The root cause of terrorism

WHILE no one yet knows the precise motives of the two Islamic fanatics who killed an off-duty soldier in London last week there is no doubt that the wave of racist attacks on Muslims across the country has been fired by the hysteria in the bourgeois media. The fascist British National Party and the rabble that follow the English Defence League have done their best to incite race hatred against the British Muslim community whose secular and religious leaders have all unequivocally condemned the Woolwich killing.

Working people have long rejected the openly racist and fascist calls of the neo-Nazi movements that seek to divide and split the working class along ethnic lines to pave the way for the reactionary dictatorship of their dreams. But they can be swept along into accepting more and more restrictions on basic freedoms and rights as the ruling class clamps down in the name of the “war on terror”.

The Tory led Coalition Government has predictably responded in the usual way with the promise of a further tranche of repressive legislation to give the security services even more surveillance powers. They claim these are needed to counter the terrorist threat in Britain but they are an attack on the civil liberties of every British citizen.

But others, including the Stop the War Coalition, have been quick to point out that the Woolwich attack appears to confirm British intelligence warnings that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to terror attacks at home. Outspoken Respect MP George Galloway, who described the London murder as an “indefensible crime” went one further by pointing out that “this sickening atrocity in London is exactly what we are paying the same kind of people to do in Syria”.

“We’ve given hundreds of millions of pounds to the Syrian rebels and demanded the EU ends the arms embargo so we can give them guns too” Galloway declared. And he is quite right. This is precisely what President Assad and his Baathist-led popular front government are up against in Syria.

The man who publicly ate the heart and liver from the body of a dead Syrian soldier and the others who maim and butcher Syrian civilians are members of fanatical Muslim sects armed and funded by imperialism via their feudal Arab lackeys in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

We have to ask ourselves why has Britain become a haven for Islamic fundamentalist movements that seem to operate with impunity, despite the fact that many of them are wanted in their own countries for inciting sectarian violence? The answer is that many of them have served the interests of British imperialism and many of them still do.

We also have to ask ourselves why Britain and its imperialist allies are seen as the enemy by millions of Muslims across the world. The answer is simply that Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism is waging open and covert war against a number of Muslim countries for strategic and economic reasons, not least to get their greedy hands on the immense oil and gas fields under their sands and new fields under the Mediterranean to give the big oil corporations a global monopoly on energy resources.

This is what the “war on terror” is all about and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans and Syrians have died at the hands of US-led imperialism and their local lackeys.

The best way, and indeed the only way, to stop the “terror” is to end the root cause of it all — the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the end to the Nato protectorate over Libya and an end to the support of the reactionary Islamic terror gangs that are fighting to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.