In the short history of the 21st century, a certain sentence has gained considerable popularity: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.” It must be stated unequivocally that this is untrue and harmful, as it serves solely to fuel the spiral of Islamophobia. In this sentence, the word “Muslims” can be replaced with any followers of any gods, because both terror and religion are human inventions, older than Islam, older than Christianity, Judaism or Buddhism.
Why is the statement above untrue? Because the phenomenon of terrorism has a much longer history than Islam, and its source is neither any religion nor ideology. Religions have, however, repeatedly served as cover, justification or an excuse for terrorist acts committed by particular people.
In 20th-century Europe, Catholics (Christians) were called terrorists, but their faith was not emphasized.
IRA – the Irish Republican Army. The formation’s original aim was to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom.
- 1937: an unsuccessful attempt on the life of King George VI in Belfast
- 1939: a series of bomb attacks in the United Kingdom
- February 1971: the first British soldier was killed by the IRA
- July 1972, “Bloody Friday” – 22 bombs exploded in Belfast within a single day, killing 9 people
- August 1979 – two bomb attacks on the same day – Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, was killed in the first, and 18 British soldiers in the second
- October 1984 – a bomb exploded at the conference of the British Conservative Party – 5 people were killed, and Prime Minister Margharet Thatcher narrowly escaped with her life
- 1991 – mortar fire was directed at the prime minister’s residence on Downing Street
- 15 August 1998 – the Omagh bombing – 31 people died at the scene (including two unborn twins), and approximately 220 were injured
ETA was founded in 1959 by radical activists from the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). ETA’s aim was to secure autonomy for the Basques.
- October 1992: 55 residents of the village of Cevizdali in Bitlis Province were shot dead (the organization frequently attacked villages that refused to cooperate with it, declining to provide food and shelter)
- 1993: a coordinated series of attacks on Turkish diplomats in thirty cities across Western Europe
- January 2008: a car bomb explosion killed five people and injured 68 in Diyarbakir
In the short history of the 21st century, we have witnessed many religiously motivated terrorist attacks committed not by Muslims at all, but by, for example, Christians (including attacks on abortion clinics in the USA) or Buddhists (for example, in Sri Lanka or Burma). The media did not devote much attention to them, however, and no one seeks the sources of terrorism in Christianity or Buddhism. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks have nothing to do with religion; terrorists motivate their actions ideologically or politically, or their actions result from mental-health problems.
To better understand how untrue this claim is, let us look at the statistics. The most significant European research on terrorism was published in 2015. It was conducted by EUROPOL (the European Police Office) at the request of the European Union. It shows that in 2009–2014, more than half of all terrorist attacks in EU countries had an ethno-nationalist or separatist background. At the same time, less than 2% of all attacks during the period studied were religiously motivated, of which 0.7% were connected with Islam.
Source: uchodzcy.info