Terrorist organizations have to spread their ideology somehow.

Enter the strange, fascinating world of... al-Qaeda's magazines.

For the past few years, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has published the magazines Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of Battle) and Sada al-Jihad (The Echo of Jihad).

Al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula is a branch of al-Qaeda that operates primarily in Saudi Arabia; they are the charming folks responsible for the kidnapping and murder of New Jersey helicopter engineer Paul Johnson in 2004. Johnson was executed live on camera as three men held him down and one jihadi beheaded him with a sword.

According to intelligence experts, the group was also responsible for the 2004 massacre of American, European, South African, Sri Lankan, Indian and Filipino expats in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. However, they are also perfectly happy to work outside of Saudi; the group engineered a bombing in Qatar in 2005.

Issue 11 of Sada al-Malahim started appearing on jihadi online forums a few days back in PDF form ready-to-print. A copy may be obtained here, complete with a charming cover showing a beaker and a hand grenade. It’s a dense little bastard of a magazine, clocking in at 73 pages of text, graphics and basic-Pagemaker design. As one might expect; al-Qaeda magazines don’t include such kuffar innovations as advertising.

 

Read the rest of this story on true/slant. 

Last week, Taliban-affiliated forces launched an attack on the national headquarters of the Pakistani Army. The result was a firefight followed by a standoff with hostages that ended earlier today. This attack represents a game-changing moment for Pakistan, and by extension for the US-led coalition in Afghanistan. Here's why.

In the past, the Pakistani military and intelligence (ISI) establishment have allowed the Taliban considerable freedom of operation inside Pakistan, and either turned a blind eye or provided support to Taliban and Al Qaeda forces operating across the border in Afghanistan who are based inside Pakistan, primarily in South Waziristan.

The toleration of Pakistani Taliban wore thin in May, when Taliban forces seized control of the Swat Valley, ending a truce with the Pakistani government. That action prompted the Pakistani military to engage in an extended campaign over the Summer to unseat them, leading to a formal declaration of surrender by Taliban forces in September. During the course of that campaign, Pakistani forces massed on the border of South Waziristan, the province that is home to the bulk of the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, but never actually went in. Invading South Waziristan would be no small undertaking. There are an estimated 10,000 Taliban fighters in that province, and previous military incursions have been beaten back with significant losses.

Despite the crackdown on the Taliban inside Pakistan, the military and the ISI have continued to allow Al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban forces to operate with impunity, presumably as a check on Indian influence in Afghanistan. India's influence is largely in the form of infrastructure investment. Pakistan simply does not have the economic resources to compete on that basis, so it relies on Pashtun proxies. As recently as this past week, in fact, Afghan government sources allege that the ISI was directly involved in a Taliban attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

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Good news out of Algeria -- an al Qaeda training camp, believed to be the incubator of biological weapons, has gone kaput because all the jihadis got infected with whatever they were cooking up:

The story was first reported by the British tabloid the Sun, which said the al Qaeda operatives died after being infected with a strain of bubonic plague, the disease that killed a third of Europe's population in the 14th century. But the intelligence official dismissed that claim.

AQIM, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, maintains about a dozen bases in Algeria, where the group has waged a terrorist campaign against government forces and civilians. In 2006, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on foreign contractors. In 2007, the group said it bombed U.N. headquarters in Algiers, an attack that killed 41 people.

Black Death would have had a certain ring to it, although the last time it caused trouble on a massive scale was still about seven centuries too late for the age Al Qaeda wants to bring back.

Foreign Policy blogger Marc Lynch (a.k.a. Abu Aardvark) has an interesting post up at FP's new-minted digital playground, which has already drawn lurid attention to itself for its inclusion of Israel Lobby theorist Stephen Walt and his dubious "thought experiments." Lynch is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, and, much like his cheerleader and confrere-at-the-keyboard Juan Cole, has built a reputation as a Mideast analyst who sees almost every effort to stamp out jihadism as an unintentional bolster to jihadism. Case in point: His latest claim that Israel's buffeting of Hamas is sweet music to the ears of Al Qaeda:

Israel's assault on Gaza has really created an almost unbelievable no-lose situation for al-Qaeda. If Hamas "wins", then al-Qaeda gets to share in the benefits of the political losses incurred by its Western and Arab enemies (Zawahiri mentions Mubarak and the Saudis in this tape, but not the Jordanians) and can try to take advantage of the political upheavals which could follow. If Hamas "loses", al-Qaeda still wins. It will shed no tears at seeing one of its bitterest and most dangerous rivals take a beating at Israel's hands or losing control of a government that they have consistently decried as illegitimate and misguided. Either way, the Gaza crisis guarantees that a far more radicalized Islamic world will face the incoming Obama administration -- potentially severely blunting the challenge which al-Qaeda clearly felt after the election (hence Zawahiri's attempt to pre-emptively discredit Obama by declaring the attack Obama's "gift" to Muslims).

The way this crisis is playing out shows the bankruptcy and strategic dangers of trying to simply reduce Hamas to part of an undifferentiated "global terrorist front". The Muslim Brotherhood, from whence Hamas evolved twenty years ago, is no friend of the United States or Israel but is nevertheless one of al-Qaeda's fiercest rivals. Zawahiri himself penned one of the most famous anti-Brotherhood tracts, Bitter Harvest. Over the last few years, the doctrinal and political conflict between the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda's salafi-jihadism has become one of the most active fault-lines in Islamist politics. As ‘Abu Qandahar’ wrote on al-Qaeda's key al-Ekhlaas forum in October 2007, the "Islamic world is divided between two projects, jihad and Ikhwan [Brotherhood]."

Lynch's reason for how Al Qaeda "wins" if Hamas loses is that the latter terror group's monopoly on Gaza would effectively be broken, thus allowing the former to finally infilitrate (cf. "Up to now, AQ-minded groups have had little success in penetrating Gaza, because Hamas had it locked. Now they clearly have high hopes of finding an entree with a radicalized, devastated population and a weakened Hamas.").  If this does in fact happen, then I wonder if Lynch has extrapolated the likely consequences, which tell against his implied thesis that military incursions such as these are inherently self-defeating. Al Qaeda's setting up shop right next door to Israel would almost certainly do two things: 1. Give Israel even greater legitimacy to wage war there, if not invite a U.S./international military presence; 2. Change the world's perception of the zone of conflict from that of a colonial-nationalist struggle into that of a... "global terrorist front." (What price immediate cease-fires when the premier enemy of our time, with a trail of carnage stretching from New York to London to Madrid, is doing the fighting?) 

What Lynch doesn't acknowledge -- at least not in this post -- is that Al Qaeda's flagging popularity is due in large part to its military and political defeat in Iraq,  where it (foolishly) decided to create a cynosure of Islamist terror and test out the prospects of a neo-caliphate. If it should try to do this again, and in the one place it can ill afford to have Muslims grow more disillusioned with its activities, might we expect the realist school to indulge us with the following headline: "and the winner is... America!"?

Note: This interview was originally conducted for the online literary-political journal Democratiya. Please support Democratiya by donating to it here.

Dr Andrew Bostom is Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He is the author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008) More of his work can be found at www.andrewbostom.org The interview took place on November 14, 2008.

Personal and Intellectual History

Alan Johnson: How does a medical doctor come to produce books on Islam, Jihad and antisemitism?

