The left is not merely obstructing the physical prosecution of the War on Terrorism. It has also emerged as the chief supplier of ideas to al Qaeda. In a new message (the link is to a PDF), Osama bin Laden once against cribs from the anti-American ramblings of the Western left. Not content to condemn us for being infidels, he also blames us for global warming, sub-prime mortgages, the military-industrial complex, and the general exploitation of the workers.
There are a number of reasons for this.
If Bin Laden sounds like a Western leftist, that is because he has the aid of a Western leftist—a disaffected young American named Adam Gadahn who has apparently become Bin Laden's speechwriter.
Second, MEMRI reports that al-Qaeda is increasingly focusing its efforts on "economic jihad"—the attempt to make the US economy collapse, in the same way that Bin Laden imagined the war in Afghanistan caused the Soviet economy to collapse. (The futility of this endeavor is nicely summed up in a commentary by an economist who documents the fundamental vigor of the American economy since September 11 and notes that "Betting against the US has not been profitable."
But most fundamentally, I would argue that Islam—particularly the fundamentalist version championed by Bin Laden—is too crude to support a whole ideology with universal appeal. Specifically, it is too crude to generate theories in the special sciences. There is no really distinctive Muslim economics or Muslim psychology or Muslim perspective on the science of biology—not the way there was with Communism or the Old Left. And so Bin Laden has to borrow from the political and economic theories of the Western left.
In doing so, however, the brilliant commentary below by Anne Applebaum points out that bin Laden is also looking for an ideological recruitment tool to gain al-Qaeda supporters among disaffected young Westerners—a danger underscored by the recent arrests of terrorists who are German converts to Islam.
"Bin Laden's Mortgage Calculation," Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, September 11 Real or fake, the message might still hint at the direction in which al-Qaeda propaganda, or at least al-Qaeda propaganda designed for the Western market, is heading. Reza Aslan, in an essay for Slate last month, eloquently described how the organization's list of alleged "grievances"—which now include global warming, corporate capitalism and African poverty, as well as the American bases in Saudi Arabia—weave "local and global resentments into a single anti-American narrative, the overarching aim of which is to form a collective identity across borders and nationalities." But the narrative clearly isn't meant only for the Arab world. On the contrary, perhaps it is time to take the main message seriously:
Al-Qaeda's long-term goal is to convert Americans and other Westerners to its extreme version of Islam.
Before you fall over laughing, think again. It would only take a very few such converts to do a lot of damage. The results of the Soviet Union's massive propaganda campaign on behalf of world Marxist revolution were also numerically small but at the time were considered quite effective: the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Italian Red Brigades, the Weather Underground. There are always disaffected young people—Gadahn himself is a former fan of "death metal" rock bands—and they're always looking for a cause. Conversion in general is increasingly common across Europe. Some 4,000 Germans were recently found to convert annually, and if only 0.1 percent of them choose the militant version of Islam, that would be enough to cause trouble.
For, as news from Germany well illustrates, there is no one quite so passionate as a recent convert. At least two of the men recently arrested and accused of plotting to bomb American interests in Germany were converts. So were Richard Reid, the failed shoe-bomber, and Jose Padilla, the US citizen who was suspected of planning to construct a dirty bomb….
Bin Laden will sooner or later die or be captured. But he, or someone close to him, is trying to ensure that his ideology lives on. And he, or someone else, wants it to survive in a form that will appeal to Americans and other Westerners disillusioned with their own political systems.
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