Osama Bin Laden as Che Guevara, and Other Dumb Narratives

A housekeeping note: I'm on a leave of absence through April writing a book, but I'll be keeping my toes in by writing on the blog. Given that my main priority right now is cranking out chapters, I'm going to be late on any post that requires more than a few minutes of writing. The column I look at below, for example, was published last Monday.

Anne Applebaum writes for the Washington Post, a reflexive institutional supporter of Pax Americana. As you might imagine, WaPo opinion columnists don’t waste a lot of ink considering the concept of “blow-back.”

Perhaps that's why Applebaum wraps herself into a rambling and unnecessarily complicated sociological analysis of what motivated Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the educated physician who blew himself up at a CIA base in Afghanistan --and other members of what she calls a “Jihadi elite” -- to commit acts of lethal terror.

Ultimately, she omits the most relevant facts of the case on which she’s commenting, and ends up with a rather muddled picture as a result.

As we catch up with the column, she’s discussing Balawi’s widow, Defne Bayrak:

Bayrak is a shining example of what might be called the international jihadi elite: She is educated, eloquent, has connections across the Islamic world -- Istanbul, Amman, Peshawar -- yet is not exactly part of the global economy. She shares these traits not only with her husband -- a doctor who was the son of middle-class, English-speaking Jordanians -- but also with others featured recently in the news. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for example, grew up in a wealthy Nigerian family and studied at University College London before trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day.

She cites a few more examples of relatively privileged terrorists in the news, and continues ...

These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven't emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, "Westernized" parents who sacrificed for their education -- though they are often people who, for one reason or another, didn't "make it," or didn't feel comfortable, in their respective societies.

The flaw here is quite straightforward: truly international terrorism — with an individual or group moving from one country to another for the purposes of launching an attack — represents a tiny, almost insignificantly small share of all terror attacks (they're not insignificant in terms of effect, because the media pay quite a bit of attention to those high-profile incidents, and amplify the anxiety they cause). Her sociological analysis has plenty of problems, which I’ll get to, but even if it were accurate of the handful of high-profile jet-setting terrorists Applebaum focuses on, the truth is that the al Qaeda movement is broad and attracts a lot more of those “wretched of the earth” from Waziristan than it does high-flying physicians with connections in the Jordanian intelligence community. The latter may offer the kind of stories the Western media investigate in depth, but that doesn’t make them representative of the larger dynamic.

And from that flawed analysis comes some really poor conclusions:

Perhaps it sounds strange, but they remind me of the early Bolsheviks, who were also educated, multinational and ambitious, and who also often lacked the social cachet to be successful. Lenin's family, for example, clung desperately to its status on the lowest rung of the czarist aristocracy...

• 1
• 2
• Next page »

View as a single page