Andrew Bostom: It's pretty straightforward. The stimulus was 9/11. Until then I was an average citizen trying to keep abreast of world events. I am not particularly religious as a Jew though I certainly support the state of Israel. But I grew up in New York, living in Queens most of my life, and I went to medical school in Brooklyn. My wife and I still have family in New York City, so the day of 9/11 itself was traumatic, trying to make sure everyone was OK. A colleague's wife was in the second tower. She was very lucky, barely getting out before it collapsed. On the way home I grabbed a book by Karen Armstrong about Islam. I was reading it and commenting to my wife that it just didn't seem to jibe. (I learnt later that Armstrong is a notorious apologist.) As I read it out loud my wife was just laughing. I didn't find it particularly funny. Nor the news reports over the next days that were transparently apologetic. And I was alarmed at stories that appeared in the New York Times (and other New York area newspapers) about an Egyptian Imam who was preaching at a large Mosque in Manhattan, and spreading conspiracy theories about Jews leaving the world trade centre in advance of the attacks, due to their 'prior knowledge.' So I started reading independently. A small book by Yossef Bodansky, a terrorism expert, discussed Islamic antisemitism as a political instrument, and referenced the work of Bat Ye'or on the Dhimmi. I got that book by Bat Ye'or, and everything else she has written in English-all her books, essays, and published lectures. I met Bat Ye'or after a correspondence with Daniel Pipes and brought her to Brown to give a guest lecture. She became a very close mentor, and introduced me to Ibn Warraq and that's how things started. I had begun writing short essays within a year of 9/11. Ibn Warraq resided with us in 2003, for a time, and he encouraged me to consider a book project. I was increasingly interested in the Jihad and it was with Warraq's support that I put that first book together.

Part 1: 'Islamic Antisemitism'

Alan Johnson: Your new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, is a 766 page collection of primary and secondary sources, some translated into English for the first time, about the relationship of Islam and antisemitism. It is prefaced by a 200-page interpretive essay written by you. Let's begin with your controversial conclusion. Here it is:

A widely prevalent conception of Islam's doctrinal and historical treatment of Jews rests on two false pillars ... (I) In Islamic society hostility to the Jew is non-theological. It is not related to any specific Islamic doctrine, nor to any specific circumstance in Islamic history. For Muslims it is not part of the birth-pangs of their religion, as it is for Christians. (II) '...'dhimmi'-tude [derisively hyphenated] subservience and persecution and ill treatment of Jews... is a myth.'] (...) [This] sham castle of glib affirmations-must be swept away if the enduring phenomenon of Islamic Antisemitism is to be properly understood.'

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Mordechai Nisan, writing a decade ago, observed that already by the mid-1990s the world's then over 50 Islamic nations had amassed considerable economic and military power-both of which have further increased during the subsequent 10-years:

The Muslim umma  [global community] was by the mid-1990s numbering approximately one billion believers, possessing over 50 Muslim states, and in control of a little less than a third of United Nations membership; moreover, possessing more than 50 per cent of known crude oil resources and a combined military arsenal of conventional and non-conventional weaponry second only to the combined Western bloc of states. The international balance-of-power could not in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War ignore the Muslim civilization and its awesome pretensions to playing a dominant role in global affairs.

Nisan's cogent observations continue to have obvious implications for the so-called "war within Islam" narrative promoted by policymaking, academic, and media elites across the political spectrum, and reaffirmed, vociferously, in the aftermath of the recent jihadist carnage in Mumbai, India. For example, Boaz Ganor-acclaimed as a terrorism expert, and currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at The Hoover Institution-opined in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 5:

This is not Islam but a cynical, calculated misuse of Islam...It is also not the responsibility of the United States alone to deal with this global growing threat, but rather the obligation of all of Western society and the civilized world, including - and perhaps primarily - the Muslim world itself, which stands revolted and terrified by the ideas and atrocities perpetrated by the jihadists. It is time for moderate Muslims to save Islam from the jihadists.

"Cynicism" and "calculated misuse," versus attacks entirely consistent with the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad war (including jihad terrorism) across a 13-century continuum, notwithstanding, I agree with Ganor's admonition that it is "primarily" the responsibility of "the Muslim world itself" to confront jihadism.  But it was documentary filmmaker Sean Langan's harrowing account (just reported in the NY Daily News ) of his three-month captivity by a resurgent Taliban/Al Qaeda within Pakistan (in the so-called "lawless tribal belt"), along the Afghanistan border, that clarified how a moral, intellectually honest, and concrete "war within Islam" should be waged, without delay. Langan has identified-once again-those who must be the obvious targets of a campaign by Muslims to "reclaim Islam" from radical, barbaric "hijackers" of their faith.

Jailed in the cramped, dark room of a house, Langan heard the constant sound of machine guns, mortars and grenades, accompanied by the steady hum of U.S. Predator drones overhead. "I was in a valley surrounded by training camps, bases and caves. Arabs were having meetings there-Al Qaeda-making plans," Langan told NY Daily News reporter James Meek. One of Langan's captors explained, bluntly "We are meeting and discussing global jihad issues." The captured filmmaker recalled listening to an ex-Pakistani minister on the BBC one day denying Al Qaeda operated camps inside the country. "I had to turn up the radio to hear his denial over the sound of gunfire from all the training camps," Langan, smiling, told Meek. "The world's leading terrorists are there -safe, and with the time to plot and plan attacks," Langan asserted. During his captivity Langan also became convinced of the jihadists' utterly depraved indifference to human life. He was show the photograph of a bomb-laden young child blowing up a U.S. Humvee, and just prior to escaping, Langan was forced to view jihadist sniper and beheading videos with the toddler son of a jihadist.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, in the wake of the Mumbai massacre wrote a December 9, 2008 New York Times op-ed entitled, "The Terrorists Want to Destroy Pakistan, Too." Zardari at least acknowledged the significant presence of Al Qaeda in his country, claimed to be committed to the fight against this jihad terrorist organization-perhaps even more so than NATO-and sought worldwide support for his efforts:

The challenge of confronting terrorists who have a vast support network is huge; Pakistan's fledgling democracy needs help from the rest of the world. We are on the frontlines of the war on terrorism. We have 150,000 soldiers fighting Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their extremist allies along the border with Afghanistan - far more troops than NATO has in Afghanistan.

Ignoring serious concerns about the dubious use of some $5 billion in US military aid to Pakistan (via Coalition Support Funds) since 2002-ostensibly to combat Al Qaeda and its allies in the tribal areas-I maintain that Zardari's plaintive appeal for assistance-military and financial-be heeded primarily, if not exclusively by Muslim nations from the now 57 member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).   

After all, the OIC Dakar Declaration of March 13-14, 2008 from the 11^th Session of the Islamic Summit Conference has sworn the 57 Muslim nations to combat terrorism. The OIC statement even highlights a convention assembled for this purpose, along with "other international initiatives by the Islamic geographical sphere," citing this involvement as proof of its unequivocal willingness "...to fight against the heinous phenomenon [of terrorism]," and the global Muslim organization's "total rejection of it [terrorism]." However, in a statement issued December 2 ("Islam, the religion of peace, tolerance and compassion"), shortly after the murderous attacks in Mumbai, the OIC, while mentioning, "...the multiplicity of terrorist attacks perpetrated recently by deviant and fanatic individuals," decried the

...tendency of a section of the media, to interpose the word ‘Islam' in reporting these incidences... maliciously trying to establish conceptual link between such evil and wicked practices and Islam, the religion that condemns, scorns and outlaws them...Those who refer to the perpetrators, as acting on behalf of Islam, help them by offering them justification, anchor and premise that they don't have or deserve. On the other hand, the generalization of the guilt of a few aberrant misguided individuals, to engulf the adherents of a religion of 1.5 billion followers is an outrageous judgment and amounts to an illegal collective punishment on a global scale. Moreover, any attempt to implicate all Muslims in such a wicked and wanton acts goes contrary to the well established principles of international law. It is therefore hoped that media will avoid resorting to any reference to Islam when narrating such events in order not to disseminate erroneous information that might jeopardize the basic human rights of Muslims, the world over.

