Managing Terror

25 July 2008

Keith Suter is one of the world experts on terrorism. For as long as I can remember he has been used by the media here in Australia every time some terrorist attack happens somewhere.

His is a voice of reason in what appears to be crimes that have no reason.

They do have a reason, he says. They are motivated by one of two things. Racism or Poverty.

Think aboiut it. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy was motivated by Sirhan Sirhan’s fears for his Palestian brethren. The first world war started with an assassination that was similarly motivated. Or in the Occupied Territories in the former Palestine, Arab and Israeli lived side by siude for many years, until Palestinean poverty led to uprisings and then terrorist attacks. The same could be said of the IRA actions in Ireland.

But the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 had nothing to do with poverty. That was simple race hate.

Keith Suter says terrorism will not go away anytime soon. It will be a generational thing. Today this issue will come to the fore with our interview with film director Benjamin Gilmour, who has just shot a movie called Son Of A Lion, which is set in a small village in Pakistan and is about a weapons maker and his son. The father wants his son to go into the business and become a weapons maker too. The son wants to get educated and have nothing to do with guns. What is interesting here is that the other elders in the community all want the boy to have that education. They see no future in fighting and war. Education, they say, is the way out of poverty, not killing other people. Watching the film, I thought about how much money it must be costing them, all those bullets, fired off into the sky willy-nilly. That can’t be helping to put bread on the table.

The elders, as elders often are, are wise people in that little Pakistan town. The big lesson from this movie is that hates of the father should not be visited upon the son.

Amen.

Ridding the world of terrorism will be a generational thing, but it will also require respect of all people for all people. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take too long.

- Phil