Excerpted from a longer article by Jessica Stern
With each successive fatwa, bin Laden altered his mission. His third fatwa, issued in February 1998, urged followers for the first time to deliberately target American civilians, rather than soldiers. Although it mentioned the Palestinian struggle, this was only one among a litany of Muslim grievances. His fourth, in October 2001, emphasized Israelâs occupation of Palestinian lands and the suffering of Iraqi children under UN sanctions  concerns broadly shared in the Islamic world.
| Basically, he was just listing grievances, which he didn't really consider all that important, as justification for jihad, which he did consider to be important... |
Bin Laden was actively seeking to turn the US âwar on terrorismâ into a war between Islam and the West. The Sept. 11, 2001, âevents,â he said, had split the world into two camps: the Islamic world and âinfidels,â and the time had come for âevery Muslim to defend his religion.â A mastermind of Sept. 11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, would later describe violence as âthe taxâ Muslims must pay âfor gaining authority on earth.â
| "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," as Chairman Mao famously said. In the case of Islamists, world domination would grow out of the barrel of a gun. |
Individually, the terrorists I interviewed cited many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause. But the variable that most frequently came up was not poverty or human rights abuses  as has been posited in the press  but perceived humiliation.
| Coulda read that on Rantburg, Jessica. We've been discussing honor/shame cultures for a couple years now... |
Humiliation came up at every echelon of terrorist group members â leaders and followers. For example, the founder and former leader of a Kashmiri group, the Muslim Jambaz Force, told me that the primary factor that led him to start the group was a sense of cultural humiliation. âMuslims have been overpowered by the West. Our ego hurts. We are not able to live up to our own standards for ourselves. It felt to me at the time I was involved in militancy like a personal loss,â he said.
| "If you can't compete, because you're a part of a stagnant culture, what else can you do but kill people?" |
But the militant despaired at what had happened to the jihad movement, saying: âThe first generation of fundamentalists â Qutb and Maududi â was focused on daawa â education. We focused on freedom. This generation is much more rigid, stricter, than my generation. They are focused on hate. Hate begets hate. You cannot create freedom out of hatred.â
| Hatred's so much easier than rational thought. It's also self-perpetuating. The Islamist's hatred, as soon as its roots are understood, begets contempt. |
Bin Ladenâs deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, observed that the ânew world orderâ is a source of humiliation for Muslims. He has argued that it is better for the youth of Islam to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to humiliation. Violence, in other words, restores the dignity of humiliated youth. This is similar to Franz Fanonâs notion that violence is a âcleansing force,â which frees oppressed youths from an âinferiority complex, despair and inaction,â making them fearless and restoring their self-respect.
| That's where the contempt comes from. Beturbanned goobers, wallowing in their inferiority complexes, unable to build societies that are productive or even livable, running around with guns, shrieking and rolling their eyes — what're we supposed to do? Be afraid of them? They arouse fear, alright. It's not the fear of a formidable enemy, though. It's the fear of irrationality, the same fear that any psychopath arouses. And here we have an entire religion that marches lemming-like into organized psychopathy. |
Fanon also warned of the dangers of globalization for the underdeveloped world. The purpose of terrorist violence, according to its advocates, is to restore dignity. Its target audience is not necessarily the victims and their sympathizers but the perpetrators and their sympathizers. Violence is a way of strengthening support for the organization and the movement it represents... Perhaps the most evil aspect of religious terrorism is that it aims to destroy moral distinctions themselves. Its goal is to confuse not only its sympathizers, but also those who seek to fight it. By the same token, the adversaries of terrorist groups need to respond not just with guns, but also by sowing confusion, conflict and competition among terrorists and between terrorists and their sponsors and sympathizers. They should encourage condemnation of extremist interpretations of religion by peace-loving practitioners. They should change policies that no longer serve their interests or are inconsistent with their values, even if these are policies the terrorists demand. In the end, what counts is what we fight for, not what we oppose. We need to avoid giving into spiritual dread, and hold fast to the best of our principles and values by emphasizing tolerance, empathy and courage. |