The quote above is from the politically and racially satirical Hollywood movie, Team America. It was quite a brave move from the same producers who made South Park to parody and satirise America’s approach to terrorism, at the same time trying to highlight America’s perception of terrorists in general.  But with the coming of films such as these it’s quite obvious that terror plays a big role in the world today and for me, terrorism is a word that has been massively over-used and as a result, has lost its meaning. The vast majority of terrorists we see flashing on our TV screens are big brown bearded (occasionally British) Muslims. Personally, I’ve had enough with these hoodlums destroying my identity and feeding it to the dogs. I’m not the biggest fan of the whole “every muZlim is a terrorist” stereotype and I’m here to set this straight.

For the purpose of this article, terrorism is a bloody and violent act that has caused fear and distress amongst a civilian population and in this context, I wish to tackle the terrorists who have taken my identity and ripped it into tiny pieces. Today you ask anyone to describe a terrorist and the vast majority will detail one to be a brown Asian/Arab male who has a beard and is Muslim. We can clearly see here that it seems the description of a terrorist fits my very personality but yet I don’t commit acts of mass murder. The modern day terrorists play the religion card as an excuse for perpetrating acts of terror and for me, this is disgusting, deplorable, and down-right dishonest. How dare they! So-called “Muslim” terrorists have destroyed the concept of Jihad. The word Jihad does not even mean fighting, nor blow-yourself-up, nor does it mean savagely killing anything that is walking on two legs, white in skin colour, and wearing a suit. Jihad means “to struggle”. A single mother who has a career, cooks, does the house chores, and still finds time to drop her son to football practice is Jihad. The man who is using every ounce of his will-power to give up drugs forever to keep his marriage together is Jihad. The amputee soldier coming back from Afghanistan taking his first steps with artificial legs for the first time in three years is Jihad. Struggling for a higher purpose is precisely what Jihad is all about.

Apparently since I share a similar background to a lot of these terrorists, I’m an expert and so people ask me “Why would they do such a thing?” The answer is quite simple really; they aren’t educated. It seems to me that the root cause of terrorism today is a serious lack of any morally-upright teachings. They feel that because an injustice is going on in some part of the world, they have to take matters into their own hands through the murder of innocent people. “If they can kill children in Baghdad, why can’t I kill children in London?” Violence only breeds more violence and there are far better methods to get your voice heard. What have civilians ever done to hurt children in Iraq? Were the British people aware that Tony Blair would take us to Iraq? Hell no! It is not the fault of the British people so why kill innocents.

To summarise, there is no excuse to commit acts of mass murder no matter what your race, religion, or nationality. Terrorism is not an exclusively Muslim-problem and the only way I see this terrible Titanic tumbling is to give people the morally-sound education that they deserve because the ink of a scholar is more sanctified than the blood of a martyr.

“Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.”- Maria Montessori

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