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COMMENTARY
July 17, 2004
Jihad as a whole
One of the difficulties in explaining terror threats to readers in North America is how to get around obstacles set in place by "political correction" -- by a very strange and insupportable ideology now often backed by the power of law. Among the many (often mutually contradictory) principles of this post-modern ideology is that human cultures or "communities" are not merely equal but interchangeable. One must write as if this preposterous assertion were true: as if for instance there were no significant differences between a person raised in an Arabian Muslim milieu and one raised in a secular North American milieu. Both are assumed to share essential values. To suggest the contrary is to invite a charge of "racial discrimination" -- absurd because this has nothing to do with race everything to do with culture and upbringing and habits of mind and feeling. The belief that human experience can be homogenized leads more often than not to very crass misjudgements about the motives of foreigners founded in the assumption that they at least are "all the same". Example: as many as half of the Arabs in North America came from Christian backgrounds in the Middle East and have little or no sympathy for Muslim aspirations. This includes almost all of the older immigration from the Levant and Egypt most of whom migrated to get away from Islam. In turn the subdivisions within the Muslim Arab communities are many and deep. Islam is a genuinely and profoundly unifying factor but the difference between a Cairo Sufi and an Arabian Wahabi is at least as great as the difference between a High Anglican and a Holy Roller (though not even slightly analogous). A principal difference is in their respective concepts of "jihad" of holy war against the infidel. The Cairo Sufi is of no possible danger to us because he defines "jihad" as a mostly spiritual struggle and mostly against his own lower nature. But it would be sadly true to say that most if not all the imams sent with oil money from Saudi Arabia want us as infidels converted or enslaved or dead. "Wahabi" refers to the most "puritanical" and "fundamentalist" Islamic creed or sect (all these Christian terms need important qualifications when applied to Muslims). It is the sect that most directly and literally embraces "the sword of Islam" the spiritual cause of spreading Islam by violence. But those who embrace the sword cannot be restricted to Wahabis. Even less can they be restricted to members of specific terror cells. In the course of three years' intense study of the issue I've become convinced that there is -- well this is a slight exaggeration -- no such thing as "Al Qaeda". It is more precisely only a name applied vaguely to one of several financing and logistical arms of the Wahabi branch of what could more accurately be called the "Islamic Jihad". Not an army nor a disciplined network of underground cells but an historical movement -- and thus more comparable to something like "the Enlightenment" in the West than to any organized militia. Not to say the Jihad shares ideals with the Enlightenment -- far from it -- but rather it is similar in being a vast idealistic movement consciously advanced by men who co-operate as and where they think they can be most effective -- but taking their orders ultimately not from men but from "the zeitgeist" or "Allah". This may sound a very abstract analysis but it has practical consequences for "homeland security". For starters it means we cannot draw neat legalistic lines between who's in and who's out of the cabal. For instance a journalist working for Al-Jazeera may be every bit as committed to the struggle as a man rehearsing the assembly of a mid-flight bomb. Each is advancing the Jihad by the means most available to him. And exempting the one from prosecution while arresting the other is entirely obtuse. Indications especially from the FBI are to expect a major terrorist hit on North America sometime between now and the U.S. election in November. I think they are right to expect this. The political economic and social fallout from such a hit is unpredictably huge. But I am less and less confident that it can be prevented by anything resembling normal police methods. This is because thanks chiefly to "political correction" we cannot look at the whole Jihad and are in fact only looking for the pointy bits. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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