The Darkest Sides of Politics, II: State Terrorism, “Weapons of Mass Destruction [1 ed.] 9781138785625, 9781138785632, 9781315766102

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“I know of no other expert worldwide with the depth and breadth of knowledge of extremist ideologies possessed by Dr. Bale. The Darkest Sides of Politics reveals what for many readers – even seasoned scholars – will be new facets of the complex undercurrents of political extremism that plague global society.” – Gary Ackerman, Ph.D., Director, Unconventional Weapons and Technology Division, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), USA “Professor Bale has followed for a long-time developments on the European extreme right with particular emphasis on the violent groups and ‘groupuscules.’ His books can be recommended without any reservation.” – Walter Laqueur “This volume contains a number of carefully researched, well-written, and thoughtful essays on both the nature of terrorist communities and, perhaps even more significant, the passive response of democratic governments in recent years. Professor Bale brings together a constellation of evidence from a wide variety of sources, and he makes a convincing case that our representatives continue to ignore that evidence. This is a remarkable work by a remarkable scholar. – Rudi Paul Lindner, Professor Emeritus of History and Astronomy, The University of Michigan, USA “Jeffrey Bale’s collected articles are a tour de force of clear-headed analysis which demonstrate the close relationship between Salafi-jihadis’ operations and their ideology. His work provides a detailed, well-argued and meticulously documented case for taking the jihadists at their word, and seeing through mainstream media (and often governmental) obfuscation about their goals. Taking materials from a wide range of jihadist fronts, including the Caucasus, the Islamic State, and Europe, Bale presents a vivid picture of jihadi methods and goals. This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the murky world of Salafi-jihadism as it plays out both in full view as well as behind the scenes. Bale’s qualifications for the study of terrorism, both in its jihadi manifestation, as well as other variants, are unmatched, and this book brings together much of his significant work from the recent past.” – David B. Cook, Professor of Religion, Rice University, USA “Jeffrey Bale’s collection attests to a highly disciplined, morally-oriented, incisive mind that unflinchingly dissects the erroneous thinking of many of today’s self-described experts on terrorism and Islamism. Anyone who wants a clear window into the misleading portrayal of Islam’s role in the global Jihad that has come to dominate the Western public sphere over the last two decades, including among intelligence and policy makers, owes him- or herself the bracing experience of Bale’s painstakingly documented analysis. Despite being harshly critical of these now hegemonic (mis-) interpretations, which unwittingly give aid and comfort to our Islamist enemies, he shows great patience and even respect for those whose reasoning he challenges. For independent minds who have begun to suspect that they have been badly misinformed about these very important security threats, this is your Guide for the Perplexed.” – Richard Landes, Professor, Boston University, USA

THE DARKEST SIDES OF POLITICS, II

This book examines a wide array of phenomena that arguably constitute the most noxious, extreme, terrifying, murderous, secretive, authoritarian, and/or anti-democratic aspects of national and international politics. Scholars should not ignore these “dark sides” of politics, however unpleasant they may be, since they influence the world in a multitude of harmful ways. The second volume in this two-volume collection focuses primarily on assorted religious extremists, including apocalyptic millenarian cults, Islamists, and jihadist terrorist networks, as well as CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) terrorism and the supposedly new “nexus” between organized criminal and extremist groups employing terrorist operational techniques. A range of global case studies are included, most of which focus on the lesser known activities of certain religious extremist milieus. This collection should prove to be essential reading for students and researchers interested in understanding seemingly arcane but nonetheless important dimensions of recent historical and contemporary politics. Jeffrey M. Bale is Professor in the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, USA.

Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy Series Editors: Roger Eatwell, University of Bath, and Matthew Goodwin, University of Kent. Founding Series Editors: Roger Eatwell, University of Bath, and Cas Mudde, University of Antwerp-UFSIA.

www.routledge.com/politics/series/ED This new series encompasses academic studies within the broad fields of ‘extremism’ and ‘democracy’. These topics have traditionally been considered largely in isolation by academics. A key focus of the series, therefore, is the (inter-)relation between extremism and democracy. Works will seek to answer questions such as to what extent ‘extremist’ groups pose a major threat to democratic parties, or how democracy can respond to extremism without undermining its own democratic credentials. The books encompass two strands: Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy includes books with an introductory and broad focus which are aimed at students and teachers. These books will be available in hardback and paperback. Routledge Research in Extremism and Democracy offers a forum for innovative new research intended for a more specialist readership. These books will be in hardback only. Titles include: 36. Understanding the Populist Shift Othering in a Europe in Crisis Edited by Gabriella Lazaridis and Giovanna Campani 37. The Darkest Sides of Politics, I Postwar Fascism, Covert Operations, and Terrorism Jeffrey M. Bale 38. The Darkest Sides of Politics, II State Terrorism, “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Religious Extremism, and Organized Crime Jeffrey M. Bale

THE DARKEST SIDES OF POLITICS, II State Terrorism, “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Religious Extremism, and Organized Crime

Jeffrey M. Bale

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Chapters 3, 4, 7, 8, 9 © 2018 Jeffrey M. Bale Chapter 1 © 2012 Michael A. Innes. Reprinted with permission Chapter 2 © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Reprinted with permission Chapter 5 © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Reprinted with permission Chapter 6 © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Reprinted with permission Chapter 10 © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. Reprinted with permission The right of Jeffrey M. Bale to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-78562-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-78563-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76610-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Notes on the materials included in these volumes Acknowledgements 1 Terrorists as state “proxies”: separating fact from fiction

ix xiii 1

2 South Africa’s Project Coast: “Death Squads,” covert state-sponsored poisonings, and the dangers of CBW proliferation

34

3 “Privatizing” covert action: the case of the Unification Church

65

4 Apocalyptic millenarian groups: assessing the threat of biological terrorism

108

5 Jihadist ideology and strategy and the possible employment of WMD

154

6 Islamism and totalitarianism

216

7 Denying the link between Islamist ideology and jihadist terrorism: “political correctness” and the undermining of counterterrorism

244

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Contents

8 “Nothing to do with Islam”? The terrorism and atrocities of the Islamic State are inspired and justified by its interpretations of Islam

302

9 Ahmad Rassam and the December 1999 “millennium plot”

333

10 Some problems with the notion of a “nexus” between terrorists and criminals

345

Contents of volume I Index

380 381

NOTES ON THE MATERIALS INCLUDED IN THESE VOLUMES

The materials collected in the two volumes of this book derive from a variety of sources. Most have already been published in academic works or journalistic magazines devoted to covert politics, whereas two were prepared for contractors for agencies of the U.S. government and have not yet been published. The reader should be warned, however, that most of the materials herein are examples of “old school” historical scholarship, which means that they are densely packed with rich, empirical details, are based as much as possible on a careful evaluation of the existing corpus of primary sources, and contain very extensive reference notes. Thus those who have become accustomed to reading modern “social science” literature, with its excessive emphasis on theories and models, obsession with quantification, and embarrassingly limited use of primary sources, may find some of them rough going. On the other hand, traditional historians should feel themselves right at home. That is entirely intentional.

Volume 1 The introductory chapter was mostly prepared for a separate book-length study (provisionally entitled Where the Anti-Democratic Extremes Touch: Patterns of Interaction and Collaboration between Islamist Networks and Western Left- and Right-Wing Extremists) that I had planned and begun to write. However, the emotional fallout from the sudden death of my longtime girlfriend interrupted the process of writing that book, which therefore may never be written. Hence I have added some new prefatory paragraphs to a chapter focusing on the nature and importance of extremist ideologies. The second chapter was first published in the 1990s in Lobster: A Journal of Parapolitics, and then expanded and republished in the academic journal, Patterns of Prejudice.

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Notes on the materials

The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters were all originally prepared in the early 1990s for my doctoral dissertation in Late Modern European History at the University of California at Berkeley. Although several academic publishers expressed an interest in publishing a book version of that 600+-page dissertation, I instead moved on to work on other research topics since I felt that I would have had to add a very large chapter on the 12 December 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre, an extraordinarily complicated case. As a result, only the sixth chapter on the May 1973 attack on Milan police headquarters was subsequently published, in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. For this collection, I have slightly augmented the third chapter, significantly updated sections of the fourth and fifth chapters (since a wealth of new sources have since appeared on those topics), and added a brief paragraph addendum to the sixth chapter. I am very pleased and proud to say that my detailed reconstructions and close analyses of these murky events over three decades ago proved to be extremely accurate and indeed prescient, since the new information that has subsequently appeared has not only confirmed, but further reinforced, virtually all of my narrative accounts and conclusions. This goes to show, yet again, that comprehensive scholarly research generally stands the test of time, unlike the trendy, fashionable theoretical drivel that too many people in the humanities and “social sciences” have been peddling in recent decades. Chapter 8 was originally published in the Bulletin of the Turkish Studies Association, and then republished sometime later in Lobster so that it would reach a specialized non-academic audience. It has not been altered. Chapter 9 was previously published in Patterns of Prejudice. It has not been altered.

Volume 2 Chapter 1 originally appeared in an edited volume entitled Making Sense of Proxy Wars, edited by Michael Innes. It has not been altered. Chapter 2 was published in the journal Democracy and Security. I am happy to say that the fears of many analysts (myself included) that some toxic chemical or biological agents produced in connection with “Project Coast” may have been smuggled out of South Africa appear not to have materialized. The reconstruction of the actual details of this covert program, including special operations assassinations carried out with the use of these agents, has proven to be accurate. It has not been altered. Chapter 3 was originally written for a graduate seminar course at UC Berkeley and then published in Lobster. It has been slightly amended and updated. Chapter 4 is an unpublished report that I prepared under contract for a U.S. government entity. It contains no classified information. Chapter 5 was first published as a chapter in a book entitled Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction, edited by Gary Ackerman and Jeremy Tamsett. It has been slightly altered. Here I would like to emphasize that I would have preferred to devote most of my research efforts in recent years to reconstructing particular jihadist terrorist plots and attacks, on the basis of an in-depth examination of judicial materials and other

Notes on the materials

xi

primary sources, which is the same methodology I employed for many years while doing research on neo-fascist terrorism. I did indeed adopt those tried-and-true methods in connection with both the 1999 Ahmad Rassam “Millennium” bomb plot (see Chapter 9 in this volume) and the 2004 Madrid train bombings (in a monograph entitled Jihādist Cells and I.E.D. Capabilities in Europe: Assessing the Present and Future Threat to the West, which was published by the United States Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute in 2012). Unfortunately, given the proliferation of ill-informed nonsense being peddled after 9/11 by so many newly minted “terrorism experts,” most of whom had no prior academic background in the study of terrorism, Islamic history, Islamic religious and legal doctrines, or Islamist ideologies and movements, I increasingly felt compelled to try to promote more conceptual clarity about these broader issues. This seemed all the more necessary because naïve and erroneous ideas about Islam and Islamism were exerting an evergrowing influence on the counterterrorism policies adopted by the United States and other Western nations, with predictably disastrous real-world consequences. The next three articles included herein were therefore designed to counter widespread but misleading claims that a) Islam is inherently a “religion of peace” (despite numerous Qur’anic suras that explicitly enjoin warfare against non-believers, Muhammad’s own “exemplary” behavior as a warlord, and centuries of brutal Muslim conquests of “infidel” territory); that b) Islamism, an intrinsically literalist, strict, and puritanical but in most respects orthodox interpretation of core Islamic doctrines, can be “moderate” with respect to its goals (as opposed to its methods); that c) jihadist terrorism has “nothing to do with Islam” despite the fact that its Islamist sponsors and perpetrators correctly insist otherwise; and that d) Western counterterrorist policies should be based on promoting these absurd revisionist fictions instead of acknowledging reality. In these three chapters, my growing exasperation about the West’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the nature of our Islamist adversaries is at times on display. Then again, this sort of denial of reality is rarely if ever a problem when one writes about fascism and neo-fascism. Although Islamist apologists are currently omnipresent in academia (and the media), as are communist apologists and cult apologists, fascist apologists have fortunately not been common there since the 1920s and 1930s. How does one explain the seemingly never-ending willingness of supposedly educated people to engage in such apologetics for totalitarian ideologies and movements? As George Orwell once wryly noted, “[t]here are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” American literary critic Lionel Trilling helped to explain why when he observed that “[t]hose members of the intellectual class who prided themselves upon their political commitment were committed not to the fact but to the abstraction.” Sadly, this is no less true today. Chapter 6 was published in a special issue, devoted to Islamism, of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (now Politics, Religion, and Ideology), which was edited by myself and my colleague Bassam Tibi. Chapter 7 was published in the leading online Terrorism Studies journal, Perspectives on Terrorism. It is now being republished, as I always prefer, in a hard copy format.

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Notes on the materials

A shorter version of Chapter 8 was published as a special report for the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) website. The longer, slightly updated version appears here for the first time. Chapter 9 is a previously unpublished segment that I originally prepared for a larger research report for a U.S. government agency. It has been slightly modified. Chapter 10 was first published in a 2014 McGraw-Hill “e-book” edited by Russell E. Howard, The Terrorism-Trafficking Nexus: Clear and Present Danger? and is now being republished in a hard copy format. It has not been altered.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank the following persons and organizations for inspiration or assistance that has resulted in the publication of this volume: Craig Fowlie from Taylor & Francis, who shared my interests in the dark but arcane subjects covered in this volume, and thus encouraged me to prepare a collection of some of my scholarly publications and unpublished materials; Olivia Hatt and Matthew Twigg from Taylor & Francis and both Chris Mathews and Autumn Spalding from Apex CoVantage for logistical assistance throughout the publishing process; Zsofia Baumann, my Graduate Student Researcher and editorial and technical assistant at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), who aided me in the preparation of the final manuscript; my colleagues, inside and outside of academia, who I have collaborated with off and on over the decades in the study of “parapolitics” and covert operations, including Professor Peter Dale Scott, Kevin Coogan, Jonathan Marshall, Robin Ramsay, Jim Hougan, Professor Stephen Dorril, Professor Jeffrey Burds, Bernard Fensterwald (RIP), and “David Teacher”; other academic historians and mentors (and/or friends), including Professors Rudi P. Lindner, Andrew Ehrenkreutz (RIP), John V.A. Fine, John Masson Smith, Grace Smith, Richard Webster (RIP), Harold Nicholson (RIP), William Hoisington, and Gerald Feldman (RIP); academic colleagues who study the radical right, fascism, and/or terrorism, including Walter Laqueur, Brigadier General Russell Howard (ret.), Jean-Yves Camus, Fernando Reinares, Angel Rabasa, Olivier Guitta, Guido Olimpio and Professors Roger Griffin, Alex P. Schmid, Martha Crenshaw, Robert Paxton, Stanley Payne, Graham Macklin, David Rapoport, Anton Shekhovtsov, Nicolas Lebourg, Andreas Umland, George Michael, Jeffrey Herf, Adam Dolnik, and Leonard Weinberg; colleagues who study “weapons of mass destruction” in relation to terrorism, including Gary Ackerman, Raymond Zilinskas, Milton Leitenberg, Sharad Joshi, Markus Binder, Eric Croddy, Chandre Gould, Glenn Cross and Jonathan Tucker (RIP); colleagues who study religious extremism, cults, Islam, Islamism, and/or jihadism, including

xiv

Acknowledgements

Timothy Furnish, Gordon Hahn, John Rosenthal, Robert Reilly, Steven Emerson, Guido Olimpio, and Professors Bassam Tibi, Lorenzo Vidino, David Cook, Nelly Lahoud, Ana Belén Soage, Richard Landes, Richard Ofshe, Janja Lalich, Benjamin Zablocki, and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi; Professor Phil Williams, a colleague specializing in organized crime and other sub rosa groups; Professors Raimondo Catanzaro, Piergiorgio Corbetta, Arturo Parisi, and Gianfranco Pasquino of the Istituto di Studi e Ricerche “Carlo Cattaneo” in Bologna, as well as the unfailingly helpful staff there (in particular, Giovanni Cocchi, Anna Galetti, and Mirella Mirani), who kindly allowed me to examine several thousand pages of judicial sentences on the premises; the library staffs at the University of Michigan, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, the Hoover Institution, Columbia University, the Biblioteca della Camera dei Deputati, the Biblioteca Nazionale, and the Library of Congress, for putting up with innumerable requests for obscure books; the archival staffs at the U.S. National Archives (especially John Taylor [RIP]), and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome; Professor Franco Ferraresi (RIP), Professor Piero Ignazi, Professor Aldo Giannuli, Giuseppe De Lutiis, Paolo Cucchiarelli, and Gianni Flamini, who provided me with useful information and/or materials; other faculty colleagues or staff at MIIS, who have – at least most of the time, LOL – made my extended sojourn there congenial (William Potter, Jeffrey Knopf, Avner Cohen, Anna Vassilieva, Mike Gillen, Philipp Bleek, Barbara Burke, Ann Flower, Edith Bursac, Jan Dahlstrom, Phil Murphy, Fernando De Paolis, Bob McCleery, Moyara Ruehsen, Kent Glenzer, Jeff Dayton-Johnson, Robert Rogowsky, Jason Scorse, Dan Pinkston, Clay Moltz, Amy Sands, Viktor Mizin, and Tim McCarthy); the intellectuals from assorted extremist milieus who have shared their often fascinating ideas with me during in-person and email interviews over the decades; Jean-Gilles Malliarakis, Peter Sebastian, and Marco Battara, at whose bookstores in Paris, Rome, and Milan, respectively, contain many obscure but crucially important primary and secondary sources concerning the history of neo-fascism and the postwar radical right; the most intellectually inquisitive, thoughtful, and dedicated students at the academic institutions where I have taught, who have forced me to augment my own knowledge and refine my own arguments; all of my countercultural hippie and punk rock friends from the 1960s to the present day, (especially Terry Nelson, who has been an obsessive underground rock ‘n’ roll fanatic for as long as I have; needless to say, “we’re never, ever gonna stop,” even though “the Pistols quit, the Clash slowed down, and Gen X are in a [ J]am!”), who have made my life infinitely more fun than any one individual has a right to experience; my close long-term friends, Chris Burns (RIP) and Robert Doner (RIP), both of whom died prematurely and whom I miss very much; and, above all, Mimi Harary (RIP), the stunningly beautiful and remarkably brilliant woman I loved for thirty-three years prior to her premature death in September 2012, a tragic event that I will never, ever get over – if I could turn back the clock, knowing what I do now, I would have spent more quality time with you, Mimi, and less time in musty libraries and at underground rock’n’roll gigs. I only wish I could blame my mentors and colleagues listed above for any shortcomings found herein, but unfortunately I cannot.

1 TERRORISTS AS STATE “PROXIES” Separating fact from fiction1

[State-sponsored terrorism is] the most important component of the international terrorism problem. – R. James Woolsey2 A terrorist organization requires more than money and guns . . . indispensable services [such as logistics and secure facilities] could only come from states. – Michael A. Ledeen3 Today, state sponsorship of terrorism continues unabated. – Bruce Hoffman4 In today’s world, the main threat to many states . . . no longer comes from other states. Instead, it comes from small [terrorist] groups and other organizations which are not states. – Martin van Creveld5 Despite the Western view (and specifically the American view) that without state-sponsorship there will be no terrorism, reality proves otherwise. – Ghada Hashem Talhami6

One of the most contentious and misunderstood issues surrounding modern terrorism is the extent to which diverse nation-states have been involved in using violence-prone extremist groups as surrogates or proxies. This theme was particularly salient during the Cold War, especially from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, when governments on either side of the Iron Curtain repeatedly accused each other of sponsoring or supporting terrorism and, indeed, often of secretly directing or controlling the actions of ostensibly autonomous terrorist groups. Despite the fact

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Terrorists as state “proxies”

that these Cold War-era themes were disseminated primarily for partisan political, if not explicitly propagandistic, purposes and often rested on incomplete, unverifiable, contaminated, spurious, or even manufactured evidence, similar sorts of themes have not only survived the end of the Cold War but also have either been updated and reprised or assumed new, politically convenient guises in today’s post-Cold War, multipolar international environment. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: to subject current efforts to claim that “rogue” regimes are the primary drivers of contemporary Islamist terrorism – and thus to portray Islamist terrorists as being effectively the “proxies” of states – to critical scrutiny; to highlight some illustrative aspects of the actual history of state interactions with terrorist groups; and finally to develop a new categorization scheme for better identifying and distinguishing between different levels of state involvement in terrorism.7 Although the aim herein is simply to present a scholarly analysis of what has always been a very fluid, dynamic, and complex pattern of state interaction with extremist groups, the conclusions have clear policy implications. After all, if Western democratic nations and their allies genuinely wish to lessen the present and future threat of jihadist (and other forms of ) terrorism, they must understand the real sources of that threat and the actual objectives of the groups involved rather than uncritically adopting or cynically peddling a host of politically convenient but often spurious explanatory paradigms that are bound, if accepted at face value, to lead to the continued adoption of misguided and counterproductive policies.

Factors promoting state-centric perspectives on terrorism Before turning to the main topic, however, it is necessary to discuss some factors that have led policymakers, scholars, and journalists to adopt a state-centric perspective regarding terrorism. Perhaps the most mundane but influential of these factors has to do with certain disciplinary biases associated with the field of political science, in particular those that have for decades underlain its international relations (IR) subfield. The primary premise in much of that subfield, especially its “realist” schools, is that the key actors in the international system are nation-states, a focus that was largely warranted in earlier decades given the overwhelming prominence, power, and influence of states in the international arena. Starting from such a statecentric premise, it is hardly surprising that so many IR scholars would emphasize the importance and preeminent role of nation-states, that they would focus on developing theoretical models and research methodologies designed to explain the behavior of states in the “anarchic” international system, and that they would consequently overlook or at least minimize the role of non-state actors, including extremist groups and terrorist organizations.8 There is no doubt that state-centric biases have persisted up to the present day, both within IR and in other subfields of political science, including comparative politics and even political theory. This is in spite of the fact that (1) the rise of the nation-state was a relatively recent phenomenon in historical

Terrorists as state “proxies”

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terms; and (2) these long-standing disciplinary biases, theoretical preferences, and favored interpretations in the IR subfield have increasingly been subjected to criticism by both older and younger generations of scholars – especially those among the latter who are concerned, e.g., with the study of international organizations such as the United Nations, regional supra-state quasi-governments such as the European Union, nongovernmental lobbying organizations such as Amnesty International, or subnational groups of various types. The practical result is that the overwhelming majority of scholars and academicians – apart from those in the interdisciplinary field of terrorism studies, historians of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary groups, security specialists who focus on covert operations or counterinsurgency, and some “social movement” theorists in sociology – have never seriously studied extremist milieus or terrorist organizations.9 For that very reason, they generally find it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the nature, ideologies, motivations, and objectives of such groups, to adopt appropriate methodologies for studying them, or to assess their importance and role in international affairs accurately, even within the narrower context of national or international security studies. Given these entrenched state-centric approaches and prejudices, it is hardly surprising that so many political scientists, and the pundits and policymakers they have influenced, have overemphasized the role that states have played in sponsoring terrorism. A second, but far less excusable, factor that has contributed to the exaggeration of the role of states in fostering terrorism is the prevalence of political biases, whether pro-government or anti-establishment, in the terrorism field. Many terrorism specialists tend to be conservatives, Cold War liberals, or realists who have all too often adopted the self-serving perspectives of their own governments concerning the origin and nature of terrorism. As a result they have generally assumed a priori that Western governments are the innocent victims of terrorism and mistakenly portrayed modern terrorism as either an exclusively non-state, insurgent phenomenon or, paradoxically, as one that is really being “sponsored” behind the scenes by hostile enemy states, even when particular terrorist actions appear to have been carried out independently by small groups of political extremists.10 Alas, these distorted and rather contradictory perspectives can themselves be traced in large part to the pernicious cumulative impact of disinformation and propaganda disseminated by what some left-leaning analysts have labeled as the “terrorism industry,” a supposed coterie of co-opted terrorism experts and organizations that, consciously or not, have promoted the interests of hawkish factions in various Western intelligence agencies.11 A good deal has already been written about some of these individuals and the network of research centers and funding institutions with which they have been associated, but the essential point is that they have collectively promoted one of the most politically influential interpretations of contemporary terrorism, one that depicts hostile enemy regimes – previously communist regimes but nowadays rogue Middle Eastern regimes – and their alleged non-state surrogates as the primary disseminators of terrorism. In response to this one-sided and at times simplistic establishment literature on terrorism, an increasing number of left-wing or nonconformist academics and

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Terrorists as state “proxies”

journalists have presented an alternative but no less Manichaean picture. In their view, right-wing governments and para-state apparatuses, with the backing of the United States and other Western nations, have been the main perpetrators of terrorism during the past sixty years.12 Some have explicitly contrasted the “retail” terrorism carried out by insurgent left-wing groups with the “wholesale” terrorism carried out by authoritarian right-wing regimes.13 Although they justifiably call attention to the prevalence and importance of right-wing state and non-state terrorism, topics that were systematically neglected by most terrorism specialists during the Cold War, these anti-establishment analysts have in effect only succeeded in reproducing and inverting mainstream biases by portraying Western democracies and allied Third World regimes, rather than hostile states and non-state actors, as the principal terrorist villains.14 In other words, there has long been a perverse sort of symmetry observable in the extant literature on terrorism, a symmetry rooted in political partisanship. In pursuit of their respective political agendas, both the establishment and anti-establishment terrorism analysts have consistently displayed similar degrees of blindness, albeit in different eyes, by exaggerating the role of state sponsorship of terrorism. With rare exceptions, neither faction has made a serious effort to assess the evidence presented by the other. Their approach has been either to ignore one another entirely or to accuse each other of serving as conduits for intelligence-generated propaganda themes, which has unfortunately been true more often than one might think. They then stop, as if they had already proved their point, without actually examining and evaluating the substantive arguments or the evidence marshaled by their political opponents.15 Given this polemical context, it is hardly surprising that diverse parties with vested interests have uncritically accepted or cynically exploited so many problematic and misleading claims concerning state-sponsored terrorism or the alleged role of terrorists as proxies.

