The West’s Terror of Islam

Abstract

Many significant political actors or groups of actors in the West and among western democratic states currently contend that a new threat is posed to the system of government and rule which prevails in the post-Cold War order. That threat, according to defence department analysis, for many sections of the mass media, foreign policy strategists and intelligence agencies in Washington, Bonn and Paris, has emerged with a set of qualitatively different characteristics.1 The new threat is increasingly religious (including cults) in nature, thus setting it apart from dominant political ideologies of secularbased democratic capitalism, communism or democratic socialism. As a form of terrorism, the threat is also different from that which was known and understood as part of a global pattern of international relations and politics which grew in the 1960s and dominated western attitudes towards political violence – as directed at its institutions, symbols and citizens – for so many decades. As a form of combating and countering terrorism, this new threat challenges prevailing traditions and conceptualisations about war and conflict that had dominated defence analysis and military/strategic thinking throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

Whenever I think of Muslims I think of terrorists

Tom, Belfast 2002