TheJakartaPost
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Al-Qaeda, terrorism and threat to democracy
Nations in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa have experienced terrorism as a tool of suppression and intimidation against opposition.
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Maximum escort: Counterterrorism squad Densus 88 personnel take a terrorist suspect onto a waiting bus inside the compound of the East Java Police headquarters in Surabaya on March 18, 2021. The squad relocated the detention of 22 suspected terrorists to Jakarta. (Antara/Didik Suhartono)
L
ong ago, on one fine autumn afternoon, my friends and I were discussing which one of our friends who had escaped the get-together in that café to penalize. An army general sitting next to us was intrigued by our excitement and dragged his chair closer to us, bringing his vaporized coffee mug.
With very friendly interaction he advised us his theory "channelize, canalize and penalize" as a solution. Two decades of my hawkish eye on the Islamic extremist movement, I find the general's theory appropriate here.
After World War II, the dollar became the strongest and only international trade currency. In the early 1990s, the world started a reorientation that strengthened the dominance of the Western capitalist economic system, supplanted the primacy of the nation-state with transnational corporations and organizations and eroded local cultures and traditions through Western culture.
The Western nations have enjoyed supremacy in the military and economy and they have been ferrying their capitalistic and democratic ideologies around the world, which are consumerist and materialistic in nature.
Now, Western nations have reached the peak of their vertex in terms of lifestyle, consumerism and prosperity. This creates an ideological vacuum and people have become frustrated. We have found widespread cases of suicide and mass shootings in Western societies, which are flagrant examples of this claim. An Islamic ideology is starting to fill the void.
I will dwell upon one jihadist organization, al-Qaeda (AQ) which has spectacularly gained its capabilities in acting as a transnational militant organization. During my research, I find, interestingly, it is the AQ that lays down the gauntlet for the United States on the battlefield.
AQ founder Abdullah Azzam first accentuated global jihad among all militant organizations. Before that, various Islamic extremist organizations fought for sharia (Islamic rule) sporadically and locally. AQ members around the world gathered in Afghanistan to fight against Soviet occupiers.