The mythology: autonomous terrorists as the simple agents of nation-states This toxic combination of built-in disciplinary biases within academia and blatant partisanship in the subfield of terrorism studies (which has often reflected, if not actually emanated from, state-sponsored propaganda or disinformation initiatives) has served only to obfuscate the fluid, dynamic, and highly complex nature of the interaction between nation-states and terrorist groups in recent decades. Indeed, it has resulted in the establishment of a mythology based on the notion that non-state terrorist groups are essentially the simple agents – or at least the proxies (i.e., confederates who can be relied upon to act on the sponsors’ behalf ) or surrogates (i.e., substitutes who can facilitate the maintenance of “plausible deniability”) – of states. In creating this mythology, its proponents have failed to make a crucial analytical distinction between autonomous extremist groups with their own ideological and operational agendas that may decide, usually temporarily and often reluctantly, to collaborate with states, and pseudo-independent terrorist organizations that are

Terrorists as state “proxies”

5

secretly created and controlled by states and therefore tend to function as their genuine agents. It is patently obvious that these two types of relationships are fundamentally different, especially regarding the amount of de facto control that a state will likely be able to exercise over a non-state group. Yet the conspiratorial alarmists have often sought, for no valid reason, to deny this distinction. For example, Roberta Goren has written that “the sponsor state must have certain political or strategic goals in mind which may or may not be identical to those of the terrorist group. In either case it can be said that the group is being used as a proxy” (italics added).16 One of the most straightforward formulations of the theory of state sponsorship of terrorism is provided in Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander’s book Terrorism as State-Sponsored Covert Warfare. Therein the term “terrorism” was defined – in contradistinction to the many official definitions that (no less erroneously) restrict the term to violence by non-state actors – as “the deliberate employment of violence or the threat of use of violence by sovereign states or sub-national groups encouraged or assisted by sovereign states to attain strategic and political objectives by acts in violation of law” (italics added).17 In short, for these authors and many others, terrorism was virtually inconceivable in the absence of state involvement on some level. However, a number of contrasting and competing versions of this mythology exist. Two of these have special salience because they seemed superficially plausible in a bipolar Cold War context in which both superpowers tended to view all localized conflicts as mere “fronts” in the larger global struggle against their main enemy.18 The most common mythology about terrorism during the Cold War era, at least in the West, is that the Soviet Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB: Committee for State Security) and its client secret services in Eastern Europe and the third world were secretly and systematically directing the activities of ostensibly autonomous left-wing and ethno-nationalist terrorist groups, not only in Europe but also in various other parts of the world.19 This theme was widely disseminated, especially during Ronald Reagan’s administration, even though it assumed diverse forms ranging from alarmist and conspiratorial versions to relatively restrained and nuanced versions. Inveterate Cold Warriors who supported the rollback rather than the containment of communism, neoconservatives, and other foreign policy hawks who were ideologically predisposed to see the sinister hidden hand of the Soviet Union and its allies behind virtually every threatening development in the world, including international terrorism, promoted most of the overly simplistic and conspiratorial versions of this theme.20 A few emblematic quotes should suffice to illustrate this one-dimensional perspective. According to Hans Josef Horchem, an official of the West German Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV: Office for the Protection of the Constitution), the “KGB is engineering international terrorism.”21 For Cline and Alexander, Moscow served as the “nerve center” of the “international infrastructure of terrorism.”22 For journalist Claire Sterling, a diverse array of violent non-state groups – ethno-nationalist, religious, anti-colonial, criminal, and leftist – all came to “see themselves as elite battalions in a worldwide Army of Communist Combat.”23 Hence from this perspective, terrorists of all kinds, perhaps even ostensibly right-wing terrorists such as the Turkish would-be papal

6

Terrorists as state “proxies”

assassin Mehmet Ali Ağca, were effectively considered agents of the Soviet Union or its allied states. Although the Soviet KGB was viewed as the chief “puppet master” behind international terrorism, in cases where the Soviets themselves were not secretly sponsoring or controlling terrorist groups, they allegedly relied on their client regimes in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia to do so, mainly by contracting out these tasks to the secret services of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Cuba, North Korea, Libya, Syria, or Iraq.24 Many of these intersecting theories about supposed Soviet, communist, and rogue state sponsorship of different types of terrorism neatly converged in the case of the plot to kill the pope, according to which the KGB, with the help of the Bulgarian secret service, the Iranians, and the Turkish mafia, purportedly sponsored the 1980 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II.25 In addition to viewing the world through unabashed ideological filters, the proponents of these theories – many of whom were former intelligence and military officers – tended to rely heavily on anonymous government insiders, inaccessible documents, or unreliable defectors as their primary sources of information, which they supplemented with unconfirmed and often sensationalistic media reports, without consulting other available sources to verify the accuracy of that information.26 Indeed, a strong circumstantial case can be made that the authors of these reports, whether intentionally or unwittingly, were serving as conduits for propaganda or disinformation that hard-line factions within the Western intelligence community had generated. Hence it is not surprising that their methods and conclusions were criticized, sometimes harshly, both by more circumspect academicians and by serving or former intelligence officers associated with more moderate rival factions.27 However that may be, it is undeniable that during the Cold War the KGB and other Eastern Bloc secret services provided extensive tangible assistance – above all, funding, weaponry, hands-on training, and sometimes even operational direction – to a vast array of dictatorial client regimes and brutal self-proclaimed “national liberation” movements in various parts of the Third World.28 They did so for the same reason that Western secret services supported similarly unsavory anticommunist regimes and insurgents: they viewed these indigenous local struggles as fronts in the global conflict between the two superpowers. Many of those Soviet-backed guerrilla movements (and, for that matter, states) did in fact employ terrorism as one of their operational techniques or tactics. Nevertheless, since terrorism was often not their primary tactic, much less their sole tactic, they cannot be legitimately referred to as terrorist movements per se. It is only on the basis of such a misleading and unwarranted conflation between insurgents in general and terrorists in the strict sense that the proponents of the “KGB-sponsored terrorism” thesis have been able to buttress their exaggerated claims. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, pro-Soviet secret services, a worldwide network of communist “fellow travelers,” and Western left-wing activists promoted a parallel but diametrically opposed mythology. In this version, the U.S. Central

Terrorists as state “proxies”

7

Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other Western secret services were the primary sponsors of terrorism in the world, in particular the terrorism carried out by right-wing regimes and paramilitary groups.29 However, the idea that American intelligence agencies were secretly orchestrating and directing all the counterrevolutionary terrorism against the world’s “progressive” forces was as much of a propagandistic, conspiratorial fantasy as the notion that the Soviets were controlling international terrorism. This claim was based upon most of the same false premises concerning the alleged omnipresence and omnipotence of secret service puppet masters (in this case the CIA and its affiliates) and the supposed pliability of all the entities that received some sort of assistance from those services. An illuminating example of this unsophisticated, reductionist perspective was the notion that Operación Cóndor – a mid-1970s agreement between the secret services of authoritarian southern cone regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to wage a collaborative, continent-wide covert war against real or imagined communist subversives – was a scheme that the CIA hatched and directed.30 So sinister was this agency that it was even purportedly able, operating behind the scenes, to direct “pseudo-leftist” terrorist groups.31 Moreover, according to pro-Soviet sources, the CIA itself sponsored the attempted assassination of the pope in order to implicate Bulgaria and the Soviet Bloc and thereby sabotage détente.32 Ironically, there is more reliable documentary evidence, at least in the public domain, about the covert support offered by Western democracies to authoritarian client regimes and civilian paramilitary groups that have engaged in terrorism, though this may well be an artifact of the greater openness and accessibility of information in free societies. Although some have conveniently attributed all such claims to communist and left-wing disinformation given that Soviet operatives and their “useful idiots” in fact systematically disseminated these themes, there is no doubt that the United States actively or tacitly supported numerous anticommunist regimes and right-wing vigilante groups that engaged in acts of terrorism against real and imagined subversives.33 One may note, as examples, the brutal campaigns of state terrorism that the U.S.-backed juntas and affiliated death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala carried out; the antidemocratic violence perpetrated by some components of the clandestine “stay-behind” networks, which the secret services of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members established in various European countries to resist a possible Soviet invasion; and the logistical if not operational support that American intelligence provided to anticommunist “freedom fighters” who regularly resorted to terrorism, such as right-wing Cuban exiles from the organizations Alpha 66 and Omega 7, contra elements from the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (FDN: Nicaraguan Democratic Force), and select groups of fanatical Afghan mujahidin.34 Sadly, many of these partisan left-wing claims about Western state-sponsored terrorism were subsequently confirmed after various repressive military regimes collapsed, especially in cases where their archives were opened or when former members of their security forces began offering firsthand accounts of their past misdeeds.35 Indeed, if one honestly applied the same loose criteria that are used

8

Terrorists as state “proxies”

nowadays to determine which rogue countries should be added to the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, many Western client regimes during the Cold War would easily fit those criteria. Still, it would be absurd to claim that the CIA was – to appropriate the colorful phrase that foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen applied to hostile regimes – the “terror master” behind such states and organizations. Despite this long, sordid history of Cold War-era exaggerations and distortions, similar mythologies about state sponsorship of terrorism are still being peddled, most recently in connection with jihadist terrorism. Once again, there are two competing variants of this mythology. One claims that various anti-American rogue regimes, in many cases the very same villainous states that were earlier identified as Soviet clients, are the principal sponsors of Islamist terrorism.36 American neoconservatives and Israeli hard-liners have peddled this theme tirelessly. It is Ledeen who has perhaps expressed it most succinctly: “Western intelligence sources have long been reluctant to accept the fact that modern Islamic terrorism is above all else a weapon used by hostile nation states against their enemies in the Middle East and in the West” (italics added).37 Similarly, for foreign policy analyst David Wurmser, the war against terrorism was “an epic struggle between a whole category of nations . . . the seven state sponsors of terror and us.”38 Basically, their argument is that states making up the so-called axis of evil and other renegade regimes are the principal sponsors of terrorism, including Sunni jihadist terrorism, in the Muslim world, and that without their support these particular forms of terrorism would not constitute a major security threat.39 Different proponents of this distorted notion, while uncritically accepting that all the regimes on the State Department’s list are actually sponsors of terrorism, have tended to focus their attention primarily on one or more of these renegade states – namely, Iran, Syria, or Saddam Husayn’s Iraq.40 Other hawks, with far more justification, have laid the blame for supporting global Sunni terrorism primarily on nominal U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.41 The second version is that the United States itself has been a principal sponsor of Islamist extremism and jihadist terrorism. The more restrained versions of this theory emphasize the pre-9/11 support that Western secret services provided to diverse Islamist movements, ranging from the Jami‘iyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Society of the Muslim Brothers, or Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt and Syria to the jihadist opponents of Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi’s regime and, through the intermediary of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, local and Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan, claims for all of which there is some actual evidence.42 The more alarmist, conspiratorial, and speculative versions argue that the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services have been secretly directing or manipulating Islamists and even some jihadist terrorists all along as part of a calculated strategy to weaken America’s geopolitical rivals, obtain control of oil pipelines, or justify launching “imperialist” military interventions abroad.43 Indeed, some of the many delusional 9/11 conspiracy theories suggest that the United States either ordered its jihadist “allies” to carry out the attacks or duped them into doing so.44

Terrorists as state “proxies”

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The norm: autonomous terrorists as willing periodic collaborators or unwitting occasional instruments of the secret services of nation-states What, then, is the normal nature of the interrelationship between complicit nation-states and terrorist groups? The earlier criticisms of various conspiratorial mythologies about state sponsorship should not be misconstrued as a denial that numerous states, both hostile and friendly, have provided encouragement as well as tangible logistical or even operational aid to non-state terrorist groups. Regime components have indeed frequently offered diverse types of assistance to particular terrorist groups in their efforts to penetrate, manipulate, or exploit them instrumentally. Yet this support does not mean, as many have implied, that those states are actually controlling or directing terrorist organizations or that the latter normally function as the de facto agents of states. That is because such mythologies are based upon two naïve beliefs (or duplicitous claims) – that states and terrorist groups both invariably benefit when they collaborate with one another, and that insurgent terrorism of various types develops into a serious threat only when there is state sponsorship. Both of these notions are mistaken for two reasons. First, such collaboration almost always creates difficulties and involves risks, often serious ones, for both parties. Second, several terrorist groups, such as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru or Oumu Shinrikyo (Aum Supreme Truth) in Japan, have gravely threatened their own or other societies without any significant state sponsorship. In fact, most extremist political and religious groups in the world, including those that have relied primarily on terrorism to achieve their goals, have been relatively small, autonomous, sectarian organizations that emerged organically within particular historical and cultural contexts and were established independently in response to specific political circumstances. Moreover, the majority of those that had recourse to violence initially carried out acts of terrorism without having received any significant support from nation-states, depended largely on their own resources to support and sustain their activities, and managed to maintain a considerable degree of ideological, organizational, and operational autonomy even if at some point they opted to forge relationships, overt or covert, with particular regimes. This is clear from the historical record. Moreover, apart from not being substantiated by the available evidence, these mythologies about the omnipresence of state sponsorship and non-state actors functioning as mere “agents” of states all rest on numerous unstated assumptions that are severely problematic if not manifestly false. The first is that extremist organizations, including those that rely on terrorism as a technique, are stable, disciplined, and internally united. After all, for states to control extremist groups effectively, the members of those groups would have to accept, more or less passively, the decisions made by their leaders who had opted to establish collaborative relationships with those states.45 In actuality, a fluid, dynamic, and kaleidoscopic process of organizational fission and fusion characterizes all extremist milieus, since the organizations within those milieus are themselves typically divided into factions and riven by

10

Terrorists as state “proxies”

sometimes bitter internal conflicts deriving from personality clashes; disputes over doctrinal, strategic, or tactical matters; and social, if not cultural, ethnic, or national, distinctions.46 In short, extremist milieus are rarely if ever in a condition of stasis, and extremist groups are often volatile and unstable, making them exceedingly difficult to manage, much less control. This description is even truer of today’s diffuse, horizontal, and “franchised” jihadist terrorist networks than it was of the more centralized and hierarchical organizations during the Cold War. Second, states are not monolithic organizations either. Even authoritarian regimes and those with totalitarian pretensions are often internally divided and factionalized, if not effectively polycentric.47 In practice, this means that it is not always clear whether secret service collaboration with extremist and terrorist groups has been undertaken in response to the direct orders of national political leaders, by one or more of those services acting collectively, or on the initiative of officers on behalf of particular factions within those services.48 Generally, such services are functionally specialized, structurally compartmentalized, and operate clandestinely on a need-toknow basis. Hence it may well be a mistake to assume a priori that such secretive initiatives are invariably authorized by the leaders of particular countries rather than by some of their underlings without official sanction.49 Third, these theories attribute almost preternatural powers to nation-states and their security agencies in terms of their ability to manipulate and control terrorist groups or their actions covertly. In practice, then, the most alarmist and reductionist of these portrayals of state-sponsored terrorism resemble “conspiracy theories” in the pejorative sense of that term.50 This conspiratorial approach is precisely the problem, since the kind of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence that conspiracy theorists attribute to alleged cabals of secret plotters, including the so-called terror masters, does not accurately depict the complicated, variegated nature of actual covert and clandestine politics. In the real world, the apparatuses that initiate covert operations are composed of inherently flawed individuals who, along with everyone else, are prone to commit errors of judgment and other blunders. Moreover, they not only have to cope with the formidable problem of unforeseen consequences, but also have to contend with numerous other more or less powerful groups that are likewise operating secretly, broader social forces that are difficult if not impossible to control, and deep-rooted structural and cultural constraints that place limits on how much they are able to affect the course of events.51 Fourth, these depictions ascribe far too much passivity or docility to members of extremist political and religious groups, whose members tend – almost by definition – to be fanatical true believers in their respective causes.52 Whatever their specific doctrinal tenets, extremist ideologies are generally characterized by Manichaeanism (a sharp division of the world into good and evil), monism, authoritarianism or totalitarianism, collectivism, and a penchant for demonizing designated enemies. None of these characteristics of ideological extremism is conducive to the establishment of fraternal coexistence with persons or organizations that do not share their own perceptions and goals. Moreover, the people who are attracted to such radical doctrines tend to be deeply suspicious of anyone outside their own

Terrorists as state “proxies”

11

organizations and ideological milieus, making sustained collaboration with states and other non-state groups problematic and fraught with potential friction. Finally, the often egomaniacal or paranoid leaders of extremist groups tend to be hostile to perceived rivals and obsessed with preserving their own autonomy and influence, which causes them to distrust and resent outsiders, even those with whom they may be temporarily cooperating. These factors all militate against them willingly acting as the pliant, long-term agents of other, more powerful entities that do not fully share their own radical agendas. This does not mean, of course, that terrorists never collaborate with states that do not share their own ideologies. They have often done so, albeit usually on the realist grounds that “the enemy of my (principal) enemy is my (temporary) friend.” Indeed, resource-poor extremists are likely to accept tangible support from many different quarters – the more the merrier, since variety helps to lessen their dependence on any one sponsor – in order to pursue their objectives or resist common enemies. It does mean, however, that they are likely to be very suspicious and wary of the states that offer them support, since such support invariably comes with certain strings attached, and that they will assiduously strive to maintain their own autonomy, all the more so if the regimes in question do not share their particular worldviews or long-term goals. For their part, states are willing to collaborate with violence-prone extremists for a multiplicity of reasons, ranging from ideological solidarity to supporting co-religionists or co-ethnics to geopolitical realpolitik, although in this context ideological factors are arguably less important to states than to extremist groups.53 Despite these important qualifications, it is undeniable that the secret services of various states have often sought to infiltrate, manipulate, and instrumentally exploit autonomous extremist and terrorist groups for their own purposes. Some of these efforts may be regarded as basically legitimate (such as gathering information and attempting to prevent such groups from carrying out acts of violence), whereas others could be viewed as illegitimate (such as acting as agents provocateurs by encouraging or manipulating those groups into carrying out acts of violence). It is also true that many terrorist groups have at times tried to obtain tangible support and material aid from states. Although the historical record is replete with examples of these intertwined phenomena, a brief examination of three high-profile cases should make it abundantly clear that the clandestine relations between states and terrorist groups, when and where they have existed, are generally far more complicated and volatile than any of the discussed mythologies would suggest. However, it should be emphasized that evidentiary lacunae in the available sources necessarily make all conclusions about these complex matters tentative and provisional, and that the unanticipated appearance of reliable new information could drastically alter our present understanding. If one considers the interaction between the terrorist Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF: Red Army Faction) and the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS: Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi), it quickly becomes clear that the more simplistic, alarmist interpretations of their relationship are problematic.

12

Terrorists as state “proxies”

Proponents of the “Soviet terror network” thesis had long claimed that Eastern Bloc secret services were secretly sponsoring European left-wing terrorist organizations, and these claims were partially confirmed when information from the MfS archives, former Stasi officers, and ex-terrorists surfaced after the Soviet and East German regimes collapsed. Nevertheless, not much can be said with certainty about the links between the Stasi and West German terrorists. First, in the late 1960s and 1970s some wanted West German terrorists had established contacts with the Stasi and thence had been provided with false documents and allowed to travel freely in the East (despite being kept under surveillance), usually when on their way to training camps in the Middle East.54 Second, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, under the aegis of the new Hauptabteilung (Main Department) XXII: Terrorabwehr (Defense against Terrorism), ten members of the RAF and other German terrorist groups, most of whom were disillusioned terrorist “mistakes” or “dropouts,” were brought to East Germany and allowed to assume new identities, lives, and jobs (in Operativer Vorgang [OV] “Stern II” [Operational Case “Star II”]).55 Third, and perhaps most seriously, between 1980 and 1982 Stasi officers in a lodge near Briesen (in OV “Stern I”) provided a few select members of the RAF’s second generation, including its command level, with actual hands-on weapons and explosives training; in some cases, these individuals apparently carried out bomb and rocket attacks against American military officers in West Germany.56 Finally, other West German terrorists affiliated with Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, “Carlos the Jackal,” or with rival Palestinian factions also periodically took refuge in or transited through East Germany.57 However, the fact remains that the MfS always seemed to have had an ambiguous and rather strained relationship with RAF members. On the one hand, its leaders felt some romantic solidarity and sympathy for their supposedly misguided “antiimperialist” comrades who shared the same class enemies or perhaps viewed them as potential auxiliaries if war should break out between the two Germanys; therefore, they offered them support. On the other hand, they distrusted the RAF so much that they characterized its members as potential enemies of the state in secret documents, kept them under constant surveillance, refused to collaborate in certain adventurist RAF schemes, and systematically exploited both the “new citizens” and visiting terrorists to gather intelligence on extremist milieus and vulnerabilities in the West.58 In short, although there is no doubt that the Eastern Bloc secret services did periodically provide certain so-called fighting communist cells in Western Europe with logistical aid of various types, the role of those services in actually fomenting, much less directing, left-wing terrorism has frequently been exaggerated.59 Another example of conspiratorial alarmism regarding state sponsorship concerns the Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya (PLO: Palestine Liberation Organization). The proponents of the thesis that the KGB was secretly masterminding international terrorism paid particular attention to the PLO, which allegedly “became the chief and central agency for dispensing terror and death, for supplying fighters, arms, money, training, orders and advice to customers of every shade of political and ideological coloration who were eager or willing to destroy, terrify and kill.”60 Indeed, for writer Jillian Becker, the power for which the PLO “acted as agent in

Terrorists as state “proxies”

13

its mission of global partisan warfare was the Soviet Union.”61 This formulation grossly oversimplifies and mischaracterizes the real nature of the relationship among the Soviets, their clients, and the terrorist components of the Palestinian resistance movement, a relationship that was far more convoluted. The first point to emphasize is that the PLO is an umbrella organization that the Arab League originally created in 1964 and that has long encompassed a wide variety of groups and factions, ranging from Islamic nationalists (and even some Islamists) to secular nationalists and Marxists. Such a disparate, fractious coalition has always proved to be extraordinarily difficult to manage and control, and it only held together for so long owing to the political skills of Yasir ‘Arafat, the organizational predominance of his own Fatah group, and the collective support for the “Palestine liberation first” policy. Not surprisingly, this “lack of unity within the organization [made] it difficult for the Soviets to control its movements or even influence its policies.”62 Second, the centrist stance, flexible policies, and sometimes moderate approaches that ‘Arafat and his loyalists in Fatah adopted periodically led other key components within the PLO to challenge ‘Arafat’s authority (for example, through the formation of the Rejection Front) or caused radical splinter groups to break away from the PLO.63 Third, ‘Arafat always sought to obtain tangible and intangible support from a diverse array of nation-states, not only to augment his resources but also to avoid becoming overly dependent upon any single state supporter. Over the years the PLO had received extensive support from, among others, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states, and Algeria, as well as Libya, Syria, Iraq, China, the Soviet Bloc, and, more recently, several European countries, the United States, and Israel.64 Fourth, since ‘Arafat and his cronies shrewdly invested money that they had siphoned off from state-supplied funds or had earned from various licit and illicit business activities and thereby became very wealthy, they were able to maintain considerable operational independence for the PLO.65 More importantly, a documented history of distrust and friction, both public and private, existed between ‘Arafat’s organization and the Soviet Union, so much so that the latter periodically sought to moderate the PLO’s goal of destroying Israel and to restrain Fatah and other Palestinian factions from launching terrorist actions outside Israel or against civilians.66 Indeed, according to Professor Galia Golan, “Palestinian terrorism was generally – though not always – perceived by the Soviets as counterproductive.”67 However, this is by no means the entire story, because the Soviets seem to have pursued a two-track strategy with certain Palestinian groups. For example, hard-core Palestinian rejectionists and radicals, especially Marxist factions such as Jurj Habash’s Jabhat al-Sha‘biyya li-Tahrir Filastin (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP), openly criticized the Soviets for their pusillanimity and for not supporting their terrorist acts, and in return the Soviets publicly characterized them as extremists and adventurers.68 At the same time, the KGB apparently recruited Wadi‘ Haddad, a leader of the PFLP’s military wing, as an agent (code-named NATSIONALIST), and through him they sought to manipulate the PFLP covertly. In some cases, moreover, the Soviets not only provided advanced weapons to the PFLP but reportedly also instigated certain terrorist attacks carried

14

Terrorists as state “proxies”

out by Haddad and his operatives.69 Nevertheless, even though the Soviet Union sold considerable amounts of military armaments to Fatah, provided paramilitary training to select Palestinian fighters at camps inside the Soviet Bloc, and apparently even covertly facilitated certain Palestinian terrorist attacks, it would be absurd to characterize the PLO as a whole, or even entire radical factions within it, as little more than the terrorist agents, surrogates, or proxies of the KGB. If these two claims regarding state sponsorship involving relatively well-known cases are problematic, one is entitled to be even more skeptical of recent allegations that anti-Western jihadist groups are effectively the proxies of rogue regimes such as Saddam Husayn’s Iraq. Indeed, in the period leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, many of the very same hawks who had earlier promoted theories about Soviet sponsorship of terrorism began insisting that the Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian regimes were sponsoring contemporary jihadist terrorism. There is no doubt at all that the revolutionary Iranian regime has provided tangible logistical and operational assistance and even partial direction to Shi‘i terrorist groups such as Hizballah (Party of God) and the militias affiliated with their Iraqi clients. Furthermore, Iraq, Syria, and Iran have all actively supported various Palestinian “rejectionist” groups, both nationalist and Sunni Islamist.70 However, many neoconservatives also ostentatiously claimed that Husayn – together with Syria and Iran – had become one of the “terror masters” behind global Sunni jihadist networks such as al-Qa‘ida. Although these alarmists were correct to note that ideological incompatibility would not necessarily prevent such disparate partners from warily cooperating, since both states and non-state actors at times forge at least temporary alliances against dangerous common enemies, in this case the available evidence does not support their more hyperbolic claims.71 Only a few points can be made with some confidence about alleged Iraqi relations with al-Qa‘ida. First, in early 1996, in connection with Sudanese leader Hasan al-Turabi’s efforts to forge a united Sunni-Shi‘i jihadist front against the West, a senior Iraqi intelligence officer named Faruq al-Hijazi met with Usama b. Ladin in Khartoum.72 Second, on a few other occasions Iraqi intelligence officers were reportedly contacted by individuals linked to al-Qa‘ida, but they either rebuffed their approaches or briefly exploited them to gather information. Third, in 1998 Bin Ladin sent an emissary named Abu Hafs al-Mawritani to Iraq. Abu Hafs was to ask Saddam Husayn to provide al-Qa‘ida operatives with operational training, including in the use of chemical and biological agents, but the Iraqi leader refused to meet with Abu Hafs and ordered him to leave the country.73 Fourth, after December 2001 numerous al-Qa‘ida “associates” fleeing Afghanistan used Iraq, especially the Kurdish-controlled areas in the north, as a “safe haven and transit area,” or as an operational base, though there is no evidence that Husayn’s regime was complicit in this activity (though it may well have been acquiescent).74 Fifth, in the summer of 2002, Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi and a dozen other al-Qa‘ida-linked extremists who were collaborating with the Kurdish jihadist group Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam) spent some time in Baghdad (apparently, in certain cases, to get medical treatment).75 It is possible but by no means certain that Husayn provided covert

