GENEVA, March 21, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), an international foundation working for peace in the Middle East, hosted an event on international terrorism on March 18, 2017 in Geneva. The guest speaker at the event was Tarek Fatah, an author and columnist from Canada specializing in international terrorism. The invitees at the event included diplomats, members of international organizations and Think Tanks.

Tarek Fatah, in his presentation, highlighted that the pick and choose policy adopted by Western nations with regard to radical Islamic regimes, some whom they supported while targeting others, was one of the key reasons for the failure in the fight against international terrorism. He argued that this policy of the West was not only encouraging regimes like those in Pakistan and Iran to thrive, but also resulting in the inflow of immigrants from these countries, who in turn were gradually working from the inside to demolish institutions and ideologies that represented Western civilization.

He called on the Western governments to get over their colonial era guilt and instead recognize the danger posed to liberal western institutions from the extremist Islamic ideology propagated by certain governments and take a tough stand against them. Giving the example of how Pakistan was promoting Islamic terror groups to carry out acts of terror in its neighborhood and beyond, he warned that such terror acts would continue to be repeated unless countries did not unite to recognize Islamic fundamentalism as the common enemy. He opined that the need of the hour was for the European nations, the US, Canada and other like-minded countries to identify States like Pakistan that sponsored terrorism and work towards isolating them.

SOURCE Scholars for Peace in the Middle East