The evidence is in on Islamist terrorism

From Melbourne to the Middle East, terrorists want to kill

February 06, 2009 Article from: The Australian

ABDUL Nacer Benbrika is morally on a different planet from the rest of us and it is about time people who think the terror threat is exaggerated realise it. Benbrika was sentenced in a Melbourne court on Tuesday to 15 years for terror offences. Six of his henchmen also went to prison. The cause of their convictions explains a great deal about the way Islamist extremists, some mad, some bad and all dangerous to know, will twist the tenets of the honoured Muslim faith into a justification of mass murder. Their example shows how terrorists, from Melbourne to the Middle East, think and act the same. And it demonstrates how enemies of Israel in the West, who explain terrorism as an inevitable response to the problems of the Palestinians, miss the point. The grim reality is that for religious zealots with murder on their mind, any excuse will do.

Anybody who believes Benbrika was a misguided man who did no harm in the end should consider the evidence against him. Despite Australia giving him a home, and an unearned social security income paid to support his seven children, he was keen to kill as many of us as he could. Certainly, he said Australians deserved to die because of the country's involvement in the war against Saddam Hussein. But he also argued Islam sanctioned death for unbelievers. That Benbrika is as incompetent as he is irrational and never launched an attack does not matter. The World Trade Centre attackers were not highly trained combatants either -- struggling to fly a plane straight. As judge Bernard Bongiorno said in court, "terrorist acts as they have been experienced in modern times are often carried out by amateurs whose principal attribute has not been skill, but rather zealous or fanatical belief".

For an example of the fanaticism Justice Bongiorno points to, it is impossible to beat Samira Ahmed Jassim, who was arrested in Iraq this week. This woman is an enemy of the emerging Iraqi democracy and expressed her political opinions by organizing 28 terrorist attacks. Her modus operandi was to arrange for women to be raped and then tell them the only way they could erase the shame was to blow themselves up, taking unbelievers, in this case ordinary Iraqis, invariably Muslims, with them. The pointless brutality of such crimes beggars belief for all but those who see mass murder as a form of worship. It is nonsensical to suggest that it serves any political purpose. Nor does the way the Hamas Government of Gaza uses suicide bombers and rocket attacks. Hamas has the despicable distinction of deploying the first female suicide bomber. That 2002 attack killed two, wounded 150 people and accomplished precisely nothing. Nor did the Hamas rocket attacks that led the Israeli army to intervene in Gaza last month. Hamas has no chance of defeating Israel in open war and there was no chance that Muslim nations would come to its assistance. But attacking Israel at every opportunity makes sense to anybody who believes in a divine directive to destroy the Jewish state.

It is time for people who believe Western decadence and the Iraq war are the cause of terror attacks to accept the obvious. While Islamic extremists sometimes dress up their motives in the language of conventional politics, they are at war with everybody who does not agree with them. The vast majority of Muslims understand this and recognise there is no place in their faith for terror of the Hamas and Benbrika kind. Opposition to sectarian conflict was one of the reasons Iraqis voted against religious candidates at last weekend's provincial elections, with Shia religious parties losing control of five of the seven provinces they previously ran. It is also time for enemies of Israel to stop blaming the Jewish state for war crimes it did not commit, presumably on the assumption that anything that makes Israel look bad helps Hamas, the ostensible ally of innocent Palestinians. Last month, UN officials in Gaza said Israeli forces had mortared a school where they knew civilians were sheltering. It made international headlines and undoubtedly encouraged Muslim anger all over the world. But it wasn't true -- and the UN knew it. There is no reasoning with Hamas terrorists and the Benbrikas of the world and no case for any argument that explains their actions as anything other than acts of evil.