Terrorists as state “proxies”

15

support to Ansar, which had connections to al-Qa‘ida, in order to make trouble for his secular Kurdish opponents.76 It is also true, of course, that after the U.S. invasion commenced, elements of the Ba‘thist underground formed insurgent coalitions with local Islamists and arriving foreign fighters. None of this information demonstrates – unless one has a conspiratorial mindset, an overactive imagination, or a political agenda to promote – that the secular Iraqi regime was a “terror master” controlling al-Qa‘ida; that Bin Ladin was a “proxy” of the Ba‘thist regime, his oft-declared enemy; or, even more fancifully, that Saddam Husayn secretly sponsored the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, or the 9/11 attacks.77 Indeed, a June 2002 CIA report concluded that “in contrast to the traditional patron-client relationship Iraq enjoys with secular Palestinian groups, the ties between Saddam and Bin Ladin appear much like those between rival intelligence services, with each trying to exploit the other for its own benefit.”78 Furthermore, according to former CIA director George Tenet, the agency’s “intelligence did not show any Iraqi authority, direction, or control over any of the many specific terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qa‘ida.”79 Other U.S. government agencies and officials, as well as outside researchers, have reached similarly skeptical conclusions concerning such a proxy or operational relationship between al-Qa‘ida and Iraq.80 If one compares these exaggerated claims about the sponsorship of jihadist terrorism by enemy regimes – excluding, perhaps, Iran – with the evidence documenting the involvement of friendly regimes such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia in sponsoring, supporting, facilitating, or enabling this sort of terrorism, the contrast is glaring. Indeed, as Professor Daniel Byman rightly notes, “Pakistan is probably today’s most active [state] sponsor of terrorism.”81 There is no doubt at all that Pakistan’s powerful ISI has played a vitally important and sustained role in arming, training, supplying, and even providing operational direction to numerous radical anti-Western jihadist groups, including leading factions of the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party), ‘Abdul Rasul Sayyaf ’s Ittihad-i Islami Bara-yi Azadi-yi Afghanistan (Islamic Union for the Freedom of Afghanistan), and Jalaluddin Haqqani’s mujahidin network in Afghanistan, as well as Fazlur Rahman Khalil’s Harkat-ul Mujahidin (Mujahidin Movement), Hafiz Muhammad Sayyid’s Lashkar-i Tayyiba (Army of the Pure), Maulana Masood Azhar’s Jaysh-i Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), and Bakht Zamin’s al-Badr Mujahidin in Pakistan and Kashmir, to name only the most prominent.82 Many of these same groups also developed close links with al-Qa‘ida, indicating that a collusive albeit complicated three-way relationship has long existed among pro-Islamist factions within the ISI, South Asian jihadist organizations, and members of Bin Ladin’s leadership directorate.83 Such documented links have recently been further confirmed both by the indications that ISI officers were apparently directly involved in training the Lashkar jihadists who carried out the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, and by the discovery that Bin Ladin had been living undisturbed for several years in a large compound in Abbottabad, right under the noses of the Pakistani military. The latter revelation has understandably given rise to suspicions that the degree of ISI complicity with al-Qa‘ida was even greater than was

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previously thought.84 However, even these ISI-backed jihadist terrorist groups should not necessarily be viewed as the docile proxies of that agency, since most of them have continued to pursue their own extremist agendas and have at times viciously turned on their supposed sponsors or “handlers.”85 Yet despite its intimate, decades-long involvement in supporting jihadist terrorists, for geopolitical reasons Pakistan has never been labeled as a “rogue” regime or been added to the official U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, just as Americanbacked regimes that directly sponsored and perpetrated terrorism during the Cold War were conveniently never accused of being terrorist sponsors. Moreover, since the United States and Saudi Arabia have themselves provided extensive logistical and material support to the very same jihadist groups in Afghanistan – usually (but not always) indirectly using the ISI as an intermediary – they too were complicit in the facilitation or sponsorship of jihadist terrorism, which in both cases was later redirected, in textbook examples of intelligence “blowback,” against them.86 Indeed, given the intermittent covert support, dating back to the 1950s, that the U.S. and British secret services provided to Islamists against their mutual Cold War enemies, the State Department should have included the United States and its major ally as sponsors of jihadist terrorism once it began publishing its official annual list of state sponsors of terrorism – if it had fairly applied the same loaded, imprecise criteria that it now uses for designating enemy states.87

The exceptions: secret service creations, covert penetration, and “Guns for Hire” However that may be, in three types of circumstances one can legitimately refer to terrorist groups as agents or proxies of states. The first is when the secret services of particular regimes intentionally create pseudo-independent terrorist groups that remain under those services’ direct control. Some examples are the Syrian-controlled Palestinian terrorist group al-Sa‘iqa (Thunderbolt) and its Iraqi-controlled counterpart, the Jabhat al-Tahrir al-‘Arabiyya (Arab Liberation Front).88 Other examples are the innumerable “death squads,” or paramilitary groups normally consisting of both off-duty members of the security forces and civilian vigilantes, that have functioned as the terrorist auxiliaries of authoritarian regimes in such places as Sukarno’s Indonesia, apartheid-era South Africa, the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, Spain before and after Francisco Franco, and various countries in subSaharan Africa and Latin America.89 Using such groups to carry out various “dirty” covert jobs made it easier, at least for a time, for the state security forces to “plausibly deny” that they were perpetrators of terrorism. In the second case, the regime’s security agencies manage to penetrate a bona fide extremist or terrorist group and gradually assume control from within by maneuvering their own operatives or agents into key positions. When this process is making headway, the entire organization or factions within it may sometimes come under the effective control of the state and can therefore evolve into its de facto tool or agent. Since these types of covert operations are especially sensitive, it

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is often hard to obtain reliable evidence about them. Nevertheless, some of them have eventually come to light. Perhaps the best-documented example of this sort of manipulation is the case of Evno Azev, an agent of the tsarist Okhrana who became a member of the central committee of the Partiya Sotsialistov-Revolutsionerov (Socialist-Revolutionary Party) and the head of its notorious terrorist apparatus, the Boevaia Organizatsiia (Combat Organization).90 In these contexts, agents provocateurs working secretly for regimes can often be found actively instigating violence.91 Here is an ideal point to digress briefly and discuss “false flag” operations. In these maneuvers, particular states or non-state groups (which are often either knowingly colluding with or unwittingly being manipulated by elements of certain secret services) secretly carry out terrorist actions that are then falsely attributed to groups from different extremist milieus.92 One particularly illuminating and welldocumented example of this phenomenon was the so-called strategy of tension in Italy, a series of provocations and terrorist massacres carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s by neo-fascist radicals, operating more or less in collusion with hardline factions within various security services, massacres that were often subsequently made to appear as if they were of anarchist or Marxist provenance.93 Several other cases have also come to light, such as in the 1980s when elements from the secret services and neo-fascist groups in Belgium appear to have initiated a mini-strategy of tension, the so-called Mad Killers of Brabant Wallonia affair.94 Generally, three techniques are employed to initiate false flag terrorist operations. The simplest and least effective method is merely to claim publicly, in the wake of a terrorist attack, that someone other than the real perpetrators carried it out. The second method involves creating a bogus radical group, staffed by security personnel or complicit civilian extremists from a rival or opposing milieu, and then using it as a “cover” to launch terrorist attacks. Examples of this technique include the British Army – controlled pseudo – Mau Mau “counter-gangs” that systematically perpetrated terrorist attacks in Kenya, the Portuguese secret police’s establishment of phony “national liberation” movements that engaged in terrorism in Mozambique and elsewhere in Africa, and an Israeli special operations unit, Unit 131, that set off bombs in Cairo and then attributed them to anti-Western Egyptians.95 The third and most sophisticated method involves surreptitiously placing regime agents inside a bona fide extremist organization and thence inducing it, from within, to carry out terrorist attacks that can then be used as a pretext to discredit or destroy the infiltrated and manipulated group. Examples include the bombing of an Air France office in Lisbon by al-Da‘wa al-Masih (The Call of the Messiah), a Libyan-backed terrorist group under the secret direction of a French intelligence officer, and several successful attempts by European neo-fascist militants, in collaboration with various secret services, to infiltrate certain far left groups and use them as a cover to carry out acts of terrorism.96 If the testimony of former Algerian military and intelligence officers can be believed, the Algerian security forces apparently used all three techniques against the Jama‘at al-Islamiyya al-Muslaha/Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA: Armed Islamic Group) during the “dirty war” they waged against exceptionally brutal jihadist terrorist organizations.97

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Returning to the main narrative, the third type of genuine proxy situation develops when certain extremist groups, or factions thereof, gradually lose their ideological purity over time and increasingly begin to act on the basis of vulgar materialistic motives, specifically by hiring themselves out to the highest bidder as contract killers or contract terrorists. This development certainly occurred in the case of the Abu Nidal Organization, with elements of the Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army), and apparently also with various ad hoc groups operating under the command of Carlos the Jackal.98 Once corrupted ideologically and morally, these types of groups tend to shift their “business” from one state “client” to another, having effectively become mercenaries with no real loyalty to any particular cause or paymaster. Needless to say, in such cases both the “guns for hire” and their employers are using each other instrumentally.

Levels of state involvement in terrorism: a new categorization scheme One of the reasons why misinformation and disinformation have become so prevalent in discussions concerning the relationships between nation-states and terrorist organizations is because the term “state sponsorship” is itself overly vague. At present, it is often applied casually and imprecisely to completely different levels of state interactions with non-state actors, ranging from providing rhetorical support and encouragement, at one pole, to engaging in hands-on logistical or operational activities, at the other. Indeed, the phrase “state sponsor” in relation to terrorism could conceivably signify virtually any type of interrelationship – however trivial, exploratory, or episodic it may be – which only serves to facilitate its partisan and propagandistic usage. Sadly, most existing attempts to categorize different levels of state involvement in terrorism have failed to capture all of its complex historical manifestations. For that reason, it is important to present a more granular and sophisticated scheme to distinguish conceptually between varying levels of state involvement in terrorism. The first key distinction that must be made is between direct state terrorism and indirect state terrorism. Direct state terrorism is terrorism carried out, more or less overtly, by members of the state’s security forces. An example of direct state terrorism would be the terrorist and, indeed, genocidal actions that the Santebal (Keeper of the Peace) secret police or military units of the Khmer Rouge waged against “reactionary” and “counterrevolutionary” segments of the Cambodian population. In contrast, indirect state terrorism is initiated secretly by the security forces in an indirect and deceptive manner by using intermediaries, usually civilian paramilitary groups, to carry out actions on behalf of a state. Those intermediaries can be willing participants, coerced individuals, or manipulated dupes, but whatever the specifics, their employment is normally designed to enable the state to launch especially sensitive or “dirty” operations while maintaining plausible deniability. This conceptual distinction between direct and indirect state terrorism is fundamental,

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even though in practice it is sometimes blurred when serving members of the security forces participate undercover in the actions carried out by ostensibly civilian organizations. However, it is necessary to subdivide the category of indirect state terrorism further to more accurately reflect the different levels of state involvement with, or at the expense of, non-state groups. One can identify at least seven distinct levels of such participation, ranging from the most to the least active forms of engagement: 1 2 3

4

5 6

7

State-directed terrorism – elements of the state’s security forces actually guide, supervise, or control the terrorist actions of their intermediaries. State-sponsored terrorism – elements of the security forces provide hands-on operational assistance for acts of terrorism carried out by their intermediaries. State-supported terrorism – elements of the security forces provide logistical support (training, specialized equipment, weapons, finances, false documents, safe houses, cover), but not operational direction or assistance, to facilitate acts of terrorism carried out by their intermediaries. State-manipulated terrorism – elements of the security forces use informants, agents in place, infiltrators, or agents provocateurs to manipulate their intermediaries into carrying out acts of terrorism covertly, without the latters’ knowledge or consent. State-encouraged terrorism – elements of the security forces incite their intermediaries to carry out acts of terrorism against mutual enemies. State-exploited terrorism – elements of the security forces knowingly attribute terrorist actions to false perpetrators, usually declared enemies, either to protect their intermediaries or to discredit the political opposition. State-sanctioned terrorism – elements of the security forces simply ignore or fail to punish acts of terrorism that civilian vigilante groups independently launch against targets that are also perceived to be enemies by the state.

Note, however, that these distinct subcategories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Elements of a given state’s security forces have often engaged in several of these activities simultaneously. It should be obvious that devising a more nuanced scheme that better reflects the fluidity, dynamism, and complexity of the actual relations between states and non-state paramilitary groups is preferable to using a single generic phrase – “state sponsorship” – that encompasses all potential levels of state involvement and therefore serves to obfuscate or obliterate vitally important distinctions. It really does matter, after all, if a state is actively helping terrorist groups plan and carry out operations or if it is simply supporting those operations rhetorically. These distinctions are all the more important when one government’s security policies in relation to other states are directly affected by a reference to a generic category whose criteria are so vague and open-ended that they can easily be applied in an imprecise and wholly partisan fashion.

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Conclusion At this point, it should be clear that the clandestine relationships between components of the security services of various nation-states and extremist groups relying on the operational technique of terrorism do not generally conform to the simplistic notion that the former control the latter or that the latter are simple agents of the former. This concept was severely problematic even during the heyday of the Cold War, and at present it has arguably become increasingly outmoded and even less applicable. In reality, these types of relationships are best characterized as double-edged swords inasmuch as they have normally been complicated, fluid, deceptive, risky, fractious, troublesome, and potentially dangerous for both parties. After all, the parties involved are usually struggling behind the scenes to exploit and manipulate each other. Terrorist groups are trying to finagle tangible assistance from states while retaining their organizational and operational independence, whereas states are seeking to penetrate, exploit, and use, if not actually control, terrorist groups for their own instrumental purposes. Often the security agencies have the upper hand in clandestine interactions with less powerful extremist groups, especially in their own countries when they covertly “assist” violence-prone radicals.99 However, when security agencies are sponsoring terrorist organizations operating in more distant regions, the latter are often able to retain considerable autonomy. As such, in practice violent extremists often manage to con regime elements into giving them much-needed resources even as they stubbornly persist in pursuing their own radical, idiosyncratic agendas and goals, which may or may not conform, even in the short term, to the political interests of their state benefactors. Indeed, ideological fanatics of all stripes have sometimes explicitly violated prior agreements by using those state-supplied resources to carry out acts of terrorism that their would-be handlers have not sanctioned and that may well have been directly contrary to their so-called sponsors’ intentions. In assessing whether a given terrorist group is really an agent, proxy, or surrogate of a given nation-state, which implies that the group has lost some or all of the independence it may have once possessed, the key question is this: is the group now promoting political agendas or attacking particular targets that it would otherwise not have promoted or attacked if it were not receiving support of some type from a state? If the answer to this question is yes, then those terms may be at least partially applicable. However, if the group has not changed its overall objectives or its targeting priorities and if it is essentially still operating as it had previously and would presumably have kept doing so in the absence of state support, labeling the group as a proxy makes little sense. A subsidiary question that should be asked is this: is a given terrorist group now employing weapons or operational techniques that it would not otherwise have adopted had it not been receiving support of some type from a state? In this case, even if the group was using new weapons or techniques provided by a given state, it would be more accurate to characterize that group as the “beneficiary of state aid” rather than

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as an actual proxy of that state – unless, of course, in exchange for that aid, the group also shifted its objectives or targeting priorities to conform to those of its alleged sponsor. In short, it is necessary to devise new policies that more accurately reflect the real, ever-shifting nature of the interactions between states and terrorist groups. After all, implementing security policies that are based on misperceptions or false allegations of state sponsorship only inhibits the U.S. government’s ability to confront “really existing” terrorism and is liable to unnecessarily increase friction between the United States and designated terrorist sponsors. One possible step in this process would be to eliminate the blatantly partisan official list of state sponsors of terrorism, as it is unlikely that the vague criteria used to determine a state’s inclusion on the list will ever be applied impartially – that is, applied to U.S. enemies and allies alike.100 This action will hopefully make it more difficult in the future for vested political interests, both inside and outside of the government, to make bogus charges concerning state sponsorship of terrorism or to characterize terrorist groups falsely as the simple proxies of states. A second crucial step, however, would be to adopt a more nuanced, precise, and accurate conception that better reflects the multiple varieties and levels of state involvement in terrorism. It is crucially important to de-polemicize the entire subject of state sponsorship so that the real underlying phenomena – widespread but usually only semi-effective state efforts to manipulate and exploit terrorists – can be confronted in more effective ways and ultimately countered. At the same time, it is even more necessary to recognize that the state-centric paradigm concerning terrorism is itself problematic, although admittedly not yet completely obsolete. The real terrorist threat to the world’s security in the twentyfirst century will likely emanate less from the clients of “rogue” states and more from a motley, disparate array of non-state entities: left- and right-wing political radicals, religious extremists – including Islamist jihadists, Christian militias in the United States, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, Hindu nationalists, and apocalyptic millenarian cult-type groups like Aum Supreme Truth – eco-radicals, ethnic gangs, drug cartels, and organized criminal groups. Most of these groups will be operating independently of de facto state authority or control.101 Under these circumstances, the ideologies and objectives of such nongovernmental and often anti-state groups need to be much better understood. If, however, Western governments persist in maintaining the illusion that jihadist terrorist networks are essentially functioning as the surrogates of certain hostile enemy regimes, they will naturally conclude that the solution to winning the war on terrorism is simply to overthrow those alleged terror masters. Alas, this view not only represents an egregious distortion of the real situation, especially in relation to Sunni jihadist groups with a global agenda, but one that has already encouraged the adoption of counterproductive policies and the initiation of ill-advised military interventions that have significantly damaged the interests and international stature of the United States and its allies.

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Notes 1 Reprinted with permission from “Terrorists as State ‘Proxies’: Separating Fact from Fiction” [from Michael A. Innes, ed., Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates, and the Use of Force (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2012), pp. 1–29, 153–67] 2 “Woolsey: Iran and State-Sponsored Terrorism,” Voice of America editorial, April 29, 1993, available at www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/news/1993/1419177214194893.htm. Woolsey was then director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Since his retirement he has suggested that Iraq may have sponsored both the 1993 World Trade Center attacks and the Bacillus anthracis letter mailings in the United States. 3 Quoted from Michael A. Ledeen, The War against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened, Where We Are Now, How We’ll Win (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), p. 9. On the same page, he identifies the post-Soviet “terror masters” as the “radical regimes of Iran, [Saddam Husayn’s] Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, and Sudan.” Other conservatives have also adopted the cartoonish phrase “terror masters.” See Kenneth R. Timmerman, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), p. 242. 4 Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 263. 5 Martin van Creveld, “In Wake of Terrorism, Modern Armies Prove to Be Dinosaurs of Defense,” New Perspectives Quarterly 13:4 (Fall 1996), p. 58. 6 Quoted from Ghada Hashem Talhami, “Muslims, Islamists, and the Cold War,” in Grand Strategy in the War against Terrorism, ed. Thomas R. Mockaitis and Paul B. Rich (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 114. Compare Stephen Segaller, Invisible Armies: Terrorism into the 1990s (London: Sphere Books, 1987), p. 154. Although I agree with Talhami’s view that non-state terrorism would still constitute a significant security problem in the absence of state sponsorship, I do not subscribe to her argument (on the same page) that it is necessarily an “outgrowth of the perceptions and actions of disadvantaged communities,” which, under pressure, “resort to violence against groups that oppose and oppress them.” By “terrorism” I am referring to the use or threatened use of violence, directed against victims selected for their symbolic or representative value, as a means of instilling anxiety in, transmitting one or more messages to, and thereby manipulating the perceptions and behavior of wider target audiences. Since terrorism is therefore nothing more than a violent technique of psychological manipulation, there is no reason to suppose that one has to be “disadvantaged” to employ it. Note, also, in the interests of terminological precision, that the term “terror” refers to a psychological state marked by fear and anxiety and must therefore be distinguished from “terrorism.” There is no such thing as a “terror network,” only a “terrorist network.” 7 For another recent attempt to categorize different types and levels of state support for terrorism, see Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Chapters 1–3. 8 For a recent criticism of realist-oriented IR theories on this basis, see Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 55–6. Thomas rightly notes (see p. 56) that “the impact of non-state actors, including the role of religious actors, is marginalized from the core of this approach to international relations.” 9 Unfortunately, many self-styled “terrorism experts” have themselves never seriously studied extremist milieus and terrorist organizations, since they have typically failed to carry out in-depth research on these topics and have not systematically and comprehensively examined the available primary sources. See, e.g., the critical judgments leveled by Andrew Silke, “An Introduction to Terrorism Research,” in Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements and Failures, ed. Andrew Silke (London: Frank Cass, 2004), pp. 9–12; and John Horgan, “The Case for Firsthand Research,” in ibid., p. 30. I made similarly harsh criticisms of both the lax scholarship and the political biases in the terrorism field back in the early 1990s. See Jeffrey M. Bale, “The ‘Black’ Terrorist International: Neo-Fascist

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10

11

12

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Paramilitary Networks and the ‘Strategy of Tension’ in Italy, 1968–1974” (PhD dissertation: University of California, Berkeley, 1994), pp. 26–33. Sadly, these long-standing shortcomings in the field have become even more pronounced in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001. Indeed, most governments have formulated official definitions of terrorism that intentionally restrict the term to the violent actions carried out by non-state actors, thereby trying to make it impossible for others to label or characterize their governments as terrorists. In short, they have simultaneously sought to exclude their own regimes from the category of terrorism, by definitional fiat, while also frequently accusing rival states of sponsoring terrorism. On the basis of this inconsistent and indeed contradictory conceptual logic, states can apparently never be terrorists themselves, but only sponsors of terrorism carried out by non-state entities. For the state-centric biases inherent in what he labels “orthodox terrorism theory,” see Jason Franks, Rethinking the Roots of Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), especially p. 46. For the Cold War era, see especially Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan, The “Terrorism” Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Alexander George, “The Discipline of Terrorology,” in Western State Terrorism, ed. Alexander George (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 76–101; and Philip Paull, “International Terrorism: The Propaganda War” (master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 1982), pp. 59–94. For the post-9/11 era, see John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: Free Press, 2006), pp. 6–7, 33–47; George Kassimeris, “The Terrorism Industry: The Profits of Doom,” in Playing Politics with Terrorism: A User’s Guide, ed. George Kassimeris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 301–20; Sam Raphael, “In the Service of Power: Terrorism Studies and U.S. Intervention in the Global South,” in Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, ed. Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 49–65; David Miller and Tom Mills, The Politics of Terrorism Expertise: Knowledge, Power and the Media (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Maximilian Forte, “Minerva and the Terrorism Industry: ‘The Rule of Experts as a Means to Covert Imperial Rule’,” Zero Anthropology, October 24, 2008, posted by academicians critical of prospective collaboration between scholars and military funders, available at http:// openanthropology.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/minerva-and-the-terrorism-industrythe-rule-of-experts-as-a-means-to-covert-imperial-rule/. Note, however, that Mueller defines the term “terrorism industry” more broadly than Herman and O’Sullivan originally did and ascribes material rather than ideological motives to it. Likewise, Ian S. Lustick has emphasized that many different types of interest groups have sought to exploit the war on terrorism for their own political or financial purposes. See his Trapped in the War on Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), Chapter 5. See, e.g., Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002); Noam Chomsky, 9–11 (New York: Open Media/Seven Stories Press, 2001); Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, vol. 1, The Political Economy of Human Rights (Boston: South End Press, 1999), especially Chapters 3–4; Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda (Boston: South End Press, 1982); George, Western State Terrorism; and Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2004), Chapters 1–7. Similar sorts of anti-establishment, left-wing perspectives have recently made a resurgence in the form of “critical terrorism studies,” as reflected in Jackson, Smyth, and Gunning, Critical Terrorism Studies; and the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism, which Jackson edits. The blatant anti-state and anti-Western biases of this new current are well illustrated in Scott Poynting and David Whyte, eds., Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence: The “War on Terror” as Terror (New York: Routledge, 2012). Chomsky and Herman, Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, pp. 6–7, 85–95. Elsewhere, Herman contrasts what he calls “lesser” (insurgent non-state) and “mythical”

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(Soviet-backed) terrorist networks with retail right-wing terrorism and especially with U.S. sponsorship of national security states that rely on wholesale terrorism. See Herman, Real Terror Network, pp. 47–82, 110–37. Other left-leaning critics of the official line on terrorism have instead adopted different arguments: that the threat of terrorism is minor or inconsequential, that there is no nonstate or state-sponsored Islamic terrorist threat, and that the official Western discourses about terrorism since 9/11 are essentially false. See, e.g., Mueller, Overblown; Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells, eds., The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), especially Chapter 4; and Adam Hodges and Chad Nilep, eds., Discourse, War and Terrorism (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007). However, it is one thing to say that governments or other political interests have oftentimes exaggerated and instrumentally exploited the terrorist threat, which is perfectly true, and another thing altogether to insist that there is no significant terrorist threat, a claim that is manifestly absurd during an era in which terrorists kill dozens or more people in various parts of the world every single month. For a generally less partisan treatment of the political exploitation of terrorism in different countries, see Kassimeris, Playing Politics with Terrorism. Bale, “‘Black’ Terrorist International,” pp. 28–31. Roberta Goren, The Soviet Union and Terrorism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 6. Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander, Terrorism as State-Sponsored Covert Warfare (Fairfax, VA: Hero Books, 1986), p. 32. Cf. the state-centric definition of “international terrorism” by Israeli hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu: “the use of terrorist violence against a given nation by another state, which uses the terrorists to fight a proxy war as an alternative to conventional war.” See his Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 52 (italics in original). Note that Cline was a high-ranking CIA officer and former station chief in Taiwan, where some have suggested that he personally played a covert role in the creation of the World Anti-Communist League, an international private network that eventually encompassed many right-wing terrorist groups. See Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Exposé of How Terrorists, Nazis and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), pp. 55–6. For a recent overview, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Former East German spy chief Markus Wolf himself emphasized that “many of these unholy alliances” between the two superpowers and repressive regimes and violent non-state groups in the third world were “the tragic product of the Cold War.” See his memoir Man without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster, with Anne McElvoy (New York: Times Books, 1997), p. 249. An even more simplistic and ludicrous notion peddled in some extreme right circles was that all the world’s terrorist groups were ideologically left wing. See, e.g., Robert D. Chapman and M. Lester Chapman, The Crimson Web of Terror (Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1980), p. 99, who argued that terrorists everywhere are “very much alike,” including being “Marxist-Leninist.” No doubt that last assertion will come as a great surprise to victims of right-wing paramilitary squads and violent jihadists in various parts of the world. This sort of literature is voluminous. See, e.g., Stefan T. Possony and L. Francis Bouchey, International Terrorism: The Communist Connection (Washington, DC: American Council for World Freedom, 1978), pp. 21–40; Robert Moss, “Terrorism: A Soviet Export,” New York Times Magazine (November 2, 1980), pp. 42–58; Samuel T. Francis, The Soviet Strategy of Terror (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1981), especially pp. 5–25; Claire Sterling, The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism (New York: Berkeley Books, 1982); Edouard Sablier, Le fil rouge: Histoire secrète du terrorisme international (Paris: Plon, 1983); Goren, The Soviet Union and Terrorism; Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander,

