FEMA

Ground zero: the remains of the World Trade Centre following the Setember 11 attacks.

I want to argue that the crimes of September 11 will not be seen to be of world-historical import, although it is always possible that the forces of order, by their reaction, will endow the criminals--Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and their allies--with significance that they could not claim for themselves. In this connection, the rhetoric of a 'War against Terrorism' is probably a mistake--criminals are not to be made war on, but to be hunted down, and if possible caught and tried; in any event, these criminals are not some kind of generic terrorists: they are a very specific group driven by a very specific set of ideas, ideas that, fortunately, have only a limited appeal to the majority of the world's inhabitants, whether the latter live in the prosperous West or the impoverished South--including the so-called 'world of Islam'.

Challenging the international order
It may seem strange to assert that the ideology of Al Qaeda lacks popular appeal, since one of the most striking features of the post-September 11 landscape has been the way in which so many people have reacted to the fall of the World Trade Center towers with a degree of satisfaction ranging from outright glee in much of the Arab world to more restrained approval in the rest of the South and a mealy mouthed, sotto voce 'the Americans had it coming' from parts of the left intelligentsia in the West. Such reactions to the killing of several thousand innocents are contemptible but, for the most part, they reflect generic anti-Americanism--and an element of schadenfreude--rather than specific approval for bin Laden's aims.

The brand of radical Islam bin Laden and his associates espouse cannot appeal to more than a small minority of the peoples of the world--even, it must be hoped, Muslims. The Palestinian women ululating in triumph at the discomfiture of Israel's ally for the benefit of CNN's cameras are unlikely actually to want to see Taliban-style rule in Palestine, while even the most irreconcilable America-hater in the West could hardly approve of Al Qaeda's value-system, whatever excuses they may produce for its actions. What is central is that extremist radical Islam cannot form the basis for a constructive challenge to the international order--although the downside here is that its intellectual poverty may make it more difficult to deal with in the short- to medium-term.

	Bin Laden: Theology and Appeal
	(1:46 min) Chris Brown: The theology that bin Laden and his group put forward is quite complicated. It contains a number of accretions that don't have any Koranic basis. In fact, they are to be found neither in the Koran nor even, in some cases, in the early traditions. It is a variant of the official version of Islam found in Saudi Arabia (which is in itself a particularly strict version) and one that the majority of Muslims would not follow. In any event, it is important to remember that his version of Islam is not Shi'ite, so the Shi'ite Muslim world is going to be suspicious, but many Sunni Muslims will also reject it. At the same time, however, there is sense of fellow-feeling, that even though they do not follow his version of Islam, he is in some way on their side. The idea that some Islamic figure is giving the United States a smack in the eye is quite appealing to many. That was quite a common reaction after September 11 in 2001: not just in the Arab world, but in the rest of the Muslim world, as well as in Africa and Latin America.

To bring home both of these points, a comparison with an earlier and superficially similar challenge may be helpful. In the late 1960s, global capitalism--that is, the US and to a lesser extent its allies--faced a combination of hostile forces joined together in a very loose coalition with roots deep in the progressive half of global civil society. The US was at war directly in Vietnam, and indirectly fighting a number of guerrilla campaigns elsewhere in South-East Asia, in Latin America and in Africa. These various campaigns shared a common ideology, membership in the loose 'Tricontinental Congress' of Marxist movements and contacts with terrorist groups in the developed world--the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and, indeed, the Weathermen in the US itself. These groups were connected to nationalist movements that had adopted Marxism--such as the IRA in Ireland and the Palestine Liberation Organisation--and they had the tacit support of one of the superpowers; even though the USSR regarded the 'revolutionaries' as infantile leftists, since the latter were making a nuisance of themselves in the rest of the world not the Eastern Bloc, covert Soviet support was usually forthcoming. Moreover, these various revolutionary groups had a great deal of partial, conditional support from Western trade unionists and democratic socialists--the latter may not have approved of the tactics of the Vietcong or PLO, but they could, at least at some level, identify with their struggle.

	Glossary
	Red Brigades Ultra-leftist movement in Italy that sought to separate Italy from the Western Alliance. Advocated class warfare and revolution during 1970s and 80s. IRA Para-military republican organisation seeking to separate Northern Ireland from British rule. Particularly active during the 1970s, 80s and 90s. PLO Umbrella organisation set up in 1964 for armed and civilian groups within the Palestinian resistance network seeking to establish a Palestinian state. Declined in influence over the last decade. Vietcong Military arm of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. Established in 1960 by North Vietnamese communists to escalate the armed struggle in South Vietnam.

This was a genuinely international movement--the Red Army Faction trained with the PLO in the Lebanon, Che Guevara led guerrilla foci in Angola and Bolivia, students in London and Paris marched in sympathy with the Vietcong. And, unlike the anti-globalization coalition of recent years, the differences between the various groups were largely tactical, occasionally strategic, but rarely concerned the overall goal, which was universally agreed to be some form of socialism or communism. The latter may not have been clearly defined, but still provided a kind of unity, and, of course, explained the appeal of the movement to the global underdogs of the South, as well as to marginalised groups in the North, although the relatively prosperous working class of the North was less interested. The point is that there was an ideology underlying this challenge to international order with which a great many different people in different parts of the world could identify, even though when closely cross-examined they might have meant different things by the general principles to which all subscribed.

