David Brooks announces the new spin on terrorists [View All]

[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.

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