Religion and Public Disclosure

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 A news article published in 2002 by Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) explores

the relationship between religious militancy and terrorism. The article outlines terrorism as one

of the religious challenges facing the Middle East. PBS claims that religion has been weaponized

to mobilize individuals into extremism, leading to terrorism. Despite religious groups having less

military capabilities to kill, unlike governments, their influence, garnered from dedication and

unpredictability, gives them immense power1. The article states that religious extremism arises

when a fraction of the community feels threatened or challenged in their belief. Challenges are

often political, economic, or cultural and not necessarily religious in any form. The region is

experiencing various non-religious challenges that negatively impact the people’s living

standards and values thus, leading to religious extremism reactions2.

Religions have been used by various terrorist groups to justify their conducts. Most of

these groups go mistreating, harassing, and even killing people in the name of their particular

religions. This has continued happening all along and it has now become a norm of most of these

groups.

For instance, A Zionist settler from the orthodox community of Qiryat Arba stormed the

crowded Ibrahim Mosque in the biblical town of Hebron on the West Bank on February 25,

1994, during Islam's holy month of Ramadan. Before being beaten to death, he discharged three

30-shot magazines into the assembly of 800 Palestinian Muslim worshippers killing 29 and

wounded 150. The attack was primarily a result of two opposing religion movements (Zionist

and Islam), in which, the Zionists did not see it as a big deal attacking, destroying and killing

their fellow humans.

1
Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God. University of California Press, 2017, 4.
2
Public Broadcasting Service, “What is Religious Militancy and its Relationship to Terrorism.” PBS. Last modified
2002. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/globalconnections/mideast/questions/militant/index.html
 Religious violence has been is increasing on a daily basis. We view pictures of terrorism

in different times, days, as well as places. This happens in buses, social places such as schools,

market areas, and even in hotels. The pictures are of bodies ton to shreds by these terrorists.

Some of these bodies might be of people whom we are closely related or whom we have lived to

know for a long time. This creates a sense of fear among the members of that community where

the attack took place. For instance, the bombing that occurred at Baghdad, Belfast, and Jerusalem

made the people of these cities have a feeling of betrayal in that personal security and order that

is usually a basic assumption cannot be taken in its normal way.