The world is not the Wild West

Malaysiakini: Are there alternatives to a US attack on Afghanistan?

Jomo:It is not yet clear that Osama bin Laden was responsible. Also, everyone knows that Osama developed his al-Qaeda network with the help of the Pakistani intelligence and rival Islamic political movements, backed by the US, Saudis and their allies.

The US secretary of state says that the US has evidence. Well, if so, then it should be presented to the International Court of Justice. (Remember it was the US which opposed establishing an International Criminal Court.) If the world agrees with the US that Sept 11 was an act of war, there are many precedents for war crimes tribunals.

Why is an investigation and a trial important? Because we all need to learn more about terrorism to be better able to deal with it.

Also, what kind of people go on drinking binges or conduct themselves in ways not condoned by Islam, then kill thousands ostensibly in the name of Islam.

The world is not the Wild West. So-called summary justice is not acceptable in this day and age, least of all by those claiming to want to uphold the rule of law.

Remember how the US bombed Tripoli and killed Gadhafi's daughter in 1985. Or later, after the two Libyan Lockerbie suspects were tried in Holland, one was found not guilty, and many victims' family members are not even convinced that the man convicted was the perpetrator.

Lots of people have agreed on Osama's guilt with rather minimal evidence. It is now increasingly clear that Osama is not as rich as previously assumed, though the actual costs of the Sept 11 operation were not all that high.

And with the benefit of hindsight, it is also clear that the Sept 11 operation was basically brilliantly simple, whose 'success' probably even surprised its own organisers who may not have expected three out of the four groups to 'succeed'.

US domestic flight security measures were less than international standards and worked on two assumptions. First, the likely use of firearms as weapons in a country where guns are so widely available. Second, that plane hijackers are not suicidal, forgetting the kamikaze pilots of World War II, Tamil Tigers' routine use of cyanide pills in case of capture and the suicide bombers of the Middle East.

Thankfully, the voices of justice, peace and restraint are to be heard all over the world, including in the US itself, even from among the victims' families, once again underlining how wrong the terrorists were.

The humanity of such victims' families - and not the vengeful instincts of the hurt bully - contrasts most sharply with the terrorists' inhumanity.

The US seems to think that 'taking out Osama' will not only punish the perpetrators of Sept 11, but also finish off terrorism. How far is this true?

In the event that Osama was responsible for Sept 11, 'taking him out' will only make things worse because we will never know for sure and many will doubt it even if true. That is why it is counter-productive to proceed as the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration seems to be doing.

There are many reasons some people resort to terrorism, but most people will agree that they do so out of frustration because they feel they do not have effective or meaningful alternative channels for dissent.

Terrorism thus usually involves self-righteousness, with the terrorist feeling righteously aggrieved and justifying the terrorist action in terms of the grievance felt and a sense of helplessness in terms of options available.

That is why many would argue that repression of Islamic dissidents would lead to an escalation of violence by militant fringe elements who see no other way to get their grievances addressed. All this usually invokes particular cultural, historical or moral modes of rationalisation, usually self-servingly selective.

Hence, effectively containing terrorism should involve eliminating injustice and unfreedom, but that is hardly what Bush and his chorus have in mind. They are bent on containing terrorism with their own brand of state terrorism all in the name of security.

Let's go back to the Palestinian issue, which is arguably the main outstanding issue unlikely to be resolved in the current situation?

Remember that the Zionist state is a creation of modern Zionism, created in the interstices of 19th century European imperialism when anti-Semitism against Jews - remember Arabs are also Semites - also re-emerged.

Israel could only be established after World War Two, and the Holocaust, when six million European Jews were murdered by Hitler's Nazis. Many Europeans had collaborated with the Nazis, while many Jewish refugees had been rejected by the US.

Thus, Western guilt sought to address their 'Jewish problems' by displacing Jews to the Israeli settler colony. Remember that Palestine was only one of many options originally including Uganda and Argentina. Not unlike Australia and other sites of European settler colonialism, the humanity of the indigenous communities was not recognised and their land was considered available for settlement.

To put it simplistically, the creation of the Zionist project of Israel claimed to be in the name of all Jews, but involved the injustice of displacing Palestinians from their homeland. For half a century, Palestinians have been killed and otherwise oppressed in their own land, while refugees have been subject to different types of discrimination in diaspora, both in the Arab world and the West.

Many Jews recognise this, and in Durban last month, there were rabbis demonstrating against the Israeli state and Zionism. Unfortunately, African-Arab solidarity has been weakened by some racist Arab regimes, including those claiming that slavery is alright because it is not banned in the Qur'an.

The old Third World solidarity is no longer there and the failure of the resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism underlined the erosion of support since the 1970s, especially with the post-Gulf War compromises, especially PLO involvement in the disastrous Helsinki peace process.

One would like to think that the world would require just resolution of the Palestinian question as a condition for supporting Bush's 'war against terrorism', but I fear that is unlikely to happen.