Rabat – Understanding what has been taking place in the Middle East depends on answering a few fundamental questions. Here are some that are being raised in various debates and discussions without being fully answered and which still need consensual responses?
Who are we and what would make us cease to be who we are? What defines us as a culture and a civilization? What are the pressures that will make our identity shatter or the frontiers beyond which it will transfigure into something else? How can we justify to ourselves the merge we have been operating lately of our own definitions of backwardness, criminality, tyranny and dictatorship and those of democracy, freedom and human rights into a single definition? How can we revise the definitions of the philosophical concepts that found the values we have argued for centuries to be universal principles for our politics, ethics and daily behaviors?
How much of our freedom and liberty are we willing to give up to protect ourselves from them Do we really have to give up any freedoms and liberties to be secure as many a politician is trying to push on us? What price should we pay for our security? Is the price we are requested to pay not too excessive? Is the situation not being taken advantage of to abuse of our political naivety and reduce us to mere slaves?
How much understanding do we really have of this war against what we call terrorism? Who exactly is warring whom? Who is fighting on behalf or in lieu of whom? To whom is the war benefitting – if it is not to us who are paying for it?
When exactly has this thing we are calling terrorism sprung in the Middle East? Did any terrorism exist in the region prior to the launch of the Western wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? Can anyone give us the exact figures? When exactly has the desolation and waste process started in the region? How much democracy has the West brought to the region since it has launched its democratization process? How much money has been made selling weapons to the various belligerents? How many ailing industries have been reinvigorated as a direct result of this war? How many jobs have been created, and where exactly, as a direct result of this war and how many will be lost if happens to stop? How many financial systems had collapsed before the war which have been saved as a direct result from it?
Can it be that those who have excelled in creating enemies to fight in order to maintain themselves in power and sustain their economic interests are at work again in the region? Can it be that those economies and industrial systems that need wars to stay afloat have found a new market in the region? Can it be that some parts of the world have problems with terrorism because they have been interfering with internal affairs of others, trying to re-engineer societies and political systems, to re-write Holy Books, to police cultures, to topple régimes and to bomb peoples when they resist? To what extent can one expect a people under occupation or whose culture, civilization and religion are under attack not to react and defend itself the way it can What is exactly done to fight terrorism in the region and elsewhere?
How can we defeat the deadly communication power of ISIS, that is, if that is still possible?
How do the terrorists use images, fear, terror, words, pain inflicted to members of the family, moral and psychological humiliation both to subdue and to convince and recruit?
How sound – and earnest – are the solutions of mass surveillance that are promoted in Western Democracies in protecting populations while they have inadequate predictive capacities to analyze the data they collect? What use is there in watching those very individuals whom everyone knows are not the terrorists and missing the terrorists until they strike? What has been done, for example, to check the huge cyber capacities of ISIS which many an expert is saying they may “be much much more devastating” than other forms of traditional wars?
How seriously are we taking the warnings of experts, John MCAFEE for one, telling us the wars of the future are going to be cyber wars?
How much understanding do we have of how ISIS is invading more social media and virtual territories every day? How aware are we of how ISIS is using social media, controlling them and getting away with it beating all official control mechanisms? What measures are we implementing to overcome the expert strategies of ISIS in imaging emotions, hopes and alternative ways of life and capitalizing the video game culture to recruit young generations into a world that echoes their games. To what extent is the true power of ISIS, holding more virtual territories than any State is, as some experts suggest, is also the strategic flaw of the democratic world that is more concerned in occupying lands?
To what extent can USIS invest the virtual sphere without complicities within well established Internet networks? Is it possible, technically, to severe ISIS from the global Internet and deprive it of its power? To what extent has ISIS integrated global economy and become a structural necessity of some states, especially those helping themselves to its preferential and competitive prices of oil and those providing them with weapons at high prices? How come so many superpowers are bombarding and shelling ISIS headquarters, economic sites and oil facilities without overcoming its military capabilities and its ability to recruit throughout the world and socioeconomic categories?
It’s all a matter of answering these questions with no ambiguity! Let’s get back to the discussion after we have answered them all.
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