But the December 2 OIC statement also insisted,

Islam, the religion of peace, tolerance and compassion, that sanctifies the human soul, and whose universal message is one of mutual peaceful coexistence among all the peoples of the world, regardless of their ethnicities, race, religions or languages, and which calls for kind reasoning and dialogue with all their fellow human beings, abhors and despises all such criminal acts and had enacted the utmost severe punishment for their perpetrators. [emphasis added]

I argue that the OIC-currently headed by its Turkish representative Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu-is uniquely suited to marshal the military and economic might to "enact the utmost severe punishment" for Al Qaeda and Taliban "perpetrators" of "anti-Islamic" acts of terrorism. Turkey and Egypt-key OIC member states-have large, modern, well-equipped armed forces (here; here; here), including air forces (here; here), and both nations are believed to have been victimized by Al Qaeda attacks (here; here; here; and here). These Muslim nations-with formal, enthusiastic sanctioning by the OIC-should send large military contingents to reinforce the "150,000" of their Pakistani Muslim brethren under President Zardari already doggedly engaged in combating the "anti-Islamic" terrorists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Finally, there is even an ideal occasion in the offing at which such an ambitious Muslim-led, OIC-sanctioned initiative could be announced-the speech Mr. Obama plans to deliver as US President in an Islamic capital. Talk about a "unique opportunity to reboot America's image ...in the Muslim world in particular...," and express the "unrelenting" commitment to "...create a relationship of mutual respect and partnership"-President-elect Obama's own words, uttered just this past Tuesday, December 9, 2008.

After an election campaign in which the wingnut right tried repeatedly to raise the spectre of Barack Hussein Obama as crypto-Islamist sleeper sent by the terrorists to destroy the republic from within – a sort of Mohammedan candidate, if you will – it’s kinda refreshing to see normal service resumed this morning, now that the newbie’s back to being attacked as a tool of the Jews. That, at least, is the subliminal message of Al Qaeda’s latest video message, in which Ayman Al-Zawahiri deploys what the media are coyly referring to as a “racial epithet” to describe the President-elect:

 

The phrase that has caught everyone’s attention, of course, is the punchline; Obama is portrayed, like Colin and Condi, as compliant “house Negroes”, who in Malcolm X’s infamous categorization were too docile to rise up against their oppressors, unlike their counterparts “in the field”. (As news outlets have carefully pointed out, the Arabic word used in the message, “abed”, does not actually mean “Negro”, though it’s rendered as such in the subtitles. In fact it can mean either “slave” or “black”; Arabs use the same word fairly interchangeable for both ideas. One wonders what Malcolm would have made of that.)

Lest there was any doubt that he was sharing the Al Qaeda perspective on African-Americans’ long march to freedom, though, Zawahiri (if indeed it is he) hammers the real point home with characteristic subtlety:

“You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews”

…accompanied by obligatory photo of Obama wearing a kippah.

As a reminder that we are dealing with antediluvian minds, this is at least welcome, if (one would hope) redundant. But while the crass use of racially loaded language may jar horribly to western ears, at least we have some idea now of the narrative that Islamists intend to construct around America’s first mixed-race President, and the implicit threat to Muslims who seek accommodation with Israel and the West, rather than conflict.

Still, at least they didn’t call him an Uncle Tom. Endorsing McCain was bad enough, but if I thought Al Qaeda were Naderites I’d be starting to question their judgement.

[Nick Cohen, author of the bestselling polemic What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way (the subtitle's slightly different in the UK), has generously agreed to let us reprint his new preface for the paperback edition. In August, I defended Cohen's book, and the Euston Manifesto, against the mendacious attacks of Johann Hari. --MW]

Tony Blair: There is global struggle in which we need a
policy based on democracy, on freedom and on justice . .
John Humphrys (a BBC presenter): Our idea of
democracy. . .
Blair: I didn't know that there was another idea of
democracy. . .
Humphrys: If I may say so, that's naïve . . .
Blair: The one basic fact about democracy, surely, is that you
can get rid of your government if you don't like them.
Humphrys: The Iranians elected their own government, and
we're now telling them. . .
Blair: Hold on John, something like 60 per cent of the
candidates were excluded.
BBC Radio 4, February 2007

WHEN I published What's Left? I did not expect to be universally loved. I have lived among London's liberal intelligentsia long enough to know that while it is hard on others it is always easy on itself, and would not take kindly to a history of how leftish people had ended up apologizing for the ultra-right. The reviewers who praised this book are all over its cover, what surprised me about the critics was their denial. A few said the book was a defence of the second Iraq war, even though every time I mentioned opposition to the war I said the opponents were right in nearly all their arguments but had astonished me and others by their inability to support those Iraqis who wanted something better after thirty-five years of a vile dictatorship.
More common was a transparent shiftiness.

All right, critics conceded, a few leftists had flipped over and gone along Islamism and Baathism. But these people were not worth bothering with. No connection existed between the ideological contortions of the extremes and a liberal mainstream that remained wedded to the highest principles. All I had done was use odious but fringe figures to smear decent and moderate men and women, such as themselves. As an account of my argument, this was partial in the extreme. What's Left? looks at how the Left picked up and then dropped the opponents of Saddam Hussein; why the European Union stood by and allowed Slobodan Milosevic to ethnically cleanse the Balkans; the reasons for the liberal middle class's disillusion with democracy and free speech; the instant willingness of respectable writers to excuse Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks; the inability of the British Liberal Democrats and European Social Democrats to oppose George W. Bush while supporting a free Iraq; the growth of polite antisemitism; and the propensity of liberals everywhere to portray a global clerical fascist movement as a rational response to Western provocation. Say what you will, but these were and are mainstream phenomena. Liberal writers did not examine them and explain why I was mistaken. They just ignored what I had written and hoped that if they insisted on their righteousness with sufficient vehemence, others would believe them - and maybe they would believe themselves.

For denial about what had happened to the liberal-left was not confined to the reaction of a couple of reviewers to one political book. In Europe and North America intellectuals worked ferociously to maintain the illusion that a principled consensus survived the mayhem after 9/11. I can sympathize with them to an extent because although it is essential to realize where the received wisdom is going wrong it is rarely a simple or painless task. Historians have it easy. They can look back at another time and see the faults in what almost everyone took for granted. In theory, we know future historians will do the same to us and find elements of our beliefs as wrong-headed and narrow-minded as we find many of those of our ancestors. In practice, however, self-examination is psychologically impossible for many. When you live in a consensus, it does not feel as if you have an ideology that needs examining. If the overwhelming majority of people you meet agree with you, your assumptions do not appear tenuous or debatable. They are just there - as natural as the air you breathe and as unquestionable as the weather.

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Of the many strange things George W. Bush has said while president, here is one of the strangest: “I couldn’t imagine someone like Osama Bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah.”

Shrub must have figured this sound bite was a slam-dunk. He was wrong. Osama Bin Laden may be the person on the planet most attuned to the joys of Hanukkah. As it turns out, the traditional Hanukkah spiel about the oil-that-was-only-supposed-to-last-for-one-day-but-lo-and-behold-it-lasted-for-eight-wowza is mostly Talmudic PR. Contrary to popular myth, the holiday arose from the exact struggle Bin Laden is waging today: an armed rebellion against an imperial power, driven by religious fanaticism and suicidal self-assertion.

