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The Key to Jihadist Ideology and Strategy

(FrontPageMagazine) Lawrence Auster- Both the anti-war left and the pro-war right commit the same narcissistic fallacy of thinking that the Islamist holy war against the West revolves solely around ourselves, around the moral drama of our goodness or our wickedness, rather than having something to do with Islam itself. A very different perspective on the Islamist challenge comes from Mary Habeck, a military historian at Yale University, who says the various jihadist groups base their war against non-Moslems on the paradigms provided by the stages of Muhammed's political and military career. It is this internally driven logic of Islam, and not any particular provocation, real or imagined, by some outside power, that is the key to understanding why the jihadis do what they do. Wahhabism began in the 18th century when there was no Western colonial power in the Islamic world; it was not set off by any Western intrusion into Moslem lands.
2004-08-18 00:00:00
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