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Terrorism: The Soviet Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1984); Jillian Becker, The Soviet Connection: State Sponsorship of Terrorism (London: Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies, 1985); and Michael Ledeen, “Soviet Sponsorship: The Will to Disbelieve,” in Terrorism: How the West Can Win, ed. Benjamin Netanyahu (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), pp. 88–92. Cited by Sterling, Terror Network, p. 286. This claim was made at a 1979 conference held in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Jonathan Institute, which others have identified as an important institutional component in the terrorism industry. See Paull, “International Terrorism,” pp. 8–31; and Herman and O’Sullivan, “Terrorism” Industry, pp. 104–6. Cline and Alexander, Terrorism: The Soviet Connection, pp. 55–60. Sterling, Terror Network, p. 16. The absurdity of this all-encompassing blanket statement should be self-evident. To be fair, to preserve their own credibility, these authors sometimes expressed caveats about whether the Soviets were centrally directing international terrorism. See ibid., pp. 291–2; Possony and Bouchey, International Terrorism, p. 1; and Francis, Soviet Strategy of Terror, p. 40. Yet they nonetheless made every effort to create that very impression. For the non-European state sponsors of terrorism linked to the Soviets, see, e.g., Roger Fontaine, Terrorism: The Cuban Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1988); Joseph S. Bermudez, Terrorism: The North Korean Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1990); and Uri Ra’anan et al., eds., Hydra of Carnage: The International Linkages of Terrorism and Other Low-Intensity Operations: The Witnesses Speak (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1986). For the so-called KGB-Bulgarian connection to the 1980 papal assassination plot, see Ray S. Cline, “Soviet Footprints in Saint Peter’s Square,” Terrorism 7:1 (1984): 53–5; Claire Sterling, The Time of the Assassins: Anatomy of an Investigation (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985); and Paul Henze, The Plot to Kill the Pope (New York: Scribner’s, 1985). Henze was formerly a CIA station chief in Turkey. For substantive critiques of this thesis, see William Hood, “Unlikely Conspiracy,” Problems of Communism 33 (March–April 1984): 67–70; Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square, 1986); and Jeffrey M. Bale, “The Ultranationalist Right in Turkey and the Attempted Assassination of Pope John Paul II,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 15:1 (March 1991): 1–63. Among the most unreliable of those oft-cited defectors, at least with respect to terrorism, are former Czech intelligence officer Jan Šejna and former Romanian intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa. See, e.g., Jan Šejna, We Will Bury You (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985); and Ion Mihai Pacepa, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007). See, e.g., Harry Rositzke, “If There Were No KGB, Would the Scale and Intensity of Terrorism Be Diminished?,” New York Times (July 20, 1981), p. A17 (a question to which he responded in the negative); Brian Jenkins, “World Terrorism: The Truth and Nothing but the Truth,” Manchester Guardian Weekly (May 24, 1981); Richard E. Rubenstein, Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 51–9; Segaller, Invisible Armies, pp. 124–48; and Grant Wardlaw, Political Terrorism: Theory, Tactics, and Counter-Measures, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 55–7, 175–86. See, e.g., Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2006). For examples of this type of Soviet and communist propaganda, see Boris Svetov et al., International Terrorism and the CIA: Documents, Eyewitness Reports, Facts (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983); and Vitaly Chernyavsky, The CIA in the Dock: Soviet Journalists on International Terrorism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983). See Soviet propagandist Valentin K. Mashkin, Operación Cóndor: Su rastro sangriento (Buenos Aires: Cartago, 1985), pp. 15–22 passim. Cf. Stella Calloni, Los años del lobo: Operación Cóndor (Buenos Aires: Continente, 1999), p. 17. It is also one of several theories mentioned by Gerardo Irusta Medrano, Espionaje y servicios secretos en Bolivia, 1930– 1980: “Operación Cóndor” en acción (La Paz: self-published, 1995), pp. 279–88. It is now

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clear, however, that the Chilean secret service first proposed this scheme in early 1974. Although U.S. intelligence agencies apparently facilitated the development of some of its precursors, provided those services with advanced communications equipment, soon became aware of Condor itself, and sometimes appear to have supported its activities tacitly, there is no clear evidence as yet that they actually instigated them. For more, cf. J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 53–8, 78–83, who arguably attributes too much influence to the CIA and the U.S. Defense Department; and Mark J. Osiel, “Constructing Subversion in Argentina’s Dirty War,” Representations 75:1 (August 2001), pp. 119–58, who rightly gives due weight to the indigenous sources of Southern Cone countersubversion and state terrorism, such as the Catholic integralist ideologies associated with groups such as Tacuara and the military’s so-called Doctrine of National Security. For more, see Daniel Gutman, Tacuara: Historia de la primera guerrilla urbana argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones B, 2003); and José Comblin, “The National Security Doctrine,” in The Repressive State: The Brazilian “National Security Doctrine” and Latin America, ed. Jean-Louis Weil, Joseph Comblin, and Judge Senese (Toronto: Brazilian Studies, 1978). See, e.g., Viktor V. Vitiuk, Leftist Terrorism, trans. Andrei Zur and Galina Glagoleva (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), pp. 196–211. Note that Vitiuk was one of the more sophisticated and intelligent of the Soviet propagandists who wrote on the subject of terrorism. See Iona Andronov, On the Wolf’s Track (Sofia, Bulgaria: Sofia Press, 1983); Iona Andronov, The Triple Plot (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1984); Eduard Kovalev and Igor Sedykh, “Bulgarian Connection”: CIA & Co. on the Outcome of the Antonov Trial (Moscow: Novosti, 1986); and Ivan Palchev, The Assassination Attempt against the Pope and the Roots of Terrorism (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1985). See, in general, Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counter-Terrorism, 1940–1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992); and Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez, eds., When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). The literature on these topics is large and often polemical. For the baleful role of U.S. security agencies in Salvadoran and Guatemalan state terrorism, see Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 1, State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador (London: Zed Books, 1985); and Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 2, State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1985). More generally, see Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). For the antidemocratic activities of various “stay-behind” networks in postwar Europe, see the analysis of the European literature by Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005). For U.S. support for diverse anticommunist insurgents who relied heavily on terrorism, cf. Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988); Jeffrey Burds, The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944–1948 (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2001); Maj. D. H. Berger, “The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool: An Analysis of the Operations Conducted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 1949–1951” (unpublished thesis, Marine Corps Staff and Command College, Decatur, Georgia, 1995); Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League; Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations in Cuba, 1959–1965 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006); Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish Is Red: The Story of the Secret War against Castro (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); Sam Dillon, Commandos: The CIA and Nicaragua’s Contra Rebels (New York: Henry Holt, 1991); Glenn Garvin, Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, Inc., 1992); Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987).

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35 To cite only two examples, one may note the eye-opening information about covert state-sponsored terrorism found in the archives of the Portuguese secret police and the Paraguayan security forces following the collapse, respectively, of the dictatorial Caetano and Stroessner regimes. See Frédéric Laurent, L’orchestre noir (Paris: Stock, 1978), pp. 117–65; and Fabrizio Calvi and Frédéric Laurent, Piazza Fontana: La verità su una strage (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), pp. 60–81, for the former; and Alfredo Boccia Paz, Myrian Angélica González, and Rosa Palau Aguilar, Es mi informe: Los archivios secretos de la Polícia de Stroessner (Asunción: Centro de Documentación y Estudios, 1994); and Gladys Meilinger de Sannemann, Paraguay y la “Operación Cóndor en los “Archivios del Terror” (Asunción: no publisher, 1994), for the latter. Similarly, information from the East German and Iraqi archives, as will become clear in the following notes, has also shed much more light on covert secret service activities related to terrorism. 36 Indeed, some proponents of this notion, such as Ledeen, had earlier been promoters of the “Soviet terror network” thesis. Two other neoconservatives who exerted a significant influence on the Bush administration’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policies, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, had both previously contributed to Ra’anan et al., Hydra of Carnage. 37 Ledeen, War against the Terror Masters, 45. 38 Wurmser’s remarks are cited in Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), pp. 224–5. 39 See Ledeen, War against the Terror Masters, especially pp. 9–28, 45–52; and David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), especially Chapter 3. They remained convinced, e.g., that “a bunch of ragtag terrorists in Afghanistan” could not have carried out the 9/11 attacks without a state sponsor. See Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), p. 108. 40 See, e.g., Ronen Bergman, The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle against the World’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Power, trans. Ronnie Hope (New York: Free Press, 2008), especially part 3; Doron Zimmermann, Tangled Skein or Gordion Knot? Iran and Syria as State Supporters of Political Violence Movements in Lebanon and in the Palestinian Territories (Zurich: ETH Zürich, 2004), pp. 7, 15–22, 71–111; Matthew Levitt, Targeting Terror: U.S. Policy toward Middle Eastern State Sponsors and Terrorist Organizations, Post-September 11 (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2002), Chapters 6–7; Con Coughlin, Saddam: King of Terror (New York: Ecco, 2002), Chapter 6; and Stephen F. Hayes, The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 41 Laurent Murawiec, Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Steven Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism (New York: Knopf, 2003); and Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Pakistan’s Terror Inc.,” Washington Times (January 14, 2008). 42 See, e.g., Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 2002); and Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), Chapters 7–10. 43 See, e.g., Richard Labévière, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam, trans. Martin DeMers (New York: Algora Publishing, 2000); Alexandre del Valle, Islamisme et ÉtatsUnis: Une alliance contre l’Europe (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1999); Jürgen Elsässer, Wie der Dschihad nach Europa kam: Gotteskrieger und Geheimdienste auf dem Balkan (Berlin: Homilius, 2008); and Maloy Krishna Dhar, Fulcrum of Evil: ISI–CIA–Al Qaeda Nexus (New Delhi: Manas, 2006). 44 This is certainly the implication in German conspiracy theorist Elsässer’s remarks. See Silvia Cattori, “Jürgen Elsässer: ‘The CIA Recruited and Trained the Jihadists’,” Réseau Voltaire website, August 14, 2006, available at www.voltairenet.org/article143050.html.

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45 To put it another way, a state would have to find suitable non-state puppets if it hoped to function as their puppet master. 46 For illustrative examples from diverse extremist milieus, cf. Jeffrey M. Bale, “‘National Revolutionary’ Groupuscules and the Resurgence of ‘Left-Wing’ Fascism: The Case of France’s Nouvelle Résistance,” Patterns of Prejudice 36:3 (July 2002), pp. 24–49; Goldie Shabad and Francisco José Lleras Ramo, “Political Violence in a Democratic State: Basque Terrorism in Spain,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1995), pp. 402–69; and Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 47 Note, e.g., that many leading scholars have characterized even the structure of the totalitarian Nazi regime as polycentric. See Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (London: Longman, 1981), conclusion. 48 For examples of just how convoluted this situation can be, see Bale, “‘Black’ Terrorist International,” Chapters 2–3. 49 Cf. Byman, Deadly Connections, p. 14. 50 Indeed, Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman refer to such notions as “conspiracy theories of terrorism” in their classic work Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2004), pp. 101–8. However, the authors make no effort therein to distinguish between conspiracy theories proper and real-world covert and clandestine politics. For that discussion, see Jeffrey M. Bale, “Political Paranoia v. Political Realism: On Distinguishing between Bogus Conspiracy Theories and Genuine Conspiratorial Politics,” Patterns of Prejudice 41:1 (2007), pp. 45–60. 51 Bale, “Political Paranoia v. Political Realism,” p. 58. 52 For the view that extremism is a distinct phenomenon with recognizable characteristics, cf. John George and Laird Wilcox, American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, and Others (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), pp. 54–62; Gian Mario Bravo, L’estremismo in Italia (Rome: Riuniti, 1982), pp. 7–18; Neil J. Smelser, The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially pp. 58–80; and Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Perennial, 2002), though “true believers” are even more common within sectarian vanguard parties than the mass movements they aspire to lead. Cf. also Maxwell Taylor, The Fanatics: A Behavioural Approach to Political Violence (London: Brassey’s, 1991), especially Chapter 2, wherein “ten features of fanaticism” are listed that are analogous to several of the characteristics associated with extremism. 53 See, e.g., Daniel Byman et al., Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), pp. 23–40. In their opinion, “states are primarily motivated [to support insurgencies] by geopolitics rather than ideology, ethnic affinity, or religious sentiment.” 54 Karl-Wilhelm Fricke, Mfs intern: Macht, Strukturen, Auflösung der DDR-Staatssicherheit. Analyse und Dokumentation (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1991), p. 57; and Tobias Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder: Die zweite Generation der RAF (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher, 1997), pp. 389–93. 55 Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder, pp. 393–95; Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF (Berlin: Argon, 2004), pp. 539–53, 556–76; and Michael Müller and Andreas Kanonenberg, Die RAF-STASI Connection (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1992), pp. 67–103, 140–71, 208–18. For the general activities and organization of Hauptabteilung XXII, see Tobias Wunschik, Die Hauptabteilung XXII: “Terrorabwehr” (Berlin: Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik [BstU], 1996); and Roland Wiedmann, Die Organisationsstruktur des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit 1989 (Berlin: BstU, 1995), pp. 264–77. 56 Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, pp. 578–80; Müller and Kanonenberg, RAF-STASI Connection, pp. 171–89; Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder, pp. 396–7; and John Koehler, STASI: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999),

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pp. 387–401. Some have argued that MfS chief Erich Mielke may have fantasized that, in the event of an armed conflict between West and East Germany, some RAF terrorists could have been mobilized to serve as auxiliaries for the Nationale Volksarmee’s professional “partisan units” from the Arbeitsgruppe des Ministers/Sonderfragen (AGM/S, Minister’s Working Group/Special Questions). Koehler, STASI, pp. 359–86. However, apparently neither the Soviets nor the East Germans trusted Carlos, who they claim to have regarded as an unreliable and decadent adventurer, narcissist, and troublemaker. The MfS kept him under constant surveillance, fearing that he might engage in actions harmful to East Germany. Cf. Peter Siebenmorgen, “Staatssicherheit” der DDR: Der Westen im Fadenkreutz der Stasi (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993), pp. 225–35; Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder, pp. 390–3, 398– 401; Wunschik, Hauptabteilung XXII, pp. 44–5; Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 576–7; John C. Schmeidel, Stasi: Shield and Sword of the Party (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 154, 156. Some have even suggested that the MfS secretly alerted the West German authorities about the location of the RAF’s arms depot outside Frankfurt, where information was discovered that soon led to the arrest of virtually the entire “second generation.” See Schmeidel, Stasi, 159. In Wunschik’s opinion, e.g., the “unholy cooperation” between the MfS and the RAF had little actual impact or significance. See Baader-Meinhofs Kinder, p. 402. One caveat should nonetheless be made. The federal German commission responsible for handling the MfS archives has sealed vast quantities of former MfS records presumably because much embarrassing information could be found therein, not only about the Stasi, but also about the covert activities of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND: Federal Intelligence Service) and other Western secret services. Hence it likewise remains possible that much more evidence exists of MfS involvement in terrorism than is now in the public domain. Jillian Becker, preface to Goren, Soviet Union and Terrorism, p. ix. Cline and Alexander refer to the PLO, with more justification, as the “transmission belt” for disseminating Soviet funds, weapons, and training to other terrorist groups. See Terrorism: The Soviet Connection, pp. 31–54. Cf. Yonah Alexander and Joshua Sinai, Terrorism: The PLO Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1989), pp. 186–91. Goren, Soviet Union and Terrorism, p. ix. Galia Golan, The Soviet Union and the Palestine Liberation Organization: An Uneasy Alliance (New York: Praeger, 1980), p. 250. For the structural complexity, factional infighting, bitter personal rivalries, and underlying processes of organizational fission and fusion that have always characterized the PLO, see the detailed accounts in John W. Amos II, Palestinian Resistance: Organization of a Nationalist Movement (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), Chapters 3–6; Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), passim; and Helena Cobban, The Palestine Liberation Organization: People, Power and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), parts 1–2. Cobban, The Palestine Liberation Organization, Chapters 9–10; and James Adams, The Financing of Terror: How the Groups That Are Terrorizing the World Get the Money to Do It (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 39–43. Hence, one can only wonder which, if any, of these multiple paymasters constituted the PLO’s real “terror master.” Adams, Financing of Terror, Chapters 4–5; and Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), Chapter 3. For their “uneasy alliance,” see Adams, Financing of Terror, pp. 43–9; Golan, Soviet Union and the Palestine Liberation Organization, passim; Roland Dannreuther, The Soviet Union and the PLO (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); and Cobban, Palestine Liberation Organization, pp. 221–8. The Mitrokhin documents confirm that neither the Soviet leadership nor the KGB trusted ‘Arafat, in part because he was a manipulator who distorted information and stubbornly maintained good relations with both “reactionary

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Arab regimes” and the communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu, whom the Soviets also did not trust. See Andrew and Mitrokhin, World Was Going Our Way, p. 251. Golan, Soviet Union and the Palestine Liberation Organization, p. 211. See, e.g., Bard O’Neill, Armed Struggle in Palestine: A Political-Military Analysis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press/National Defense University, 1978), pp. 197–8. Andrew and Mitrokhin, World Was Going Our Way, pp. 246–50, 252–5. The KGB had one other agent in the PFLP, Ahmad Mahmud Samman. Both Haddad and Samman died in 1978, after which the KGB was unable to recruit suitable replacements. Although much of the literature on Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism is also partisan and tendentious, more than enough reliable evidence exists to justify labeling Iran as a state supporter of terrorist groups. The most detailed journalistic efforts to argue for an Iraqi regime – al-Qa‘ida link are those of Hayes, The Connection; and Ray Robison, Both in One Trench: Saddam’s Secret Terror Documents (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2007). Unfortunately, their analyses of the available intelligence information is overly alarmist and partisan, and many of the specific claims they refer to as evidence were derived from unreliable sources or subsequently disconfirmed. Interestingly, however, captured Iraqi documents reveal not only that Saddam Husayn’s intelligence services provided funds, suicide belts, and other materials to Palestinian rejectionist groups but also that around the time of the Gulf War they established links to Islamist parties in Pakistan (the Jami‘yyat ‘Ulama-i Islami [Assembly of Islamic Scholars]) as well as to actual jihadist groups in Jordan (the Palestinian Jama‘at al-Tajdid wa al-Jihad [Renewal and Jihad Organization]), Egypt (the Tanzim al-Jihad al-Islami [Islamic Jihad Organization] and the Jama‘a al-Islamiyya [Islamic Group]), and Afghanistan (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami [Islamic Party]). See Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), Joint Advanced Warfighting Program, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, Volume 1 (Redacted), Iraqi Perspectives Project (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analysis, 2007), pp. 13–21. In the last two cases, the goal was apparently to find local allies who could make trouble for Iran or for Muslim countries that joined the Gulf War Coalition. The most convenient summary of the evidence concerning purported al-Qa‘ida links to Saddam Husayn’s regime can be found in Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), S. Rep. 109–331, at 60–112 (2006). For the reported meetings between Iraqi regime and al-Qa‘ida representatives, see 70–73. Ibid., pp. 73–4. Ibid., pp. 85–6, 89. Ibid., pp. 86–8. Ibid., pp. 88–94. Here the key figure was Iraqi intelligence operative and Ansar subleader Abu Wa‘il, who functioned either as an inside informant, a liaison between the regime and the Ansar group, an Islamist double agent, or a secret operative and possible provocateur for the Iraqi regime. Cf. Laurie Mylroie, The War against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge (New York: Harper, 2001), which argues that Saddam Husayn sponsored the 1993 jihadist bombing of the World Trade Center; and Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2004), which suggests that the Iraqi regime was in part responsible for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. CIA report, “Iraq and al-Qa‘ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship,” June 21, 2002, 1. Note that the authors of this report were told to “lean far forward and do a speculative piece . . . [and] stretch to the maximum the evidence that [they] had.” Interview with CIA deputy director of intelligence, cited in SSCI, S. Rep. 109–331, at 61. See George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: The CIA during America’s Time of Crisis (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), pp. 341. On the same page he likewise suggested that at most the two parties were “trying to determine how best to take advantage of the other.” Cf. SSCI, S. Rep. 109–331, at 62–68, 92; IDA, Saddam and Terrorism, pp. 41–3, 45–6; U.S. Government, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Final

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Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2002), pp. 61, 66, 128, 468n55, 470nn74–76, 502n49, 522–23nn69–70; Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 32; and Council on Foreign Relations, “Backgrounder: Iraqi Ties to Terrorism,” April 29, 2003, available at www.cfr.org/ publication/7702/. See Byman, Deadly Connections, p. 155. This involvement is apparent even if one excludes the generally partisan and often propagandistic Indian literature on the ISI and its alleged direction of Islamist terrorism, e.g., Srikanta Ghosh, Pakistan’s ISI: Network of Terror in India (New Delhi: A. P. H., 2000); Bhure Lal, Terrorism Inc.: The Lethal Cocktail of ISI, Taliban and Al-Qaida (New Delhi: Siddharth, 2002); and Rajeev Sharma, Pak Proxy War: A Story of ISI, bin Ladin, and Kargil (New Delhi: Kaveri, 1999). See the next note for more sober sources. For the ISI’s sponsorship of jihadist terrorist groups in South Asia, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Ladin, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 67–8, 113, 119–20, 128–9, 131, 157, 165–6, and passim; Bruce Reidel, “Pakistan and Terror: The Eye of the Storm,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 618 (July 2008): 31–45; and Byman, Deadly Connections, Chapters 6–7. Of course, in response to U.S. pressure and provision of aid in the wake of 9/11, the Pakistani government has adopted a more circumspect but no less deceptive policy toward jihadist terrorists, one that combines helping the Americans capture or kill certain high-profile al-Qa‘ida figures and doing little or nothing to interfere with the activities of the Taliban or Kashmiri jihadists. See, e.g., Shaun Gregory, “The ISI and the War on Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30 (2002): 1013–31; Ashley J. Tellis, “Pakistan’s Record on Terrorism: Conflicted Goals, Compromised Performance,” Washington Quarterly 11:2 (Spring 2008), pp. 7–32; and Carlotta Gall, “Pakistani Military Still Cultivates Militant Groups, a Former Fighter Says,” New York Times (July 3, 2011), available at www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/ world/asia/04pakistan.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&hp. For information about the main ISI-sponsored jihadist organizations in Pakistan, see Muhammad Amir Rana, A to Z of Jehadi Organizations in Pakistan (Lahore: Mashal Books, 2006), pp. 328–42 (Lashkar, a Wahhabi group), 214–57 (Jaysh and Harkat, Deobandi groups), and 459–68 (Badr, a Mawdudist group); and K. Santhanam Sreedhar and Sudhir Saxena Manish, Jihadis in Jammu and Kashmir: A Portrait Gallery (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), pp. 224–30 (Lashkar) and 196–201 (Jaysh). For the ISI’s reported complicity in the Mumbai attacks, see Jason Burke, “Pakistan Intelligence Services ‘Aided Mumbai Terror Attacks’,” The Guardian, 18 October 2010 (based primarily upon Indian interrogations of David Headley, a Lashkar operative and onetime U.S. government informant), available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ oct/18/pakistan-isi-mumbai-terror-attacks; and the series of reports on Pakistan’s terror connections on the Pro Publica website, www.propublica.org/topic/mumbai-terrorattacks. However, some Pakistani journalists have instead emphasized the role of rogue ISI operatives or pro-jihadist ex-military officers in the Mumbai (and other) attacks. Cf. Imtiaz Gul, The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), pp. 169–74; and Syed Saleem Shahzad, Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Ladin and 9/11 (London: Pluto Press, 2011), pp. 68–9, 94–8 (former army majors Harun Ashiq and Abdul Rahman, then collaborating with Brigade 313 and Lashkar). For the location of Usama b. Ladin’s hideout, the material found therein, and its problematic implications, see Adam Entous, Julian E. Barnes, and Matthew Rosenberg, “Signs Point to Pakistan Link,” Wall Street Journal (May 4, 2011), http://online. wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322804576303553679080310.html; and Carlotta Gall, Pir Zubair Shah, and Eric Schmitt, “Cellphone Offers Clues to Bin Ladin’s Pakistani Links,” New York Times, 23 June 2011 (discusses Bin Ladin’s links to the Harkat ul-Mujahidin). See, e.g., Ryan Clarke, Lashkar-i-Taiba: The Fallacy of Subservient Proxies and the Future of Islamist Terrorism in India (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute,

