Lecture 1: Democracy in Strange Places

It’s been said that new ideas and innovations require freedom of expression and experimentation. If anyone was looking for an example then I can show you one that is rather surprising. The morphing of al-Qaeda from a highly centralized organization dependent on fixed locations and the protection of friendly governments such as the Islamic Caliphate of Afghanistan into a web of death that is highly adaptable was a product of tolerance and freedom of thought. Most pundits have not clued in on this but back in the Eighties times my gut feelings told me this early on as I observed Islamic extremists in the West.

However narrow-minded and obtuse many of them are the effects of the “westernization” they claim to abhor has had a telling effect. Decades of infiltration into the West resulted in relationships with leftist individuals and organizations in and outside of academia that was sure to result in a transference of ideas and the most salient feature of this has been the rise of “leaderless jihad”. Interestingly enough the collaborators who pine for the likes of George Galloway and Respect such as Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb (once the second most widely read blog in the UK), Yoshi Furuhashi, punkassblog, daily kos and the staff at zmag.org haven’t go a clue about this either. But then again Seymour avoids debating me like the plague since he knows I’ll kick his ass and the rest of the seem to be staying very quiet about rooting for the jihadis now that so many people have identified them as “Allahborators”.

The transformation of jihad from what it once was in 2001 to what it is now has a long and largely unreported history. So much so that when incidents of violence done by Muslims do occur they are rarely seen as part of the overall global jihadist effort to attack the foundations of not just the West but all non-Muslim societies. That is, all who are a part of Dar ul-Harb and not a part of Dar ul-Islam. However, some do recognize that seemingly, random and senseless acts of violence are a part of a larger pattern and if one connects the dots carefully enough the emerging picture is undeniable.

The Salt Lake City rampage of Sulejman Talovic is a case in point and there are many others that have this element of “spontaneity” that the likes of Rosa Luxemburg promoted early on in the 20th century. In fact, the acts of violence described as “random and senseless” are anything but. The very fact that many Muslim attacks in America go back a long ways is likely to bring up the question “what came first? The chicken or the egg? I would say that the roots of Islamic violence go back to cult of personality that centers around the Prophet Muhammad and that what we are witnessing nowadays is in reality simply the continuation of a long line of raids (ghawzas) that he embarked upon. I will go further and state that the existence of al-Qaeda as a hierarchical organization with a fixed geographical locality was an anomaly that simply could not continue. Why? There are several reasons and the one that comes to mind is this:

The rigidity of a top-down, hierarchical organization designed to destroy entire societies renders itself susceptible to infiltration and destruction. The end of the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) is a fine example. By the time this group achieved prominence intelligence agencies such as the CIA had already had decades of experience at picking them apart. Any thorough study of the rise and fall of Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) would identify the weaknesses that result from developing a cult of personality. In the case of SL, that organization was dependent upon absolute uncritical adulation and much of it from young women enthralled by Dr. Abimael Guzman. A strange mix of eroticism and longing for a father figure is revealed if one looks closely enough at the confessions and rants of his female followers. It was Beatlemania with a pathological twist and not unlike the earlier phenomenon of the Manson girls and today’s contemporary equivalent of unbalanced young women who convert to Islam while actually believing that “love conquers all”. The latter are convinced that they can change the ways of their Muslim boyfriends who all too often become their lords and overseers. In short, the suppression of certain personality types by dominant, authoritarian characters will result in highly predictable trajectories of any organization’s development and only serves to enhance any predictive model.

Whether or not jihadi theoreticans ever understood this enough is another question to mull over for another lecture.