The genesis of Hanukkah resides in the Books of Maccabee. You can be forgiven if you have not read these books--they never made it in to the Biblical canon.* I only read them, in fact, because my wife is converting to Judaism and I wanted to be able to provide her a full accounting of the festival. Weirdly, I happened to have the New American Bible at home, a Catholic version of scripture that includes both books.

History repeats itself: Insurgents in action 1 Maccabees opens with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. The Hannukah story begins around 175 BC, when Antiochus, leader of the occupying Seleucid dynasty,issues a decree forcing the Jews to profane their Covenant: “Women who had had their children circumcised were put to death, in keeping with the decree, with the babies hung from their necks.” The high priest Mattathias kills a Seleucid official, then retreats to the desert to launch a revolt, which under the direction of his sons Judah, Jonathan, and Simon becomes a guerilla war. There’s another word for all this, of course: insurgency.

Judah Maccabee leads the Jews to numerous improbable victories on his way to reclaiming the Temple in Jerusalem, “destroying the impious” (here defined as any Jews less pious than themselves) along the way. Up north, Judah squares off against Antiochus IV’s son, the unfortunately named Eupator, whose army includes armored elephants, the Old Testament equivalent of tanks.

The account of a Maccabee soldier named Eleazer made me queasy:

Eleazar, called Avaran, saw one of the beasts bigger than any of the others and covered with royal armor, and he thought the king must be on it. So he gave up his life to save his people and win an everlasting name for himself. He dashed up to it in the middle of the phalanx, killing men right and left, so that they fell back from him on both sides. He ran right under the elephant and stabbed it in the belly, killing it. The beast fell to the ground on top of him and he died there. (6:43)

Eleazer sounds to me like a Biblical version of the suicide bombers who launch themselves at military convoys in Iraq. He isn’t trying to kill and maim innocent bystanders, so it’s not an exact comparison, but his mindset is essentially the same: He relishes the chance to give his life in exchange for the glory of the cause, and his own name.

I got the same queasy feeling when I read about Judah decapitating the vanquished general Nicanor and putting his head on display in Jerusalem. This might have been how you asserted your might 2000 years ago. But isn’t the gesture really just an old school version of the decapitation videos Al Qaeda uses today to horrify its Western foes?

Judah himself eventually dies, but his brothers Jonathan and Simon carry on the insurgency. Their methods could hardly seem more familiar:

They watched and suddenly saw a noisy crowd with baggage; the bridegroom and his friends and kinsmen had come out to meet the bride’s party with tambourines and musicians and much equipment. The Jews rose up against them from their ambush and killed them. Many fell wounded and after the survivors fled toward the mountain, all their spoils were taken. Thus the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of music into lamentation.

Again, from where I’m sitting this sounds a lot like, well, terrorism. It calls to mind the horrifying images of the 2005 attack at a Jordanian hotel, when members of al Qaida turned a wedding party into a bloodbath.

Miniature imperialists: This is roughly what a battalion of Seleucid troop looked likeIt gets worse.

Jonathan then cuts a deal to send 3000 of his soldiers -- let’s not call them foreign-born terrorists – to help the despot Demetrius put down a rebellion by his troops in Antioch. The Jewish mercenaries kill 100,000 people.

Obviously the Maccabees were in a tight spot, surrounded by hostile enemies and forced to defend themselves in mortal combat. What’s striking is the righteous lust with which they carry out this defense. Because they believe in the one true God, they have no problem with killing innocent civilians, killing other Jews, and killing themselves.

Radical Islam, meet radical Judaism.

I hoped the second book would be a softer ride, one that might tease out the less martial aspects of Hanukkah. Wrong.

2 Maccabees recounts the victories of Judah, only this time the Almighty plays a much more significant role in the combat. Indeed, if the message of the first book was that Jews kick serious ass when inspired by God, the message of the second is that the Jews kick ass because God actively intervenes on their behalf

In one particularly hallucinogenic episode, God helps his people by conjuring a “manifestation” straight from the pages of the Book of Revelation: he takes the form of a “richly caparisoned horse, mounted by a dreadful rider” who attacks one of Judah’s antagonists. Elsewhere, Judah reminds his troops that the Almighty will vouchsafe their victory. The rebels cut down “at least 35,000” of the enemy and “rejoice greatly over this manifestation of God’s power.”

The second book also places a disturbing emphasis on martyrdom. The most famous example is the story of a Jewish mother and her seven sons who refuse Antiochus’s order that they eat pork. The story illustrates the cruelty of the Seleucid soldiers, but its real emphasis is on dying for a cause:

At that, the king gave orders to have pans and cauldrons heated … He commanded his executioners to cut out the tongue of the one who had spoken for the others, to scalp him and cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of his brothers and his mother looked on. When he was completely maimed but still breathing, the king ordered them to carry him to the fire and fry him. As a cloud of smoke spread form the pan, the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die bravely…

Which they do.

I am going to resist using this story to suggest that torture doesn’t really work, because I think it speaks to a broader pathology—the mindset that exalts a noble death above all other human courses.

The other oil miracle of the Hanukkah story: Drilling for petroleum One other passage in 2 Maccabees is nothing short of eerie. It’s the retelling of a story about Nehemiah, the leader who had helped rebuild the Temple wall after the Babylonian Exile. During the exile, the priests took some of the sacred fire of the Temple altar and hid it in the hollow below a dry cistern. Hoping to rekindle the altar flame, Nehemiah sends the priests to retrieve the hidden fire, but they come back with a thick liquid instead. “And when the materials for the sacrifices were presented, Nehemiah ordered the priests to sprinkle the liquid on the wood and what was laid upon it.” (7:21) A great fire blazes up and everyone marvels. The King of Persia declares a miracle. The material, whatever it is, comes to be called naphtha – which, translated from Greek, means “petroleum.”

I wish I were making this stuff up. But it’s really and truly in the book. Twenty two hundred years ago, with insurgents and imperialists doing battle in the Middle East, people were agog over the miracle of petroleum.

In recent years, Jews have made an understandable decision to steer people away from the violence in Hanukkah’s exegetical basement. As an assimilated and not-very-observant Jew, I grew up hearing almost exclusively about the miracle of the oil.

The only thing I knew about the Maccabees was that they were heroic defenders of the faith who had something to do with the Jewish Olympics. The modern holiday has been recast as a cheery Festival of Lights, a counterpart to the bright tinsel of Christmas. It’s the same impulse that leads Christians to repackage Easter as a vista of bunnies and candy eggs, rather than the commemoration of a brutal public murder.

But this kind of soft-pedaling distorts our history and distracts us from the true meaning of our holidays. Hanukkah really is about a violent insurgency. It’s about the lengths to which the oppressed will go to defend their beliefs. But it’s also about a strain of unchecked aggression that infects those who are convinced that God is on their side. It’s precisely the sort of holiday story, in other words, that might force us to confront the moral crises of our present historical circumstance – before we go the way of the Maccabees, or their imperial enemies.

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RELATED LINKS:

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens agrees that Hanukkah is predicated on some less-than-enlightened principles. Being Christopher Hitchens, he also calls Judaism "an ancient and cruel faith" and suggests that Hanukkah violates the first amendment; hilariously, Slate illustrated this rant with a picture of an adorable Jewish child lighting the menorah.

In the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Danya Ruttenberg takes a more positive approach, looking for the good in a holiday that celebrates Jew-on-Jew civil war.

Correction, December 14: The original piece mistakenly stated that the Books of Maccabee were removed from the Biblical canon in the third century. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

In the wake of the most recently released Osama bin Laden audio recording I’m compelled to ask several questions:

1. Why has al Qaeda been unable to release one single video of bin Laden demonstrably talking about current events since October 2004?

