Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left.

The Weekly Standard ^ | 11/26/2001 | Waller R. Newell

[dennisw]

Sho 'nuff!

[Victoria Delsoul]

Thanks Dennis.

[dennisw]

 

This how Osama Bin Laden will look soon. Che Guevara was Argentinian.

[Victoria Delsoul]

Yes. Thank you, Dennis. Good job.

[Valin]

The Left has always valued "authenticity" and passion far more than it values human life, or even any specific political program.

That's because for them ideas are the only thing that matter, people are only there to put the ideas into practice.

[lavaroise]

Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a foggy, medieval, blood-and-soil collectivism purged of the corruptions of modernity, and just as Pol Pot wanted Cambodia to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama dream of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century Islam.

Just as I feared. And with the destruction of Israel, arabs hope to turn the clock back 6000 years before God gave the Tohra to the Jews. There is an angle where these people are extortioners by nature (they should not be called communists or Nazists but extortionists) , so that they want to turn the clock back to barbarity while keeping the technology or improving it (the Hitlerian model). Hence the blessings earned by goodness will be claimed by evil.

While I believe we face great dangers and Jiang's 1000 year of extortion reign, I do also believe that miracles do exist. Still, I am not going to be the one ready to try to extort heaven from God.

See you in the other life... maybe.

[harpseal]

Thanks for the heads up on this. My only hope is that once through with the Islamic Terrorists we can then get to it with the academic terrorists in our Universities.

Stay well - Stay armed - Stay safe - Yorktown

[Valin]

Bump.

[headsonpikes]

Bump. One can never see too many pictures of dead Communists. ;^)

[Semaphore Heathcliffe]

bump for later; thanks, d.

[dennisw]

How goes it? You are one busy guy. I can tell by the way you cannot get to threads right away.

Have a good Thanksgiving and all.

[Semaphore Heathcliffe]

LOL. I've actually been slave to Age of Empires lately, only get around to FR when I'm not cutting great swaths through the Hittites.

And a Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.

[ramdalesh]

In part yes the machine collapses (the notion of entropy fits here), but another way to look at it.....If a crop fails in South Carolina, what is there to stop North Carolina from raising tarriffs....(The states cannot be soveriegn).

If a crop fails in Nicaragua what is there to stop Guatemala from raising tarriffs? (thus capitalizing on their misfortune) Central American Union would work.

If an Egalitarian system of economic policies is going to work, wether Capitalist, or Socialist, it must regard its neighbors as business partners, and political allies.

The anti-globalists are not protesting against a world state, they are protesting against corporations who profit in the absence of international peace. These corporations are the "warmakers", who make it their business to smash the machine in other states, so that their company can get richer.

Free trade and big business aren't bad things, but there is no political body capable of regulating what they do internationally. The situation is so bad in some places....WalMart employees in Burma make $.06/hour, Nike sweatshops in Vietnam are equally bad. OPEC is responsible for more international policy than any war party is, and so on and so forth.

Marx describes suicide as failure on the part of civilization as a whole. John Locke was also of the belief that crime is a byproduct of an unjust society, as opposed to just a Mad individual.

The investigator played the tape backward, starting from the time of death (of the suicide victim), searching for the actual cause of death, who or what caused the victims maddness. In conclusion he discovered that no one person or event could have prevented the suicide, but the entire civilization itself was responsible.

[Jabba the Nutt]

Pol Pot and his pals spent 20 years in the jungle trying to take power thru violence. Osama Bin Laden's doing the same in caves.

Open letter to the world. These creeps can not and will not bring America to her knees. Ain't gonna happen. There's a bigger possibility of Arabia becoming a glass coated parking lot than this happening.

[AthenaUNC]

I think this article is fundamentally wrong.

Islamists have not completely distorted the religion of Islam as we'd like to imagine (that would certainly make ourselves feel more PC and more armed to fight this threat), but are actually traditionalists in nature.

The assertion that Osama bin Laden primarily wants to bring America to its knees is false.

Osama writes and speaks from the same fundamental viewpoint as Mawdudi, Taymiyyah and ultimately Qutb. It is an internal, domestic struggle.

They want to first bring the Middle East under their control in order to establish a one world Ummah or Islamic state which is ruled by a "rightly-guided" Calipha (much like the Pope) with strict adherence to Sharia (Islamic law).

In order to achieve this vast plan of one world worshipping Allah, they feel the must first conquer the regimes of the Middle East that are apostates.

In this calculation, they see the West as the foremost supporter of these regimes. So in order to bring down the Middle Easter governments, the Islamists targeted the United States in an attempt to bring instability to these regimes.

Osama bin Laden calculated that the US was really a "paper tiger" in nature. He felt the US would violently lash back after 9-11 and create what Huntington would call "A Clash of Civilizations." He thought we would immediately invade Arab countries releasing a pandora's box and that, because our society is extremely casualty-averse (as seen currently in the war in Iraq), we'd fold after we had some losses. And after we folded in the Middle East, they could set up shop.

He calculated wrong.

The idea of socialism sparks some Islamists to action, but the gather their ideas more so from the Quran rather than the West.

The Quran squelches individualism and glorifies building a hudud (wall) around their society to keep everyone in as a collective body.

I would hardly attribute so much of their rational calculations as a result of postmodernism. That's letting them off the hook too easily.

[beckett]

Bump for an article that receives an interesting analysis here at Samizdata.net blog

[nw_arizona_granny]

..... the leader was found to be a Spaniard who had converted
to Islam. His pre-Muslim background? Active in HB, the
political wing of the Marxist Basque-separatist terrorist group
ETA. That same day, I read about Hugo Chavez, the left wing
dictator of Venezuela, praising bin Laden.

The doors between Marxism and Islam, in other words, open
both ways .....

All of the world's terrorists are first and foremost, psychotic marxist
gangsters -- and _____________________ ... fill in the blank [Irish
"republican," for example] distant second.

Most, like the self-styled "i r a" have become so addicted to their
criminally-murderous ways -- robbing banks, trafficking drugs,
kneecapping, blowing the arms and legs off babies, little girls and
boys and little old ladies -- stuff like that -- that they probably don't
even remember about half of the time what they were supposed to be
about in the first place! And don't care!
44 posted on 11/18/2001 1:20:27 PM PST by Brian Allen
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