The word "Islam" is derived from the Arabic word for peace, and the overwhelming majority of the world's 1 billion Muslims have little sympathy for murder in their name and resent the media's association of their religion with the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Yet most U.S. experts agree that the greatest foreign terrorist threat to Americans today comes from small, radical Islamic groups who cloak their bloodshed in the language of holy war. Spread across half the globe and often divided by language and nationality, they are united by their implacable hostility to the United States.
"As far as the U.S. is concerned, the global threat at this time is unfortunately largely from Islamic extremists," says Yonah Alexander, director of terrorism studies at George Washington University, who has studied the phenomenon for 40 years. "There's a loose confederation of Islamic extremists that reaches from the Philippines to Turkey. It's really a corruption of Islam. They utilize religious concepts to achieve political goals."
What may seem to besenseless hatred for America actually is motivated by very specific U.S. foreign policies, say those who study the terrorist groups. They point to three major reasons for the militants' targeting of the United States:
U.S. support for Israel, which is seen as having displaced and mistreated Palestinians and occupied Jerusalem, the third holiest city in Islamic tradition after Mecca and Medina.
American backing for authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries, where U.S. interests in political stability and steady oil supplies are seen as taking precedence over Americans' stated championing of democracy and human rights.
The U.S. leadership role in the Persian Gulf war and its aftermath, particularly the continuing economic sanctions against Iraq, where shortages of food and medicine are blamed for tens of thousands of deaths.
"Without doubt, some U.S. policies hurt citizens of other countries, whether the policies are right or wrong," says Robert W. White, an Indiana University sociologist who studies the psychology of terrorism.
Economics and culture
While terrorist leaders are often educated and sometimes wealthy, the foot soldiers of their movements are recruited from the slums of Beirut, Gaza, Kabul and Khartoum, their motive not just politics or religion but economic desperation.
Anti-American feeling is further fueled by the anger of conservative Muslims at the relentless advance of American pop culture -- Hollywood movies featuring explicit sex and non-traditional roles for women, rock music and other fashionable assaults on religious values.
"It's the whole Coca-Cola culture, the idea that sneaky capitalism is slowly subverting traditional culture," White says.
The choice of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania for attack this month was logical in the symbolic language of the anti-American terrorist, says Gary R. Perl-stein, who studies terrorism at Portland State University in Oregon. "An embassy is a perfect symbol, because under international law it's U.S. soil," Perlstein says.
The holy war, or jihad, declared by some radical Muslims against the United States has deep historical roots, experts say. The militants associate America's presence and influence in the Muslim world with the West's colonialism in the Muslim world in the 19th century and even the Crusades of medieval European Christians against Muslims beginning in the 11th century.
It is no coincidence that Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born millionaire whose terrorist network was targeted in Thursday's U.S. cruise missile strikes in Afghanistan and the Sudan, has referred to American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia as "crusaders." The name of his organization is the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.
While bin Laden and other ideologues of terrorism can cite American policies as their justification, facts and subtleties are often lost in their anti-American extremism, says Marius Deeb, a Lebanese-born professor of Middle Eastern politics at Johns Hopkins' Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
"The U.S. is in Saudi Arabia not because it wants to be but because a bully like Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait," Deeb says. But the radicals "have a vision, a conspiracy theory. They believe the U.S. wants to dominate, wants to be everywhere. If you know American policy at all, you know the U.S. doesn't want to get involved anywhere."
Media carelessness
Scholars agree that the news media have been careless in not sufficiently distinguishing between the radical fringe of terrorists Muslim countries, such as bin Laden, and the peaceful millions who follow the teachings of Mohammed, both the 90 percent in the Sunni tradition and the 10 percent who are Shiites.
Hesham Reda, Washington director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, notes that the media do not habitually use such terms as "Catholic terrorism" or "Protestant terrorism" of the strife in Northern Ireland.
"The term Islamic terrorism is very offensive to us," Reda says, patiently pleading with yet another journalist not to smear an entire faith with the label of fanatical violence. "Terrorism is anathema to Islam. The embassy bombings were really offensive to us and to many Muslims."
And Islam has no monopoly on the religious radicalism that leads to terror.
From the Crusades to the Inquisition and beyond, religious scholars note, radical Christian ideology has turned violent and cost millions of lives. Today many extremist groups in American politics claim Christian justification, including the anti-government militia movements that spawned the Oklahoma City bombing.
"The Sunni tradition of Islam has been marked by a great deal of moderation and compassion," says Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, who spent a decade living in several Muslim countries. "And in history, the Shiites were even quieter than the Sunni."
Cole says that no mainstream Islamic clergy, from such centers of Islamic theology as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, have issued a fatwa, or religious decree, justifying attacks against Americans.
Fundamentalist Muslims
But Cole says a minority of fundamentalist Muslims, including the terrorist financier bin Laden, seek to impose an Islamic theocracy that imposes rigid standards of belief and behavior according to a literal reading of Islamic law. The ruling regime in Sudan and the Taliban movement that controls most of Afghanistan, the radical ayatollahs in Iran, and the spiritual leaders of Egyptian, Lebanese and Palestinian terrorist movements all hold such views.
Such a radical brand of Islam "has a number of advantages as an anti-imperialist ideology," Cole says. It automatically excludes non-Muslim foreigners, it gives a theological basis for resistance to existing regimes in Muslim countries, and it appeals to a natural constituency among Muslims, he says.
Even if it remains a distinctly minority phenomenon within the faith, the roots of radical Islam date to the 19th century, when Western colonial regimes brutally suppressed resistance from Muslim natives. Even the U.S. Tomahawk missiles that fell last week had historical precedents in both countries.
"This phenomenon of bombs falling on you from Western countries is not new in these countries," Cole says. There were three Anglo-Afghan wars, and an Anglo-Egyptian force crushed the nationalist Mahdist state in Sudan in the 1890s.
Despite the publicity, fear and disruption terrorist attacks can cause, their actual toll in recent years has been modest by the standards of warfare, natural disaster or even crime.
Last year, the State Department counted 304 acts of international terrorism -- many of them not carried out in the name of Islam -- in which 221 people died; in 1996, with 296 terrorist acts, the toll was 314 dead.
In the two years combined, 30 Americans were killed, about the toll of an average month of homicides in Baltimore alone.
Yet officials worry that sponsors such as bin Laden, who has millions of dollars to spend, could move from traditional explosives to chemical or biological weapons, with which a single attack could cost thousands of lives. The Sudanese pharmaceutical plant attacked by the United States was manufacturing components for chemical weapons, U.S. officials say.
Uncertain results
American experts' consensus is that U.S. retaliation may slow but is very unlikely to stop the terrorists.
Some believe that such retaliation is worse than pointless, because it fuels the very paranoia and anger that generate support for the terrorist movements.
Others say that it is an understandable response to the helplessness even a superpower feels in the face of a brutal and random attack.
"I think the stated purpose of the missile strikes, to send a deterrent warning, is useless," says Perl-stein, of Portland State University.
"But I have to say that my own reaction when I heard the news was, 'Good, at least we did something.' "
Pub Date: 8/23/98