Quote:
Originally posted by Mule
So there's no suche thing as al queda? Yeah, thats the ticket. There was no such thing as naxism either. Let me repeat. Put down the torch & step away from the crack pipe.
It seems like you know all the inside scoop on what's going on down there. Maybe we should put you in charge of gitmo. Or MAYBE ----------- you're one of them al queda sympathizers hmmmmm? Is your real name bin weenie?
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There are these things called "books." And in them, you can sometimes find information that doesn't get to you through your crack pipe or Limbaugh.
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Terror Vision
Al Quaeda
Jason Burke
Ben Granger
The most striking fact Jason Burke hammers through time and again in this meticulous and comprehensive study is that "Al Quaeda" does not exist. Or at least, "Al Quaeda" the organised terrorist group, cohesive and complete we hear of in the media doesn't. I like Spooks as much as anyone, but I fear we have been misinformed.
What does exist is a series of interconnected yet disparate and competing forms of militant Islamism. Bin Laden's faction, amorphous in itself and rarely termed "Al Quaeda" by its followers is only one part of this, yet it has become lazy shorthand for a massive phenomenon. Burke does not claim Islamist fundamentalism isn't a large, violent and dangerous force, but does show that this one key misunderstanding is disastrous if you want to deal with it. For one example, the twin towers atrocity could be said to be the work of "Al Quaeda"; the ones in Madrid and Bali cannot. And as another, al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug currently given to beheading aid-workers in Iraq has been described as an "Al Queda operative" and "bin Laden's Lieutenant" in highly reputable papers despite the two having never met, and their groups being bitter rivals of one another.
Burke, who has spent the last ten years as The Observer's Middle East correspondent, tells two separate yet interlinked stories; that of the formation of militant political Islamism, and that of the more specific violent groupings of which bin Laden became a leading figure. He traces the roots of modern political Sunni "Islamism" (as opposed to the Shia extremism of Khomeini) as comparatively recent, stemming from Wahaabism, a variant of Islam espoused in the eighteenth century by the ultra-orthodox renegade Abdul al Wahaab. This was developed into an all-encompassing political doctrine by an Egyptian, the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna in the 1920s and 30s. Explicitly rejecting all Western influence as degenerate, Al-Banna and his successor Syed Qutb, (another Egyptian campaigning in the 50s and 60s) sought to recreate the world according to the laws of Islam in the early post-Mohammed years as they interpreted it, an interpretation very obscure and unpopular at the time in the wider Islamic world (though, crucially, not in Saudi Arabia, where it gained credence amongst the ruling royal family who used it to re-inforce their legitimacy.)
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Read the full review at http://www.spikemagazine.com/0205alquaeda.php
Or don't.