straitstimes,
JAKARTA – Might alone will not put an end to terrorism, but serious attempts to 'understand Islam' and the reasons some people develop extremist views might make the world a safer place, said analysts and politicians yesterday after a three-day security meeting here.
The remarks came a day after Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda criticised the United States for its Iraq policy and said 'military operations create martyrs and make it so much easier for terrorists to gather new recruits'.
Yesterday, former Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas said: 'We need to understand Islam if we want to fight terrorists who claim to act in the name of religion.
'Efforts that do not take this understanding into context will fail, and may even backfire and create more ground support for radicals.'
Other think-tank analysts and officials from the Asia-Pacific region brought up the idea that terror experts and some Western governments have made the world less secure by 'seeing Islam purely through the prism of security'.
Dr Farish Noor, a Malaysian political scientist who is based in Germany, said: 'Islam is too complex to be quarantined as a security issue. But Western countries have done just that, earning the distrust of Muslim communities.'
He added that media groups, by relying on sound bites and black-and-white comments from terror experts as they cover bombings and other incidents, help create negative perceptions of Islam and Muslims.
If the analysts and politicians who took part in the Jakarta conference advocated a more multi-dimensional approach to fighting terror, they also made it clear that there is no excuse for terrorism.
Datuk Mohamed Jawhar Hassan, director-general of the Institute for Strategic and International Studies in Malaysia, said: 'People who kill indiscriminately should not be tolerated, but we should find out more about why they do those things.'
