By Naguib Mahfouz I want to see an international conference being held on the issue of terrorism. Since the early 1990s, Egypt has been pressing for such a conference, and now there is more need for it than ever. Random violence is spreading all around us, like a pernicious disease, dumb and deadly. In response, countries are beginning to act like outlaws, responding to terror with terror, assaulting civilians and calling it collateral damage, blowing homes up, bombing residential areas. The battlefield has lost its legitimate boundaries. Religious sites which should have been kept out of the fighting have come under attack. Countries are sending armies across oceans and desolate desert to fight against a mirage, and the locals respond by declaring a national battle for liberation, but look at the methods they use. Terror is a common enemy of humanity, for it does not differentiate between friend and foe, military and civilian. The Chechen attack in Russia shocked the world, so did the abduction of civilians in Iraq. This has to stop. We need an international gathering that defines terror and envisions ways of curbing it. Lives are at stake. Terror is no excuse for invasion of other nations, just as liberation is no excuse for the murder of innocents. Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
