Sayyed Fadlullah: We ask the world and the EU in particular to voice its protest against this terrorism and oppression that will lead only to more chaos and more devastation, and not to appease the Administration by adding more names to the list of terrorism.

Asked in his weekly seminar the following question: What is the Islamic definition of terrorism in view of the America's continuous use of the term?

The Religious Authority, Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlullah, said:

One of silent features of this stage is that what the Americans have termed as the war on terrorism has become an integral part of the political culture of the world and especially the arrogant powers, that aims at waging preemptive wars on terrorism without actually defining terrorism from the Islamic point of view is when a party commits aggression without any right or legitimacy against the other or against civilians in which the aggressor commits killing, plundering and destroying individuals and the society without being in self-defense or in a legitimate war.

But in any definition of terrorism, occupation cannot be excluded, since it uses collective terrorism, and even states terrorism.

On the contrary, Martyr operations that have been resorted to way of necessity since the fighters for freedom in the occupied lands were left with no other means to defend their security and those of their people. Such operations are not terrorist operations since they are a compulsory way of self-defense in issues that have to do with the future of the entire people.

Terrorism, before being an aggressive practice is a mentality of conceit and exclusivity. Those who call for fighting it should first aim at confronting this mentality being the real basis of terrorism.

This is why we saw that when Islam laid the foundation of tolerance and dialogue, it was offering the humanistic alternative for the culture of aggression that finds justifications to every terrorist act. Islam was aware of this issue right from the beginning. It studies the causes and the elements that constitute terrorism, and laid the appropriate foundations to confront it before having to meet its consequences in a direct and violent way.

In our monitoring of the so called "war on terrorism" that is waged by political circles and international research institutes for well known reasons, we have noticed that there is real terrorism in the terms used. Those terms are actually cultural weapons that pave the way for political and military invasions.

We also noticed that America which has failed to achieve any victory in its war against what it calls terrorism wants to cover these failures by waging media and political wars on several levels and holding several political conferences to keep its political culture in circulations suggesting that their war is succeeding and that it has become on the political agenda of several countries which did not use to conceive it as a priority.

Furthermore, the American Administration that claims to fight terrorism to reach a safer world has failed completely since it only managed to spread terrorism and create a favorable atmosphere for spreading it. It is responsible -along with Israel- for the state of chaos that the world has sunk in, as well as for the explosions, killings and destructions in the region. America that failed to present itself to the world as a moral leader that protects it from terrorism is trying to compensate by raising the slogan of spreading democracy in another attempt to run forward, but in a way that serves its expansionist project in the region and decreases the internal pressures.

We ask the Americans who say that there are 45 states in the world that do not adopt democracy. How many states are there that occupy the lands of others? Is the Israeli occupation an expression of democracy? What about the American occupation of Iraq? Substituting the fight against terrorism by spreading democracy is only a means of increasing political and military pressures that will lead to oppressing civil freedoms in the name of protecting them.

In this respect, the biggest enemy of democracy is occupation which has demonstrated all its barbarism in Palestine.

And the place where terrorism is practiced in its most severe form is in Iraq where the American occupation practices have led to devastating consequences. Thus the American Administration that presents itself as an enemy of terrorism, and that tries to pressurize the EU to include additional Islamic movements on the terrorism list is quite hypocritical, since those who practice terrorism in its most brutal form cannot preach against its.

We agree with what has been said on terrorism by a European member in the Madrid Summit. The fall of innocent victims creates anger, which nourishes terror. And this is what the American catastrophic policies in the last few years have led to.

We ask the world and the EU in particular to voice its protest against this terrorism and oppression that will lead only to more chaos and more devastation, and not to appease the Administration by adding more names to the list of terrorism.

We also warn against accepting the various offers on the ground of having to bow with the wind. These offers aim only at serving the Israeli interests, and not those of our peoples who know how to stand in the face of storms by enhancing their unity and by being wise in their discourse, actions and reactions.