Yes, I Am A Terrorist By Ahmad Matar The West cries in fear When I make a toy from a matchbox While they [the West] make a gallows of my body Using my nerves for rope. The West panics when I announce one day That they have torn my galabia While it is they who have urged me to be ashamed of my culture And to announce my joy and my utmost delight When they violate me. The West is sorely grieved when I worship One God in the stillness of the prayer niche [ 1] While from the hair of their coattails [ 2] and the dirt of their shoes They knead a thousand idols that they set atop the dung heaps made of the titled ones So that I become their slave And perform amongst them The rituals of flies. And he, they Will beat me if I announce my refusal. If I mention among them the fragrance of flowers and grass They would crucify me Accusing me of terrorism! Admirable are all the actions of the West, and of its tails As for me, as long as I am related to freedom Everything I do is...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51