Prior to September 11, 2001 words such as “terror”, “terrorist” and “terror attack” were not so familiar to Westerns. Extreme changes to security policies after 9/11 attack exposed Western public to such concepts to the point that the fear and threat of terror attack has increased dramatically. However in reality only 2.2% of fatalities from terrorist attacks happened in US and Western Europe between 2001 and 2015 according to Global Terrorism Database.
Although the ideal would be zero terrorist attacks, such small percentage of fatalities resulted in changes in policies, creation of organs to prevent terrorism and NGOs to speed recovery, founding and plans to insure security and more in Western countries.
On the other hand 75% of all fatalities took place, and continue to take place, in Muslim majority nations that are about 25 countries. Although such fatalities did not start after 9/11 or Arab spring, number of causality dramatically increased since. In other words Muslims are killing Muslims, and non-Muslims in their countries.
Even with such high fatality rate, these nations only restricted their citizen more instead of adopting more freedom based policies that would result in more satisfaction and less conflict between groups and governments.
As much as Media portrait that it’s religious differences that is resulting in such killings the reality is different. Countries with most terror attacks have more in common than their population.
“Researchers at the Institute for Economics and Peace have identified two features common to countries where terrorism thrives. According to their research, 92 percent of all terrorist attacks in the past 25 years have occurred in countries with widespread state-sponsored political violence, while 88 percent of attacks have occurred in places with violent conflicts”
What could be contributing to such high number of fatalities is governments’ lack of freedom s such as freedom of expression, religion and assembly. State-sponsored political violence is known and widely used reaction to pro-democracy assemblies and to oppress freedom seekers. Incompetency of governors and kings in Islamic nations not only oppress their citizens, it creates opportunities for terrorists grow and recruit.
Struggle over power and corruption at state level and forced state religion and lack of diversity appreciation among citizen leads to extreme tendencies and terror activities.
Based on mentioned theory and research, governments are to be blamed for such high fatalities in Islamic nations. AccordingRichard Bulliet, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, “Sunni Islam… is falling apart drastically, and I think this is the source of a great deal of the violence.” If you have an entrenched state, can you get rid of it without violence? If you don’t believe that’s a possibility, then violence becomes the alternative option.”
Having said that, if weak kings and governments, who use violence to oppress pro-democracy movements, invest in building just and open minded government system, terror activities and fatality rate would go down.
What research shows is that strong governments serve their people and adopt policies to secure them, and weak governments serve their own interest and power. Terror is high in nations where human life and dignity has no value to the eye of their own governments and terror is lower where governments treat their nations as valuable assets.
And the end result is 2.2% terrorist attack in West and 75% in Islamic nations despite the peaceful and freedom based teachings of Islam.
All Muslim kings and governments are betraying Islam after their own citizens, and that is SAD.
