Radical Islam predates Iraq war

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, October 19, 2006

A column regarding terrorism written by Fouad Ajami, a columnist for U.S. News and World Report, is insightful and alarming.

He says there is a strand of liberal thinking that aims to explain that terror is justified if we drown it in the search for “root causes” or if we insist that terror sprang from “legitimate” grievances. In this vein, nowadays it is maintained that Islamist terror was fed by the rage over the invasion of Iraq. We should know better. The trail of radical terror emanating from Islamic lands and Islamic movements predates the Iraq war. We have three decades of this kind of terror behind us.

Political terrorism is as old as human history. The very word “assassins” derives from the Arabic “hashshasin” (hashish takers) after a terrorist cult established in Iran in the 11th century. Victims were rulers of Islamic dynasties and some Lords of the Crusaders principalities in the land of Islam. The victims, we are told, were chosen with care and the assassins were “suicidals” who never returned alive from their missions. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

RAY DORBOLO

Everett