I have just finished reading a marvellous paper by one of the foremost writers in the study of Islamic terrorism Most importantly, it was written 6 month ago, but it could just have well been penned this morning, clarifying as it does the origins, methods and aims of the movements behind the current war in Lebanon. Read it and you will come out with a much deeper and clearer understanding of the fight we have on our hands today, and why Israel must get the backing of the whole free world as the first line of defense against a vicious, evil enemy.
THE RADICAL POLITICS OF ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM by Daniel Goldhagen
The most telling paragraphs, for me, were these ...
Political Islam is on the march in the three loci of politics: the street, the halls of power, and the field of battle. Its targets are both domestic (to suppress freedom and dissent within Islamic countries; sharia is already becoming the rule in Gaza) and international (to spread its sway and impose its orthodoxy abroad). While its international power is still circumscribed, political Islam's ambitions are extensive, violent, and frightening-- with its members sensing its growing potential (fueled also by America's geostrategic weakening in the Iraq quagmire). Political Islam's leaders and masses watch a Western world in evident disarray about what to do regarding each aspect of this partly coordinated, partly fortuitous offensive. We must consider that we are witnessing the beginning of political Islam's intensifying social and political mobilization into a new multipronged, intercontinental intifada.
and these ...
Political Islam is a transnational movement. Precisely because it cuts across countries and includes political movements and groups that, on some matters, are antagonistic to one another, it can seem somewhat amorphous and diffuse. But its common ideological foundation--and its overarching set of concerns--give it a shared purpose for which its adherents can singly, and in concert, work. Political Islam, which erases the distinction between politics and religion, includes all those in power or aspiring to power who want politics to be merged with, and subordinated to, Islam in a domestic and (for many) ultimately global rule of fundamentalist versions of Islam (which differ from the more tolerant, pluralistic forms that are widely practiced, including by most Muslims in the United States). As Hamas's Musa Abu Marzook, its deputy chief leader-in-exile, said on Israeli radio this month, one of the principles it will never compromise is "government according to the laws of the sharia." Political Islam also includes all those in power or vying for power (including secular leaders) who use an intolerant version of Islam as a political ideology to mobilize Muslims at home or abroad for aggressive political action. These actions are typically directed at those bucking the political Islamic line, especially abroad against non-Muslims, derogatorily called "infidels," against whom it is lawful, even normative, to act in ways that would be criminal if done to Muslims.
By identifying political Islam (a term preferable to Islamofascism, militant Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, or others because it is not Islam itself but a political Islamic movement with a coherent and distinctive political ideology and goals), we emphatically do not implicate all Muslims or all Islam. The phenomenon includes only Islamic-grounded political regimes, organizations, and initiatives that share (whatever their other-- sometimes internecine--differences, Shia versus Sunni, Arab versus Persian, et cetera) a common ideological foundation about Islam's political primacy or its need to systematically roll back the West. It is a conviction that the modern world is fundamentally corrupt and must be reshaped, often through the annihilation of others. Therein, political Islam resembles the international communist movement in its heyday. Political Islam is many things: totalitarian, aggressive, conquering, cocksure about its superiority and destiny to rule, intolerant, bristling with resentment, and only tenuously in touch with aspects of reality. But what marks it most distinctively are two things: its religious consecration of its tenets, emotions, and goals, which are putatively grounded in Allah's will and to which slavish (indeed literally mindless) devotion is due; and its cult of death, which produces its extreme danger and has three central components.
First is the willingness to die (or at least to let political Islam's duped minions die) for the greater earthly and heavenly glory of political Islam and for a martyr's place in paradise. This is rhetorically and behaviorally manifest throughout the movement, including in the well-known glorification of suicide bombers' deaths by the videotaped killers and their families, and in public ceremonies and speeches of political leaders, including Mashal's broadcast to the world in the wake of Hamas's election victory: "Today, you are fighting the army of Allah. You are fighting against peoples for whom death for the sake of Allah- -and for the sake of honor and glory--is preferable to life."
Second is the well-established willingness to slaughter entire categories of opponents and the drive to attain the weaponry to do so.
And third is the unabashed rhetorical ease and lurid excess of trumpeting fantasies of killing opponents, starting with Israelis, for any real or imagined bucking of political Islam. (In December, according to a poll conducted for the London Times, 37 percent of British Muslims said that British Jews are "legitimate targets as part of the struggle for justice in the Middle East.")
More than the members of any other major modern political movement, political Islamists, including their highest leaders, exhibit an archaic bloodlust of the kind quoted above, repeatedly speaking with evident relish and unmatched openness of killing their enemies, decapitating them, playing with their blood and body parts, and watching them suffer.