2. How has Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri managed to make over 10 such videos and have them released in the same period of time?

3. Why isn’t much made of this?

Al Qaeda has to know how important it is to offer a credible piece of evidence that bin Laden is alive. As U.S. forces continue to demoralize (and kill) their brethren in Iraq, and as their former protectors in Afghanistan continue to descend mountain hide-outs for yearly spring culling, the least they could do would be to youtube a verifiable morale-booster from their supposed number one. Yet this task has remained, for them, insurmountable—for over four years.

The last time Osama bin Laden was seen discussing current events was in a clip broadcast on Arab television October 29, 2004, four days before the U.S. presidential election. He demonstrated cognizance of the then present by offering, “Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.” After that installment, we get some audiotapes, narrated videos, and unearthed oldies through 2006. Then the supposed return to form comes in September 2007. This is the coal black beard video. Amid all the speculation about the significance of the dye job, curiosity about the video’s genuinely puzzling nature was almost non-existent. Fox News reported matter-of-factly:

During the video, bin Laden's image moves for only a total of about 3 1/2 minutes in two segments, staying frozen the rest of the time while his remarks continue.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it might have resulted from a technical glitch while Al Qaeda passed the video through a variety of computer sites to mask its cyber trail.

What’s not mentioned is that the "freezes" occur several times, and only while current events are being discussed. In other words, there isn’t a second during which Osama bin Laden can be seen talking about anything after 2004. If I was in charge of A/V the day that tape was shot I’d have been pretty thorough about making sure it was glitch-free.

Since then, there’s been more audiotapes and narration over still pictures.

Dr. Zawahiri, on the other hand, practically has his own vlog. He’s turned out a long series of up-to-the-minute videos, some as long as an hour and, as far as I know, absent of glitches. Does al Qaeda’s number two have better equipment and more capable videographers than the world’s most wanted man?

At this point, I concede I have no answers to questions 1 and 2. I don’t begin to have a technical explanation as to how recordings may have been doctored, etc. And if I see a clip of Osama bin Laden actually talking about, say, Iraq’s al-Maliki government or Annapolis I’ll readily accept the fact. I merely find it all a bit curious. As to question 3, the only people who would make a big deal of bin Laden’s being dead (or not provably alive) are in the Bush administration. But after “mission accomplished” and “last throes” maybe they have learned something about hubris after all.

 

Christopher Hitchens and Anne Applebaum are both wary of cheering the rosier state of affairs in Iraq. For one thing, the gains of the surge might prove temporary and in war journalism, hubris must be guarded by a bodyguard of dispassion. For another, not even faithful hawks cotton to the "Mission Accomplished" rhetoric anymore (they say they do, but they don't). But despite the noticeable and (for Iraqis) palpable de-escalation in daily violence, one barometer of progress is, I think, also the most cynical.

The Washington Post carries a front-page story today about what's really motivating the insurgency:

"I was out of work and needed the money," said Abu Nawall, the nom de guerre of an unemployed metal worker who was paid as much as $1,300 a month as an insurgent. He spoke in a phone interview from an Iraqi military base where he is being detained. "How else could I support my family?"

U.S. military commanders say that insurgents across the country are increasingly motivated more by money than ideology and that a growing number of insurgent cells, struggling to pay recruits, are turning to gangster-style racketeering operations.

That means they can be bought off by other parties, too. Namely, us.

Let's be real, though. No one with a conscience has been able to look calmly on something like the Sunni Awakening and not fret about the fact that former wage-killers of Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers are now fighting on our side against Al Qaeda. These are not allies in the true sense of the term because given the slightest change in the weather and they'll be back to killing those same civilians and soldiers. However, we must make do with what we can, especially in a region of the world where suicide is used as a weapon of mass destruction. So much of the nightmare that has defined this war has been a matter of sheer ideology. Clerical fascism that brooks no negotiation or compromise; it is totalitarian in the sense that individuality and personal materialism are anathema to the greater struggle. I recently happened upon this description of Islam by the Pakistani Qutb, Abu Ala Maududi:

“In reality Islam is a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals. “Muslim” is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary programme. And “Jihad” refers to that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion which the Islamic Party brings into play to achieve this objective.

[...] 

Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it. The purpose of Islam is to set up a State on the basis of its own ideology and programme, regardless of which Nation assumes the role of the standard bearer of Islam or the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic State.” 

So it is a welcome occurrence that at least a handful of those fighting on behalf of such a doctrine look at the literal text of the thing and think, "Yeah, yeah. Show me the money."  This is a shift in hearts and minds, all right, however insufficient or preliminary it may be. 

By killing two South Korean hostages and refusing to release the remaining twenty-one, including eighteen women, the Taliban is taking a new path that hints it is becoming an Afghan branch of Al Qaeda. [Christian Science Monitor]

Cheney says he was wrong about the status of the Iraqi insurgency. The Vice President admitted to Larry King that he was (gasp!) "incorrect" in saying two years ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes.” [Iraq Slogger] It took two years of vicious, bloody insurgency and thousand of military and civilian casualties for the VP to finally admit he was "incorrect." That's noble of him. Now, how about some remorse.

The House of Representatives passed a measure intended to improve diagnosis and treatment of PTSD in service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. [Iraq Slogger]

Pro-Taliban fighters have seized control of a mosque and shrine in the Mohmand area of Pakistan's North West Frontier province and renamed it the Red Mosque. The tribesmen have expressed support for Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the leader of Islamabad's Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, killed in a government assault last month. [Al Jazeera]

Tori of Atlanta, a voluptuous Southern courtesan, will be in Iraq this month to entertain the men of the Private Security Contractors Association. [Iraq Slogger]

"One of the least covered aspects of the fallout from the Iraq war is the rising toll of suicides, both near the battlefield and back home." [Editor & Publisher]

Efraim Halevy, former chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, says it is time for Israel to speak directly with the leaders of Hamas. [The Wall Street Journal]

The Bush administration offers 25 percent more aid to Israel as part of the massive arms deal for Saudi Arabia, but Democrats and Jewish groups say they still want many questions answered before signing off on the plan. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

Syria’s political and military leaders have rescheduled the start of hostilities against Israel on the Golan for the second two weeks of November, 2007, postponing their original planning by more than two months. Also, Saudi Arabia will not promise to attend Bush's proposed Mideast peace conference, and they say Israel needs to show peace rather than just talk about it. [Debka]

Professor Martin Kramer, a senior fellow at Shalem Center's Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, blogs on the geopolitical situation of the Jews. [The Jerusalem Post]

