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>>>> I think [the Islamo-fascists] are not entirely self-motivated.

My guess: they are 99% self-motivated by Arab nationalism. Nationalism gives the individual a greater sense of belonging, a larger purpose in life. It doesn't have to be positive, like American patriotism -- it can be any government or movement to unite a people by race or creed. Who might benefit? Sometimes the Chinese side with one mideast group or another, but I think it's Machiavellian on their part. France, Germany, and Russia also have irons in the fire. But they stand to lose much if they can't continue accessing the oil on the free market. In short, the west (plus China) pay a lot of money to the mideast, which in turn, is used to stoke the fires of brooding (if stunted) nationalism. On its own, Islam and all its related cultures give mideast people a stronger sense of history and meaning, albeit a hollow one. But it motivates them in so many ways.

Pan-Arab nationalism has everything that Hitler had going for him except one government. It can and will go farther because it only needs a religious concept -- not even a specific dogma. I doubt it even needs one particular sect to be cohesive. And I blame that cohesiveness on a primitivist neomedievalism, an erector set religion which justifies militarism for spreading its beliefs, and anti-semitism. And all of that I blame on the human need to belong to a larger purpose.

For the west, I can sum up our higher purpose: freedom of conscience and commerce. In pursuing that goal, we obtained a great deal of power. For pan-Arab nationalists? A fearless ambition to geopolitical power directly without earning it.

Before I continue, I'd like to digress on anti-semitism, because I think it may have provided a common motif for anti-modernists of all stripes, from Mao to Khoemeni. ("Market capitalism" anyone?)

Over the years I have come to believe that anti-semitism has a force of its own. I was raised to understand that due to the mobility of the Jews and their commitment to learning, they have come to be treated as scapegoats throughout European history. The printing press and the advent of recorded media has now spread this disease all over the world. You can find discussion of the protocols of Zion in Japan before the second world war, for example. Adolf Hitler observed the mayor of Vienna using anti-semitism to unite his constituents, and he grasped it as a political tool. There is a link between the Mufti of Jerusalem during the 1930s and Adolf Hitler, and it extends to Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Anti-Zionism (the fight against a Jewish homeland) is anti-semitism, because it would deny them their right to exist outside of exile. But a Jewish homeland is a wedge driven down the middle of Arab nationalism.

Answering the question what is Arab nationalism is no easy task, and I am not up to it myself. It certainly includes Islamic culture, but would also involve Persian, Afghani, and Pakistani converts not to mention African and Indian. There are several sects, including Sunni and Shi'ite -- both of which have produced deadly, cult like mass behavior.

A website apologizing for Wahhabism recently came across in a Google search: http://www.thewahhabimyth.com/. It should send shivers down the spine of any careful reader. Perhaps its owners could tell you more about who pays their bills and why. My guess? They themselves are caught up in a battle for the soul of this future perfect Arab world, and al Qaeda frightened many -- emerging as it did out of the murky depths of those absolutist values found in the Koran. But if al Qaeda was a warning to them, why do they persist? It's oil, the undeniability of the religious underpinnings of their daily lives, and a culture that once produced Damascene Steel blades and cannot forget that it once ruled the transasian world. It also may be an ugly sense lurking in the mideast that life is meaningless without reinventing a superculture to match and outdo the west's. It's the idea of a super race all over again.

Would others try to take advantage of the destabilizing of American allied interests? Certainly. But a collapsed Russia and China, overrun by power-mad Islamic jihadis in the mid 21st century is no future either of those world powers wants.