On the level of indirect warfare, the Islamicization of Middle Eastern terrorism has been an enormous success. The essence of indirect war... is to deflect the victims' attention away from the people who embody the causes of the violence, the people who make it possible - to complicate the question, who's the enemy? As every terrorist from the region professed, sincerely or not, to be fighting for Allah, it was difficult for westerners to avoid the fallacious conclusion that Islam itself, or perhaps only "Islamic fundamentalism" is the enemy, the cause of terrorism.
But in fact terrorists of varying religiosity, while they speak just as loudly of their attachment to Islam, make the very same efforts to dissimulate their ties to the regimes from which they get the things without which any and all terrorist activities would be impossible: money, bases from which to organize, safe havens, and propaganda, as well as living proof that the cause is doing well. Even for suicide bombing, mistakenly supposed to be mere donation of lives to the cause, millions of dollars are necessary for organizing and for, in effect, paying the suicides' families for their services. The money would be useless without permissive environments in which the recruitment can take place. This in turn requires propaganda media that legitimize such things. And of course the organizers need protection against their enemies. Hezbollah is headquartered in Iran and is deployed in Syrian-controlled Lebanon; Hamas cohabits uneasily with the Palestinian Authority in territories granted by Israel, as well as in Lebanon and Syria; and Islamic Jihad is run out of Syria. All these and many more depend on money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Unknown to many, all of the Palestinian terror groups run on money provided by European and American taxpayers. Can one imagine a cessation of terrorism while such regimes exist? Conversely, can one imagine terrorism were the regimes of the Mideast to police their countries so as to prevent it?
