Posted on 08/03/2005 11:16:00 PM PDT by neverdem
Nothing has changed during the war on terror as much as our definition of the enemy.
In the days after Sept. 11, it was commonly believed that the conflict between the jihadists and the West was a conflict between medievalism and modernism. Terrorists, it was said, emerge from cultures that are isolated from the Enlightenment ideas of the West. They feel disoriented by the pluralism of the modern age and humiliated by the relative backwardness of the Arab world. They are trapped in stagnant, dysfunctional regimes, amid mass unemployment, with little hope of leading productive lives.
Humiliated and oppressed, they lash out against America, the symbol of threatening modernity. Off they go to seek martyrdom, dreaming of virgins who await them in the afterlife.
Now we know that story line doesn't fit the facts.
We have learned a lot about the jihadists, from Osama bin Laden down to the Europeans who attacked the London subways last month. We know, thanks to a database gathered by Marc Sageman, formerly of the C.I.A., that about 75 percent of anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes. An amazing 65 percent have gone to college, and three-quarters have professional or semiprofessional jobs, particularly in engineering and science.
Whether they have moved to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, England or France, these men are, far from being medieval, drawn from the ranks of the educated, the mobile and the multilingual.
The jihadists are modern psychologically as well as demographically because they are self-made men (in traditional societies there are no self-made men). Rather than deferring to custom, many of them have rebelled against local authority figures, rejecting their parents' bourgeois striving and moderate versions of Islam, and their comfortable lives.
They have sought instead some utopian cause to give them an identity and their lives meaning...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Bingo. David Brooks almost gets to that point in this, but can't bring himself to come out and say it. I do think he knows it.
good post
"Third, terrorism is an immigration problem. Terrorists are spawned when educated, successful Muslims still have trouble sinking roots into their adopted homelands. Countries that do not encourage assimilation are not only causing themselves trouble, but endangering others around the world as well."
He's certainly right about it being an immigration problem. However, those British Jihadis seem to have been about as assimilated as one can be. Assimilation happens in the heart, it would seem, so I'm not sure the failure to assimilate is the big problem.
The Amish are not "assimilated" the Ultra-orthodox Jews are not "assimilated" but they aren't running around killing people either.
Thanks for the ping!
Excellent point.
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