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91

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2010). The most extreme cases of jihadist blowback have involved terrorist attacks directed against the Pakistani military itself. Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 63–8; and Cooley, Unholy Wars, pp. 2, 5–7, 10. Perhaps the most reckless example, which President Reagan’s national security adviser William Casey instigated in the mid-1980s, was covert American support for terrorist actions carried out inside Soviet Central Asia by some of the CIA’s and ISI’s Afghan jihadist “allies.” Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, pp. 125–7; and Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (London: Leo Cooper, 1992), pp. 25–6, 189. Cf. John Prados, foreword to Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. xiii: “In this age of global concern with terrorism it is especially upsetting to discover that Western Europe and the United States collaborated in creating networks that took up terrorism. In the United States such nations are called ‘state sponsors’ and are the object of hostility and sanction. Can it be the United States itself, Britain, France, Italy, and others who should be on the list of state sponsors?” Indeed, “what is clear from the examination of state terrorism, mass killings, state repression, and human rights violations is that these actions have been committed by states which are rich and poor, revolutionary and reactionary, expansionist and reclusive, secular and religious, east and west, north and south. In short virtually all types of states have at some time engaged in or promoted behaviors which many neutral observers would characterize as terrorism, either within their own borders or in the wider international system.” See Michael Stohl, “The State as Terrorist: Insights and Implications,” Democracy and Security 2:1 (2006), p. 5. For these groups, see Amos, Palestinian Resistance, pp. 99–110; and Cobban, Palestine Liberation Organization, pp. 157–61, 163–4. See, in general, Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner, eds., Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). There are also several studies of individual death squads. See, e.g., Ignacio González Janzen, La Triple-A (Buenos Aires: Contrapunto, 1986), for the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA: Argentine Anticommunist Alliance); and Melchor Miralles and Ricardo Arques, Amedo: El estado contra ETA (Barcelona: Plaza & Janes/ Cambio 16, 1989), for the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL: Antiterrorist Liberation Groups) and their precursors in Spain. For more on provocateurs, see Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2000); and Nurit Schleifman, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The SR Party, 1902–14 (Basingstoke: St. Antony’s/Macmillan, 1988), pp. 113–17 (on provocateurs and terrorism). Gary Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant,” American Journal of Sociology 80:2 (September 1974), pp. 402–42; and Jean-Paul Brunet, La police de l’ombre: Indicateurs et provocateurs dans la France contemporaine (Paris: Seuil, 1990). See, in general, Philip Jenkins, Images of Terror: What We Can and Can’t Know about Terrorism (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2003), Chapter 5. Note, however, that nowadays conspiracy theorists of various types claim that virtually every major terrorist incident is a “false flag” operation. Hence one needs to be skeptical of all such claims in the absence of reliable evidence. Gianni Flamini, Il partito del golpe: Le strategie della tensione e del terrore dal primo centrosinistra organico al sequestro Moro (Ferrara: Bovolenta, 1981–5), especially volumes 1–3; Bale, “‘Black’ Terrorist International,” Chapters 2–4; Franco Ferraresi, Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), Chapters 4–6; Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991); Vittorio Borraccetti, ed., Eversione di destra, terrorismo, stragi: I fatti e l’intervento giudiziario (Milan: Angeli, 1986); and neo-fascist insider Vincenzo Vinciguerra, Ergastolo per la libertà:Verso la verità sulla strategia della tensione (Florence: Arnaud, 1989). See Philip Jenkins, “Under Two Flags: Provocation and Deception in European Terrorism,” Terrorism 11 (1989), pp. 275–89; Gilbert Dupont and Paul Ponsaers, Les tueurs: Six années

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96

97

98

99 100

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d’enquête (Anvers, Belgium: EPO, 1988); René Haquin, Des taupes dans l’extrême droite: La Sûreté de l’État et le WNP (Anvers, Belgium: EPO, n.d.); Walter de Bock et al., L’Enquête: 20 années de déstabilization en Belgique (Paris and Brussels: Longue Vue, 1989); and Danny Ilegems, Raf Sauviller, and Jan Willems, De Bende-Tapes (Louvain, Belgium: Kritak, 1990). See, respectively, (Brig. Gen.) Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1960), pp. 72–211; Laurent, L’orchestre noir, pp. 148–56; and Yoram Peri, Between Battles and Ballots: Israeli Military in Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 237–8. Pepe Díaz Herrero et al., “French Connection: El jefe de los terroristas libios es un agente francés,” Cambio 16 755 (May 19, 1986), pp. 36–9; and Miguel Angel Liso, “París confirma su infiltración en el terrorismo libio,” Cambio 16 756 (May 26, 1986), pp. 38–9 (incorrect heading). For neo-fascist infiltration of radical leftist groups in Italy, see Flamini, Partito del golpe, passim. The most extraordinary examples occurred in connection with a series of neo-fascist infiltrations of anarchist groups and terrorist attacks leading up to the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan. See the detailed recent analysis of Paolo Cucchiarelli, Il segreto di Piazza Fontana (Milan: Ponte alle Grazie, 2009). For another possible case, see Jeffrey M. Bale, “The May 1973 Attack on Milan Police Headquarters: Anarchist ‘Propaganda of the Deed’ or ‘False Flag’ Provocation?,” Terrorism and Political Violence 8:1 (Spring 1996), pp. 132–66. See, e.g., Habib Souaïdia, La sale guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), especially Chapters 5–7; and Mohammed Samraoui, Chronique des années de sang: Algérie: Comment les services secrets ont manipulé les groupes islamistes (Paris: Denoël, 2003). The units most often blamed for carrying out terrorist attacks that were attributed to the GIA or for covertly directing GIA terrorist cells were the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS: Intelligence and Security Department) and the Centre de Conduite et de Coordination des Actions de Lutte Anti-Subversive (CCC/ALAS: Center for the Conduct and Coordination of Activities in the Antisubversive Struggle). No one should conclude, however, that most of the horrendous atrocities and massacres attributed to the GIA, an extreme takfiri group (i.e., one that labels other, less militant Muslims as “infidels”), were actually false flag operations carried out by state security forces. Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, pp. 259–60. See also, respectively, Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire (London: Hutchinson, 1992); Yossi Melman, The Master Terrorist: The Story Behind Abu Nidal (New York: Adama Books, 1986); Michaël Prazan, Les fanatiques: Histoire de l’armée rouge japonaise (Paris: Seuil, 2002), Chapters 3–6; William Regis Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990); David Yallop, Tracking the Jackal: The Search for Carlos, the World’s Most Wanted Man (New York: Random House, 1993); and John Follain, Jackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the Jackal (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998). See the analysis in Bale, “‘Black’ Terrorist International,” pp. 568–71, in connection with the strategy of tension in Italy. Cf. Lionel Beehner, “America’s Useless Terrorism List,” Los Angeles Times, 20 October 2008; and Daniel L. Byman, The Changing Nature of State Sponsorship of Terrorism (Washington, DC: Saban Center Analysis Paper, Brookings Institution, May 2008), available at www.brookings.edu/papers/2008/05_terrorism_byman.aspx. I do not share Beehner’s view, however, that the focus should be on the “socioeconomic causes of why terrorism takes root in the first place,” since the historical record has not substantiated any of the structural theories about the so-called root causes of terrorism. There are no root causes that compel states or insurgent groups to adopt particular asymmetric military techniques – e.g., terrorism – anymore than there are root causes that force states to adopt particular conventional operational techniques, such as blitzkrieg tactics. Cf., e.g., Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Vintage, 2001); Mark Juergensmeyer, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Carolyn Nordstrom, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

2 SOUTH AFRICA’S PROJECT COAST “Death Squads,” covert state-sponsored poisonings, and the dangers of CBW proliferation1

Introduction On 11 April 2002, approximately seven months after the devastating terrorist attack launched by al-Qa‘ida operatives on United States soil, a South African judge acquitted Dr. Wouter Basson, the Project Officer for the secret South African chemical and biological weapons (CBW) program, Project Coast (later Project Jota), of all that remained of the 46 criminal charges originally filed against him by state prosecutors. Several years’ worth of controversial, high-profile hearings and judicial inquiries thereby ended with a whimper rather than a bang, to the astonishment of most observers.2 Unfortunately, the judge’s decision not only ignored masses of evidence that appeared to link Basson to kidnappings and assassinations of so-called “enemies of the state,” but it also left many crucial questions about the possible proliferation of dangerous Project Coast materials and know-how to various unsavory regimes and non-state actors unanswered.

History of the South African CBW program Chemical warfare activities in South Africa before Project Coast South Africa’s chemical industry was established at the end of the nineteenth century, but the country’s leaders did not become aware of the importance of CW until they observed the battlefield effects of the chemical agents deployed by the Germans and other parties during World War I. The potential future importance of CW was further recognized when the Italians carried out mustard agent attacks in Ethiopia in 1936, and soon after the outbreak of the Second World War the Jan Smuts government agreed to assist the British Ministry of

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Supply in producing phosgene and mustard. These agents were manufactured by South Africa at the Klipfontein factory near Pretoria and the Firgrove factory in the Cape Province, which employed a total of 1,697 persons and were capable of producing 250 tons of different chemical substances each month. In July 1945 both of these factories were shut down – or, according to other accounts, redirected to the production of insecticides – and their stocks of chemicals were destroyed. Although the documentation concerning these projects was retained, for the next fifteen years there is no evidence that South Africa was involved in the production of CW agents.3 In 1960 a company named Mechem was established as the Chemical Defence Unit (CDU) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and thereafter operated under the direction of Dr. J. P. De Villiers and the bureaucratic aegis of the Department of Trade and Industry. Although it was contracted solely by the South African Defence Force (SADF) to investigate chemical compounds and monitor the CW and BW threat to South Africa, the CSIR’s policy of not working with lethal agents restricted Mechem’s production to compounds such as teargas and CX (phosgene oxide) powder used for tracking. CS (2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, one main type of tear gas) was then being manufactured at African Explosives and Chemical Industries (AECI) for the state Armaments Corporation of South Africa (ARMSCOR), after which it was added to pyrotechnic smoke munitions, grenades, and cartridges and at times used to suppress riots; and during this period three other chemicals were produced and tested at Mechem for use as Riot Control Agents: CN (chloracetophenone), DM (adamsite), and CR (dibenzoxazepine). In 1961, a Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) Defence School was established in Cape Town, but until the late 1980s the training there was restricted to the use of gas masks and tear gas. Hence no large-scale production of CW agents was undertaken.4 However, during this period De Villiers prepared several reports which revealed that he and some of his colleagues were developing a growing interest in the potential value of offensive CW usage. In one undated document, he argued that although South Africa was not threatened by CW attack from abroad, chemical weapons could nonetheless be useful for the SADF. In a 12 July 1977 report, he expanded upon that view by noting that the “treatment of terrorist bases with a non-persistent, non-lethal agent just before a security force attack can affect both the terrorists’ ability to defend themselves and their ability to escape.”5 In a collective 1977 report on CBW commissioned by the South African government, he declared that members of the family of lethal fluoroacetates, which are stable, odorless, and colorless, easily made, commercially available as rodenticides, and have delayed symptoms, were especially well-suited for use by enemy “terrorists and saboteurs” to poison water supplies. This statement takes on a somewhat more ominous connotation when one considers that these very tactics were then being employed by the Rhodesian security forces to fight guerrillas, something De Villiers may have been aware of. Finally, in his chapter on CBW from a 1970s SADF manual, he suggested that it might be advantageous to use lethal chemical agents

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against internal enemies, since in his view this was not explicitly forbidden by the 1925 Geneva Protocols. Moreover, the CDU proved to be an ideal recruiting ground for the SADF when the need for more specialized CW services was recognized. In the early 1970s Dr. Jan Coetzee, head of CDU’s Department of Special Equipment, was personally recruited by SADF chief General Magnus Malan to head the Defence Research Institute, after which Coetzee worked out of ARMSCOR’s premises for a time. He was instructed to develop special counterintelligence equipment for the Special Operations Group (SOG) of the SADF, the forerunner of the Special Forces (SF). Eventually, procurement problems caused Prime Minister P. W. Botha to personally authorize the establishment of a new ARMSCOR subsidiary headed by Coetzee, Elektroniks, Meganies, Landbou en Chemies (EMLC: Electronic, Mechanical, Agricultural, and Chemical), which in August 1980 moved to SF headquarters at Speskop.6 In the mid-1980s, the chemical component of EMLC was transferred to the new Midrand facility of Delta G Scientific.

Biological warfare activities in South Africa before Project Coast There is no evidence that South Africa developed or produced BW agents of any type prior to the establishment of Project Coast, but by the early 1980s advanced research on many virulent biological pathogens had already been carried out for decades at several of the nation’s leading medical, veterinary, and agricultural facilities.7 This is hardly surprising, given the large number of diseases endemic to the country and the substantial role played by diverse animals and plants in South Africa’s economy. Apart from clinical work performed at hospitals and animal facilities to treat or quarantine disease-stricken persons and animals, research on various lethal bacteria was carried out at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute and the H. A. Grové Research Centre at the University of Pretoria, whereas dangerous viruses were studied at the National Institute for Virology, the only facility in South Africa that contained a P-4 safety level biological laboratory.8 Some of the scientists employed at these facilities were later recruited to work at the principal Coast BW facility, Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL), and a few of these men later testified that they had earlier done contract research for the SADF. Perhaps the most noteworthy case is that of Dr. Daan Goosen, who was working on a snake venom project for the South African Army at the H. A. Grové Centre when he was approached by Basson in 1983 and asked to turn over some mamba toxin so that a security threat could be eliminated.9 In addition to the legitimate research conducted in South Africa to facilitate the management of natural outbreaks of diseases caused by biological agents, as previously noted, De Villiers’ Chemical Defence Unit was charged with monitoring the BW as well as the CW threat to South Africa. Although its director had been one of the first government scientists to cultivate a keen interest in the offensive potential of CW agents, there are no indications that the CDU carried out research on BW agents.10

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The Rhodesian CBW program and its influence on South Africa The Rhodesian Civil War was not the first conflict in Africa in which poisons were used as weapons of war, since as early as the 1960s the Portuguese army reportedly deployed defoliants and napalm, poisoned wells and water-holes, and drugged prisoners and threw them out of airplanes in their efforts to counter the actions of Angolan (and possibly also Mozambican) guerrillas.11 However, the Rhodesian security forces used chemical and biological agents in some novel ways, and exerted a much more direct influence on their South African counterparts. Faced with a deteriorating security situation as the 1970s wore on, Rhodesian authorities resorted to increasingly extreme counterinsurgency measures to resist nationalist guerrillas, including “pseudo-operations,” psychological warfare, covert executions, and the deployment of ingenious booby traps and toxic substances.12 On the basis of insider accounts, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the Rhodesians employed: 1 2

poisonous chemicals to impregnate clothing, canned food, drinks, and aspirin; and lethal biological agents such as cholera bacteria and anthrax bacteria to contaminate water supplies and farmland.13

Although one former member of the Special Branch of the Rhodesian national police – a force that was still designated, quaintly, as the British South Africa Police (BSAP) – claimed that he and his colleagues were aware of the use of poisons as early as 1973, the first clear evidence of this dates from 1975 or 1976, when the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) apparently asked doctors and chemists from the University of Rhodesia to identify and test a range of chemical and biological agents that could be used as a “fear factor” in the war against nationalist guerrillas.14 Professor Robert Symington, head of the clinical program in the university’s Anatomy Department, then recruited several colleagues and students to carry out this research.15 According to former Officer Commanding Counter Terrorist Operations Michael J. McGuinness, the most senior Special Branch officer seconded to the CIO and the man who oversaw the CW program and other covert operations launched from the Selous Scouts fort at Bindura, 25-gallon drums of foul-smelling liquid were delivered to the base a dozen or so times in 1977. The chemicals were then poured into large sheets of tin and dried in the sun. When the liquid had dried, the leftover flakes were scooped up and pounded in a mortar with a pestle. The resulting powder was then brushed onto stocks of denim clothing favored by the guerrillas, mixed into processed meat such as bully beef before being repacked in new cans, or injected into bottles of alcohol with a micro-needle.16 Moreover, several prisoners were forcibly brought to the fort and allegedly used as “human guinea pigs” to test the effects of the poisons, after which their bodies were secretly disposed of. Other accounts indicate that denim clothing was also brought to the André Rabie barracks of the Selous Scouts, where it was soaked in vats of odorless

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and colorless liquid chemicals.17 The distribution of the contaminated items was generally organized by the Projects Section of the Special Branch and delivered by uniformed policemen to agents and intermediaries willing to sell them to the guerrillas, but some bottles of poisoned alcohol were instead disseminated by the Selous Scouts.18 Secret Special Branch documents made available by Peter Stiff confirm the distribution of various poisoned items, and reveal that at least 800 people died after absorbing the poison through their soft body tissues. Indeed, the CW program was terminated by police commissioner Peter Allum after the Special Branch commander learned of the deaths of innocent rural villagers to whom some of the poisoned clothes had been sold by unscrupulous local agents, agents who had been recruited by the Selous Scouts and Special Branch and been paid a 1,000 Zimbabwean dollar bonus for each “confirmed” guerrilla death.19 The Rhodesians also made several attempts to disseminate lethal BW agents, in particular Vibrio cholerae and Bacillus anthracis. McGuinness claimed that two unsuccessful efforts were made by the Selous Scouts to contaminate the Ruhenya River in northeastern Rhodesia with cholera bacteria. A former Rhodesian intelligence officer who remained in Zimbabwe after the country’s independence stated that many other attempts to deploy cholera bacteria were made by the Rhodesian security forces, especially in order to pollute water sources close to guerrilla camps inside neighboring Mozambique. He admitted, however, that “this tactic was said to be of very limited use due to the quick dispersal of the bacteria.” As for anthrax, this same source said that anthrax spores were “used in an experimental role in the Gutu, Chilimanzi, Masvingo, and Mberengwa areas . . . to kill off the cattle of tribesmen,” harmful incidents that were then attributed by Rhodesian Army psychological operations officers to infiltrating guerrillas. For his part, McGuinness said he was surprised to learn from some of his colleagues that anthrax bacteria had been disseminated on at least one occasion. The Selous Scouts had originally been asked to carry out the task, but their commander Lieutenant-Colonel Ron Reid-Daly had refused because he thought it would be too risky for his men. In the end, members of the Rhodesian Special Air Service (SAS) regiment delivered the anthrax bacteria by dropping it from an aircraft near Plumtree, on the Botswana border.20 Even today, anthrax is only endemic to Matabeleland, where Plumtree is located. For this and other reasons, Dr. Meryl Nass’ argument that the Zimbabwean “anthrax epizootic” of 1979 and 1980 might also be attributable to intentional human dissemination must at least be seriously considered.21 Finally, in 1979 the CIO allegedly activated a plan to assassinate either Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) leader Robert Mugabe or Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) leader Joshua Nkomo in London, and then recruited an expatriate former British SAS member nicknamed “Taffy” to do the job. After performing successful tests on dogs, he opted to use a rifle to shoot Mugabe with a dum dum bullet into which ricin toxin was inserted, but the operation was aborted at the last minute.22 Many of the CW and BW tactics employed by the Rhodesian security services were later emulated by their South African counterparts. This is mainly

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attributable to two factors. First, operatives from the SADF, the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) and its National Intelligence Service (NIS) successor, and especially the South African Police (SAP) were sent to Rhodesia to acquire firsthand counterinsurgency experience, where some received direct training from special operations units such as the Selous Scouts or the SAS, possibly in exchange for helping train the Rhodesians in mine-laying and intelligence work.23 In such a collaborative context, it is almost inconceivable that scuttlebutt about some of the covert Rhodesian CW and BW operations did not reach the ears of their South African guests. Moreover, there are indications that South African scientists, soldiers, and policemen participated directly in such operations. According to former African National Congress (ANC) guerrilla Jeremy Brickhill, South African forensic experts and intelligence personnel had access to the most secret Rhodesian bases and likely played some role in the development of that country’s CBW agents, including organophosphates, thallium, warfarin (an anticoagulant rodenticide), anthrax bacteria, and other unspecified bacteriological agents.24 A Dutch anti-apartheid activist named Klaas de Jonge claimed that various “dirty tricks” poisoning operations were carried out in Rhodesia in the mid- to late 1970s under the rubric of “Operation Alcora,” a joint Portuguese, Rhodesian, and South African effort. In the course of this operation, “sophisticated” chemical weapons developed at the SAP Forensic Sciences Laboratory on Visagie Street, which was at that time headed by Major-General Lothar Neethling, were allegedly deployed.25 Also, a former Rhodesian Army colonel named Lionel Dyck insisted that members of South African military intelligence were directly involved in the contamination of rivers with cholera bacteria during the Rhodesian civil war.26 Although these specific statements have not yet been substantiated, a secret August 1977 Special Branch report may lend them some credence by noting that “there is a shortage of necessary ingredients that are to be obtained from South Africa within the next two weeks.”27 Second, on the eve of Zimbabwe’s independence, many frustrated and soon-tobe-unemployed Rhodesian special operations personnel left their former homeland and moved to South Africa to continue their fight against “terrorists.” Under the rubric of “Operation Winter,” Rhodesian special forces assets may have been covertly transferred en masse across the border. This operation was allegedly carried out with the connivance of British government ministers in Rhodesia, and effectuated in part by British and American transport planes. Among these assets were members of the Selous Scouts, the SAS, and the CIO, as well as their black collaborators and “the poisoners and their poisons.”28 Whether or not such a mass covert transfer of assets took place, there is no doubt that many former Rhodesian special operators or scientists – e.g., Fritz Loots, Philip Morgan, and perhaps even Robert Symington – were subsequently incorporated directly into compatible South African units or institutions.29 Hence there seem to have been various intimate, organic links between the Rhodesian and South African CBW programs, even though the precise role that Rhodesians may have played in the scientific or operational orientation of Project Coast remains to be clarified.

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The origins and purposes of Project Coast As the 1970s wore on, a few South African officials expressed more and more interest in the development of a CBW program. Other than the De Villiers reports cited previously, which generally concluded that South Africa was not directly threatened by a CBW attack but that it might be useful for the nation to develop CW agents, few if any contemporary SADF documents provide a clear and explicit CBW threat analysis during the period prior to the establishment of Project Coast. Although it is likely that the looming collapse of Rhodesia and the escalation of the Angolan conflict between 1978 and 1980 altered SADF threat perceptions, most of the reports concerning this subject were prepared much later by Wouter Basson and his associates in order to justify the program’s initiation retrospectively. The official line was that the program was created entirely for defensive purposes, since Marxist Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA: Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and Cuban forces in Angola were reportedly equipped for and perhaps planning to use – if they were not already using – chemical agents against the SADF.30 It is true that Soviet-made vehicles used by Cuban forces that were captured in Angola were outfitted with chemical air filters, CW antidotes, and gas masks, and that rumors abounded about supposed MPLA use of CW agents against the troops of South Africa’s allies, the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA: National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), but this equipment was standard issue and the allegations about communist CW usage were never actually confirmed. Nevertheless, this provided the rationale, whether militarily justifiable or merely convenient, for the establishment of Coast. If Project Coast had really been initiated primarily in order to provide defensive CBW protection to SADF troops and their allies, all along its primary focus should have been on the purchase or manufacture of protective clothing and on the training of fighting troops to defend against CBW attacks. Yet this was never the case. According to Dr. Brian Davey, the scientist responsible for developing these defensive measures, even these most basic steps only began to be taken in 1986, and it was not until 1988 that the actual training of SADF troops to respond to CW commenced. This assessment is confirmed by several soldiers who underwent the training. Willem Steenkamp said that at an SADF camp he and other soldiers attended lectures and tried on NBC suits, which almost immediately caused them to faint in the hot African sun, but was told afterward that the lecture was merely a propaganda exercise designed to convince their Angolan enemies that the SADF was prepared for a CW attack. According to Danie Du Toit, the CW protection courses were only offered to select groups, not the SADF in general. At the time of “Operation Modular” in Angola in 1987, he said there were no NBC suits available to SADF troops in the field. Instead, the troops were told that in the event of a CW attack they should dig a foxhole, crawl in, and cover themselves with their ponchos, a wholly inadequate response. Even specialized medical units only had a total of ten to twenty NBC suits at their disposal.31 This is all the more astonishing given that a succession of companies owned by bioengineer Jan Lourens had by then succeeded

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in designing and manufacturing some of the world’s best protective CBW equipment and clothing, stocks of which were already in great demand overseas. This gear had been successfully tested in the field using actual CBW agents rather than simulants, yet virtually none of it was being supplied to South African troops or their allies operating in neighboring states.32 As Chandré Gould and Peter Folb rightly emphasize, such a lackluster reaction suggests that the SADF did not take the purported communist CBW threat all that seriously. Moreover, from the outset the South African CBW program also had offensive features and capabilities. This should come as no real surprise. The apartheid-era South African government viewed itself as the target of a “total onslaught” by Soviet-backed Marxist guerrillas in neighboring states and black nationalists at home, and to meet this all-encompassing “red-black danger” it was apparently willing to use almost any means at its disposal to defend itself.33 It was in this highly charged political and military context, which precipitated a “bunker” or “laager” mentality, that Project Coast was secretly initiated in 1981 under the aegis of the SADF Special Forces (SF). In a top secret November 1989 military report prepared by Basson on the privatization of Project Coast, he explicitly acknowledged the many offensive dimensions of the program. Among other things, he said that it was designed “To conduct research with regard to basic aspects of chemical warfare (offensive) . . . To conduct research with regard to basic aspects of biological warfare (offensive) . . . To conduct research with regard to covert as well as conventional [delivery] systems . . . To establish an industrial capacity with regard to the production of offensive and defensive CBW equipment . . . [and] To give operational and technical CBW support (offensive and defensive).”34 Note that these particular statements directly contradict his public testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and at his trial, during which he repeatedly stated that the project was defensive in orientation and denied that it had sponsored any offensive CBW actions. They also confirm the testimony of the many scientists who actually carried out research, testing, and production activities at the CW and BW facilities. Even though most of them had been recruited with the understanding that Coast was a defensive program, it soon became clear to them that it was in large part offensive.35 Furthermore, there were various other covert SADF projects that focused exclusively on defensive CBW procurement and preparation, such as Project Academic, Project Galvanise, and Project Fargo. In early 1981 Defence Minister Constand Viljoen, who was reportedly very concerned about the threat posed by potential Cuban use of CW, ordered Basson to travel abroad and covertly collect information about Western CBW programs that might be used as a model for South Africa’s own program. Basson was also instructed to make contact with people who could provide him with information on East Bloc programs. To this end he embarked on an international fact-finding mission, and in May 1981 attended an international CBW conference in San Antonio, Texas, and visited the Army Chemical School in Taiwan. In August 1981, after Basson had reported back to the Defence Command Council, Viljoen allocated funds for the completion of a feasibility study on the establishment of a South

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African CBW program. Toward the end of 1981, Defence Minister Magnus Malan approved the idea and authorized the release of funding for such a program.36 Thus was born Project Coast, for which Basson was at once appointed Project Officer. At the time he was summoned by Viljoen and asked to gather CBW information, Wouter Basson was a brilliant young SADF medical officer specializing in internal medicine who was working at 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria. In March 1981 he was appointed as a specialist advisor at SADF headquarters and as Project Officer for Special Projects of the Army Surgeon-General, but was also seconded to SF headquarters. There he worked under the operational command of the Commanding Officer SF, who henceforth oversaw all of his military activities. One of his appointed tasks there was to head the Special Operations (SO) unit of the South African Medical Services (SAMS), an elite medical team that provided health-related logistical support and hands-on medical treatment to SF, 1 Parachute Battalion (Parabat), SAP, and NIS elements operating clandestinely in the field.37 Members of the SO themselves received specialized military training of the type generally reserved for special operations personnel, including parachute, diving, and survival training. In January 1985 this SO unit was officially renamed 7 Medical Battalion Group, though Basson remained its commander. Not coincidentally, most of the individuals who later held senior positions in the Coast-related SADF front companies and in affiliated private companies dependent upon SADF contracts had started out as trusted members of the SO unit of SAMS. This indicates, as Gould and Folb point out, that in general the entire project was “built on personal relationships and informal networks.”38

