The Muslim community has been subjected to a combination of debilitating mind games for most of the last century. Still struggling from the after-effects of colonialism, they have been oppressed by dictators installed by the retreating colonialists, and disempowered by their sweet talk of nationalism. Conspiracy theories have added to their impotency, leading to a mindless, hopeless and mutually destructive tendency to violent revenge. With their scholars imprisoned and replaced by Western educated bureaucrats, their religious schools filled with the least capable of learners and funded by bedouin theology, the ignorant have become leaders, contributing through unaccountable underground networks and the harsh yelling of Friday sermons to a combined sense of emasculation. Hence the easy recourse to terrorism.
But the hold of terrorism is weakening.
There has been no benefit to any group from the mindless terror of suicide bombs, market bombs and the eradication of alternative views. Over the past few decades millions of families - mostly Muslim - have suffered devastating injury, crippling fear, and the irreparable loss of loved ones.
