Today marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11/9/2001, a day that has since become a deeply engraved entry on each calendar, as the world changed, and the terms pre-9/11 and post-9/11 entered the lexicon. On that fateful day, I condemned terrorism in absolute terms, and I continue to do so. But today, I want to add that both sides, i.e. the aggressor and the victim, bear some responsibility for what has happened, and that the war between them has ended with both sides defeated, which is what I believe – even though the fight has yet to end. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization and an enemy of Islam and Muslims as much as it is the enemy of the United States. All those who support al-Qaeda or justify its actions would be staining their hands with the blood of innocent victims, who are in their vast majority Muslim, and not ‘Jews and Crusaders'. Osama bin Laden has been killed, and was recently followed by the Libyan Abdel Rahman Attia, whom the Americans claimed was the number two man in al-Qaeda's command. This is despite the fact that when I first heard about him, he was described as a trusted courier between bin Laden and al-Qaeda fighters. While al-Qaeda has spawned many similar organizations, its biggest loss is that it has been marginalized in the Arab street. The Arab uprisings started and progressed without any role by al-Qaeda, and when al-Zawahiri tried to chart a place for it, he was met with nothing but scorn and rejection or outright inattention. In other words, al-Qaeda is yesterday's news among the Arabs and Muslims, and has no role in their future. A war is supposed to usually end with a victor and a vanquished side. However, al-Qaeda lost without this meaning that the United States has won, and perhaps we can even say that America's loss was much, much bigger, or equally big, compared to al-Qaeda's size. The war was between a hundred terrorists from al-Qaeda and hundreds of millions of people led by the world's only remaining superpower, a title that the United States has begun to lose – if it has not lost it already. Al-Qaeda can claim today that it has destroyed the American economy, and unleashed an ongoing global financial crisis. When terror struck, there was a surplus of around one trillion dollars in the U.S. treasury, but this has quickly turned into a trillion dollar deficit, and many pundits around the world estimate that the total cost of the war will stand at around seven trillion dollars. At the same time, the U.S. armed forces have become ‘exposed'. While the latter possess the world's strongest arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles, this is useless in a war against a bunch of terrorists. And since 2001, the budget of the U.S. Department of Defense has reached a record number each year, in a country that is practically bankrupt. And yet, the U.S. has lost both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while its loss was even bigger in the War on Terror, which the Obama administration decided to refrain from calling it that. Nonetheless, terrorism continues to exist today, and while no American soldiers were killed in Iraq last month, for the first time since the invasion of Iraq, the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan reached a new record in the same month. Then there are those lost civil liberties in the country of liberties. For the Bush administration had taken advantage of the opportunity to augment the powers of the executive branch at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, and started eavesdropping on American citizens and spying on their bank accounts without permission from the courts, or detaining citizens on suspicion of terrorism, without allowing doubt to be in favor of the suspect until proven guilty. The rest of the world is also paying a price for no guilt on its part, and will continue to do so because the reasons that led to al-Qaeda's terrorism still stand: The successive U.S. administration since Lyndon Johnson have all stood against Arabs and Muslims, especially the Palestinians, supported Israel with weapons and money, and protected it with the U.S. veto power at the Security Council and continue to do so while being in denial. Then the U.S. added to all this its occupation of Iraq, on premises that were falsified for oil and Israeli reasons, until a day came when the occupation became a recruitment hub for terrorists rising up against U.S. policy. Denial means that terrorism will continue. And as long as the United States will not admit its share of the blame, terrorism will endure, even if the original al-Qaeda perishes, since there are replicas of it today from Morocco and Algeria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen and Somalia, some parts of Africa, and even in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Far East. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization, and it is the duty of the Muslims before the United States to rise up against it. However, terrorism will continue to exist as long as the current U.S. policy remains unchanged. [email protected]
