Time to wake up to reality

The terror attacks in the United States, ingnominiously called since as the Septermber 11 attacks, or simply 9/11, plus all the other attacks in Bali, in Madrid, in London have all apparently failed to truly awaken the world to the real threat it is facing today.

Now we have the latest atrocity in Islamabad, when a bomb-laden truck nearly destroyed the Marriott Hotel, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. The latest word from authorities is that the attack was staged by the al-Qaeda.

And that is what everyone is missing. That is why everyone is still not convinced that the war against terror is not simply against al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. The war is against the foundation from which sprung these terror organizations.

Shortly after the Marriott attack in Islamabad, an Arab man drove a truck into crowds of people in Israel, killing many of the innocent civilians. This was not the first time that such kind of an attack was made in Israel. Yet, the threat does not come just from Arabs as well.

The threat comes from something deeper. It is deeper not in the sense that it is difficult to pinpoint or understand. In fact it has long been clear to everyone, only that most educated people in modern civilized society prefer to be “politically correct.”

But is it really political correctness or is it fear? Is the rest of this hopelessly divided world afraid to come to grips with the reality that sooner or later, everyone will have to confront the threat in the only manner that it can be confronted?

For as long as anyone can remember, the other side has been pushing the rest of the world to a confrontation it does not want to acknowledge and whose inevitability it refuses to recognize.

Why is the rest of the world afraid to make such acknowledgement and recognition when the world as we know it today no longer abides by the rules designed and imposed by civilized society?

The world as we know it today has been shoved to a position where it is now merely reacting to initiatives taken by the other wide. They are dictating the tempo of our lives. They are subjecting us to a role in which it is they who are calling the shots.

War? Nobody wants war. Or to be precise, nobody from our side wants war. Life is too short and too beautiful for us to want even a moment of our living it disrupted by bloodshed and mayhem.

But that is the fundamental mistake we are making and from which we continually refuse to learn from. As al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden put it remarkably well, the fundamental difference between us and them is that we fear death while they seek it.

For us death is an end, no matter how we pretend to think otherwise. To them it is the beginning of a reward in heaven. It is an equation we can never win, especially given the kind of attitude we have toward it.

We have been attacked endlessly, at a great cost to human life and property, and yet we continue to cling to the false illusion that these atrocities are merely the handiwork of a few misguided souls.

We refuse, or fear, to consider that the ground from which springs this thorny bush is fertile and therefore supportive of the final idea even if it does not directly participate in the form and shape which the outgrowth eventually take.

So unless we all wake up to the reality and be shaken into considering our fear and surmounting it, we will soon see the day when our very way of life will be supplanted by one whose believers are inexorably moving toward, in ways both overt and on the sly.