow up the biggest buildings in the world that control much of the global economy. While they're at it, they also manage to blow a large hole in the headquarters of the biggest military machine in the world.
In Moscow, several men and women take over a full theatre, demand the Russian evacuation of their native territory, Chechnya and say they'll kill the 700 people they're holding hostage to show that they mean it.
Meanwhile, in and around Washington, D.C., in a 20-day rampage, a sniper shoots and kills 10 people, seemingly at random, so terrorizing the entire Washington area that schools are closed and people huddle in their houses afraid even to go shopping.
What we are not supposed to point out, of course, lest we be jailed by some human-rights tribunal for "intolerance," is that one religion is behind all these events - even, according to the evidence, the sniping one. So-called radical Muslims who account for about 15% of Islam, meaning a couple of hundred million people, readily take "credit" for the attack on the World Trade Center. Chechnya, cause of the theatre incident, is a Muslim country - and the theatre terrorists let children and Muslims go before threatening the murder of the other hostages. And last week we learned that the chief arrestee in the Washington shootings is a North American Muslim convert who belongs to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam movement.
By putting all these incidents and facts together in their historical context one can begin to see what's happening.
Fact 1: Our technologically-dependent world is (a) the most comfortable environment mankind has ever created, but (b) also the most vulnerable. Disrupt the computer networks and everything from pipelines to airlines to banks to hospitals would come to an instant halt. Stores would have to close, goods could not move, police and firemen could not answer calls.
I live in Edmonton where in most winters we have a few days with temperatures at the minus-40 level. Several well-placed bombs around electric transmission towers, all unguarded, would freeze every home and building in the city because the furnaces wouldn't work, and very rapidly place human life itself in imminent danger.
Fact 2: Our society has ancient enemies. We don't know this because our educators have been careful not to teach us history. They feared it would make us intolerant. How many Canadians, for instance, are aware that a mere 300 years ago western Europe was saved from Islamic takeover by a hair's breadth at the Siege of Vienna? If Vienna had fallen, Paris would have been next.
How many know what Osama bin Laden was referring to when he portrayed Sept. 11 as the first step in the recovery of "Andalusia?" It was a reference to Spain that was conquered by the Muslim armies in the eighth century and recovered by the Christians after an 800-year war.
Fact 3: Until the late 17th century, the technology of the Muslim nations exceeded that of the Christian ones. But then the latter began to soar ahead, so that by the 20th century, most Islamic nations were relegated to Third World status. They don't like this, but regaining technological ascendancy is now impossible for them.
However, they have made an amazing discovery. The very technology that makes us powerful also makes us exceedingly vulnerable. A few determined people, religiously opposed to us and ready to give their lives in that cause, may be able to bring the whole huge structure down. Our survival depends on everybody believing wholly in our validity, and everybody doesn't. So the dissidents are now going about crippling what they can't defeat.
And this, as I say, is the first significant discovery of the third millennium.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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