Sir John Saunders, the chair of the inquiry, said the mosque had displayed "weak leadership" in failing t address what an expert witness to the inquiry described as a "very toxic political environment" fuelled byconflict and unrest in Libya.
Tracey Pook, the Didsbury Mosque's community engagement coordinator, has been monitoring the number of threats the centre has received and said they had been growing by the hour.
"Having compiled the threats and attacks, I've seen people say the mosque should be demolished, that extremists live here, and that the centre is somehow responsible for the murder of children," Pook told Middle East Eye.
Words like ‘extremism’, ‘radicalism’ and ‘terrorism’ apply only to describe violence committed by individuals or organisations. Those who monopolise definitions - when they exist – and concepts throughout history are crucial in manufacturing ‘public opinion’ and producing emotive reaction, and therefore, opinions and prejudices – the support of counter-violence and oppression becomes legitimate.
Dawn, the English-language newspaper in Pakistan in an August 23, 1998, editorial, “Who will define the parameters of terrorism, or decide where terrorists lurk? Why, none other than the United States, which from the rooftops of the world sets out its claim to be sheriff, judge and hangman, all at one and the same time.”
The ideologues, the corporate media and governments have the duty to defend state violence by either ignoring, dismissing or marginalising the causes of violence in general. The long history of multiple factors such wars, poverty, hopelessness, economic oppression, colonial history, etc. are sidelined. In short, the system that produces violence in its both state and individual forms is not or rarely questioned.
Eqbal Ahmad: “I think terrorism should be defined in terms of the illegal use of violence for the purposes of influencing somebody’s behaviour, inflicting punishment, or taking revenge. If we define terror in that way, the first thing we discover is that it has been practiced on a larger scale, globally, both by governments and by private groups. Private groups fall into various categories. The political terrorist is only one category out of many others. When we talk about terror, then, we are talking about the political variety. When we talk about the political variety, the first thing to ask is, what are its roots? Who is the terrorist?
Official definitions, even academic definitions of terror, exclude the illegal violence: torture, burning of villages, destruction of entire peoples, genocide, as outside of the definition of terror, which is to say the bias of terror is against people and in favor of governments. The reality is that the ratio of human losses between official and terrorist activity has been one to a thousand. For every life lost by unofficial terrorism, a thousand have been lost by the official variety.” (Eqbal Ahmad interviewed by David Barsamian, A Seven Stories Press First Edition, published in association with Open Media in 2001).
“Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: 'Terror is an intense, overpowering fear.' He uses terrorizing, terrorism, ‘the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government.' This simple definition has one great virtue, that of fairness. It's air. It focuses on the use of coercive violence, violence that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce. And this definition is correct because it treats terror for what it is, whether the government or private people commit it.
Have you noticed something? Motivation is left out of it. We're not talking about whether the cause is just or unjust. We're talking about consensus, consent, absence of consent, legality, absence of legality, constitutionality, absence of constitutionality. Why do we keep motives out? Because motives differ. Motives differ and make no difference.
The need to be heard is essential. One motivation there.
“The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. Battered children are known to become abusive parents and violent adults. You know that. That’s what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror.” This was said by Eqbal Ahmad in October 1998.
Notice the language of appealing to/requesting from the U.S. not engage in covert operations, etc. He was not attacking those operations as a form of state terror, but as ‘operations’ to avoid carrying out: “Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes.” Ahmad confines state terror to U.S. non-Western allies such the regimes in Nicaragua, Chile and Indonesia, for instance.
Ahmad had faith in the ‘international law’: “Please help reinforce and strengthen the framework of international law.”
Note also how Ahmed fell in the discourse of ‘the clash of civilisation’ with an astonishing exaggeration: “Two civilisations are about to collide in the fieriest duel in human history.”
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