The overall organization and command structure of Project Coast The SADF originally asked ARMSCOR to assist them in developing the South African CBW program, but ARMSCOR officials – who already had exclusive control over the country’s nuclear program – refused to do so unless they were given full control. In the end the authorities decided to place the program solely under the control of the SADF. After returning from his travels overseas Basson had informed members of the Defence Command Council that foreign CBW programs utilized ostensibly “civilian” front companies to conduct all offensive R&D up to the point of actual weaponization. Although this claim was not entirely accurate, the SADF nonetheless decided to create new front companies rather than use its own components or the existing structures under its control.39 Project Coast, like the unspecified foreign CBW programs upon which it was supposedly modeled, included both a chemical weapons (CW) component and a biological weapons (BW) component. In contrast to the CBW programs in certain other countries, however, the chemical and biological components were not completely separate in South Africa. Not only did they both have the same official chain of command, the same Project Officer, and integrated secret funding mechanisms, but the actual testing of certain chemical agents was sometimes carried out at the principal BW facility, Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL), rather than at the

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facilities responsible for CW. Likewise the primary CW facility, Delta G Scientific (Delta G), sometimes provided assistance with RRL’s biochemistry projects.40 Both the CW and BW programs in South Africa consisted of one principal production facility and a variety of other facilities that, for administrative, security, or technical reasons, carried out specialized research, testing, or production tasks. In theory, the apex of the official chain of command for both the CW and BW components of Project Coast was the President of the Republic himself (P. W. Botha), who under the militarized National Security Management System (NSMS) established in August 1979 exercised his authority primarily through the State Security Council (SSC) rather than the Cabinet. Within this elaborate securityoriented and largely covert power structure, the SADF coordinated the activities of the various armed services (Army, Air Force, Navy, and, later, both SAMS and the SF) through the Defence Command Council.41 However, although administratively subordinate to this latter body, the entity that officially managed Project Coast was known as the Coordinating Management Committee (CMC), which typically met two to four times per year and normally comprised the Army Surgeon-General (who served as its titular chair and was also the head of SAMS), the SADF chief, the Chief of Staff (COS) Intelligence, the COS Finance, representatives from ARMSCOR, personnel from the Auditor-General’s office, and Project Officer Basson, who served as CMC secretary. Directly under the auspices of the CMC, three “work groups” were supposedly formed to deal with specialized matters on a regular basis. The Technical Work Group, which was headed by Basson and included a rotating group of directors and leading scientists from the front companies, performed scientific research planning for each company. The Financial Work Group, which included the Surgeon-General and the COS Finance, was responsible for budgetary planning and controlled the movement of money through various front companies so as to hide the SADF’s role. The Security Work Group, which consisted of the COS Intelligence and other members of the intelligence community, handled security arrangements in order to assure the secrecy of the project.42 It may be, however, that these “work groups” were little more than ad hoc collections of people brought together as needed to deal with particular issues that affected their work, since several senior scientists and officials later testified that they were unaware of their very existence. Operating under the control and direction of these “work groups,” at least in theory, was Basson. As Project Officer, his appointed task was to act as an intermediary between the CMC and the directors and scientists at the various CBW facilities. Although Basson modestly claimed that his function was to deal with the practical aspects of the project in accordance with the “strategic guidelines” provided by the CMC and its “work groups,” and always insisted that he did not have a “free hand,” his nominal superiors all concur that he personally supervised or managed the day-to-day affairs of the project, operated with a very high degree of autonomy and independence, and provided the CMC with the bulk of the crucial scientific and operational information that its members needed to make important managerial decisions, including the authorization of requested project expenditures.43 In

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effect, the CMC seems to have become dependent upon Basson for its functioning, rather than the other way around. By the mid-1990s, when it became apparent that some portion of the funds requested by Basson had been used for his own personal gain rather than legitimate project needs, several of Basson’s erstwhile supervisors complained that all along he had misled them or kept them in the dark about what he was really doing. Indeed, Project Coast may well have had some sort of parallel, unofficial command structure that operated alongside the official CMC chain of command. Former Army Surgeon-General Niel Knobel claimed that Basson was often either doing things on his own initiative or, as Basson himself later acknowledged, being given operational instructions directly by other parties, including the Defence Minister, the head of the SADF, the Commanding Officer of the SF, the COS Intelligence, the Director-General of the NIS, the Commissioner of the SAP, and possibly also members of the SSC or Cabinet who he treated medically. After receiving at least some of his orders from these powerful figures, above all SADF generals A. J. “Kat” Liebenberg and Magnus Malan, Basson then passed instructions on – always verbally – to Project Coast scientists and select members of covert SADF or SAP units with a “need to know,” frequently without informing his nominal superiors on the CMC.44 As previously mentioned in section 3, several of the directors and scientists employed at BW or CW facilities and other SADF front companies were formerly members of 7 Medical Battalion Group or its SO predecessor, and the covert operatives with whom Basson collaborated were almost all ex-members of the SF or various other South African and Rhodesian counterinsurgency and special operations units. Perhaps it was just such a parallel command structure, to which Basson clearly belonged, that the NIS referred to as the Binnekring (“Inner Circle”) in its December 1992 report on illegal SADF activities.45

South African chemical warfare facilities The CW program was centered at one large biochemical research and production facility, Delta G Scientific, but it also relied upon the services of several other research facilities and laboratories in order to conduct additional testing or carry out the actual weaponization of various chemical substances. Delta G was a large, highly sophisticated CW research and production facility that cost approximately 30 million rand to build and equip. Originally, some of its functions had been performed at the smaller technical laboratories located at SF headquarters, in particular those operated by the aforementioned entity known as EMLC, which was officially designed to provide the SF with a defensive CBW capability and other specialized equipment. In April 1982, Delta G was established to take over EMLC’s CW tasks. It was originally located in the Pretoria suburb of Weldegraan, but in 1985 or 1986 the company moved to new facilities on the corner of George and Old Pretoria roads in Midrand, north of Johannesburg. Eventually, it consisted of two manufacturing plants, a pilot or pre-production plant, a large laboratory complex, workshops, and administrative offices.

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Though ostensibly a private company that did commercial contract work for industry, a “cover” which facilitated its recruitment of top scientists and its acquisition of materials overseas, Delta G was in fact an SADF front company that worked primarily on “hard” (military) projects rather than “soft” (commercial) or “in-house” (researcher-generated) projects. At its height Delta-G’s staff numbered around 120, most of whom either worked in production or in the Research Unit headed by Dr. Gert Lourens, which was itself divided into several scientific divisions – including the Biochemical Division under Dr. Hennie Jordaan. These essential units were supported logistically by administrative, financial, and security departments. The company’s managing director was Dr. Willie Basson (who was replaced in 1985 by Dr. Philip Mijburgh, the nephew of General Magnus Malan), its technical director was Dr. Gerrie Rall, its marketing director was Barry Pithy, and its administrative director was Dr. André Redelinghuys. Although Delta G had the ability to make virtually any synthetic chemical, its efforts were focused on various military projects geared toward the preservation of public order: 1 2 3 4

the large-scale production of chemical Riot Control Agents, including irritants such as CS and CR, and incapacitants; the relatively small-scale production of various illegal mind-altering narcotics in an effort to develop and test their potential viability as “calmatives”; a peptide synthesis program, headed by Dr. Lucia Steenkamp, one of whose goals was apparently to enhance the physiological effects of bioregulators; and a CW research and analysis program, which manufactured small quantities of toxic substances on demand for various purposes.46

There was no actual weaponization of chemical crowd control agents at Delta G itself – this was handled by other companies to which Delta G’s materials were shipped, such as Swartklip Products – but various dangerous chemicals were acquired, researched, and/or prepared by scientists working for Gert Lourens, whose own instructions came directly from Basson or Mijburgh. Among these were CW agents like BZ and mustard, and a wide array of other toxic chemicals. Some of Delta G’s riot control products were then apparently tested at the pyrotechnical labs at SF headquarters, the SAP’s Forensic Sciences Laboratory, or other facilities at various state companies, semi-state companies, private companies, and universities. These latter included the defensive CBW company Systems Research and Development (whose purely protective components were later expanded, relocated, and renamed Protechnik) and the weapons manufacturer Swartklip, an ARMSCOR subsidiary. In the midst of a privatization phase in the early 1990s, Delta G was briefly sold by its shareholders back to the government armaments company ARMSCOR before being acquired by the chemical conglomerates Sentrachem Ltd and Dow Chemical. A handful of key Delta G personnel, in particular managing director Mijburgh, seem to have profited considerably from this privatization scheme.

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South African biological warfare facilities The BW program was also centered at one large research, development, and production facility, Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, and it too tapped the resources of several commercial firms, university laboratories, and even zoos in order to effectuate supplementary research and testing. RRL was a large, highly sophisticated BW research, testing, and production facility that cost approximately 40 million rand to build and equip and 10 million rand per annum to operate. It was built specifically for this purpose on a farm 12–15 km north of Pretoria, near the Roodeplaat Dam, beginning in November 1983. By 1985 it consisted of a farmhouse, a small threeor four-room lab complex, and some animal cages, but it was thereafter expanded in phases to include a restricted BSL-3 basement Compression Lab and a security dog-breeding subsidiary (Roodeplaat Breeding Enterprises). There were also plans to build a BSL-4 facility further north. Like Delta G, RRL was an SADF front company that worked primarily on military projects and only rarely (on average, about 10% of the time) on commercial or “in-house” projects. At its height RRL’s staff numbered around seventy, including forty scientists and technicians, and was divided into several scientific departments – Toxicology, Molecular Biology, Organic Chemistry, Physiology, Microbiology, an Animal Unit, etc. – that were supported logistically by administrative, financial, and security departments. Its managing director was Dr. Daan Goosen (who was replaced in 1986 by Wynand Swanepoel), its R&D director was Dr. André Immelman, its Animal Laboratory Services director was Dr. Schalk van Rensburg, and its administrative director was David Sparmer. Although RRL also did beneficial work on bovine vaccines, its efforts were focused on three types of military projects: 1 2

3

a toxin R&D program headed by Immelman, whose purpose was to develop and test lethal BW and CW agents that were untraceable; a fertility program, headed by Dr. Riana Borman, one of whose primary purposes may have been – though this is bitterly debated, even by insiders – to limit the growth of the black population; and a BW program linked to new developments in the genetic engineering field, headed by Dr. Mike Odendaal, whose aim was to research and develop antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogens by combining different biological agents.47

Although there was no large-scale production or weaponization of offensive BW agents at RRL, a plethora of toxic biological substances were acquired, tested, and/ or prepared by scientists working for Immelman, whose own instructions came directly from Basson. Among these were BW agents like anthrax bacterium, botulinum toxin, brucella bacterium, cholera bacterium, Clostridium perfringens, Escheria coli, plague bacterium, salmonella bacterium, HIV-infected blood, and snake venom, as well as CW nerve and blister agents and a wide array of other highly toxic chemicals. Some of these products may have then been tested at various other

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facilities. After being privatized for a brief period in the early 1990s, the company was sold by its shareholders back to the government and then liquidated. As with Delta G, a handful of key RRL personnel profited enormously from this privatization scheme, and several eventually found jobs at other biological or veterinary research facilities.

Project Coast financing and expenses The SADF provided funding to the Project Coast front companies through various “private” bank accounts that had been set up explicitly for such purposes. The COS Finance was primarily responsible for arranging the details of the transfer of funds after the requested amounts were approved by the CMC. Most of the funds were transferred from the SADF’s Secret Defence Fund directly to Infladel, another SADF front company that in addition to disbursing funds was responsible for the technical information system, the operational coordination of the program, and the security and safety systems of Delta G and RRL. In 1990 Infladel was dissolved and its functions were transferred to two new companies, Sefmed Information Services and D. John Truter Financial Consultants.48 According to Hennie Bruwer, the Office of Serious Economic Offenses (OSEO) auditor who conducted a tenyear investigation of Basson’s financial transactions, a total of around 418 million rand were allocated to the CBW program in the period between 1 April 1983 and 28 February 1992. From 1 March 1987 to 28 February 1993, the period covered by the Basson indictment, the project had access to nearly 340 million rand, of which 37 million rand were allegedly misappropriated by Basson and his collaborators.49 These individuals set up an elaborate network of front companies and secret accounts in various parts of the world, through which SADF money could be funneled to procure embargoed materials, set up businesses, pay foreign collaborators, and bribe foreign officials in order to facilitate the transfer of materials and equipment to South Africa. All in all, Project Coast cost the SADF a total of 418,226,509 rand, of which 98,432,657 were expended on RRL and 127,467,406 were expended on Delta G.50

Classical chemical weapons use by South Africa Although Project Coast did not sponsor any large-scale production or weaponization of standard chemical warfare agents, small quantities of such agents were produced at both RRL and Systems Research and Development (SRD), a separate company established in part to test CBW protective gear. These included blister agents like mustard, nerve agents like tabun, sarin, and VX, and the military grade psychoincapacitant BZ.51 Dr. Stiaan Wandrag of RRL later testified that his principal task was to develop CBW antidotes, ostensibly for the protection of VIPs, security force members, and South African agents who might be exposed to CW and BW agents, and that this work was carried out in the basement Compression Lab at RRL. Nevertheless, in declaring that all research on lethal CBW agents

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intended for conventional weapons delivery had been concluded by 1986 or 1987, Basson tacitly acknowledged that early on the South Africans may have considered deploying CW and BW agents as offensive battlefield weapons.52 Indeed, on one later occasion this may have actually been done. In January 1992 the SADF reportedly tested an unspecified CW agent – possibly BZ – by bombing Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO: Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) troops from a pilotless observer aircraft near Ngungwe, killing at least five and injuring several more. Although a Basson-led SAMS team then “investigated” the incident and the SADF sought to blame the African National Congress (ANC) for sponsoring this CW attack, a top secret December 1992 NIS report concluded that the SADF had itself carried it out. Shortly thereafter, both the US and British governments issued a diplomatic protest (démarche) to South Africa, which suggests that they too believed that the SADF was responsible.53 However, despite allegations that the South African military carried out other CW attacks against enemy troops in neighboring “frontline” states, e.g., during their successful 1978 raid on Cassinga, there is no definitive evidence that chemical weapons were used in an offensive capacity on these occasions.

Classical biological weapons use by South Africa Although Project Coast did not sponsor any large-scale production or weaponization of standard biological warfare agents, several such agents were produced and tested at RRL. These included all of the forty-five local strains of anthrax bacteria, Brucella maletensis, all four types of Clostridium botulinum, cholera bacteria, and Yersinia enterocolitica and/or Y. pestis.54 Given the Rhodesian precedent, it is perhaps not surprising – despite Basson’s repeated denials – that the South African security forces were themselves later accused of participating in offensive BW attacks. First, some observers have attributed the so-called “anthrax epizootic” that broke out in various areas of Zimbabwe in 1979 and 1980 – prior, it should be noted, to the official establishment of Project Coast – to the intentional dissemination of B. anthracis by Rhodesian and/or South African special operations personnel. However, teams of international scientists who subsequently investigated the incident were unable to determine whether this outbreak was natural or man-made.55 Second, in August of 1989 Basson reportedly instructed RRL’s R&D director André Immelman to provide twenty-two bottles of V. cholerae to Dr. R. J. Botha, at the time a medical coordinator of the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a covert SF assassination unit. CCB deputy chief Joe Verster then provided four of those bottles to regional CCB commander Pieter Botes, who testified that he directed his subordinates Charlie Krause and José Daniels to dump the contents of two of them into the water supply at the Southwest Africa Peoples Organisation (SWAPO) refugee camp outside Windhoek in Namibia. In the end, this operation failed to produce the desired contamination effect because of the high chlorine content of the water.56 There are no other indications that biological weapons were used by South Africa in offensive actions of this type.

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The covert “Poison Assassination” program The most characteristic feature of the South African CBW program was undoubtedly the development, testing, and utilization of a wide array of hard-to-trace toxic agents to assassinate “enemies of the state.”57 As insider testimony and the notorious RRL “sales list” of 1989 (TRC document 52) indicate, several of the highly toxic substances produced at both Delta G and RRL were actually deployed by clandestine SADF and SAP “death squads,” above all the SF’s CCB and the SAP Security Branch’s C[ounterinsurgency]1 section (later renamed C10) housed at the Vlakplaas base, in covert assassination operations.58 In this context it should again be pointed out that members of various elite Rhodesian counterinsurgency units that had previously deployed toxic chemicals or biological agents against guerrillas during the Rhodesian civil war had thereafter been incorporated into SADF special operations units (like the SF and its D[elta]40 and Barnacle “hit teams,” the predecessors of the CCB) or the SAP’s counterinsurgency forces (like the Koevoet [“Crowbar”] unit).59 There is no doubt whatsoever that high-ranking officers within the SADF and SAP and other “securocrats” within the government were generally aware of these activities, many of which they in fact authorized. As early as 1969, a special unit known as the Z Squad had been set up within BOSS, a secret service that had been created by General H. J. van den Bergh and staffed largely with personnel from the SAP Security Branch, to eliminate both enemies of the state and security risks. As for the SADF, it was under the rubric of a plan initiated in 1979 and codenamed “Operation Dual” that a large number of targeted individuals – guerrillas in neighboring countries, troublesome prisoners, untrustworthy members of the security forces, or activists in the ANC and other South African opposition groups – first began to be murdered in this fashion, and those who did not actually die sometimes suffered terrible illnesses or injuries. The primary SADF formation that carried out these “Dual” actions was the aforementioned Barnacle unit. Documents demonstrate that this assassination program was secretly authorized by former Selous Scout Fritz Loots, the first commander of the revamped and expanded SF, and according to the SADF’s chief assassin Johan Theron, Loots also approved his plan to inject these victims with drugs prior to disposing of their bodies by throwing them out of an airplane into the ocean. This is confirmed by yet another top secret document, which lists “Eliminations” and “Conducting chemical operations” as being among the six primary tasks of Barnacle.60 In the mid-1980s, “Operation Dual” was replaced by a higher-level and more formalized assassination program when the Teen-Rewolusionêre Inligting Taakspan (TREWITS: Counter-Revolutionary Intelligence Task Force) was created. Consisting of representatives from the SAP’s SB, the Division of Military Intelligence (DMI), the SF, and the NIS, one of its primary purposes was to “identify human targets for removal” in a series of monthly reports that were forwarded to the SSC. During the period it was operating, TREWITS authorized a total of 82 extra-judicial killings and 7 attempted killings.61 The specific groups entrusted with carrying out these “hits” were the covert CCB and C1/C10 paramilitary units.

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On the verbal instructions of Basson, RRL’s R&D director André Immelman secretly transferred a host of highly toxic chemicals and freeze-dried pathogens that had been produced either at Delta G or RRL – and thereafter stored in a refrigerator inside a fireproof and bombproof walk-in safe in his own office – to military and police personnel through various channels. The specific recipients of these lethal substances and contaminated items were Dr. R. F. Botha (alternately known as “Koos,” “Mr. R,” and “Frans Brink”) and Vernon Lange (otherwise known as “Mr. T” and “Theo Otto”), both of whom were operatives of the CCB; Chris Smit, Gert Otto, and Manie van Staden, three SB officers who either deployed some of them personally or later distributed them to C1/C10 “hit team” members; Johnny Koortzen, an ex-SO psychologist who in 1988 assumed control over Systems Research and Development, a company that bioengineer Jan Lourens had set up in part to manufacture special “applicators,” i.e., arcane assassination devices such as rings, screwdrivers, walking sticks, and umbrellas that had been transformed into weapons by means of the addition of poison compartments and injectors or firing mechanisms for poisoned pellets; and Basson himself. The actual substances included potentially lethal chemicals such as aldicarb, brodifacum, cantharidin, colchamine, cyanide, digoxin, methanol, monensin, paraoxon, paraquat, phencyclidine, phosphide, silatrane, sodium azide, thallium, and Vitamin D3, biological agents such as anthrax spores, botulinum toxin, brucella bacteria, salmonella bacteria, mamba venom, and bottles of cholera bacteria, and a wide variety of foodstuffs, beverages, household items, and cigarettes that had been contaminated with these poisons.62 There can be little doubt that several of these toxic materials, items, or devices were subsequently used to murder or sicken opponents of the apartheid regime. Among the most prominent reported targets of these poison assassination plots, most of whom apparently became actual victims, were Dutch ANC operatives such as Conny Braam and Klaas de Jonge; SACP military leader Joe Slovo; “unreliable” security force members such as Victor M. de Fonseca, Mack (“Fernando”) Anderson, Roland M. Hunter, and Garth Bailey; anti-apartheid activists such as United Democratic Front regional secretary Abdullah Mohamed Omar; and key ANC figures such as Vuyani Mavuso, Sipiwo Mtimkulu, Mandla Msibi, Gibson Mondlane, Gibson Ncube, Pallo Jordan, Ronnie Kasrils, Kwenza Mlaba, the Reverend Frank Chicane, Knox (“Enoch”) Dhlamini, and perhaps, if certain insider scientists can be believed, Nelson Mandela.63 If one excludes the hundreds of drugged and secretly disposed of guerrillas mentioned previously in this chapter, the total number of poisoned victims appears to have been in the dozens.

The dismantling of Project Coast Later, in the course of the extraordinary political transition of the early 1990s, during which the apartheid regime reluctantly but peacefully ceded power to a new ANC-led government, the activities of Project Coast were gradually phased out and exposed. The actual dismantling process was initiated by the apartheid regime and completed by the post-apartheid government, but marked by irregularities

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throughout. It would be natural to expect that although the old regime would do everything in its power to cover up the most sensitive aspects of its covert CBW program in the course of shutting it down, the new majority-run government – most of whose leading members had long been bitter opponents of apartheid and in some cases actual targets of assassination – would be particularly keen to expose the crimes of its racist predecessor. However, the new government also demonstrated an unanticipated reluctance to reveal crucial details about Project Coast to the public, as well as to punish certain guilty parties for their crimes. After succeeding P. W. Botha as President in July 1989 and being briefed on Project Coast by Surgeon-General Knobel and others in March 1990, Frederik de Klerk ordered that no more lethal chemical agents should be produced. Even so, he authorized the continued production of irritating and incapacitating agents, the CCB and SB carried on with their violence and covert poisoning efforts, and as noted in this chapter the SADF may have tested a chemical agent by bombing FRELIMO forces in Mozambique.64 Moreover, the military – with or without the knowledge and authorization of De Klerk’s government – appears to have accelerated its illegal international procurement activities in anticipation of the January 1993 signing of the new Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) treaty.65 The situation finally came to a head in December 1992, the same month in which De Klerk officially announced the end of apartheid and released Nelson Mandela from prison. In response to the revelations about illegal “Third Force” and Coast activities by the Goldstone Commission of Enquiry, the NIS, and General Pierre Steyn in the course of a personal briefing, De Klerk decided to dismiss twenty-three senior military personnel, including Basson, from active service in the SADF. Despite this decision, in January 1993 Basson was entrusted with personally supervising the destruction of various Coast-related chemical stores, and earlier that same month he and other high-ranking SADF officers authorized the copying of all of the project’s CBW technical and scientific information onto CD-ROMs, along with the subsequent destruction of the copied documents. This year-long task was carried out by Delta G chemist Klaus Psotta and Dr. Kobus Bothma at Data Images Information Systems, a company owned by Delta G’s managing director Mijburgh (and previously known as Medchem Technologies). After the project documents were copied, thirteen discs full of classified data were placed in a succession of safes to which only De Klerk, Knobel, and the new Coast Project Officer, Colonel Ben Steyn, had keys.66 At the end of March 1993, the date he was to have been cashiered, Basson was re-employed by the government for one year to tie up other loose ends on the project. After this temporary extension of his work for Coast and a brief subsequent period of retirement from the SADF, in 1995 he was rehired as a physician at 1 Military Hospital in the hopes of forestalling his continued collaboration with unscrupulous foreign parties. In the meantime, the “privatization” of the project’s military front companies and the reassignment of some of Coast’s scientific personnel proceeded apace. Unfortunately, there is no proof that the project’s toxic materials and documents were all actually destroyed. Basson’s reported destruction of Coast’s CW and BW

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agents was never independently verified. On 29 January 1993 Basson told the CMC that he had disposed of several drums of the project’s chemicals by flying them out over the ocean off Cape Agulhas in an Air Force plane and dumping them overboard, but it was not until 30 March 1993 that Commandant J. G. de Bruyn of the DMI prepared a report certifying this destruction or that Basson actually handed over the first samples that had supposedly been taken from the drums for chemical analysis by the SAP, as required. Indeed, during his cross-examination, Knobel admitted that he had simply taken Basson’s word that these dangerous materials were destroyed.67 Basson’s claims to have overseen the burning up of Coast’s biological agents in an oven at RRL were likewise never independently corroborated, and samples of some of the lethal agents produced at RRL or Delta G may have been removed from the former facility by certain scientists who worked there.68 However that may be, there is no doubt whatsoever that hard copies of thousands of Delta G and RRL documents which had supposedly been recorded and destroyed were instead retained and stored in trunks by Basson. Nor was he alone in not handing over all of his Coast documentation for destruction. Scientists at RRL later admitted that they too had not turned over all their project reports, as instructed by RRL’s management.69 If nothing else, this demonstrates that the apartheid regime did not take adequate steps to ensure that its CBW program was dismantled in such a way as to prevent potential future proliferation. The current South African government is in no way responsible for the manifest failures of its predecessor to supervise the dismantling of Project Coast properly. Nevertheless, from the point of view of transparency regarding prior South African CBW activities, it has unfortunately not been as forthcoming in releasing information as it might have been. First, both the American and British governments protested in 1994 and 1995 that South Africa’s declarations in its Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) Confidence Building Measure were not credible because they downplayed the offensive features of the program. Second, the Form F portion of South Africa’s 1995–2000 BTWC submissions, which specifically dealt with information about its past offensive and defensive R&D programs, contained statements that Gould and Folb have characterized as “incomplete” and “misleading” insofar as they “deliberately concealed relevant information about the programme.”70 Third, in May 1998 TRC commissioners were summoned to high-level meetings at the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Surgeon-General’s office, and the NIS’s successor, the revamped National Intelligence Agency (NIA), where they were pressured to prevent the public exposure of Project Coast on the grounds that embarrassing revelations might well interfere with South Africa’s foreign relations. The TRC commissioners refused, but agreed to a process whereby sensitive documents could be identified by the authorities so that their dissemination could be restricted. Fourth, on 8 June 1998 the government unsuccessfully sought to persuade the TRC not to open its CBW hearings to the public.71 Many of these actions were no doubt undertaken in good faith to prevent the release of sensitive scientific information that might lead to further proliferation or to facilitate the overall process of societal reconciliation, but in certain

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instances the new government seems to have sought to conceal portions of the historical record in order to forestall embarrassing revelations and/or protect various compromised but influential individuals. In January 1997 Basson was arrested in a “sting operation” for possessing 3,158 capsules of the illegal drug MDMA (“Ecstasy”) that had apparently been manufactured at Delta G, ostensibly for use as a potential “calmative.” Following his arrest, the police discovered several trunks full of Coast documents that he had secretly whisked away and stashed with friends or in storage facilities, a small but important portion of the corpus of documents that was supposed to have been physically destroyed after being copied onto CD-ROMs.72 He was then indicted by the state for murder and a host of other crimes that he allegedly committed during the period he served as Project Officer for Coast. During the course of his trial, as well as at the hearings held by the TRC, a wealth of detailed information emerged regarding the true scope and nature of South Africa’s CBW program.

