Richard Bulliet is professor of Middle East history at Columbia University, and the author of six major books on the Middle East and Islam translated into seven languages. His most recent book is The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (2004). His commentaries appear in major papers around the world, including Süddeutsche Zeitung, L'Unita, The Daily Star, New York Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe.
Far from proving that international Islamic terrorism represents a vast unseen threat, the murderous deeds of a handful of young men in Britain, a seven-man cell in Madrid and 19 airborne bombers in the United States—spread out over a period of four years—highlight the limited capacities of the terrorists.
Terrorism relies on horrifying acts to generate the popular conviction that those acts are but the tip of an iceberg of violence and chaos. Governments, security services and news media unintentionally abet this strategy by warning citizens of further “inevitable” attacks, stressing in particular the peril of weapons of mass destruction. The terrorists, they say, may belong to international networks that even now are planning unimaginable horrors. From this perspective, each terrorist attack, whether in England, Egypt, Iraq or Israel, provides evidence that the bulk of the terrorist iceberg lies unseen below the surface.
An opposing view sees acts like the 9/11 attacks and the Madrid and London bombings as jagged bits of dangerous ice floating on corks. Terrorist motivations may readily be discerned within specific arenas, such as Israel, Chechnya, Egypt or Iraq. But beyond these arenas, the subsurface threat is far from being an iceberg. Instead, this view starts from the idea that terrorist acts outside those war zones represent more or less the maximum capacity of the perpetrators at any point in time.
Lurid terrorist scenarios laid out by politicians, pundits and pulp fiction writers play to our greatest fears. Indeed, they show great creativity in imagining how much more severely we might be injured if the terrorists were to follow their suggestions. But the sorts of attacks that might truly suggest an unseen terrorist iceberg have not occurred. No coordinated actions in several European and American cities and countries. No follow-up actions demonstrating flexibility of method, location and target. No successful attacks on well-secured buildings and facilities.
This does not make their attacks less ghastly, nor does it diminish the anguish of the victims. But it does suggest that the climate of intense fear that has been created since 9/11 helps the terrorists more than it hinders them. The goal of terrorism is to generate a level of fear far beyond the terrorists’ actual capacity to inflict harm. We must ask, therefore, whether governments, news organs and security experts that encourage our belief in the hidden terrorist iceberg are actually doing the terrorists’ job for them.
All sharks do not attack swimmers; all terrorists do not threaten London or New York. Though many Muslims disapprove of the policies of Israel and of the international support given to those policies, Palestinian suicide bombings rarely take place outside of Israel. Though many Muslims deplore the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraq-related suicide bombings mainly take place within the context of the ongoing insurgency in that country. Similar observations could be made about attacks in Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and most recently at Sharm el-Sheik in Egypt. In all of these places local terrorists act for local political reasons.
To be sure, Osama bin Laden’s propaganda calls for bringing the war home to the Crusaders and Jews, whom he says are responsible for decades of assaults on innocent Muslims. And there are unquestionably a small number of violent men who are willing to give their lives toward this end. But in 2005, most of the attacks attributed to Al Qaeda-related groups have been carried out within the Muslim world, and the victims have more often than not been fellow Muslims.
Cultivating an atmosphere of constant dread based on the terrorist iceberg lurking beneath the surface is both unnecessary and insidious. Timothy McVeigh did not keep us from visiting federal buildings because no one believed he represented anything beyond his own conspiracy. By the same token, the suicide bombers in London should not be assumed to represent much more than their own conspiracy.
What is insidious about the iceberg theory is that it encourages the thought that any Muslim anywhere in the world may become a terrorist. Violence perpetrated by hyper-nationalists, Maoists, separatists and cultists of one sort or another is normally assumed to be self-limiting. But when any terrorist proclaims his interpretation of Islam as a rationale, the non-Muslim public becomes gripped by a fear that the terrorist iceberg may be a billion members strong.
If the Euro-American public understood Islam as well as they understand Christianity or Judaism or secular political radicalism, they would realize that their fears of Muslims are largely groundless, and they would be skeptical of the alarmist writings of Islamophobes. Today’s reality, however, is that fear of the terrorist iceberg translates too easily into a generalized fear of Islam. The racist Yellow Peril of 1900 has become the Islamophobic Green Peril of today. This exaggerated fear of Islam, and of Muslims, erodes civility, drives wedges of suspicion between religious and ethnic groups, and threatens the traditions of mutual respect that lie at the foundation of our society.
