When the Intelligensia Wishes Upon a Star

LGF links to a piece in the Guardian that makes a familiar mistake. The author, a “leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner,” engages in some wishful thinking that the terrorists' campaigns are "struggles against poverty, against dictatorships and against foreign occupation." He's hoping for "a profound and desirable shift in the anti-imperialist struggles waged by the Muslim world: away from individual acts of terror, to mass, collective action that finds common cause with the anti-globalisation, anti-imperialist movement beyond it."

I've seen academics make the same mistake, interpreting the war on terror in terms of Marxist theory or some other Leftist template. Rather than interpreting the current events in terms of what I already knew (entirely) I looked at arguments being made by others, and found Marc Sageman and Fawaz Gerges. Their argument follows the ideas of the Salafi jihad through their development, debates within the movement, and getting to the current situation. I did have some applicable knowledge, since the nature of insurgency is something I look at. But what I knew applied mostly to what the coallition should do in responce, rather than being able to answer "why did it happen / who are they."

This failure by many on the Left to recognize the real nature of the Salafi jihad is not only a great analytical mis-step, but it has resulted in a few Lefties, possessed of clearer understanding, breaking with the rest. Christopher Hitchens may only be the more famous example. With this kind of thinking coming from the intelligensia, the whole Left is polluted by an analysis that is so wrong, its worse than useless, its dangerous. And as those like Hitchens and David Horowitz makes clear, this failure to understand means that the causes of the Left are most at risk. This "unholy allaince", as Horowitz puts it, is nothing short of an abdication of what the Left has believed in order to interpret the current situation according to those beliefs. Or to state it plainly, imagining that Islamist terrorism is not part of a fascist (or at least reactionary) attack on modernity, freedom, diversity, self-determination, but rather some kind of fellow traveling "struggle against poverty, against dictatorships and against foreign occupation." To believe that this imperialism of reaction is a Marx-compatable anti-imperialism is to get it exactly backwards. Neither the current pronouncements, the actions, or the history (the Afghani jihad was against Soviet athiesm in a Muslim land) of the Salafi jihad seems to have any influence.