Terrorist Is Misnomer for Theocrat

Why am I telling you this? I want you to look beyond the fluff television feeds. The world is more complex than the vision presented by the CBS Evening News, CNN, or Fox News.

Real problems will not be neatly solved in the abbreviated sixty minutes allotted to most dramas. You must look past the fantasies of television (and television news) if you want your country to survive beyond the life expectancy of your grandchildren. To see what must be seen, you will need to go beyond the place where you currently feel comfortable.

The War on Terror is a misnomer. It was simplified because national leaders (and news executives) don't think you are complex enough to understand what is taking place in the Middle East and other parts of the world. The purpose of the war is partially about preventing attacks here on our homeland. It is also very much about preventing the advancement of Islamic Theocracy.

Warriors, whom television calls terrorists, are actually religious fanatics. Their goal is to impose an extreme form of Islam on all inhabitants of the Middle East. They believe in imposing Islamic Theocracy. How many times have you heard that news on television?

Theocracy is government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided. This is the exact opposite of the American (and Western) form of government. We believe in the rule of law as set forth by individuals who meet and vote in a legislature. We are not ruled by those who are divinely inspired.

In the Middle East, those who wish to impose their concept of religion upon others kill people until the remaining members of the population stop arguing. That's when new rules for living are imposed. The American army is there to prevent them from accomplishing their goal.

Here are case examples of how people in this movement think. On October 6, 1981, the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat was assassinated while reviewing his own troops. Most of the assassins were caught immediately. The following is what two of the assassins thought they were doing as revealed by court transcripts and investigative documentation.

- Abdul-Salam Abdul-Al. Abdul-Al, an officer in Egyptian Air Defense, was 28-years old in 1981. During his interrogation he said he thought Egyptian society was in a state of munkar (decadence). He saw Sadat as the manifestation of Islamic regression and decided he had to kill him. He discussed how he became aware of Egyptian society's obsession with consumerism, the consumption of alcohol, and an accumulation of interest. He said women who took to the hijab were scorned and that religious scholars who preached the truth were jailed.

- Atta Tayel Hameeda. Hameeda, a combat engineer and Alexandria University mechanical engineering graduate, was 26 years old in 1981. Like Abdul-Al, he espoused justification for Sadat's killing because he felt Sadat was not ruling according to Islamic law. He compared Sadat to a pharaoh who had gone astray and believed he was a living God. Hameeda believed Sadat and the Egyptian government were attempting to secularize society and separate God from the state because Egypt's National Assembly used democracy as a mandate to ignore what was allowed under God's laws. Discos, the use of alcohol, and movies were examples of how the people's will had overtaken God's law in the legislature. His strict, fundamentalist view of Islam was even stricter than what the Prophet Muhammad practiced in Medina in 622.

Today, Osama Bin Laden shares the thinking process of the two officers described above. He is engaged in a long process whose purpose is to overthrow most of the governments in the Middle East, replacing them with a government which reflects his religious ideals. Islamic religious scholars can better explain this transformation than I. But, in short, Bin Laden represents that same faction within Islam which is unhappy with the religious values of the political leadership in those countries. His faction, once in political power, will reestablish a religious government which crosses all borders where the people of Islam now live.

As a boy and a young man, Bin Laden was a truly pious person. He was religious in the best sense of the word. After going to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, Bin Laden came under the influence of men involved in the assassination of Sadat. Men like those described above. This is the time when Bin Laden was transformed. His character changed. Where before, he expressed Islam through behavior and personal example, the new Bin Laden preached a lock-step Islam. This is the kind of Islam that allows men to cut off your head if you will not submit. It is the kind of Islam that reaches for the sword first and imposes religious and political rules to be lived by latter.

What we are fighting, over there in the Middle East, is a Theocratic movement whose purpose is to enslave non-believers of this new religious/political philosophy.

Why should you care?

If the political and religious leaders of Middle Eastern countries are replaced with adherents of this new religious philosophy, the new conquerors will feel emboldened. Then they will say that God requires them to impose this religious philosophy on non-Islamic populations in Christian Europe and the Americas. When we have shown weakness or that our culture is divided about fighting their philosophy, they have always taken that as a signal to attack.

If you doubt me, reread the history of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries in the Near East, Northern Africa, Spain, and Portugal. Also reread the history of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries Balkan (Eastern European) wars.

If you do not fully support fighting these fanatics over there today because you believe supporting the fight is the same as supporting President Bush, please reconsider your position. Losing this fight means that your children's children may lose the right to believe and express the Liberal or Conservative, the Christian, Judaic, or moderate Islamic philosophy you hold dear.