Valdai Club

The importance of the Old City in Jerusalem as a sacred place for the three great religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, goes far beyond the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Any exacerbation of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation over the Jerusalem problem in general and the Temple Mount in particular, immediately becomes a region-wide problem of the Middle East and, of course, attracts the attention of the whole world.

Terror began spreading internationally in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the actions of secular ideological and separatist terrorist organizations. In the late 1980s, many radical Islamist organizations pledged their allegiance to a new force – al-Qaeda, one of the largest ultraradical international terrorist organizations of the Wahhabi branch of Islam. Salafi jihadist terrorism fully positioned itself in the international arena with the terrorist attacks of 2001 in the United States.