A recent notice on Jihad Watch reminded me of yet another identifiable -- and regularly used -- mechanism in the PC MC template: the deflection of the Islam factor by explaining the militant violence in question (whether flaring up in the Philippines, in south Thailand, in central Asia, in Africa, etc.) to be a result of "regional" guerrilla resistance. The notice on Jihad Watch referred to how the State Department has decided to redefine -- or de-define or un-define -- a Chechen jihadist group as a non-terrorist group, even though that group is responsible for mass-murdering dozens on the Moscow subway.
The Westerner of the latter 20th century has become very familiar with the image and phenomenon of the Third World guerrilla fighter -- dozens of such groups, both ultra-right-wing as well as ultra-Leftist throughout Central and South America, Africa and Asia beginning in earnest in the 1960s and still kicking in the 21st century (with roots going back to the "Anarchists" of the late 19th century), many if not possibly the majority of them non-Muslim. Some of these, in fact, spilled over into incidents of passenger plane hijackings back in the good old days (mostly the 70s), when the hijackers weren't Kamikaze-like fanatics but actually could be counted on to act rationally -- i.e., to want to stay alive themselves.
At any rate, for those Westerners who persist in refusing to come up to speed on the learning curve about Islam, this particular mechanism -- of seeing any given Islamic hot spot of violence as merely a "regional" manifestation of "restive" guerrilla resistance (with that resistance often implying a subtext of a Che-Guevara romanticization, of poor struggling Third World Peoples fighting back against corrupt dictators themselves propped up by the corrupt and "globalist", if not evil, West, sometimes additionally imbued with some nebulous consanguinity with the American Revolutionaries who fought for their independence against Great Britain) -- helps enormously to obfuscate the global revival of Islam, by supplying a way to continue to ignore the data that indicate how all the various, seemingly disconnected jihad groups are in fact connected.
Indeed, this mechanism of denial tends to attain absurd degrees of intellectual behavior when otherwise very perspicacious, intelligent and learned analysts -- such as the folks at Jihadica -- focus their study of rebel militant violence on Muslim groups: a curious tension is generated by such analysis, a tension between two poles:
1) a prejudicial axiom guiding the analysis that resists unifying all the complex disparate data of various jihad groups under the umbrella of their common motivator, goal and blueprint: Islam
2) a genuinely and intelligently pursued scientific analysis that does not ignore or suppress the real data of these various jihad groups.
The more that the folks at Jihadica engage in their analytical project (#2), the more they amass a mountain of dots that positively scream for connection; but their eternal loyalty to the prejudicial axiom (#1) forces them to refrain from the one most rational way of connecting all those dots: Islam.
Further Reading:
Jihadica: pullulating mosquitos, the swamp, the camel, and no cigar
Our incompetent analysts: Vahid Brown
1 comment:
While you are correct, I think that it's actually more difficult to demonstrate that the different Jihads of the world are connected, particularly due to the variances in global alliances. For instance, since Russia has been backing Jihadi campaigns against Israel, whether from Iran or Syria, 'common sense' seems to suggest that the Jihad against Moscow is not a part of the same Jihad that the Palis are conducting against Israel. Or another example - since the US has been backing the Jihads against Serbia, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Bosnian/Albanians are not on the same side as the Taliban, or al Qaeda.
I know this is fallacious thinking, given that they are all Jihads, and all inspired by the Sunnah. But due to decisions taken by the leaders in different countries, be it US, Russia et al, the assumption is automatically made that the Jihadis out of gratitude share the alliances that these countries have made w/ them.
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