I saw A Mighty Heart last night, the movie about Daniel Pearl's abduction and murder, and I was surprised. First, I liked the movie and expected not to. Second, it was not the anti-Muslim screed I'd expected it to be. If anything was a subject made for exploitation Hollywood style it was this story. An American-Jewish reporter goes to Pakistan to report on the teeming world of Islamic extremism. He goes seemingly with an open mind and American values of inquisitiveness and tolerance. His values are met by jihadi hatred, kidnapping and ultimately beheading. Could you have any better recipe for a suspense potboiler full of leering, evil Arabs? Yet, Michael Winterbottom the director, chooses to avoid this obvious pitfall (and he faces many others as well). He decides he is going to try to write a story about two idealistic children of the world (Daniel and Marianne Pearl) thrown into the maelstrom of third world poverty, desperation and religious hatred. Despite being tested in the deepest and most painful ways it is possible for a human to be tested, the Pearls both retain their humanity intact. This is a hopeful movie. But its hope doesn't come cheaply or easily. It is hope wrested from violence and suffering. Perhaps this is the only type of real hope there is--hope based on adversity. The main element of this film is confusion. Everything and everyone is a swirl of movement and emotions. Hardly anything remains in one place very long. The camera sweeps through the teeming streets of Pakistan's fetid urban centers providing the full panoply of human energy and misery. The crowded slums actually become a character in themselves in the film. Winterbottom does this in an ingenious way. He doesn't really have to tell you about the social conditions in third world Muslim countries that serve as the breeding ground for Islamic extremism. No characters have to engage in long conversations about it to explain it to the audience. The camera does it for you. But there is one element I felt the filmmaker didn't explore fully enough. You have to admit that the decision by a young American Jewish journalist to accept an assignment in Pakistan, hotbed of some of the most rabid anti-Israel, anti-western sentiment in the world, strikes one as quixotic or perhaps even nuts. Why did Pearl do it? What were his reasons for taking this assignment? What was the Wall Street Journal's thinking in making this assignment? I'd like to know more about Daniel Pearl. What did he believe both as a journalist, a Jew and human being. What were his private thoughts about the imams, sheikhs and jihadis he covered in Pakistan? The movie doesn't covey much of this and I wish it did more. It would've explained much to me that is lacking in the motivations of the key characters. On a less momentous note, I wish the character of the Pakistani police inspector had been more explosive and energetic. The role as written portrays a genial, humane, soft-spoken man. What about someone who shrieks, who loses his temper, who hits people, who curses, who is wily, but still retains his humanity? Personally, I think it would've added to the drama of the situation. I was struck by one element of the plot. At the end in voiceover, Marianne Pearl tells us that just before he was beheaded Daniel looked into the camera and said he was a Jew and that a street in Bnei Brak (Israel) is named for his grandfather, who founded the town. This is Pearl reaching back into his Jewish soul for something he is proud of, something that will mark his life, something he can leave after his death for others to know what was important to him as he faced his fate. It was also the ultimate act of rebellion against his captors--saying to them: "you can kill a Jew, but my grandfather helped build a Jewish country and it will live on after me despite your hated and violence." I am grateful that A Mighty Heart didn't lapse into parody or propaganda. It portrayed a confusing, multi-faceted event with admirable nuance and emotional complexity.

Henry Porter makes the case in the Guardian that, unlike with the IRA, Al Qaeda cannot be negotiated with or even debated on civilized terms:

A couple of weeks after a man had attempted to blow up hundreds of young women at a London nightclub, it makes you quite proud to see the clubs and pubs in London full of people enjoying themselves. As I watched, a voice at the back of my mind asked: 'What the hell is al-Qaeda on about?' Which is not such a dumb question because most of the standard answers concerning Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan do not explain the terrible level of violence that the four men jailed last week - all of whom had benefited in some way from the Britain's hospitality - planned for their fellow citizens. The Middle East may seem to provide convincing pretexts but we shouldn't for a moment believe that withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq and a settlement in Palestine would stop al-Qaeda. For one thing, there is a devotion to cruelty, a blood lust if you like, among the extremist sects of Islam which seems to go way beyond the desire to gain certain political goals or religious goals. Look at the way Arabs are being killed by al-Qaeda in the Anbar province of Iraq or at the murders of barbers in Basra, or the decision by an Iranian court to order a 43-year-old woman named Mokarrameh Ebrahimi to be stoned to death for adultery, which Amnesty International says 'beggars belief'.

Of course, this should be self-evident by now. But it isn't. Still we hear that Islamists are reverse-engineered foreign policy analysts and that if the U.S. did things like pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and dismantled its air strips in Saudi Arabia (done, by the way), Bin Laden would call off his goon squad and retire to quiet life of the sharia-saturated mind. Never mind that Al Qaeda seems more preoccupied with the goings-on in Pakistan and Nigeria, over which the U.S. has precious little sway (it takes Gen. Musharraf to ask Bush to stand down on killing known jihadists, and to do so for Musharraf's own political "stability"), and that a caliphate is, by design, a theocratic imperium whose origins preexist secular republicanism.

From now on I'd like the obverse of Porter's argument the Burnt Pot Roast thesis, for it amounts to the same collapsible logic: if only the wife didn't ruin the dinner, her husband would stop beating her.

Agence France-Presse: Pakistani security forces began their assault on the mosque compound before daybreak on Tuesday, just hours after talks broke down to end the eight-day siege in central Islamabad.

Olmert calls for Syria to resume peace talks with Israel; Blair pushes for greater authority in his peacekeeping role; Iranian executions for rape, adultery, insulting religious sanctities, and homosexuality; The Jewish Agency will house 58 Sudanese refugees near Sderot. [Jewish Telegraph Agency] [The New York Times]

Bloody battle ends, leaves 82 dead at Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan. [The Washington Post]
Craig Cohen, deputy chief of staff at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discussed the deadly military raid at Pakistan's Red Mosque -- which ended an eight-day standoff with anti-government, pro-Taliban forces -- and the impact it will have on President Pervez Musharraf's control of the U.S.-allied country. [The Washington Post] [The Los Angeles Times]

Abbas convenes the Palestinian legislature; Hamas boycotts. [The New York Times]
According to Abbas, “thanks to the support of Hamas, Al Qaeda is entering Gaza.” [The New York Times]

That a few doctors aren't terribly good with their hands helped, but Anne Applebaum says a functioning civil service infrastructure deserves most of the credit: 

[T]he London bombs failed because open, Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are. The police found one of the Piccadilly car bombs because an ambulance crew, responding to an unrelated call, saw smoke seeping from its trunk and alerted the police. The other car was illegally parked, and London's supervigilant, much-hated traffic wardens towed it to a parking lot, where someone noticed that it smelled of gasoline and alerted the police. That Britain has functional ambulance services and working traffic wardens, all of whom are civic-minded enough to call the police when they suspect something is amiss, may not sound extraordinary. But these are precisely the kinds of institutions that are missing in many places, among them Baghdad, a city where parking isn't exactly a public preoccupation, and where the civic-minded avoid police who are, fairly or unfairly, suspected of everything from ethnic cleansing to taking bribes.

Point well taken, but let's not forget that Britain, which has one of the most lax immigration and asylum policies in the world, is by no means an entry point for advertised jihadists from Syria and Iran.

Londoners got lucky this time. They likely won't the next time; nor will we.

I never thought The Onion would translate so well off the page:

Not quite, but Joe Klein reports on noticeable improvements in combating Al Qaeda in Iraq:

A senior U.S. military official told me—confirming reports from several other sources—that there have been "a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there." The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni-dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances against the foreign fighters. And, as TIME's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an influential leader of the Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against al-Qaeda as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like a mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi insurgency.

Those who say the solution in Iraq lies in politics, not military strategy, are right for the wrong reason: The politics is built-into the military strategy at the ground level. Under David Petraeus's thoughtful command, MNF-I are learning how to navigate the sticky tribalism of Sunni regions where jihadists have become parasites of convenience. As Klein adds,

[A]n alliance with the tribes was proposed by U.S. Army intelligence officers as early as October 2003 and rejected by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority on the grounds that "tribes are part of the past. They have no place in the new democratic Iraq." The damage caused by that myopic stupidity may never be repaired: it gave al-Qaeda a base in the Sunni tribal areas, which enabled the sustained, spectacular anti-Shi'ite bombing campaign, which, along with the Sunnis' historic disdain for the Shi'ite majority, created the conditions for the current civil war.

Any optimism, however, should be tempered by a dogged awareness that much of the good work now being done in this failed state is merely the undoing of much of the bad work done over the last four years. 