Current status In February 2003, toward the end of a long period of bitter international diplomatic wrangling over the best way to disarm the Ba‘thist regime of Saddām Husayn in Iraq, the South African government sent a delegation to Baghdad with great fanfare to advise the Iraqis on how best to proceed with a verifiable process of WMD disarmament. In doing so, the South Africans were seeking greater world recognition and presenting their own disarmament process as a model for future Iraqi disarmament.73 Yet however justifiable South Africa’s pride may have been in regard to the dismantling of its nuclear and missile programs, such pride would have been largely misplaced had it been extended to the dismantling of the country’s CBW program. Not only did many irregularities mark South Africa’s rather convoluted CBW disarmament process, not the least of which was the lack of any independent verification of the alleged destruction of its remaining stocks of chemical and biological agents, but there are indications that certain key personnel associated with Project Coast may have subsequently facilitated CBW proliferation, intentionally or otherwise.

Project Coast, foreign intelligence agencies, and “rogue regimes” In the context of WMD proliferation, the most worrisome aspect of the now defunct Project Coast is that Basson, in connection with his overseas procurement activities, had established close contacts with foreign intelligence operatives and officials from “rogue regimes” such as Libya, with whom he is suspected of sharing information concerning CBW techniques or products.74 Among his many alleged foreign interlocutors or collaborators were North American, European, and Taiwanese CBW experts he claims to have met at conferences; former British Army intelligence and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer Roger Buffham; Swiss

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military intelligence chief Peter Regli and one of his operatives, Jürgen Jacomet; former Iranian government official, secret agent, and apparent con man Muhammad ‘Alī Hashemī (the brother of Cyrus Hāshemī of Iran-Contra Affair notoriety); senior Libyan intelligence officers Yūsuf Murghām and ‘Abd al-Razāq; unscrupulous Croatian police and intelligence officials; Danish intelligence officer Hendrik Thomsen; and a Russian named Vorabyov. In addition, Basson spent several months in Libya supposedly working on designing a transportation system, claims to have traveled to Iraq to oversee the effects of CW attacks, claims to have gone to Iran to help the government deal with one or more outbreaks of disease, and visited Germany and Eastern Europe to consult with businessmen reputedly associated with the so-called “CBW mafia,” such as Hubert Blücher.75 Other Project Coast scientists may also have made their way to countries with dictatorial regimes – on one occasion Immelman met in Johannesburg with an alleged Syrian military officer about CBW matters, but despite rumors to the contrary he never actually traveled to Syria.76 Alas, even after more than ten years of investigations, various South African government agencies have been unable to clarify exactly what it was that Basson and his associates were up to overseas. Many knowledgeable observers fear, however, that he may have provided valuable technical information or perhaps even toxic materials generated by Project Coast to individuals and regimes with dubious credentials or unsavory agendas. Moreover, as recently as the summer of 2002, other Coast-linked personnel were approached by various foreign parties seeking to obtain CBW materials. On two occasions Dr. Daan Goosen, a former RRL scientist now engaged in monitoring BW for the NIA in South Africa, was asked to provide Coast-related biological materials that had supposedly been destroyed to foreign parties. In the first instance, he willingly provided a 5 ml sample of goat serum used as an anthrax diagnostic agent for livestock and a 2 ml sample of freeze-dried E. coli genetically modified with the gene coding for Clostridium perfringens toxin to a former CIA officer named Robert A. Zlokie and his handler Donald G. Mayes, an ex-US intelligence contract operative who spent years functioning as an “independent” arms dealer. The precise nature of the second prospective deal is less clear. According to some witnesses, Goosen was asked to provide anthrax bacteria and other BW agents to a group of “Germans” in exchange for 20 million dollars. He then became suspicious, and as soon as he learned that the “Germans” were really Arabs, including a Qatari who worked at the Saudi embassy, he opted out of the deal and told his NIA superiors. According to other sources, Goosen was the target of an SAP “sting” operation. A phony “shaykh” approached him and offered to pay him 150 million dollars for samples of anthrax bacteria and the aforementioned serum, as well as other items. Goosen was unwilling to provide such materials to Arabs, who he feared might endeavor to use them in acts of terrorism, and therefore reported the incident to the NIA. At the moment, this latter version appears to be more accurate.77 In both deals the middleman between Goosen and the “foreigners” was a right-winger and retired SADF Major-General associated with the CCB named Tai Minnaar, who in 1989 established a private company called Military Technical Services (MTS)

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that had links with the powerful South African mercenary recruitment agency Executive Outcomes (EO).78 Shortly after the collapse of the second deal Minnaar suddenly died, officially of a heart attack. According to his girlfriend, however, his peculiar discoloration and bloating symptoms prior to death suggested that he may have been assassinated with some sort of poison, but this cannot be confirmed since relatives asked that his body be cremated and no autopsy was performed.79 These two examples may represent only the tip of a much larger iceberg of secret efforts by foreigners to acquire South African CBW materials.

Project Coast and the international right-wing Perhaps even more troubling is the possibility that Basson or other Coast personnel may have transferred dangerous CBW materials or know-how to elements of a loose international network of right-wing extremists. Some civilian Afrikaner paramilitary groups, whose pro-apartheid members remain violently opposed to black majority rule, have publicly threatened to attack their enemies with chemical and biological agents.80 Investigative journalists are currently following certain leads in an effort to determine if former members of the SF or various SADF- and SAP-sponsored “death squads” may have subsequently collaborated with the civilian paramilitary right inside South Africa, which in recent months has again begun carrying out terrorist attacks.81 Others have expressed fears that Basson and other Coast scientists were associated with an even broader international right-wing network, purportedly known as Die Organisasie (The Organization), among whose members are said to be expatriate Rhodesians and South Africans who immigrated to other countries both during the apartheid era and as the apartheid system was collapsing.82 If an organization of this sort actually exists, which remains to be substantiated, it may turn out that the American doctors Larry Ford and Jerry Nilsson, an outspoken white supremacist, were among its members. According to a pair of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informants, in the mid-1980s Dr. Ford transferred a suitcase full of dangerous “kaffir-killing” pathogens to Surgeon-General Knobel at the Los Angeles residence of the South African trade attaché, Gideon Bouwer.83 It has also emerged that Nilsson fought as a volunteer against nationalist guerrillas during the Rhodesian civil war, that Ford and Nilsson repeatedly visited South Africa, that Knobel consulted with Ford on CBW matters and personally introduced Ford to Basson, that Basson arranged to have secret accounts opened in Ford’s name, and that at Knobel’s request Ford lectured Coast scientists about the contamination of household items with biological agents.84 In the wake of Ford’s March 2000 suicide, which transpired just as he was beginning to be implicated in the attempted assassination of his Irvine business partner James Patrick Riley, the police discovered an arsenal of small arms and explosives, Christian Identity militia literature, and over 260 containers of biological materials on his various properties. (For unknown reasons, the FBI has yet to divulge the contents of all but 20 or so of those containers.) Patients and former mistresses have testified that Ford secretly poisoned them, and

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a jar of ricin toxin was found in a refrigerator in his garage.85 The fact that one of ex-Selous Scout and EMLC armorer Philip Morgan’s “special applicators” was also found among Ford’s possessions is itself indicative of what appears to have been a close relationship between the American doctor and key Project Coast personnel. There is also some evidence indicating that Stephen J. Hatfill, an American biological warfare expert whom the FBI later designated as a “person of interest” in its investigation of the 2001 “anthrax letter” mailings in the United States, was involved in various Rhodesian intelligence or counterinsurgency operations. Although Hatfill’s activities in southern Africa have yet to be fully clarified, it is known that he worked for the Rhodesian police’s Special Branch and that he later obtained his medical degree from the University of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.86 Some have hinted that he operated out of the Selous Scouts base at the Bindura Fort, from whence McGuinness facilitated the launching of “black operations,” including CW actions. At present, however, intimations that Hatfill may have been personally involved in the covert dissemination of CW or BW agents in southern Africa can only be characterized as unsubstantiated. Be that as it may, in 2002 the South African media reported that Hatfill had earlier helped to train the Aquila Brigade shock troops of Eugene Terre’Blanche’s right-wing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB: Afrikaner Resistance Movement).87 During this period, he also claims to have received advanced medical training from various SAMS components, as well as to have been assigned to its 2 Medical Battalion Group.

Conclusion Unfortunately, the extent to which the activities undertaken by Project Coast may have resulted, inadvertently or intentionally, in the proliferation of WMD to other regions has yet to be determined. Since a large amount of documentation is already available concerning the development, nature, and extent of the South African CBW program, it serves to highlight the difficulties involved in assessing the potential proliferation threat posed by WMD programs, even years after they have been officially terminated and dismantled. It also illustrates the fact that even democratic governments are often reluctant to “air dirty laundry” by revealing sensitive state secrets, even if doing so might serve to expose their domestic political enemies’ prior crimes.

*

The author would like to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this report: Chandré Gould and Marléne Burger from the South African Center for Conflict Resolution; Verne Harris from the South Africa History Project; Gary Ackerman and Richard Pilch, my colleagues at the Monterey Institute of International Studies; Robert Block from the Wall Street Journal; Joby Warrick from the Washington Post; journalist Ilan Ziv; Stephen Dresch from Forensic Intelligence; American journalist Edward Humes; Milton Leitenberg from the University of Maryland; Swiss journalist Rudolf Maeder; CW specialist Eric Croddy; BW specialist Michael Moodie from the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute; and the staff at the Hoover Institution library on the Stanford University campus.

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Notes 1 Reprinted with permission from “South Africa’s Project Coast: ‘Death Squads,’ Covert State-Sponsored Poisonings, and the Dangers of CBE Proliferation” [from Democracy and Security 2(1) (January-June 2006), pp. 27–59] 2 Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR), Basson Trial: Weekly Summaries of Court Proceedings, October 1999-April 2002, [final] special report (this and all other portions of these trial summaries can be available at ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/cbw_index); “The Long and Costly Road to Acquittal,” Sunday Times, 14 April 2002; Chris McGreal, “‘Dr. Death a Free Agent Once Again,” The Age, 14 April 2002; “Revenge of South Africa’s ‘Dr. Death’,” BBC News Online, 12 April 2002. For a detailed enumeration of all the charges against Basson, see especially Hooggeregshof, Die Staat teen Wouter Basson, Akte van Beskulding [Indictment] (1999). The South African Constitutional Court recently authorized the government to appeal the original verdict and re-try Basson, in the process overturning an earlier decision by the Supreme Court of Appeals. See Constitutional Court of South Africa, The State versus [Wouter] Basson, Case CCT 30/03, Judgment, 9 September 2005, paragraphs 261ff. 3 For the early history of the chemical industry and CW activities in South Africa, see G. C. Gerrans, “Historical Overview of the South African Chemical Industry, 1896–1998,” Chemistry International 21:3 (May 1999), pp. 71–7; Ian van der Waag, “review of The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and [sic] Biological Warfare Program,” Journal of Military History 66:1 (January 2002), p. 272; Stephen Burgess and Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa’s Biological Warfare Program (Colorado Springs, CO: USAF Academy, USAF Institute for National Security Studies, 2001), pp. 2–3; Chandré Gould and Peter Folb, Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2002), pp. 31–2. 4 Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 32–4, citing documents and firsthand testimony. 5 This and the other De Villiers documents are cited in ibid., pp. 32–4. 6 For EMLC, see CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Coetzee, Jan van Jaarsveld, Jan Lourens, Philip Morgan, Stephanus Redlinghuys, Johan Theron, and Sybie van der Spuy; and Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 35. 7 See, e.g., the websites of various facilities concerned with research on bacterial or viral diseases, including the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD, formerly known as the National Institute for Virology), available at www.nicd.ac.za/about/ history.html; the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute (OVI), available at www.arc.agric.za/ institutes/ovi; and the Pretoria Biomedical Research Centre (formerly known as the H. A. Grové Research Centre), available at www.up.ac.za/academic/dept_div. 8 For further information on these scientific institutions, see note 6 and Jeffrey M. Bale, “BW Facilities” section, available at Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) www.nti.org/e_ research/profiles/SAfrica/Biological/2432.html. 9 Republic of South Africa (RSA), Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Hearings on South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme, testimony of Goosen and Basson, who denied this claim. The testimony at the TRC’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Hearings can all be available at www.doj.gov.za/trc/special/index.htm#cbw. 10 Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 32–4, citing De Villiers documents and firsthand testimony. 11 Burgess and Purkitt, Rollback of South Africa’s Biological Warfare Program, p. 7. These efforts were reportedly observed firsthand by SADF personnel sent to Angola to gain counterinsurgency experience. No mention is made of such operations in the Portuguese-language sources examined by the author. 12 The best general overview of Rhodesian counterinsurgency operations is provided by J. K. Cilliers, Counter-Insurgency in Rhodesia (London: Croom Helm, 1985). Rhodesian “pseudo-operations” were derived from the “counter-gang” techniques used by the British in Malaya and against the Mau-Mau in Kenya, in which members of the security forces would pose and operate as insurgents in order to infiltrate guerrilla-held areas, gather intelligence, attack or “turn” real guerrillas, and carry out psychological warfare operations

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14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

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by, among other things, committing atrocities that could be blamed on insurgent forces so as to alienate them from the population. The primary Rhodesian special operations unit that was tasked with carrying out such operations was the Selous Scouts. See ibid., pp. 118–34. For more on the Selous Scouts and their operations, see Lt. Col. Ron Reid Daly and Peter Stiff, Selous Scouts: Top Secret War (Alberton, South Africa: Galago Press, 1982). See especially the insider accounts of former members of the Rhodesian and South African security services, including Eugene de Kock (with Jeremy Gordin), A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State (Saxonwold, RSA: Contra Press, 1998), p. 71; Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record: Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, 1964 to 1981 (London: John Murray, 1987), p. 137; Henrik Ellert, The Rhodesian Front War: Counter-Insurgency and Guerrilla War in Rhodesia, 1962–1980 (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1989), pp. 109–12; and Peter Stiff, The Silent War: South African Recce Operations, 1969–1994 (Johannesburg: Galago Press, 1999), pp. 308–10. Compare also Jeremy Brickhill, “Zimbabwe’s Poisoned Legacy: Secret War in Southern Africa,” Covert Action Quarterly 43 (Winter 1992–3), pp. 7–10; and Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 214–23. Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 26, citing an email from Mike Woods; and Brickhill, “Zimbabwe’s Poisoned Legacy,” pp. 7–10. See also Stiff, Silent War, pp. 308–10, who notes rumors to the effect that Symington (who he calls “Sam Roberts”) may have killed more guerrillas with poisons in certain months than the Rhodesian Light Infantry managed to kill through regular military actions. Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 27, citing two 2002 interviews with McGuinness. See Ellert, Rhodesian Front War, pp. 110–1; Brickhill, “Zimbabwe’s Poisoned Legacy,” p. 7; and Flower, Serving Secretly, p. 137. Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 27, citing two 2002 interviews with McGuinness. Here it should be pointed out that the Special Branch of the BSAP effectively constituted the internal operations division, known as Branch I, of the CIO; Branch II was the external operations division. The Projects Section was an offshoot of Branch I’s Terrorist Desk, which was established to “make quicker and more effective use of operational intelligence gleaned from interrogation reports.” See Henrick Ellert, “The Rhodesian Security and Intelligence Community, 1960–1980: A Brief Overview of the Structure and Operational Role of the Military, Civilian and Police Security and Intelligence Organizations which served the Rhodesia Government during the Zimbabwean Liberation War,” in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), p. 95. Note also that the Selous Scouts and C Squadron of the Special Air Service (SAS) provided the CIO’s “executive muscle,” and that both Branches I and II had established close relations with their South African counterparts, Branch I with the Security Branch of the South African Police (SAP), Branch II with the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) and, later, the National Intelligence Service (NIS). See ibid., pp. 88, 96. Ellert, Rhodesian Front War, p. 112. Compare Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 28, citing a phone conversation with Allum. Ibid., p. 27, citing two 2002 interviews with McGuinness; and Mangold and Goldberg, Plague Wars, p. 222 (quotes). Meryl Nass, “Anthrax Epizootic in Zimbabwe, 1978–1980: Due to Deliberate Spread?,” The PSR Quarterly 24:2 (December 1992), pp. 198–209. Mangold and Goldberg, Plague Wars, pp. 224–7. The ricin to be used had supposedly been prepared as an assassination weapon, along with thallium and parathion, by Professor Symington of the University of Rhodesia. Compare de Kock, Long Night’s Damage, pp. 58–9; Cilliers, Counter-Insurgency in Rhodesia, p. 9; Burgess and Purkitt, Rollback of South Africa’s Biological Warfare Program, pp. 7–8; and Ian Martinez, “The History of the Use of Bacteriological and Chemical Agents during Zimbabwe’s Liberation War of 1965–80 by Rhodesian Forces,” Third World Quarterly 23:6 (2002), p. 1170. Brickhill, “Zimbabwe’s Poisoned Legacy,” pp. 8–9.

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25 Klaas de Jonge, “The Chemical Warfare Case,” The (Secret) Truth Commission Files (November 1997), p. 4, available at www.contrast.org/truth/html/chemical_biological_weapons. html, citing an 11 November 1997 letter from former SADF officer and ANC agent Dieter Felix Gerhardt. 26 Mangold and Goldberg, Plague Wars, pp. 221–2. 27 Cited by Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 30. The term “necessary ingredients” in this report need not be a reference to chemical or biological agents, since the South Africans were then supplying many items to the Rhodesians. 28 Brickhill, “Zimbabwe’s Poisoned Legacy,” pp. 58–60. 29 Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 22. 30 RSA, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), CBW Hearings, testimony of Wouter Basson, Niel Knobel, and Daan Goosen; CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Knobel; Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 36–8, citing Basson’s comments at a 31 November 1990 meeting of the Reduced Defence Command Council. 31 For all of these details, see ibid., pp. 40–1, citing Davey’s trail testimony, a conversation with Steenkamp, and an affidavit by Du Toit entered into the Basson trial court record on 13 November 2000. See also Brian Davey, “Degradation of Human Performance with Use of Chemical Protective Clothing: Overview of Research Programme,” paper presented at the Fourth Annual Symposium on Protection against Chemical Warfare Agents in Stockholm, 8–12 June 1992. 32 CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Jan Lourens, Basson, and several in-theater military officers, including Major-General Leslie Rudman, Lieutenant-General Deon Ferreira, Colonel Paul Fouché, and Colonel Renier Coetzee. Compare Marléne Burger and Chandré Gould, Secrets and Lies: Wouter Basson and South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (Cape Town: Zebra, 2002), pp. 39, 102–7. 33 Among other places, this “total war” concept was laid out in the SADF White Paper of 1977. Compare Kenneth W. Grundy, The Militarisation of South African Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 1986), p. 11; Mark Swilling and Mark Phillips, “State Power in the 1980s: From ‘Total Strategy’ to ‘Counter-Revolutionary Warfare’,” in Society at War: The Militarisation of South Africa, ed. Jacklyn Cock and Laurie Nathan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 135–7; Mangold and Goldberg, Plague Wars, p. 247; and [General] Magnus Malan, “Die Aanslag Teen Suid-Afrika,” ISSUP Strategic Review 2 (1980). It may well be that internal security concerns were paramount for the apartheid government, and that the establishment of Coast had as much or more to do with controlling and suppressing the country’s black majority as it did with resisting external threats. This could help to explain the program’s peculiar emphasis on using CBW agents to eliminate or otherwise “neutralize” domestic opponents of the regime as well as to control unruly crowds. 34 Cited and partially reproduced by Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 153–5. The document, dated 28 November 1989, is entitled “Projek Coast: Moontlikhede vir Privatisering” (“Project Coast: Possibilities for Privatization”). Note that these quoted passages appeared alongside, and in direct contradistinction to, other passages in the very same document wherein the program’s defensive dimensions were enumerated. 35 TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Jan Lourens, Schalk van Rensburg, Daan Goosen, and Mike Odendaal. Compare Milton Leitenberg, “Biological Weapons in the Twentieth Century: A Review and Analysis,” paper prepared for the 7th International Symposium on Protection against Chemical and Biological Warfare, Stockholm, June 2001, pp. 15–16, available at www.fas.org/bwc/papers/bw20th. Only if one restricts the term “offensive” narrowly to the large-scale production of lethal battlefield and “area denial” CBW weapons can it be argued that Project Coast was not offensive, although even then there are a few instances in which such weapons appear to have been used by South Africa. It should be self-evident, however, that a CBW program whose most distinctive characteristic was the development of an extensive array of lethal, hard-to-trace chemical and biological agents to assassinate “enemies of the state” cannot legitimately be described as “defensive.” As Coast bioengineer Jan Lourens put it, official claims that the South

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43 44

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African CBW program was strictly defensive are “unqualified absolute nonsense.” See TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Jan Lourens. The South African program may have been idiosyncratic and atypically offensive, if not unique in many respects, but it was nonetheless in part offensive. Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 43–4, citing a 7 January 1993 presentation by Basson and Knobel to the Defence Minister. Compare also Basson’s testimony before the TRC and at his trial, as well as that of Knobel. For Basson’s “meteoric” career progress, see TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Knobel and Basson. Compare Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 43, citing a 1 January 1992 document prepared by Knobel. Ibid., p. 59. Among the many SO alumni were Basson, Philip Mijburgh, Jan Lourens, Wynand Swanepoel, Johnny Koortzen, Gerrie Odendaal, Hennie Bester, Ben Steyn, Deon Erasmus, Kobus Bothma, and James Davies. Ibid., pp. 44–5, citing 7 January and 19 August 1993 reports given by Basson and Knobel to the Defence Minister. Ibid., pp. 64–5. For the NSMS and its structure, see James Selfe, “South Africa’s National [Security] Management System,” in Society at War: The Militarisation of South Africa, ed. Jacklyn Cock and Laurie Nathan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 149–56. For the CMC and the “work groups,” see TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Basson and Schalk van Rensburg. Members of the CMC (and the Reduced Defence Command Council) are listed in Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 187–90, citing the minutes of CMC meetings. TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Basson and Knobel. Compare RSA, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Report (London: Macmillan, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 521–3. TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Basson and Knobel. Basson may also have received instructions from SAP Lieutenant-General Lothar Neethling. Although Neethling sought to downplay his role in Coast during his own testimony, other insiders at the TRC hearings and elsewhere provided specific information that revealed his close relationship with Basson and extensive knowledge of CBW issues. See ibid., testimony of Johan Koekemoer; CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Belgian businessman Charles van Remoortere; and Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 48, citing a 25 March 1993 document on the CBW program prepared by Lieutenant-General C. P. Van der Westhuizen, the former head of SADF counterintelligence who was himself implicated in assorted “dirty tricks.” RSA, National Intelligence Service (NIS), “Staff Paper prepared for the Steyn Commission on Alleged Dangerous Activities of SADF Components,” December 1992, Annexure C, p. 2, serial number 7. Then again, the Binnekring – assuming that it actually existed – may have had nothing to do with Coast’s parallel command structure, since in that NIS document it was described as an “underground organization” that Basson himself had founded. This odd report contains many claims that remain to be corroborated, and appeared at a time of political transition when the NIS and SADF were both vying for influence. For these details concerning Delta G, see TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Jan Lourens, Johan Koekemoer, and Philip Mijburgh (though the last-named’s is almost worthless); and CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Jan Lourens, Johan Koekemoer, Gert Lourens, Hennie Jordaan, Lucia Steenkamp, Steven Beukes, Barry Pithy, and Gerald Cadwell. It should be emphasized here that chemical Riot Control Agents are not prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention insofar as they are used exclusively for “domestic riot control purposes,” and therefore cannot be said to constitute part of a chemical weapons program unless they are used in other circumstances or against external enemies. For these details concerning RRL, see TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Jan Lourens, Schalk van Rensburg, Daan Goosen, Mike Odendaal, and Wynand Swanepoel (though the last-named’s testimony was worth little); CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Jan Lourens, Odendaal, James Davies, Riana Borman, André Immelman, Gert Lourens, Van Rensburg, and Goosen.

