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Every time something of minor importance blows up, the first thing we hear is that "terrorist groups" are suspected of being involved with it. When TWA flight 800 went down off of New York, most reports stated that a likely cause of the mid-air explosion was a hit from a shoulder-mounted ground-to-air missile. Now we all know that it was simply a fire in the engine tanks caused by sloppy mechanics that created this tragedy. We at Conspiracy Theory believe that there is more here than meets the simple eye. As in, a conspiracy to keep the American people under control with the terrorist scare.
1. TERROR TALK
Ask any student of international politics and they will tell you that there is no hard and fast definition of the word "terrorism". So why do we use the word? The word terrorism strikes fear into the hearts of freedom loving peoples everywhere. However, this word is misused to the point of abuse, and we believe that someone has a motive to do exactly that. The use of terms like threat and terror invoke a sentiment that forces us to fear others based on mere statements from those in a position to control us. It blurs the line between fictional threats and real ones, and it desensitizes us to violent acts when they actually occur. Another major key to this problem is the reporting of so-called terrorist acts through the written word. It gives more credibility to the scare than television could do alone, as most Americans hold rags like The New York Times and Newsweek as holy. The narratives you encounter about terrorism are not totally unbiased themselves. A certain amount of subjectivity invades everyone's interpretation of events. This creates a mindset that all acts done by others than ourselves are terroristic and should be dealt with, using all due speed and violence.
2. THE SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
The statistical reporting of terrorism actually creates the momentum for terroristic acts. In this world of 30-second sound bytes on the CBS Evening News, reporters hardly have time to do more than list body counts, of course highlighting how many Americans died. These quick messages of fear and death have brought us to believing, not without some help from those upstairs, that terrorism is the greatest threat to the world today. However, more people died last year from choking on their dinners than from terrorist attacks. Plus, the placements of the label of terrorist are not without bias. Your political position determines how your violent acts are categorized. When Navy SEALS blow up a building in Serbia, it's considered a victory for Democracy, even though the only important people killed are the innocent members of the janitorial staff, dreaming about returning to their loved ones before the sun rises. When rebels in Colombia, a totally corrupt ally of the US, blow up a military installation, it's called an act of terror. See the problem? By treating people as evil based on their beliefs, we often force them to turn to violence as a way to defend themselves.
3. UNCLE SAM'S STAKE IN THIS
By now, we have shown that the media has played its part in perpetuating the mindset that threats are all around us. However, they are not the ones that are truly behind it, simply unwitting pawns in a grander plan. Terror and terrorism are terms that the government uses as semantic tools to justify their goals of Western domination and hegemony. The government's ignorance and constant dismissal of the true threats in the world, many of them our allies, leads to the harms and death of terrorism. Don't forget that many of these so-called "Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organizations" were created by our own CIA to fight the Soviets on their home turf. Remember Sheik Omar Abdul? If you don't, he was the blind Muslim religious leader that the FBI pinned the blame on for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. As with Qaddafi, Noriega, and Hussein, the blind sheik is just another example of yesterday's friend transformed into today's archterrorist enemy. One Ali Mohammed, a Green Beret stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, was a frequent visitor to Abdul's headquarters, known as the Alkifah, or "struggle". He trained their men, on orders from Uncle Sam, in the terrorist tactics that we now hate them for. The FBI had been following them and monitoring their activities since 1989, so why didn't they stop the bombing before it happened? Because that bombing has done more than any other event to convince the people that they need to government to protect them from the outside world. The lack of a solid definition of terrorism, as discussed above, allows us to pin the blame for certain problems on anyone we want and call them terrorists, when we ourselves are guilty of terroristic acts in attempts to shove our hegemony down the throats of others. Don't our invasions of Grenada and Panama count as terrorism? Doesn't the mining of Nicaraguan harbors constitute an act of terrorism? The talk of terror is used to justify violence against political groups.
4. ISLAM
Associating Islamic fundamentalists with terrorists is just a trick to reinforce Western stereotypes of others and denies the root cause of most of these problems; imperialism and colonialism. The West has abused the Arab world for a thousand years, starting with the Crusades back in the days of knights and armor. The term terrorist coupled with selective representations of events has reinforced these negative beliefs. These labels serve only to make someone's ethnic identity the all-important factor in dealing with him and to solidify the "Us-Them" dichotomy that the government uses to scare us. This narrowness of thought leads to the oppression of the Islamic world and even more violence. The stereotypes that all terrorists are Islamic was empirically disproved by the Oklahoma City bombing. The very first reports listed Islamic terrorists as the prime suspects, and we all know now that it was some of our own, home-grown, Unites States Army trained boys that did the job. It's not like there aren't dangerous Christian fundamentalist groups. Must I bring up the Waco Branch Dividians?
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