The opening frame of a new Al Qaeda video, which warns of imminent terrorist attacks on the U.S. 

This Guardian cover story is all over the blogosphere:

The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.

Juan Cole thinks it's extraordinary that the Shia Islamic Republic would suborn Sunni jihadists, let alone target fellow Shia whom it has armed and trained:

At a time when Sunni Arab guerrillas are said to be opposing "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" for its indiscriminate violence against Iraqis, including Shiites, we are now expected to believe that Shiite Iran is allying with it. And, it claims that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are shelling the Green Zone. The parliament building that was hit to day by such shelling is dominated by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and its paramilitary, the Badr Organization. Who trained Badr? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And they are trying to hit their own guys . . . why?

Why not? If the Badr Organization and Mahdi Army are seen by Tehran as making overtures to the Multinational Forces-Iraq, why not strike at your own minions to scare them into compliance? Sadr targets his fellow Mahdi riffraff when he thinks they grown too big for their britches and refuse to obey his commands.

And a Shia-Sunni jihadist alliance of convenience is hardly a new phenomenon. Far more startling than it is that a Mideast "expert" like Juan Cole finds it startling.

Out of a shared antagonism for Israel, Iran reportedly gave $50 million to Hamas in 2006 after the (Sunni) Islamist party gained control of the Palestinian government, whose total operating budget is $120 million.

Time for another bake sale, AIPAC.

Radical Chic: Reznor's mujahideen-friendly lyrics appallMy friend and political co-thinker Josh Strawn debuts his writing chops at Jewcy with tomorrow's lead story on the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero. Money quote:

A few years ago, Reznor exchanged his heroin habit for books by Noam Chomsky (the great sage even enjoyed a link on the official Nine Inch Nails website). He's no longer just a brooder—he's now a brooding do-gooder. It would be unfair to deny Reznor credit for attempting to infuse his work with themes that reflect his desire to make some sort of civic contribution through art. But it appears as if, in a haze of artistic passion, he’s ended up a sounding board for the worst neo-fascist ideology. I wouldn’t bet that Trent’s bookshelves are overrun with the screeds of Wahhabism, but his visions and fantasies sync seamlessly with those of Bin Laden.

Read our interview with Josh from February. 

Performing wrapped up in wires or covered with mud, orgasmically moaning about throwing himself away, Trent Reznor has long bestowed market appeal on all things transgressive. He added FM rock flair to the experimental electronics of Cabaret Voltaire and Skinny Puppy, and made sadomasochism mainstream. Now, after having spent the majority of his career in existential self-contemplation (or flagellation, as it were), Reznor seems to have found his political voice on the new concept album, Year Zero. ...

We may despise the methods employed by Al Qaeda and other takfiri Islamists, but we cannot be surprised that they fight us. From the day Napolean Bonaparte landed on Egyptian shores in 1798, the West has unceasingly occupied Muslim land, immiserated its peoples, emasculated its culture, and pilfered its resources. Is it any surprise that a revolutionary movement has emerged which seeks to liberate Muslims from the bungling brutality of the West? Because make no mistake about it: this is a liberation movement. And though we are repulsed by the reactionary aspects of their ideology, we would be fools to deny that Islamists are justified in seeking the liberation of their peoples from the West.

If the above codswallop still sounds at all reasonable to you, I draw your attention attention to yesterday's atrocity in Algiers.

The death toll from al-Qaida-claimed suicide bombings in Algeria rose Thursday to 33, the government said, and police rolled out in force in the shaken capital, establishing highway checkpoints to reinforce security. The group that claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attacks, al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa, has carried out a series of recent bombings jeopardizing Algeria’s tentative peace. The country, a staunch U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, has been trying to turn the page on a 15-year insurgency that killed 200,000 people.

This is not just another massacre by an Al Qaeda satellite group. It may in fact be the most pathological expression of Islamist nihilism that we’ve seen in the 21st century.

The Algerian Civil War of the 1990s was not so much a war as a Kurtzian descent into the horrors of human bestiality. What began as a conflict between the military and Islamists devolved into a succession of increasingly surreal massacres in which the takfirists of The Armed Islamic Group extended takfir to an ever-larger portion of the Algerian population. Ultimately, anyone who did not support the GIA was proclaimed worthy of death, and entire villages were massacred in joyous all-night orgies in which women were raped or captured as sexual chattel, pregnant women disemboweled, children beheaded, and all the rest. The GIA proudly claimed responsibility and that the massacres were an “offering to God.” Unlike in today’s Iraq, there were not even confessional differences to justify the bloodshed.

The madness ended only when the GIA began consuming itself, with members proclaiming takfir on one another or defecting out of horror at the violence.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa—the group responsible for the recent bombing—is composed partly by remnants of the GIA. The group was moribund, and Al Qaida’s sponsorship is enabling its resurgence. If there is a purer expression of Islamism's loathing of the Muslim people, I can't imagine it. And if this isn’t the Kronstadt moment for sympathizers of Islamism, then their Kronstadt will never come.

What would the New York Times' war coverage be without John Burns?

Less pessimistic than this Week in Review piece on how roadside bombings and civilian death tolls are beginning to creep back up into pre-surge levels is Burns' brilliant video dispatch about how Saddam had been planning for just these postwar conditions for months before the coalition invasion.

According to Burns, Baathist thugs shepherded $2 billion in cash in steel trunks just the day we entered Baghdad. This money had been used to finance the Al Qaeda and Sunni Baathist insurgency, however, whether or not any of it is left begs the question, how is it that the insurgency continues its daily slaughter of civilians and military personnel? Through theft (oil pipelines are routinely tapped for ciphoning off Iraq's most lucrative natural resource), counterfeiting, and through kidnapping and exortion efforts. In the other words, the bad guys, in true gangster fashion, have grown self-sufficient. They require no longer require a state sponsor.

Now here's the most chilling fact from this video: According to leaked Pentagon records, the United States spends $8 billion a month in keeping the war afloat. The insurgency spends $200 million a year.  That means the insurgency spends less money in a year than what the American military spends in a single day.

Watch the video here. 

The top news story on Technorati right now is the Washington Post article discussing a just-declassified report by the Defense Department that allegedly puts paid to the notion that the Baath government in Iraq had suborned or sponsored Al Qaeda.

Of course, Dick Cheney's appearance on Rush Limbaugh's radio program--in which the vice president insisted that Saddam and Osama were well acquainted and cooperating before 2003--has incited the type of response one would expect. (Though Cheney has never come out and said that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, his qualified statements about Iraq's culpability in sponsoring global jihadists -- Al Qaeda operatives included -- have been taken up by the antiwar crowd as just such a propagation of falsehood, another canard in the quick, furious and irresponsible march to war.)

Nowhere in this WaPo piece is it mentioned that Richard Clarke, now the doyen of the truthiness-to-power factions, included Saddam's covert negotiations with Al Qaeda in the U.S. legal brief that justified the Clinton administration's spate of bombings of military sites inside Iraq in the late 90's. Nor will you find much on this: As early as October 2001, members of Ansar al-Islam had attempted to assassinate the brilliant, brave PUK secretary-general of Sulaimaniyah Dr. Barham Salih. Salih went on record saying, in effect, that isn't interesting that jihadists would come out of the woodwork in Iraq's northern region at the exact time that Bin Laden declared himself international Public Enemy Number One.

