Anger, not reason, is cause of terrorism

Whenever we read or hear of a terrorist attack, the first question that comes up to our minds is: Why? We never reach an answer because the root cause is more often based on anger and not reason. In short, we are dealing with an emotional, not a rational problem. The most irrational attack is still the September 11 attack in New York. Not even during the two World Wars was the United States attacked on its mainland. This makes it obvious that terrorists can be more dangerous than nations. With terrorists, we deal with groups or even individuals and they could be right in our midst. You can be a victim of terrorists without even knowing who or why you were attacked.

In Russia, 334 people were killed, half of them children. No one knows for certain the motives behind the mass slaughter. And now comes the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, Russia and Australia are worlds apart. But within days they were major victims of terrorists and they can’t figure out why.

A few weeks ago, the Australian Prime Minister was criticizing the Filipinos for withdrawing their humanitarian contingent in Iraq in order set a Filipino overseas worker free from his kidnappers. Now their Jakarta embassy was bombed and they don’t seem to know to how cope with terrorists when they are the ones attacked.

So far, the Philippines has been lucky that we have had no major attacks on any of our main centers. This is greatly due to the fact that the Philippine Armed Forces and the Philippine National Police have been on constant alert against terrorists. An ounce of prevention has always been worth a pound of cure. We have had old problems with small rebel groups, but they have been well controlled. Now we have problems with the flood victims, but that is a problem caused by nature and not people.

Our problem is now to provide more jobs for the poor. We are the second poorest country in Asia, next only to Bangladesh and now even the Bangladeshi economy is more stable than ours. The whole income of our nation is not even enough to pay the interest, not the principal of our trillion-peso debts. What went wrong? Since Spanish times, the Philippines was the second most progressive country in Asia, next to Japan. Then came Marcos and that marked our decline. What we have to really ascertain is – What went wrong: the government or the people themselves?