War comes to the heart of Europe (by Pepe Escobar)

[mom cat]

Jul 15, 2005



THE ROVING EYE
War comes to the heart of Europe
By Pepe Escobar

BRUSSELS - The battle over the future of global Islam will be fought and decided in Europe.

Whether or not it is responsible for the attacks on London, the al-Qaeda nebula is now configured as a relentless jihadi recruitment mechanism, profiting from the fact that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has been added to its original mix of extreme Wahhabism and Silicon Valley (which al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited in the early 1990s).

"Al-Qaeda" is a mutating virus, proliferating secretly in unexpected places. It used to thrive on subterfuge, evasion and deception. Now, the virus is attacking on three fronts. The Internet spreads the lethal, remixed Koran of jihad's aims and ideology; Iraq has become the university for a new, deadly generation of internationalist jihadis; and Europe is the latest battleground where the new generation is bound to strike. The Euro-jihadi is here to stay.

"Al-Qaeda" is now a metaphor for global, deterritorialized jihad - indeed a "database" (as its original name implies) that strives to represent the microcosm of the whole Islamic umma (community). This is a political war conducted by a revolutionary vanguard. It is also a social war. It is definitely not a religious war. Whether religious war may succeed it depends to a large extent on the Muslim population of Europe, and whether it can isolate the Euro-jihadis.


http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GG15Aa02.html

[tocqueville]

1. then they will lose

the muslim population of Europe has already isolated the jihadis, the Europeans won't invade countries under pretext of protecting the "home land".. and police is efficient

they may succeed with some bombings but :

the French stopped them 1995
the Spanish arrested them a couple of weeks after the bombings
the British made tremendous progres after a week

bad strategy from Al Quaeda, maybe spectacular, but doomed to fail

[newswolf56]

2. What we have in this analysis is undeniable evidence...

of the REAL war: Yehvehistic fundamentalism (in this instance Islam, but ultimately also Christofascism and the extremely reactionary forms of Judaism as well) momentarily at war within itself but ultimately at war with all True Civilization everywhere on the planet. (Thus the hideously perverse brilliance of Bush-adviser Grover Norquist's scheme to build a fundamentalist united front of Christians and Muslims as one of the foundations of Republican power.)

This is what makes taking a position on the so-called War on Terror so damnably difficult: the threat to civilization is absolutely real -- at least as real as the horrors of 9/11 -- but it is the total Yehvehistic (or Abrahamic) threat -- not just an Islamic one. Yet -- for now -- the Christofascists have been manipulated by circumstance into defending American liberty, Western Civilization and all it represents (even as they scheme to impose here at home a regime that would be no different -- and perhaps even more savage -- than the regime the Taliban imposed on Afghanistan).

How does one relate to such madness? I can think of no historical analogy that even approaches precision: perhaps the closest I can come is to the tragedy of the Ukrainians, who after years of unsuccessfully seeking freedom within the Russian and Soviet empires, welcomed the Germans as liberators -- only to discover that life under the Nazi jackboot was even more awful than than what they had suffered under Czarist and Stalinist knouts. Or perhaps the Cubans: overjoyed to strip off the san benito of Spanish oppression, appalled (and furious) to discover that the cost of American help was merely oppression of another kind. What is to be done? What if the lesson here is that liberty is ultimately impossible? I am surely as bewildered as anyone else.

Edit: addition of last sentence to first paragraph, correction of spelling.

[mom cat]

3. Again, thanks for your analysis.