Jihadi Chic Ideology isn't everything.

At the annual Cairo antiwar conference in Egypt, the hot panel discussion this year was “Bridge-Building Between the Left and Islam.” John Rees, a British Trotskyite, observed: “Where else can you sit down in a single evening and listen to senior people from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, people from the revolutionary left and the antiwar movement from around the globe?”

Gosh, it sounds great. I’m just sorry I missed the rollicking game of Pictionary between the Castroites and the jihadis afterwards.

Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, recently reported in the New York Sun on the growing alliance between elements of the hard left and the Islamist extremists. “The roster of Islamist-left alliances quietly grows every day,” Stalinsky writes. For example, “Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky praises Hamas and denounces America on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television. London Mayor Ken Livingstone invites a leading Islamist, Sheikh Yosef Al-Qaradawi, who is known for supporting suicide attacks, to visit his city. And Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “calls for a world without America even as he plays host to a Tehran peace conference” well attended by American members of the religious Left.

The aim of those “bridge-building” sessions in Cairo was, according to literature at the event, to address “the challenges and prospects facing the international antiwar and pro-intifada movements” and planning “strategy and tactics for bridging the gap and uniting Islamist and leftist ranks in the face of U.S. imperialism and Zionism.”

Now, it’s way too early to start talking about the “Taliban wing of the Democratic party” or anything like that, but this is a fascinating and largely ignored phenomenon.

Of course, if you’ve followed the anti-Israel movements on college campuses, you already know there’s a strong alliance — both ideological and strategic — between Islamic and leftist radicals. Indeed, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are often inextricably linked dogmas.

I’m a big believer in the importance of ideas and the notion that ideology matters. But I can’t help but think ideology isn’t everything. Something else is going on. For example, I recently participated in a debate at the Oxford Union (the subject of the debate: “This House regrets the founding of the United States of America”). Two of my opponents were British Islamists. One was the head of the moribund Islamic Party of Britain, the other the head of the British branch of the radical Hizb ut-Tahrir organization. Both men were more interested in spouting ancient socialist chestnuts about America’s greedy individualism than in saying anything particularly interesting about Islam itself.

Undoubtedly, selling their vision of a world caliphate where Jews and Christians would be thrown into official ghettos and homosexuals executed wouldn’t have been a smart strategy in appealing to an audience that tends to think America is too oppressive already. But I got the distinct impression that something else explained their run-of-the-mill socialist twaddle. Both men seemed to be Muslims because that’s where the action is for lefty radicals today. Indeed, the Islamic Party of Britain’s website reads like a 1920s socialist pamphlet with Muslim buzz phrases penciled into the margins.

In the 1960s, every would-be revolutionary called himself a Marxist, usually without any serious regard to what Marx wrote, said or believed. The specifics of the ideology didn’t matter, because Marxism was the oogah-boogah word radicals used to scare the fat, lazy bourgeoisie. In 1969, Stuart Schram, a specialist on Chinese Communism, wrote that “never in the course of the past century has the name Marx been so widely invoked; never has this name served to justify so many ideas and actions totally foreign to the genius of Marx.”

Today, Marxism has lost its oomph. Yuppies drinking five-dollar lattes put Che Guevara t-shirts on their private-school toddlers.

And because nobody thinks Marxists are scary anymore, radicals consumed with hatred for the status quo — for America, for Western civilization or for the plain old dreariness of their boring lives — don’t bother calling themselves Marxists anymore. It’s not that they’re any more or less Marxist then they were before. It’s just that Marxism won’t get a rise out of your in-laws the way it used to.

But Islamic radicalism? Hooboy, that’s where the action is. Of course, not everybody follows the John Walker Lindh route and actually converts to Islam, just as not every Black Panther supporter became a bank robber. But who can deny that this post-colonial, anti-imperialism, indigenous-peoples-and-the-suburban-revolutionaries-who-love-them-unite! stuff is in many respects just a magnet for the same riffraff and rabble rouses of yesteryear?

Sure, there’s much to fear in Jihadism. But there’s also something deeply pathetic about it, too. And that’s worth pointing out.

The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy (Hardcover)
by Walid Phares (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/War-Ideas-Jihadism-against-Democracy/dp/1403976392

Book Description

From Afghanistan and Iraq to Europe and the United States we are engaged in one of the most heated wars of all time. In this incisive new book, the man that has been called—the only one to understand the mind of the jihadist—shows that the most important battle is actually taking place in the hearts and minds of the world’s population. This is the war of ideas, where ideology is the most powerful weapon of all. Phares explores the beliefs of two opposing camps, one standing for democracy and human rights, and the other rejecting the idea of an international community and calling for jihad against the West. He reveals the strategies of both sides, explaining that new technologies and the growing media savvy of the jihadists have raised the stakes in the conflict. And most urgently, he warns that the West is in danger of losing the war, for whereas debate and theorizing rarely translate into action here, ideas and deeds are inextricably linked for the forces of jihad.

Walid Phares has long been among the most knowledgeable and incisive scholars of the Middle East—its peoples, its cultures, its religions, and its radical movements.”
—U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman

“This book is a ‘must read’ for those who want to understand the jihad radical Islamists are waging against democracies. Walid Phares has a gift for being able to identify the root causes of the war and what the West and the free world must do to prevail.”
—Oliver North, host of FOX News’s “War Stories”

“If you want to understand the War of Ideas being waged by Jihadists, Walid Phares is your man.”
—U.S. Congresswoman Sue Myrick

“As an Arab Muslim academic from Jordan I have witnessed Professor Walid Phares engaging in powerful debates with intellectuals from both the West and the Arab Muslim world. His knowledge of both cultures gives him the ability to understand and explain the War of Ideas between radicalism and democracy.
This book is needed by the public.”
—Professor Shaker Nabulsi, Chairman, American Interuniversity Consortium (AIC) for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

Exposing the Hidden War (The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy)
FSM ^ | 5/4/07 | Laurence Footer

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1828851/posts

(snip)

Phares defines the war of ideas as more than merely a conflict between al Qaeda and the United States, instead focusing upon the forces of democracy and those aligned against democracy - including both Jihadi groups as well as Arab dictators and monarchs. While The War of Ideas does not claim that these two groups have actively conspired with one another, it does highlight an alignment of interests in the desire of Arab states to retain power and the Jihadi objective of restoring the caliphate and confronting Western civilization.

Most significantly, the author exposes how this war of ideas is being waged within the very same halls from where the great ideas of Western civilization arose: the most prestigious universities of the civilized Western world. Specifically, The War of Ideas exposes how Arab governments, especially the Saudis, have funded Middle Eastern studies programs at hundreds of leading Western universities to both influence Western educators’ and elites’ opinions of the Arab world as well as prevent the West from understanding Jihadist objectives. It is from this base, within an infiltrated academia, that Phares explains the war of ideas has been waged: by influencing the West to believe that democracy wasn’t meant for the Middle East, thwarting Western understanding of Jihad and the violent nature of Jihadism, concealing the Jihadist vision of restoring the Islamic caliphate, deflecting Western attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and convincing the Muslim world that the West has been waging an ongoing war on Islam.
(snip)

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