Ansar al-Islam is (or was) a terrorist cell that, according to Human Rights Watch, culled from the ranks of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and native Kurdish Islamist groups. It was previously known as Jund al-Islam, which openly declared itself a sworn enemy of the "secular" Saddam Hussein yet never shied from murdering and intimidating his Kurdish democratic antagonists. (The enemy of one's enemy is still an enemy according to the stupid and primitive logic of jihad.) Ansar al-Islam was later absorbed into Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's precursor outfit as what he conveniently called "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." The inevitable question: Just how affiliated was Zarqawi with Bin Laden before the coalition invasion of Iraq, and when exactly did the late Jordanian thug enter the country?

This is false:

Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

The only biography written of Zarqawi was by the French journalist Jean Charles-Brisard. Here's what Charles-Brisard wrote in Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda, published in 2005 [Note: Suwaqah is the Jordanian prison in which Zarqawi served a sentence for terrorism before being released by King Abdullah in 1999 in an act of universal amnesty for terrorists. Hussein was worried what native Islamists might do with their parliamentary bloc if he refused]:

On the basis of the charisma he had displayed at Suwaqah and his knowledge of the small world of Jordanian Islamists, Zarqawi had established himself as the leader of the group of Jordanians who came with him to Afghanistan. These included not only his first comrades from the time of Bayt Al-Imam, Khaled Al-Aruri and Abdel Hadi Daghlas, both of whom had left prison in 1999, but also all sorts of future fighters. In the space of a few weeks he had shown surprising skill in reconstituting an operational group and bringing his partisans into Al-Qaeda.

Zarqawi then moved into a "guest house" large enough for his group of about forty Jordanians in the village of Logo, several kilometers west of Kabul, an area traditionally under the control of the extremist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He leaned on Al-Qaeda, of course, at first to take advantage of its equipment and logistical support so that he could plan large-scale operations. The man who opened the door of Bin Laden's structure to this group of Jordanians was a Jordanian himself, Abu Zubaydah, Al-Qaeda's head of operations.

By the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000 Zarqawi had proved himself an important part of the Al-Qaeda apparatus in Afghanistan, and in 2001 he took the oath of allegiance to Bin Laden. To void any conflict between dissident factions (in particular the Algerian groups), starting in May 2001 the Taliban required all heads of training camps who wanted to pursue their activities to swear allegiance to their regime.

Having taken this step, Zarqawi had to conform to the ideological line set by Osama Bin Laden. The oath of allegiance was a way for Bin Laden to rein in rebellious spirits, but it was primarily a way to bring the different "Islamo-nationalist" groups together under a single banner. The oath, written by Bin Laden himself, is as follows: "I recall the committment to God, in order to listen to and obey my superiors, who are accomplishing this task with energy, difficulty, and giving of self, and in order that God may protect us so God's words are the highest and his religion victorious."

[...]

According to a confidential document of the Spanish antiterrorist unit UCIE (Unidad Central de Informacion Exterior), at the end of the summer of 1999 Zarqawi joined the second circle [of Al Qaeda], the circle of Bin Laden's lieutenants. By this time he was no longer an unknown or marginal figure. He was assigned the planning of the group's operations, and as such was in charge of several dozen militants.

Shadi Abdalla, Bin Laden's former bodyguard, later told the German intelligence services that Zarqawi's rise within the Al-Qaeda hierarchy owed a great deal to Abu Zubaydah, who was himself very close to Osama Bin Laden. Both men were Jordanians; both were inspired by a visceral hatred of the Hashemite regime. Zarqawi is said to have assisted Zubaydah in the preparation of the so-called millennium attacks against Western interest in Jordan. During this first terrorist operation on the international level he would win the trust of the Al-Qaeda staff and of Bin Laden in particular.

Abu Zubaydah is now in U.S. custody, and though some argue he's mentally unhinged, his information apparently led to the capture of multiple Al Qaeda agents abroad.

So, then: Zarqawi took an oath of fealty and allegiance to Osama Bin Laden just four months prior to the September 11 attacks. Why on earth was such an oath mandated at that time, do you suppose? And why are we still reading in major American newspapers that Zarqawi and Bin Laden were barely even on nodding terms with one another?

UPDATE [April, 9]: I stupidly forgot to mention in my original post the following revelation in a Foreign Affairs essay, published last year, on the internal mechanics of Saddam's republic of fear. Based on captured Baathist records, we now know that the fascist tyrant supposedly "in his box" had tasked his most gruesome paramilitary milita the Saddam Fedayeen with

[taking] part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

Douglas In Less Upstanding TimesActor Michael Douglas has found his cause celebre - helping children learn about cultures through the Internet. Don't laugh just yet. While it's not Jessica Simpson's Operation Smile, it warrants some media attention.

Douglas is teaming up with the seemingly bipartisan Global Nomads Group.

In an interview, Douglas went on record to say that technology helps children understand and feel more a part of the world.

He said the Global Nomads Group had conducted a successful trial with Iraqi and American students way back in 2003, and that the trial actually gave American students the opportunity to understand Iraqis as fellow human beings.

As a disclaimer, I went on to the Global Nomads site and it's entirely clean of sexual content. I guess Douglas is over his SMS addiction, or has found a more suitable outlet, leaving his mind and spirit free and unclouded to take on more serious socially responsible work.

Yemenite Jews are now fleeing Yemen after receiving letters from the government warning them of Al Qaeda death threats.

Residents of the Saada region of Yemen have been given ten days to evacuate by the radical Muslim cleric Hussein Badr Eddin al Houthi. Forty-five Jews have already fled their homes since Monday.

So what exactly does the letter say?

One of the threatening letters said: "They (the Jews) have taken part in actions and movements that serve global Zionism first and foremost, and are working diligently at corrupting people and making them abandon their values, their moral and religious values, and spread all kinds of abominations throughout society." According to the letter, this conclusion was reached "following meticulous surveillance of the Jews living in the El-Hid region in Saada…Our Islam religion compels us to fight the corrupt and denounce them."

Yemen, a Muslim country, has been the subject of attacks against Jews in the past. A large group of Yemenite Jews came to Israel as part of Operation Magic Carpet in 1949 to flee Muslim riots. According to a Yemenite Jew living in Israel, "those who stayed are stubborn, they don’t want to come here…on Friday they told me that they got letters saying whoever doesn’t leave their home will be killed and have their children taken."

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Disaffected Jews say the darndest things: Al Qaeda convert Adam GadahnSo you're the homeschooled child of Jewish hippies. You grew up on a goat farm in California, introverted but fiercely intelligent, into death metal and other people who are into death metal. Your life is a minus sign. You're looking for uplift. So what do you do? You join Al Qaeda, of course:

Adam Gadahn’s nom de guerre is Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American). He can fluently recite the Koran in classical Arabic, and, since the late nineteen-nineties, when he joined the jihad, his English has acquired a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. At times, he speaks in what might be called Jihadlish—a peculiar fusion of American vernacular and militant Islamist theory. Gadahn may be the first Al Qaeda operative to lace a religious threat with a reference to Monopoly. (“If you die as an unbeliever in battle against the Muslims, you’re going straight to hell, without passing Go.”) Or to adopt the bluster of a barroom pundit. (“Whoever takes over for Bush probably won’t have the guts to bring the troops home.”) Once, referring to Abu Jahal, an early enemy of Islam known as the Father of Ignorance, Gadahn said, “I can’t forget the day, when, as I was praying a prescribed prayer with one of the brothers in a shopping-center parking lot in suburban America, a man sped by in his sports-utility vehicle shouting from his open window, ‘Worship Jesus, your Lord.’ The gas guzzler, cell phone, and college diploma notwithstanding, one couldn’t help but be reminded of Abu Jahal in the seventh century, abusing the Prophet while he prayed.”