Everybody denounces terrorism; there is no doubt about this. This is what the Emir of Qatar said in his speech at the opening session of the 25th Arab summit in Kuwait City, the capital of Kuwait.
Terrorism has a specific concept, and this means that we should not “describe whole sects or groups of people as terrorist, or even attach the charge of terrorism to everybody who adopts different political opinions, and in such a way we generalise opinions about terrorism instead of isolating it. Arab countries failed to protect their national unity and accuse other Arab countries of supporting terrorism in their countries”.
At the beginning of his speech, the Emir alluded to the Palestinian cause and the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is the biggest challenge facing Arabs as whole because of Israel’s repeated violations of international law and attempts to get them legitimised by the international community. He emphasised that the Israeli occupation seeks to make the international community accustomed to these violations.
“Stability and security will never be achieved in the region without a just settlement of this conflict, which is based on international and Arab legitimacy,” the Emir said.
I was a student of international relations in the Middle East in Washington when the Palestinians were using suicide bombs to defend their rights against Israeli occupation. I studied this topic under Clovis Maksoud, former ambassador and permanent observer of the League of Arab States at the United Nations and its chief representative in the United States for more than 10 years. Maksoud was known for his position against Israeli aggressions and support for the Palestinian people.
There were Jewish and Israeli students in the same course, where we discussed martyrdom operations carried out by unarmed Palestinians against Israeli occupation. The faces of these students always turned red when we discussed these operations, and they would raise their voices and shout during the discussions, and laugh at the unarmed Palestinians whose land, life, and honour were snatched from them and their homes destroyed in front of them. These Palestinians had nothing left to defend themselves except their bodies.
The Palestinians’ legitimate rights were taken away through a major conspiracy when Jews were searching for a homeland in the aftermath of the Holocaust carried out by Adolf Hilter. In order to do penance, the West confiscated a piece of the best Arab lands, the first holy shrine, and the third most sacred mosque.
The Jewish and Israeli students used to give these martyrdom operations different names. Sometimes they called them “suicide operations”. This used to make us angry. The sad thing was that some individuals and media outlets, including Arab media, used to give these operations the same name.
Sometime later, the Palestinian struggle for their rights and the defence of their sacred places and land was called “terrorism”. Any group or party that had a cause was also called a “terrorist group”. The Arabs used the same terms to designate groups that defended their countries and protected their sacred places. In this, they were blindly following in the footsteps of the Zionists, who influenced political discourse and filled it with their language.
Now, the occupiers were given a free hand to Judaize what remained of the land and the sacred sites of the Palestinians, even as they alone continued to defend the land and the sacred sites. Only a few honest Arabs continued to support the struggle of the Palestinian people.
The scene is so painful today. Many Arabs have abandoned the main cause and started fighting each other after some of their rulers, acting like Zionists, tightened the noose around them. Many of them have even stopped supporting the Al Quds Support Fund, which was suggested and funded by the Father Emir during the Arab Summit in 2013. The fund was also highlighted by
H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani during the opening session of the Arab summit in Kuwait.
We can spend a long time looking for the reason behind all these developments. The reason is simply that some people have become Zionists in their own lands, and instead of acting tough against their enemies they are doing so against their own people.
These people have broadened the concept of terrorism in order to bring some of their own people under it. They are committing mass liquidation of others simply because they have a different point of view.
Oppression of their own people by rulers will not produce anything good. Some people have sowed the seeds of terrorism in their backyards. They will harvest what they have sowed.
