David Brooks announces the new spin on terrorists

[Cocoa]

now they're 60's-style bourgoeois radicals...

Brooks's preamble describes the pundits' prevailing oversimplification, which apparently doesn't serve his masters very well anymore, so he previews the new oversimplification...

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3297008


Now we know that story line doesn't fit the facts.

<snip>

In his book Globalized Islam, the French scholar Olivier Roy points out that today's jihadists have a lot in common with the left-wing extremists of the 1930s and 1960s. Ideologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism. It draws the same sorts of recruits (educated second-generation immigrants, for example), uses some of the same symbols and vilifies some of the same enemies (imperialism and capitalism).

<snip>

In short, the Arab world is maintaining its nearly perfect record of absorbing every bad idea coming from the West. Western ideas infuse the radicals who flood into Iraq to blow up Muslims and Americans alike.

<snip>

Second, the jihadists' weakness is that they do not spring organically from the Arab or Muslim world. They claim to speak for the Muslim masses, as earlier radicals claimed to speak for the proletariat. But they don't. Surely a key goal for U.S. policy should be to isolate the nationalists from the jihadists.

more...

[despairing optimist]

1. To connect those dots, one needs to jump through black holes

Equating Islamic fundamentalism with atheist Marxism and implying that it was coopted? Nasser and the pan-Arab movement may have had Marxist underpinnings, perhaps, but not the Islamists. One might as well accuse the Catholic Church of Marxist leanings because of its repeated criticisms of empire and capitalism. Westerners like Roy and Brooks simply cannot acknowledge the ability of Arabs to have original, native-born ideas. How unsurprisingly Orientalist of them.

Roy, and presumably Brooks, should lay off the Bordeaux and absinthe. They're malnourished and delusional. If they were cats, I'd notify the ASPCA.

[ConservativeDemocrat]

2. Strange... I saw this article as validating the Democratic point of view

Specifically this quote: The first implication, clearly, is that democratizing the Middle East, while worthy in itself, may not stem terrorism. Terrorists are bred in London and Paris as much as anywhere else.

Hmmmm.... What is "Democratizing the Middle East?"

I say, it's a right wing euphemism for "the Iraq War".

This article is David Brooks saying -- "liberals, you were right".

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

[wli]

3. no, democratizing the Middle East is neocolonialism

There is in fact no intention of Democracy. It means more dealings like with the House of Saud in the 70's, the assassination of Mossadegh, and the like.

[marbuc]

4. Ain't that a kick in the head?

Makes it all the more ironic that we paid Bin Laden to fight the communists, with the notion that fundementalist religion is better than none at all. Careful what you wish for, you just might get it...in spades!

[Inland]

5. The erroneous stereotypes of yesteryear like today's erroneous stereotypes

Fact is, the threats are very different. It's just the fear driven, informationless, reactionary assumptions that are the same.

I suppose everyone coming at you with a gun looks the same in one important respect, namely, a bringer of death. But geez, not every soldier, terrorist, insurgent, rebel, whatever is fungible with the other in terms of motivation, training, execution, etc.

Pretty simplistic even for an oped.

[bemildred]

6. More simplistic drool uttered in an attempt to construct a second cold war

to prop up the US' national security state apparatus.

There is more to this thinking business than just slapping some ideas together in the PR configuration du jour.

If you are going to buy this sort of drivel, you might as well just say anybody that dislikes us is like the Communists (after all, they disliked us too, see the similarity?)