A Pepperdine University student club brings Walid Phares to speak about what he believes are the fundamental American misunderstandings about Al Qaeda’s goals in the United States and the U.S. response to terrorism in the past and present.
By Sara Rosner / Special to The Malibu Times
While Malibu is a far cry from the recent bombings in Jordan and the riots of France, terrorism is a prevalent issue for many members in the academic community at Pepperdine University. A school club, Students for the Defense of Democracy, invited Dr. Walid Phares to speak to Pepperdine students and faculty about his new book, “Future Jihad,” and also to discuss the roots of terrorism at a lecture on Nov. 14.
In his book, Phares examines what he claims are the fundamental American misunderstandings about Al Qaeda’s goals in the United States and the U.S. response to terrorism in the past and present.
“We brought him to speak because he’s an expert in the field,” said junior Kevin Mills, co-president of Students for the Defense of Democracy. “He can really shed some light and raise awareness here in Malibu and at Pepperdine.”
Phares was born in Lebanon, where he became a lawyer and a journalist. He immigrated to the United States to teach Middle Eastern studies, and ethnic and religious conflict at Florida Atlantic University in 1990 and is now an MSNBC/NBC expert on terrorism and the Middle East. In addition to producing his eighth and latest book, Phares is regularly consulted by the United Nations Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security and various media outlets including CNN and Al Jazeera.
In his speech, Phares emphasized that Al Qaeda and the Islamic ideology that governs the organization had been active long before the attacks of Sept. 11 and was not merely an immediate response to U.S. foreign policy.
“The war was on for at least a decade before 9/11. It took a whole decade for America to discover Jihadism,” Phares said.
According to the Web site of the Council on Foreign Relations, Al Qaeda members believe that Jihad is a “holy war” and that they are fighting such a war against the United States.
Phares said that Al Qaeda’s contribution to the overthrow of the Soviet regime in Afghanistan in 1989 gave the organization the inspiration and confidence to take on the United States. Phares also said that Al Qaeda tested the American response to terrorism several times before the attacks of Sept. 11.
Phares said that the lack of response from the United States to the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1998 and the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 encouraged Al Qaeda members to pursue a successful domestic attack.
“They research our systems, find the failures and use them to inflict mass casualties,” Phares said. “It was not that difficult to do in an open system where there was a failure to respond. The tactical decision to strike was totally in the hands of the terrorist.”
Though Phares acknowledged the bloody results of the Sept. 11 attacks, he claimed that the consequences could have been far worse if Al Qaeda had taken more time to gain power and increase their following in the Middle East and the strife-laden Eastern Europe in the 1990s.
“Al Qaeda would have gone from 30,000 to 300,000 in 2008. There would have been 2,000 hijackers instead of 20,” Phares said. “America would have crumbled.”
While Phares declined to entirely disclose the contents of his book, he said that he explores what terrorism looks like in the future and that there is an actual competition between the United States and Al Qaeda.
“There is a race that is between how many they [Al Qaeda] are going to recruit and the rise of democracy movements in the Middle East,” Phares said.
Phares said that the only effective way for the U.S. to combat the spread of Al Qaeda in the Middle East was to give people the incentive to go against the terrorists.
“The same societies must produce the anti-Jihadist,” Phares said. “How are you going to reach them?”