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Blair Should Know that Al-Qaeda, London Attacks Not Linked to Israel

(JTA) Dore Gold - Tony Blair has been a rare beacon of light in the global war on terrorism, and his clarity of thought is especially important now after the British have come under repeated terrorist attack. But the British prime minister has one flaw in his analysis of the current situation that unfortunately comes up far too often. Looking to explain to the British public the "deep roots" of the terrorist attacks on London last month, Blair first pointed to "the critical issues in the Middle East" that need to be "dealt with and sorted out." The purported link between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and al-Qaeda's rage is patently groundless. Historically, al-Qaeda was not born in 1948, 1967 or 1973, in response to any of the Arab-Israeli wars. It was established in 1989, at the time of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Its ideological fathers, like Abdullah Azzam, saw their struggle in global terms. Throughout the 1990s, when Israel actually did make concessions in the peace process to Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, starting in 1993 with the Oslo agreements, it didn't affect al-Qaeda's rage against the West. Al-Qaeda pursued Western targets in the very same period. After the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993, U.S. citizens were bombed in Saudi Arabia in 1995, followed by the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000. For nearly a decade, Blair's formula for ameliorating the rage of global terrorism through Israeli concessions was shown not to work. There is simply no correlation between the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and al-Qaeda's terror campaign against the West.
2005-08-12 00:00:00
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