Bin Ladenism
The challenge of the bin Laden network is different in virtually every respect. Here we are dealing with terrorists who have no concern for the welfare or interests of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians and Western secularists, and precious little for the majority of Muslims who do not follow their particular version of Islam. The 1960s revolutionaries might conceivably have attacked the Pentagon--although attempting to levitate it was more the US movement's style--but the idea of murdering several thousand office-workers in the WTC would have been anathema to them. Such callousness is the product not of a perverted progressivism, but of a set of values that are inherently anti-progressive, a point caught by very few contemporary writers of the left, although Christopher Hitchens, columnist for the Nation and Vanity Fair, and a few others deserve great credit for recognising that, unlike earlier revolutionaries, Al Qaeda hate the West for its best, not its worst, features.

US Department of Defence

A video released by Al Qaeda in which Osama bin Laden appears. It is unclear whether Al Qaeda's theology will be generally accepted.

The values of bin Laden can have no genuine appeal to those peoples he regards as animals fit only for the slaughter; whether they can appeal more widely than they currently do to Muslims in general is more contestable. Clearly many Arabs praise bin Laden for his blows against the US, but whether this support will translate into a more general acceptance of Al Qaeda's ideology is moot. Working in its favour is the general unwillingness of Muslims, and Arabs in particular, to admit that at least some of the problems that beset their world are of their own making, a tendency to blame 'crusading' Americans or Westerners in general for all their ills. But there are countervailing forces. The role of women may be crucial here: one of the driving forces behind most varieties of fundamentalism (Hindu and Christian, as well as Muslim) is the desire to control women, or, more specifically, to find a version of modernity that does not empower women, and whether Muslim women will allow themselves to be disempowered is going to be a key feature of the politics of the Arab/Muslim world over the next decade or so. In any event, it is difficult to see what the West can do to influence the struggle that will take place, although disrupting the bin Laden network will certainly hinder, while unconditional support for Israel will clearly help, the cause of radical Islam.

In the worst-case scenario, bin Ladenism will become firmly established in the so-called 'world of Islam'. This would certainly pose a major police problem for the rest of the world, including the rest of the South, and especially those countries with a Muslim majority (or sizeable minority) who had not fallen under the Al Qaeda spell. Indeed, although the nature of radical Islam makes it a less plausible challenger to world order than the movement of the 1960s, it also means it poses a more serious police problem. To put the matter a little over-simply, it is more difficult to incorporate religious fanatics into regular political life than it is to bring in the wilder elements of a progressive movement. Precisely because the 'movement' of the 1960s and 1970s was connected to a wide progressive coalition, it was open to being co-opted. A fringe member of the German extra-parliamentary opposition of the 1970s can find himself Foreign Minister of Germany in 2001. The 'red' element of the red-green ideology of the Provisional IRA has been one of the major factors leading elements of that group to seek peace; equally, at least in principle and for the same reason, the IRA has confined its human targets to those it regards as 'combatants' and given warnings when its bombs are placed in areas where they might kill civilians. Of course, who is a combatant is hotly contested, and the warnings often go astray, but still the contrast with the events of September 11 is striking: there were no coded phone calls that morning.

	Thinking Point
	In what ways is the ideology of Al Qaeda comparable to guerrilla organisations, such as the IRA and the PLO, that were particularly active in the 1960s and 1970s?

The politics of Arab-Israeli relations provides the starkest contrast here. Partly because of its links with Western progressivists, the PLO has been obliged to cast its aims in acceptably secular terms--the commitment to a single secular state for Jews and Arabs in Palestine may not be realistic politics, but it provides the basis for a dialogue and has now turned into the more realisable project of a two-state solution. This, in principle at least, is negotiable. For Al Qaeda and its local allies, on the other hand, the destruction of Israel and the removal of all Jews from Palestine is still the goal. It may be difficult to find common ground with the PLO on a secular solution to the problems of the region (partly because the obdurate Sharon government in Israel does not seem to be interested in genuine negotiations), but it is difficult to see how any Israeli politician could even begin to find a point of contact with Hamas, an organisation whose Covenant states that 'Zionism' and its Freemason allies fomented the French and Russian Revolutions, as well as both World Wars (World War II in the interest of Zionist arms manufacturers, apparently, which suggests that attempts to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism still have a long way to go in that organisation). Unfortunately, such nonsense is taken seriously in large parts of the Arab world, hence the widespread credence given to the absurd rumour that the WTC was attacked by Mossad, with Jewish employees being told to stay at home--here Muslim fundamentalism finds common ground with its true allies in the West: neo-fascists, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists.

Precisely because of its irrationalism, the ideology of Al Qaeda and similar fundamentalist movements poses a genuine problem for the world, but not, I think, a problem for international order as such.