THERE'S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DESTRUCTIVE AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE:

The self-destructive gene: Al-Qaeda’s biggest weakness is its propensity to kill indiscriminately (The Economist, 7/17/08)

THE mangonel was the big gun of antiquity. But this siege engine, used to catapult rocks, burning objects or dead animals into fortified cities, troubled Islamic scholars. Some early authorities disallowed it on the ground that it was an indiscriminate weapon.

From the Crusades onwards it met with greater approval. Ibn al-Nahhas al-Dumyati, a classical writer on jihad who fought the Crusaders, ruled that mangonels could be used against the enemy “even if there are women and children among them, even if there are Muslim prisoners, merchants or those who have been granted safe conduct”.

Such opinions are cited today in religious rulings defending the September 11th attacks or arguing that weapons of mass destruction may be used against America. But Jihadists of al-Qaeda’s sort disregard long-standing injunctions against wanton slaughter. Worse, they claim the right to declare takfir, or apostasy among Muslims. When combined with a puritanical religious practice known as salafism—imitating the earliest Muslims, known as the salaf, and treating later Islamic practices with contempt—this creates an especially violent and intolerant kind of Muslim.

Salafi-takfiri jihadists cannot build political alliances; they regard even Hamas and Hizbullah, Israel’s main foes, as corrupted by politics. And once they start to spill blood, they become ever more indiscriminate: first they attack the “apostate” rulers or their foreign backers, then the ministers, then the security forces, then the civil servants, then anybody who objects to the violence, and so on. Those who recoil at the carnage, or object to the religious strictures imposed at gunpoint, are treated as apostates. At some point, though, local populations turn against their supposed champions.

No one's ever killed more people indiscriminately than the United States and yet the End of History has gone global in the wake of the havoc we wreaked. Al Qaeda's problem is that it has nothing positive to offer that can compete with the Anglo-American model, but then neither did any of our other foes in the Long War--France, the USSR, the Nazis, etc.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 18, 2008 6:50 AM