by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Advancing a Free Society<\/em><\/p>\n The post-mortem revelations of Osama bin Laden\u2019s daily habits have confirmed the orthodox narrative about the al-Qaeda chief. Rather than a traditionalist conservative Muslim, bin Laden has been caricatured as a mentally unstable fringe figure, a narcissistic megalomaniac who \u201chighjacked\u201d Islamic doctrine in order to prey on Muslims traumatized by a lack of economic or political opportunity. Learning that bin Laden enjoyed Coke, watched porn, and was vain about his appearance seemingly confirms that assessment. Yet this kind of thinking reveals more about our own cultural myopia, the way we reduce all human behavior to our own categories and assumptions.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, this mistake leads to our misunderstanding the tactics and strategy of the jihadists. A recent example of this phenomenon is Bret Stephens\u2019\u00a0column<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0about bin Laden\u2019s references to MIT linguist and radical crank Noam Chomsky. Most of the column is an astute dissection of Chomsky\u2019s political rants, which Stephens correctly notes function as pop-cultural commodities and fashion markers for the badly educated young with\u00a0\u00e9pater le bourgeois<\/em>\u00a0pretensions.<\/p>\n The problem comes with Stephens\u2019 ruminations on why bin Laden would find Chomsky appealing. As a \u201cwannabe philosopher,\u201d bin Laden sought \u201cthe imprimatur of someone he supposes to be a real philosopher\u201d who could provide him an \u201cintellectual architecture for his hatred of the United States.\u201d Chomsky\u2019s academic position and celebrity \u201ccould only have sustained bin Laden in the conceit that his thinking was on a high plane.\u201d An analysis such as this, focused as it is on bin Laden\u2019s personal psychology and pathologies, misses how shrewdly the jihadists have taken the measure of the West and its left-wing elites, whose guilt and self-loathing make them important allies in undermining our morale.<\/p>\n The usefulness of leftist ideology for jihadists was obvious from the beginning in the work of Sayyid Qutb, \u201cal Qaeda\u2019s intellectual godfather,\u201d according toLee Smith<\/a>. Qutb found in communism\u2019s clich\u00e9s about industrial capitalism\u2019s alienation and dehumanization an idiom of indictment that could resonate with left-wing Western intellectuals. \u201cLook at this capitalism with its monopolies, its usury, at this individual freedom,\u201d Qutb wrote, \u201cdevoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives except under force of law; at this materialistic attitude which deadens the spirit.\u201d So too the Iranian Islamist Ali Shari\u2019ati, who translated into Persian Frantz Fanon\u2019s 1963\u00a0The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, one of the most important anti-colonial, anti-Western tracts. Shari\u2019ati and other Iranians adapted the Marxian notion of \u201cfalse consciousness,\u201d the device by which capitalism fools the proletariat into ignoring their own true interests and obscures the oppressive reality of socio-economic institutions, and called it \u201cWestoxification,\u201d the mind-addling allure of Western commodities and ideas that seduces Muslims from the true faith. The Ayatollah Khomeini, architect of the first Islamic state, likewise adorned his sermons and speeches with anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and Third World revolutionary rhetoric sure to delight European Marxists like Michel Foucault, who indeed celebrated Khomeini as a revolutionary hero.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s jihadists employ the same tactic, linking their theologically inspired hatred of the West to left-wing indictments of the uniquely oppressive and exploitative nature of capitalism, creating what\u00a0David Horowitz<\/a>\u00a0calls the \u201cunholy alliance.\u201d Thus when bin Laden was communicating to Americans, he sounded all these old shibboleths of leftist theory. In 2002, for example, he exhorted Iraqis not to fight for \u201ccapitalists, the lords of usury, and arms and oil dealers.\u201d That same year he chided Americans for failing to sign the Kyoto agreements \u201cso that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries,\u201d and criticized our law as \u201cthe law of the rich and wealthy people.\u201d In an address to American soldiers in 2003, bin Laden told our troops that they were \u201cspilling [their] blood to swell the bank accounts of the White House gang and their fellow arms dealers and the proprietors of great companies.\u201d And before the 2004 election, he warned Americans not to support a war begun \u201cto give business to their [the Bush administration\u2019s] various corporations.\u201d All these statements are indistinguishable from those made over the years by Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, Robert Fisk, William Blum, or thousands of college professors, pundits, and editorial writers.<\/p>\n