Terrorism

For ‘man made’ things to happen – for anybody to do anything – three requirements must be met first.
‘Circumstances’, ‘determination’ and ‘opportunity’.

To serve a meal, the chef needs ingredients and tools, willingness to do it and a hungry client.
To engage in an act of terrorism, the terrorist needs a certain set of circumstances, the ‘determination’ to do ‘it’ and a ‘trigger’.

Is it far-fetched to compare these two things?
Feeding people and killing them?

From a ‘deterministic’ point of view, there’s no difference between deciding to serve a bowl of pasta and deciding to deliver a bomb.
The consequences are, obviously, completely different.
Supporting life versus taking it away.

There are more differences.
Nobody has yet seriously considered banning restaurants and everybody hates terrorism.
When subjected to acts of terrorism! Otherwise…

Meanwhile, PKK continues to remain a terrorist organization!

So…
Just as food tastes vary enormously, so does various people’s interpretations on what constitutes a terrorist act.
The first constant being the fact that food sustains life while terror tends to make it difficult.
And the second one being the fact that both restaurants and terrorist acts are community based phenomena.

A restaurant depends on the people who deliver the goods, on those who operate it and on the paying customers who keep the business afloat.
A terrorist depends on those who help and facilitate. And a terrorist depends on the rest of the community turning a blind eye towards what’s going on. For no matter what reasons! Until they realize how foolish they have been…

‘But who is a terrorist?’

That’s a very good question!
There are up to three types of ‘associates’ in any act of terrorism.
The ‘direct operator’, the ‘first hand facilitators’ and the ‘people behind’.
While it is quite simple to understand the roles played by the ‘direct operators’ and by the ‘first hand facilitators’, things become murkier when it comes to the ‘people behind’.
For some – including for me, the current Iranian leadership are among the ‘people behind’ the Hamas terrorist organization. But what about those who, willingly or unwittingly, make it so that whole communities become ‘restless’?
Restless enough to generate terrorists and careless enough to turn a blind eye towards terrorist acts being prepared in their midst?

My point being that just as nobody becomes a celebrity chef overnight, it’s almost inconceivable that anybody might engage in major acts of terrorism without being helped by some and noticed by many.
And just as a chef has to be talented to become noticed, a ‘direct operator’ needs to be in a ‘particular’ state of mind in order to operate. But just as an untalented cook is, eventually, ‘set aside’ by a run of the mill community, a willing ‘direct operator’ ends up, literally, being embraced by a ‘triggered’ community.
Or is eventually ‘sent away’ by a normal one. By a properly functioning society!

Just before starting this post, I heard somebody commenting on Antonio Guterres’s words: ‘Even if he will not have to resign, he won’t get another mandate’…
Now, as a coda, I feel the need to share that comment with you.