Every now and then, a major Western country in the world becomes the target of terrorist attacks. France is once again the scene of a bloody attack. A vehicular act of terror occurred in Nice, France, in broad daylight. This raises two fundamental questions: how can terrorism be defeated? Can the world peace be restored?
Since the late 1980s, Al Qaeda was the terrorist organization that wreaked havoc around the world. In 1982, a truck loaded with explosives rammed through a US military barrack in Lebanon killing more than 200 US military soldiers in that explosion. The list goes on and on. Then, in 1998, the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were savagely attacked. Those attacks caused losses of lives and materials. Moreover, we had September 11, with a death toll of more than 3000 civilians and an array of subsequent terrorist attacks around the world.
More recently, on July 14, 2016, France once again saw carnage, with a total of 84 innocent civilian deaths. It was Bastille Day, a French national celebration that turned sour. The rampage on that day has dismayed France and the whole world. A Tunisian immigrant plowed his truck through a marching crowd of people with children, women and men of all ages. He trampled everyone on his path for about a mile until he got shot by French security forces. It was a moment where celebration turned to tragedy to horror.
This recent terror attack in Nice is reminiscent of the simultaneous Paris terror attacks of November 2015. ISIS and its affiliates are the thorns that the world is sitting on. But how can this outbreak of world terror be defeated? Terrorism is an evil that is difficult to fight and defeat. The superpower countries are powerless to come up with some concrete strategies to contain it.
As the terrorized nations are bewildered about their plans of actions, the slaughtering of innocent people is raging. No strategy proves capable of eradicating this world plague. Identifying every terrorist who mingles with a population is like trying to pick a needle in a haystack. In this case, if this terrorism trend continues, how about world peace and safety?
In the past, it was customary to say that the world experiences times of peace when no major wars are being fought. Now the poignant issue is that the world is supposedly at peace because no conventional war is being fought, but literally a ferocious guerrilla war in the form of terror is being fought in most parts of the world. They are phantom diabolic forces that wear no uniforms but that are trying to subdue the world to their radical Islamic ideology.
Terrorism has changed everyone’s way of life. Fear and despair supersede the culture of peace and relaxation that everyone once knew. If we wait for the terrorists to change their course of actions on their own for the world peace to return, that day may never come. It is only possible when the terrorists are being terrorized with a brute force.
