The Islamic Fundamentalist Age of Terror
From the time the Prophet Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina to spread Islam across the region there has always been a strain of fundamentalism in the tapestry of the Islamic world. One of the precepts of Islam is jihad which literally means “struggle” but which has different practical meanings for various Muslims. In the vernacular of fundamental Muslims of today, the concept of jihad is aligned with a violent struggle against the West in an attempt to bring about a universal Islamic state. “The “modern” fundamentalism of 100 years ago emerged as the Arab and Muslim world faced the bitter truth: they had lagged behind global development” (Gerstenfeld 2014).
The new modern Islamic fundamentalist age of terror can be said to have begun in 1948 with the creation of the modern state of Israel by the United Nations. Israel was founded ina section of Palestine which was at the time sparsely occupied by Arab Muslims. The reaction in the Middle East to the establishment of Israel was militaristic from the start, but Israel, with western aid and technology, managed to hold, and even expand, the territory ceded them by the U.N.
Those with an Islamic fundamentalist
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interests first with the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.. This bombing was a reaction by fundamentalists to American-led forces intervening in the ongoing civil war between the government of Lebanon and Islamic fundamentalist forces. A decade later, in 1993, an Islamic fundamentalist who had received training with a group called Al-Qaeda set off a truck bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, bringing the war of Islamic fundamentalists against the West to American soil for the first time. Ramsey Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack, was motivated by the concept of jihad at the center of the Islamic fundamentalist