Flydubai Flight 1073 to Tel Aviv coldly reminds us that terrorism is still a present threat. However, contemporary terrorism is not simply the expression of a violent contest for scarce resources; it is more than pragmatic. There is a “salvific” element, too. Thus, to understand terrorism today, we must grasp both dimensions.Consider first the pragmatic dimension of terrorism, whether new or old. Like the words “liberalism” and “conservatism,” the word “terrorism” came into use during the French Revolution. The 1793-94 “Reign of Terror” was meant to stabilize the new revolutionary government by consolidating power through killing its opponents. Shortly thereafter, Edmund Burke denounced the “thousands of those Hell hounds called Terrorists.” By the mid-nineteenth century, however, terrorism and terrorists were usually part of an anti-state conspiracy. Not until the mid-twentieth century, with the totalitarian regimes of Bolsheviks and Nazis, did terror, designed to enforce ideology, again become a mode of governance.Historically, terrorism has involved the abuse of the innocent in the service of political power. Usually, terrorists have wanted a lot of people watching more than they wanted a lot of people dead, which is to say that historically, terrorists wanted to influence an audience to accede to political demands. The initial mid-twentieth-century terrorists — the Irgun in Palestine, the EOKA movement in Cyprus, or the FLN in Algeria — were all connected to postwar anticolonial political movements. The nineteenth-century Italian revolutionary, Carlo Pisacane, called this variety of terrorism “propaganda by deed.”Even with conventional and pragmatic terrorists, those who employ such violence against third parties often see themselves as altruists serving a worthy cause to achieve a greater good for a broad constituency, perhaps the whole of humanity. However, most people reject the notion that murder could ever be connected to altruism, self-sacrifice, and heroism. From the start, therefore, there’s a fundamental flaw in terrorist logic — it treats killing the innocent as legitimate. Terrorists may go to great effort to deny this flaw, often by invoking a perverse reading of a religious text, which brings us to the second context..Consider the example of Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult, which carried out a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway system on March 29, 1995, based on a misreading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The leader, Asahara, redefined a meditative ritual, poa, as an act of murder and declared that he could “force the end” or bring about a spiritual Armageddon if enough people were “poa-ed,” which is to say, killed. In reality, human beings cannot bring about the apocalypse, however it’s defined. Even so, for these individuals, mass destruction was not an end in itself but a prelude to the survival of Aum Shinrikyo as a “saving remnant.” Asahara argued that a final apocalyptic struggle with a corrupt world was necessary for Aum Shinrikyo to save it.The logic of Aum was, in this respect, akin to that of the National Socialists and the Bolsheviks. For example, the Nazis declared that the Poles were without well-developed intellects because they had no intellectuals — because the Nazis had murdered them. Likewise, the Bolshevik doctrine that the kulaks were a “dying class” was proved by the extermination of kulaks. Similarly, Asahara sought to bring about what he “predicted.”There are other religious terrorists such as Sikh advocates of Khalistan, the “land of the pure,” or some white supremacists who advocate a “racially pure” America in conformity with the message of the Turner Diaries, which believers treat as semi-sacred. This doctrine helped motivate Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Of course, these terrorist acts attract the attention of the police charged with maintaining civil order. Asahara and McVeigh were arrested and executed. None of these examples are connected to Islam, but the greatest misreading of religious texts to justify religious terrorism has been undertaken by various Islamic terrorists.Consider the question of martyrdom. Historically, becoming a Muslim martyr (shahid in Arabic — one who bears witness to truth) was as complex and protracted as the process of becoming a Catholic saint. Then, one fine day in 1983, a Shia cleric, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, declared that the suicide bombers who attacked the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982 had conducted a self-martyrdom (istishhad) action. A few years later, Osama bin Laden made “martyrdom operations” routine..The great advantage of this (perverse) religious terrorism is that it provides terrorist acts with an imaginary transcendental dimension. The squalid business of political murder is transformed into a sacramental duty. It also invalidates the older dictum that terrorists want a lot of people watching, not dead. Now, if God tells you to kill, that ends the story. You don’t have to issue a statement to let God know. The documents left by the hijackers of three of the four planes used in the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States confirm this understanding of the terrorist motive.A second example has been in the news a lot lately, namely the “Twelver Shiism” that inspires the Iranian regime. Twelvers, the largest of the Shia groups, believe that 12 imams, all descended from Muhammad, were appointed by God. The last, named Muhammad al-Mahdi, was made invisible in the ninth century. This was called “occultation” and will continue until the Mahdi returns at the end time. The Iranian clerics modified this tradition, so their Supreme Leader was both the head of the Iranian state and the representative of the Mahdi. Twelvers also believe that just before the Mahdi returns, there will be a period of chaos, violence, and widespread bloodshed followed by the imposition of an ecumenical and divinely ordered justice that replaces the existing political order.For the Iranian regime, therefore, conflict with the greater (American) Satan and the lesser (Israeli) Satan is not political conflict but a sacred destiny sustained by eschatological expectations. Belief in the Mahdi is not a quaint and harmless religious tradition because Iranian believers are also required to help usher in his rule by initiating the final political conflict. Specifically, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is central to bringing about the rule of the Mahdi. And for IRGC zealots, the existence of Israel is the great barrier to the advent of the twelfth imam. Accordingly, the destruction of Israel will be a prelude to his return. IRGC Mahdism brings a new perspective to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. The Cold War restraints imposed by a “balance of terror” — in which neither side wanted a nuclear exchange because the other side had the means to retaliate — do not apply. If the purpose of acquiring nuclear weapons is precisely to initiate an Armageddon, by extinguishing Israel, for example, then the implications are literally, not figuratively, apocalyptic.Bottom line: the problem of dealing with religious terrorists today is not one of pragmatic deterrence.Dr. Barry Cooper is a Senior Fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary, Author of 35 books and 200 studies, and a fourth-generation Albertan. His book on terrorism, New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, was recovered by SEAL Team Six during their visit to the Osama bin Laden compound in Abbottabad in May 2011.
