Experts Call for New World Body to Fight Global Terrorism
CNS News/Julie Stahl | November 29 2004
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Democratic countries
need to band together to form an international league of states dedicated
to the worldwide fight against terrorism, given the United Nations' failure
to do so, experts in Jerusalem said.
Speaking at the second annual Jerusalem Summit - a forum
for international conservative thinkers and diplomats - participants said
something different needs to be done.
Shabtai Shavit, head of the Israel's Mossad (secret service)
from 1989 to 1996, said an international organization should be created to
deal with the global war against terrorism.
"Terrorism cannot exist without territory and thus
action must be against states that support terrorism," Shavit said.
"The U.N. is of course a natural home for such an organization,"
he said, but that won't happen. The U.N. has never even been able to come
to a consensus on a definition for terrorism, much less fight it, he added.
The difference between terrorism in past decades and today,
Shavit said, is that years ago it was primarily secularly based, aspired to
self determination and was mostly local -- whereas today it is based on radical,
religious, imperialistic Muslim worldview that has strong global support.
The terrorists today believe that they have been given a
"divine command" to either convert the rest of the world to Islam
or to extinguish it, he said.
Such an ideology has presented dilemmas to the Western world
in the methods needed to deal with the terrorism, he said, and therefore an
international organization of democracies needs to be formed in order to combat
it.
Shavit, who heads the International Policy Institute for
Counter-Terrorism near Tel Aviv, suggested that an international definition
for terrorism based on the "lowest common denominator" be adopted
by the group whose authority would be based on agreed upon conventions.
"Experts from different countries [would] investigate
the involvement of states and organizations in terror," Shavit said.
A state's involvement in terrorism would be defined by the type and level
of involvement, he said.
"States that are involved in terrorism will be penalized
based upon a fixed scale, which will be defined. The scale will mention the
different types of involvement in order to shift the balance of interests
from those states and convince them that supporting terrorism is not worthwhile,"
he said.
But according to Gold, its not enough to just pull democracies
together. In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, even some democracies believed
to be U.S. allies refused to view the threat from Iraq in the same way.
"Therefore you need a common mission, which is [to
combat] terrorism, and you need democracy, and those have to be wedded to
form a kernel of an alternative organization," Gold said.
"In the meantime, within the U.N. system, those countries
need to begin to work to change the U.N. resolutions, to begin to form an
alternative bloc that pulls in countries from Africa and Asia, away from the
non-aligned movement to a more positive voting patterns," he added.
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