Bradley Burston, a prize-winning columnist for Israel’s leading daily newspaper, Haaretz, wrote a provocative piece today, called "This is how Islam ends," in which he described how two completely innocent mentally disabled women were sent into busy marketplaces in central Baghdad with remotely-controlled bomb belts wrapped round their bodies. When their handlers flipped the switches, one woman’s bomb killed 62 people; the other a further 36.
Burston, never a man to mince words, describes this and other similar terrorist outrages carried out by Arabs against fellow Arabs in the following terms: "This is how Islam ends. This is the future according to Al Qaida. This is the real meaning of this World War III of our times: A war of Islamists against Islam itself. In sheer numbers of attacks and tolls of innocent victims, the moral outrages committed by Al Qaida of late have overwhelmingly targeted Muslims and Muslim shrines. It is a war of the self-styled devout against an Islam whose core precepts are meant to foster peace, self-discipline, respect for women, protection of the innocent and unfortunate. It is a war to the death. And Al Qaida is not the only assailant."
The point that Burston seeks to make in his column is actually that there are very many good Muslims who are trying to fight back against this butchery, while in Berkeley, California, where he comes from, the self-righteous and politically correct leadership "will continue to countenance acts of unconscionable violence against women, Muslims, Jews, and black people, as long as those who commit the violence are Muslims."
But perhaps without realising it, the author is also carrying a message relevant to the task of fighting terror financing. Most of the Arab and Muslim world knows that it is even more a victim of its home-grown fanatics than the West is. There is certainly a lot of confusion and ambiguity in this understanding, but least because many of their leaders are self-interested and cynical enough to continue spreading propaganda about how the West is the enemy of Islam and the Arabs (as well as Iranians, Turks, Pakistanis and others).
But terrorism is a threat to the stability and survival of many of these states, actually more than to the stability and survival of the United States, Western Europe and their main allies; and at least the more enlightened leaders in the Mideast know this very well and are really doing something to fight the terrorists, even if it’s not entirely out of love for the West. So we should also take more seriously whatever steps the Middle Eastern countries take to fight terror financing, money laundering and corruption. I’ve had the privilege over the last couple of years of taking part in many of the internal discussions of compliance professionals from the Arab banking world. Their cooperation with compliance standards set mainly by the United States is not just for show, even if they often resent Big Brother in Washington DC, and even if the style of discussion is more flowery and less down-to-earth than that in the USA and Europe, they really do take seriously their responsibility to protect the system from terrorists, and I believe that they deserve more respect than we sometimes show them on this blog.
Comments