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48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55

56 57

58

59

60

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Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 58. CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Hennie Bruwer. H. J. Bruwer, Projek Coast: Forensiese Ondersoek. Aanvullende Verslag (10 August 2000, p. 6). CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of André Immelman, Stiaan Wandrag, Klaus Psotta, Jan Lourens, and Basson; TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Jan Lourens. CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Stiaan Wandrag and Basson. United Nations, Report of the Investigations into the Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons in Mozambique (New York: United Nations, 1993); U.S., Department of State, “Recent Chemical Weapons (CW) Use Allegations – Africa,” 9 March 1992 memo (declassified); NIS, “Staff Paper Prepared for the Steyn Commission on Alleged Dangerous Activities of SADF Components,” Annexure B, p. 14, serial number ii; TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Jan Lourens; John Yeld, “SADF Bombed Frelimo in Chemical Weapons Test and Blamed ANC,” The Cape Argus, 17 June 1998; Paul Fauvet, “Mozambican Claims on 1992 Chemical Attack Now Appear Correct,” The Star, 17 June 1998; de Jonge, “The Chemical Warfare Case,” The (Secret) Truth Commission Files, November 1997, pp. 6–12. TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Jan Lourens, Daan Goosen, Mike Odendaal, and Schalk van Rensburg; and CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of André Immelman and James Davies. Nass, “Anthrax Epizootic in Zimbabwe,” pp. 198–209; Meryl Nass, “Zimbabwe’s Anthrax Epizootic,” Covert Action Quarterly 43 (Winter 1992–3), pp. 12–18, 61; Mangold and Goldberg, Plague Wars, pp. 214–23; Burgess and Purkitt, Rollback of South Africa’s Biological Warfare Program, pp. 10–1. CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Botes. Several Coast scientists later testified that they were instructed to develop toxic substances that would be both difficult to detect and untraceable to clandestine application. According to RRL lab director Schalk van Rensburg, “[t]he most frequent instruction we obtained from Doctor Basson and Doctor Swanepoel was to develop something with which you could kill an individual which would make his death resemble a natural death, and that something was to be not detectable in a normal forensic laboratory.” See TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Van Rensburg. The “sales list” was a list prepared by André Immelman of some of the poisonous materials and devices produced by RRL in 1989, various copies of which included his handwritten annotations identifying the recipients of certain distributed items by their nicknames. The list is reproduced in Burger and Gould, Secrets and Lies, pp. 34–5. For more information on SADF and SAP “death squads” and their covert activities in South Africa, see the insider accounts found in de Kock, Long Night’s Damage, Jacques Pauw, Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1997); and Gordon Winter, Inside BOSS: South Africa’s Secret Police (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); official reports such as RSA, Commission of Enquiry into Certain Alleged Murders, Report [of the Honourable Mr. Justice L.T.C. Harms] (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1990); and NIS, “Staff Paper Prepared for the Steyn Commission on Alleged Dangerous Activities of SADF Components”; the scholarly investigations by Keith Gottschalk, “The Rise and Fall of Apartheid’s Death Squads,” in Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability, ed. Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 229–59; Stephen Ellis, “The Historical Significance of South Africa’s Third Force,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24:2 (June 1998), pp. 261–99; Kevin A. O’Brien, “Counter-Intelligence of Counter-Revolutionary Warfare: The South African Police Security Branch, 1979–1990,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16:3 (Autumn 2001), pp. 27–59; Kevin A. O’Brien, “The Use of Assassination as a Tool of State Policy: South Africa’s Counter-Revolutionary Strategy, 1979–92 (Part II),” Terrorism and Political Violence 13:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 107–42; and Charl Schutte et al., eds., The Hidden Hand: Covert Operations in South Africa (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1998), especially pp. 167–362; and the journalistic treatment by Patrick Laurence, Death Squads: Apartheid’s Secret Weapon (London: Penguin, 1990). Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 50–2, citing both a 9 January 1981 Loots report (Basson trial exhibit 31B) and a 12 December 1980 S. Serfontein report on Barnacle (exhibit 31C);

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63 64 65 66 67

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69 70 71 72

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and CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Theron, Danie Phaal, Trevor Floyd, Jan Anton Nieuwoudt, “Mr. Z” (Gray Branfield), and “Mr. K” (Niel Kriel), yet another ex-Rhodesian soldier and the first commander of the Barnacle unit. Kriel also revealed that Defence Minister Magnus Malan had previously authorized Loots and himself to establish a front company called NKTF Security Consultants to carry out such operations. On TREWITS, see Gottschalk, “Rise and Fall of Apartheid’s Death Squads,” pp. 241–2; and O’Brien, “Counter-Intelligence for Counter-Revolutionary Warfare,” pp. 34–6. CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Immelman, James Davies, Jan Lourens, Mike Odendaal, and Basson, who predictably denied authorizing Immelman to issue these deadly agents; and the “sales list” (TRC document 52). Immelman’s annotations identifying the recipients are included in the partial “sales list” reprinted in Hooggeregshof, Akte van Beskulding, pp. 250–1. Jeffrey M. Bale’s BW and CW chronologies on the NTI website: www.nti.org/e_ research/profiles/SAfrica/Biological/2435.html (BW), and www.nti.org/e_research/ profiles/SAfrica/Chemical/2446.html (CW). Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 115–18, 134–41. Ibid., p. 217, citing an early 1990s Knobel document that provided a chronology of the Croatian transactions. Therein Knobel notes that it was the CMC that approved the plan to expedite these procurement activities. On this copying process, see TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Knobel and Philip Mijburgh; CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Ben Steyn. For the destruction of the chemical agents, mainly the illegal drugs used for “calmatives” research, see Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 215, 217–18, citing the 29 January 1993 CMC meeting minutes and the 30 March 1993 De Bruyn certification document; and TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Basson and Knobel. Later attempts to acquire specifics about the disposal flights proved fruitless. Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 214, citing interviews with Goosen and Odendaal; personal communication with Ilan Ziv, 17 March 2003. See also Joby Warrick, “Biotoxins Fall into Private Hands,” Washington Post, 21 April 2003, who notes that in the course of secret July 2002 meetings with US officials, Basson himself admitted that “people working in the labs had probably taken things with them,” making it impossible for him to account for all the microbes. Gould and Folb, Project Coast, p. 222, alluding to their interviews with ex-RRL scientists. For these two points, see ibid., pp. 210 (citing a 14 June 2001 interview with former US ambassador Princeton Lyman, who was present at the 1994 and 1995 meetings), pp. 213–14 (the previous quote appears on p. 213). Ibid., pp. 225–6. In addition to the trunks he had arranged to have stored at his friend Samuel Bosch’s home, he stored two other trunks in a storage facility. In that same facility, which had been rented by his Rhodesian associate Bill Grieve, the “lost” CCB archives were also found. Personal communication with Robert Block, February 2003. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “S. Africa Sending Arms Experts to Iraq,” CNN News, 18 February 2003; “SA Experts Start Work in Iraq,” BBC News Online, 24 February 2003. Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 209–11, citing a 14 June 2001 interview with US ambassador Princeton Lyman and an 18 August 1994 Knobel briefing on Coast and the BTWC and CWC for President Mandela. For details on Basson’s extensive foreign contacts and activities, see CCR, Basson Trial, testimony of Basson, Hennie Bruwer, Charles van Remoortere, Bernard Zimmer, Sol Pienaar, David Chu, David Webster, and many others. The background of many of his interlocutors is exceedingly interesting, to say the least. E.g., Peter Regli and some of his subordinates were implicated in all sorts of illegal political and economic activities by the Swiss government, even though in the end they were absolved of criminality by parliamentary and judicial investigators. Compare Martin Stoll, “Peter Regli unterhielt Kontakte auch zu Bassons Boss,” Sonntagszeitung, 28 March 1999; Marco Kalmann, “L’affaire Bellasi et le mythe de la perfection Suisse,” Largeur.com, 23 August 1999; Yvette

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76 77

78

79 80

81

82 83 84

85 86

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Jaggi, “Affaire Regli: Sous enquête mais pas sous pression,” Domaine Publique, 7 September 2001; Bruno Vanoni, “Regli rehabilitiert – und abgesetzt,” Blue Win, 1 November 2001; and the official Swiss government report authored by Rainer J. Schweizer, Rapport final de l’enquête administrative dans l’affaire “Service du renseignement / Afrique du Sud” au Département federal de la défense, de la protection de la population et des sports (DDPS), 16 December 2002, especially pp. 88–147. TRC, CBW Hearings, testimony of Jan Lourens; Gould and Folb, Project Coast, pp. 207–8, citing interviews with Jan Lourens and Immelman. Personal communications with Robert Block of the Wall Street Journal, Ilan Ziv, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post, and Marléne Burger of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, December 2002–April 2003. See further Joby Warrick and John Mintz, “Lethal Legacy: Bioweapons for Sale,” Washington Post, 20 April 2003; Joby Warrick, “Biotoxins Fall into Private Hands,” Washington Post, 21 April 2003; Robert Block, “A Cautionary Disarmament,” Wall Street Journal, 31 January 2003; and Sam Sole, “SA General Touted Anthrax Abroad,” Mail & Guardian, 25 January 2003. A contract for the first deal was signed on 5 May 2002 by Minnaar, Zlokie, and Goosen. Unfortunately, the accounts of the second deal provided by various informants do not entirely jibe. Note also that, according to Ziv, Minnaar was apparently trying to peddle missiles, laser guns, cases of depleted uranium, and possibly nuclear detonators, not simply BW agents. For EO, see Pech Khareen “Executive Outcomes: A Corporate Conquest,” in Peace, Profit or Plunder? The Privatisation of Security in War-Torn African Societies, ed. Jakkie Cilliers and Peggy Mason (Halfway House: Institute for Security Studies, 1999), pp. 81–109. For EO’s links to Minnaar’s MTS, see ibid., p. 99. For Minnaar’s association with the CCB, see an undated 1998 NIA report entitled “The CCB and the Generals,” which can be found in “Secret South African Disruption,” available at www.cryptome.org/zadisrupt.htm. On Minnaar and his death, see Sole, “SA General Touted Anthrax Abroad”; and “SA: Safe Haven for al-Qaeda?,” News24, 10 December 2002. See, e.g., Vrye Weekblad (30 November 1990) and Rapport (18 November 1990), both cited by Johann van Rooyen, Hard Right: The New White Power in South Africa (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1994), pp. 96–7, 199; and Arthur Kemp, Victory or Violence: The Story of the AWB (Pretoria: Forma, 1990), p. 47. Some indications of collusion between personnel from covert SADF components and the paramilitary right are alluded to in NIS, “Staff Paper prepared for the Steyn Commission on Alleged Dangerous Activities of SADF Components,” p. 5, Annexure A, p. 5, and Annexure B, p. 12. For some interesting details about the recent wave of Afrikaner right-wing terrorism, see Mark Klusener, “South African ‘Coup Plotters’ May Have Links with US Groups,” CNS News, 23 September 2002; and Basildon Pela, “Far Right in South Africa Foiled in Plot to Poison Water in Townships,” The Independent [London], 25 November 2002. Mangold and Goldberg, Plague Wars, pp. 250, 254, 277–9. The authors imply that Die Organisasie was a jazzier name for Third Force elements operating abroad, but this is probably an oversimplification. Edward Humes, “The Medicine Man,” Los Angeles Magazine (July 2001), pp. 95–6. The Afrikaans term kaffir, which oddly derives from the Arabic word for “infidel” (kāfir), is equivalent to “nigger” in the U.S. Compare CBS News, “‘Dr. Death’ and His Accomplice,” 60 Minutes, 7 November 2002; Jeff Collins, “Ford Advised S. Africa on Warfare Devices,” Orange County Register, 15 March 2000; Arthur Allen, “Mad Scientist,” Salon Magazine (26 June 2002), available at archive.salon.com/health/feature/2000/06/26/biofem; and Rachel Bell, “Larry Ford,” Court TV’s Crime Library, available at www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/ larry_ford/1.html. Humes, “Medicine Man,” pp. 166–8. On the militia connection, see ibid., p. 97; Michael Reynolds, “Memo on Larry Ford and the Far Right,” unpublished report, 2001. On his CV, Hatfill claimed that he served with C Squadron of the Rhodesian SAS, whereas in a note to his Missouri high school newspaper he indicated that he saw action

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with the Selous Scouts. Neither of these claims has been confirmed, and could be false given all the other information he apparently fabricated on his CV. Even so, at least one unnamed SADF veteran claims that Hatfill did in fact serve in the Selous Scouts, “mainly as an ‘operational medical orderly’,” and added that it was the Scouts who “decided he should study medicine because they felt he would serve them better as a field surgeon than as a medic.” 24 January 2003 email forwarded to the author by Stephen Dresch of Forensic Intelligence. Moreover, in the memoirs of Peter McAleese, a former member of the Rhodesian SAS, the author mentions that a “Steve Hartful” – undoubtedly Hatfill – worked for the Rhodesian police’s Special Branch, one of the forces that played a significant role in the covert Rhodesian CW program. Compare Hatfill CV, p. 3; and Peter McAleese, No Mean Soldier: The Story of the Ultimate Professional Soldier in the SAS and other Forces (London: Cassell & Co., 1993), pp. 163–4. 87 See, e.g., Tony Weaver, “US Anthrax Suspect Had Links with AWB,” The Herald, 1 July 2002; and Marléne Burger, “Murky Past of a US Bio-Warrior,” Mail & Guardian, 15 August 2002. For more on the AWB, see Kemp, Victory or Violence; and P. J. Kotzé and C. P. Beyers, Die opmars van die AWB (Morgenzon: Oranjewerkers Promosies, 1988). For the entire Afrikaner paramilitary right in South Africa, see Martin Schönteich and Henri Boshoff, ‘Volk’, Faith and Fatherland: The Security Threat Posed by the White Right (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2003).

3 “PRIVATIZING” COVERT ACTION The case of the Unification Church

“You don’t investigate people for what they think, but for what they do.” former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti1

Introduction If nothing else, the Iran-Contra scandal temporarily illuminated the extent to which ostensibly private organizations have been helping secretive elements within the American government – in this case the core of the executive branch’s national security bureaucracy – to circumvent Congressional restrictions regarding the conduct of certain important aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Information that has surfaced in the course of both official and unofficial investigations of this affair has not only revealed the widespread use of “proprietaries” and dummy companies by U.S. intelligence and military personnel – a long-standing practice – but also the fact that numerous formally independent organizations have willingly engaged in operations that were blatantly illegal.2 In a few instances this aid may have been provided solely for financial or narrow political gain, but in most cases it also resulted from a convergence of the conservative or rightist political aims of both these “private” groups and factions within the national security apparatus created by President Ronald Reagan and his advisors. Among the groups that have participated in these activities are the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the Air Commando Association (ACA), the National Defense Council (NDC), Refugee Relief International (RRI), Civilian Military/Material Assistance (CMA), and Sun-Myung Moon’s cultic Unification Church (UC), to name only a few.3 Herein I examine some of the covert and clandestine political connections of the last of the previously named organizations. The vast majority of the existing literature on so-called “new religious movements,” including bona fide “cults,” falls into one of four categories: journalistic

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exposés; personal accounts by former members, their relatives, or their friends; academic analyses; or theological/ideological assessments. In the first two of these categories, attention has normally been focused on the techniques used by particular cult groups to recruit new members and subsequently control their external behavior, if not their innermost thoughts. This focus is somewhat understandable, for it is precisely the systematic use of these techniques – selective recruitment of vulnerable targets, initial deception concerning group affiliation and purposes, extreme forms of peer-group pressure, isolation from mainstream society, sensory overload, sleep and protein deprivation, constant surveillance, enforced lack of privacy, intense ideological indoctrination, and sometimes even physical or sexual abuse – that serve to set cults apart from more ordinary organizations in modern industrialized societies.4 And it is precisely because they are extraordinary in certain ways that they elicit such widespread personal and professional fascination. Yet this almost exclusive focus tends to distract attention from other potentially significant aspects of cult behavior, including their political interaction with the outside world. This is especially unfortunate in the case of the Unification Church, or “Moonies.” While most cults both engage in some disreputable political activities (at least on the local level) and have noticeable totalitarian propensities and ramifications,5 the UC has long had an explicitly political agenda. As Moon, the Korean evangelist who founded the church, has said, “we cannot separate the political field from the religious . . . segregation between religion and politics is what Satan likes most.”6 Given such an orientation, it is clearly necessary to consider Moon’s political activities in order to properly evaluate the role and functioning of the UC. Many people have examined aspects of Moon’s political work, but they have often done so from an overly traditional political perspective, one that narrowly concerns itself with explicating the Church’s overt attempts to influence political decisions and policies in the countries within which it operates. Thus, for example, Moon’s attempts to support Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate crisis, raise money for a variety of anti-communist causes, and influence Congressional votes through lobbying are reasonably well known7; and due to the extraordinary efforts of the House Subcommittee chaired by former Minnesota Representative Donald Fraser (Democrat), some of the more sordid activities of the “Moon Organization” have also been exposed to public view.8 Nevertheless, despite these suggestive and important findings, the general view of the Moonies remains one of either bemused distaste for a bunch of “religious kooks,” or, at most, fear of the UC’s purported “brainwashing” abilities.9 The degree to which Moon has been able to mislead the public and conceal the UC’s authoritarian political agenda behind a religious image – however “heretical” or unconventional – is best exemplified by the amount of support he garnered from mainstream church spokesmen in the wake of his prosecution for tax fraud. Even liberal and left-leaning ministers, as well as certain American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) officials, have adopted his view that his incarceration for illegal financial activities was a case of “religious persecution.”10 To counter this deceptive imagery, which was sustained by systematic and extensive propaganda of the most transparent sort, some of the lesser-known political

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activities of the organizational complex run by Moon and his right-hand man, “former” Korean Army colonel Bo-Hi Pak,11 must be sketched. It should then become clearer that Moon’s actions geared toward external social control, backed as they are by extensive economic and political resources, may have constituted the most serious threat posed by the UC during earlier periods of its history. When compared to this external danger, the internal social control mechanisms of the “Moonies” arguably have less significance – except, of course, for the individuals it recruits and subjects to “coercive persuasion” or “thought reform.”12 In this study I will only cover two of Moon’s many alleged covert political operations. First, the links between the UC and the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) will be explored. This will necessarily involve a discussion of the early history and structural features of both organizations, particularly the establishment of joint front groups. Second, the intimate connection between the UC and the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), an international umbrella organization encompassing numerous extreme right and neo-fascist groups, will be revealed. Both of these interconnections are indicative of Moon’s authoritarian political agenda, but probably do not reflect the full range of past UC covert and clandestine operations.

The Unification Church – Korean Central Intelligence Agency connection Of the topics to be covered herein, the links between the UC and the repressive Chung-Hee Park regime in South Korea have received the most publicity. Congressional investigations of the so-called “Koreagate” scandal, which involved both overt and covert efforts by the Republic of Korea (ROK) government to manipulate U.S. policy toward Korea, generated hundreds of articles throughout the world. Yet despite all the media attention and the thousands of pages of Congressional hearings, the precise nature of those links remains difficult to untangle. One reason for this is that the House Subcommittee’s data are incomplete in some crucial areas; another is that sensationalized media accounts often suggested more than the evidence warranted. I do not pretend to definitively answer all of these questions below, but I hope to clear up some of the major misunderstandings that have arisen about Moon’s relationship with the Park regime. Perhaps the best starting point is provided by the rash of eye-opening newspaper articles that appeared in mid-March of 1978, which the following headline in the 16 March Washington Star perfectly summarized: “Moon’s Church Founded by Korean CIA Chief as Political Tool, Panel Says.” These articles were all based on an unevaluated U.S. CIA report released by the Fraser Subcommittee and dated 26 February 1963. This report stated that “Kim Jong Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which had a membership of 27,000, as a political tool.”13 This has been interpreted by some conspiratorially minded people to mean that the UC was founded by the KCIA as a bogus front group. This is obviously false

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since, as will soon become clear, the UC has formally existed since 1954 and in fact predates that year in some form by almost a decade.14 But this fact alone does not absolve the UC, for it does not vitiate the second claim regarding the KCIA’s “use” of Moon’s organization.

In the beginning To come to grips with this issue, the social and political context within which the UC developed must be considered. When World War II ended, the Korean peninsula was in a state of political confusion, social disruption, and economic chaos.15 The lifting of the repressive hand of the Japanese colonial administration, the traumatic division of the country into communist and non-communist halves, and the underdeveloped condition of the economy (particularly in the south) combined to create a psychological climate of insecurity and desperation. In such conditions, millenarian religious movements tend to flourish, and indeed numerous “newly risen religions” (shinhung jonggyo) arose throughout Korea in the decade following Japan’s surrender.16 These religions were characterized by charismatic leadership; syncretistic beliefs combining ancestor worship, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, magic, divination, astrology, Christianity, and shamanism; extreme nationalism that might take political forms; and this-worldly attempts to create an ideal society in which “no poverty or social classes will exist and the thoughts of all men will be uniform . . . . All the world will become one true family.”17 This earthly orientation and the promise of success in the here and now led these movements to emphasize organization and business acumen along with fervor and discipline.18 All of these characteristics were to apply to the UC as it developed. With this background, it is possible to place the early history of the UC and its founder in its proper milieu. As Rüdiger Hauth has pointed out, the accounts of Moon’s early life are “a mixture of legend, truth, fantasy and saint-worship.”19 Nevertheless, the basic outlines of Moon’s career can be reconstructed.20 He was born on 6 January 1920 in a rural province of northwest Korea called P’yong’an Bugjjog. His family converted to a millenarian brand of Presbyterianism when he was ten. Upon finishing at a technical high school in Seoul, he studied electrical engineering at Waseda University in Japan, though it is unclear whether he officially graduated.21 When the war ended in 1945, he returned to northern Korea and attempted to found a small community church near P’yongyang, without much success. He then joined a mystical sect in the southern Korean province of Kyonggi called Israel Suo-won, whose tenets foreshadowed both his later theological principles, particularly in their emphasis upon the imminent appearance of a Korean messiah, and his ritual practice of “blood purification” via sexual intercourse (pikarume).22 Six months later he returned to P’yongyang and began preaching, but complaints about his missionary practices (including pikarume) by other, established religious groups led first to his excommunication and then to two arrests by the North Korean authorities, the second of which occurred on 22 February 1948.23 The charges against him are alternately listed as adultery and polygamy, or – according to one

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“official” UC source – espionage24; in any case, he was incarcerated at Hungnam prison camp until being freed by advancing United Nations troops on 14 October 1950. He then traveled by ship to the South Korean port of Pusan, where he performed manual labor and initiated new missionary activities. After gathering a small circle of followers, he moved his parish to Seoul. In May of 1954, he officially founded a religious association called T’ong-il Kyo (Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity). This later became known as the UC. Once ensconced in Seoul, Moon concentrated his recruiting efforts on the university community and drew most of his converts from among idealistic students.25 His fervor and occasional successes, e.g., the mass recruitment of six faculty members and forty students from the all-female Christian school Ewha University,26 generated widespread publicity and opposition among mainline Protestant church officials; and the complaints of the latter led to his arrest by the South Korean government of Syng-Man Rhee in 1955. The nature of the charges against him remains a matter of bitter controversy. Some cite unconfirmed intelligence reports to the effect that Moon was again initiating new female church members by means of pikarume, but his followers vehemently deny it and the available evidence is contradictory.27 As Bromley and Shupe Jr. conclude, “a quarter of a century later the truth or falsity of the charges still seems beyond demonstration.”28 Whatever the case, though the charges were dropped shortly thereafter, the UC and the ROK government maintained a somewhat uneasy relationship until the 1971 coup that brought Major General Chung-Hee Pak to power.29 Nevertheless, throughout the second half of the 1950s, the UC was able to expand its membership and develop some organizational sophistication.30

Moon’s theology Moon’s theological doctrines must now be summarized, for otherwise the UC’s political work cannot be fully explained. The focus of his religious teaching, as revealed in both the UC’s “bible” (The Divine Principle)31 and the periodic compilations of his speeches (Master Speaks), is on the Fall of Man and the need to restore Man’s original state of perfection.32 Adam and Eve forfeited their chance to become the ideal parents of a God-centered Mankind, since Eve copulated with Lucifer and thence with Adam. Christ, who was sent by God to restore Man to perfection, failed to accomplish this task in the physical sense because he was prevented from siring a sinless family due to his betrayal by the Jews and subsequent crucification.33 Because of this partial failure, God was forced to send another Messiah – the Lord of the Second Advent – to bring God and Man into physical harmony again. That Lord is none other than Moon himself.34 To perform his appointed task, Moon must overcome Satan and create a God-centered human family so as to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Put another way, “Moon’s primary interest is in unifying the world – religiously, politically, scientifically – around himself as Messiah and [around] his revelation as truth.”35 Thus, Moon has a megalomaniacal conception of his own role as a divinely inspired worldwide leader.36

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If this revision of the Christian concept of Man’s restoration was not placed within a terrestrial context, it would doubtless have little political significance. But like the other “new religions” of Korea and Japan, the UC was from the beginning a movement directed toward this-worldly salvation and improvement.37 Therefore, it is not surprising that Moon has come to believe that he will not be able to fulfill his mission of restoring Man to physical perfection until he subjugates the earthly satanic forces descending from Cain’s lineage. He came to equate these with atheistic communistic societies through a peculiar theological logic. These societies are dangerous not because they deny God’s providential designs outright, but because they have been established by Lucifer to mimic and thus preempt God’s ideal of a “socialist,” i.e., economically democratic, universal human society.38 Materialistic, “scientific” communism in this way deceitfully constitutes the pseudo-image of a genuine God-centered family. As a result, the Heavenly side and the satanic side have “come to dominate the world in their respective ways . . . . the war for the unification of these two worlds must come next.”39 The third and final world war must be waged on both a material and an ideological level; and, indeed, Moon emphasizes the importance of the latter. This is where his notion of “heavenly deception” comes in. Since Satan’s forces base their success on deception, Moon argues that similar tactics must be employed by the Heavenly side. This serves as a theological justification for the type of obfuscation and deceit that characterize so many UC operations.40 Thus, even from this short summary, one can see that the church’s emphasis on political action is inextricably linked to Moon’s theology. It may therefore be true, as Alain Woodrow has noted, that the UC is among the “most politicized” of all sects.41 Yet given the intrinsic political ramifications of Moon’s Manichean religious views, it does not seem wise to claim further that the UC “is an essentially political movement with a religious façade,”42 because such a statement suggests a separation between the political and the religious that may well be artificial, and which, indeed, implies that the church’s adoption of a political agenda preceded its religious evangelism in Korea. The latter interpretation can hardly be maintained in view of the evidence that neither Moon nor his theoretical mentor Hyo-Won Eu adopted anti-communist views before the late 1950s, at the very earliest.43 We must now turn to the Korean CIA (KCIA). Fortunately, a good deal of information about this organization has been accumulated by the Fraser Subcommittee.44 The key figure in the establishment and development of the KCIA was Jong-Pil Kim. He was born in Ch’ungch’ong province in 1936, graduated from the Korean Army’s Officer Candidate School in its eighth class of 1949, and was immediately assigned to the military intelligence (G-2) staff, where he specialized in counterintelligence and North Korean affairs.45 Within this secretive milieu, he and other increasingly disaffected younger officers maneuvered for promotions (which were repeatedly delayed), agitated for reform, and eventually began to plot the overthrow of their corrupt superiors. Kim had personally studied coup techniques for some time, and when popular opposition developed during the term of Syng-Man Rhee and came to a climax under successor Myon Chang, he enlisted

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the aid of fellow members of the eighth graduate class and Major General Park in his attempt to topple Chang’s weak civilian government.46 On 16 May 1961, 3,500 Marines and paratroopers under their command seized control of Seoul in an almost bloodless coup. The coup leaders immediately declared martial law, dissolved the National Assembly, banned all political activity, and formed a ruling junta known as the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction (SCNR).47 Despite initial resistance from the U.S. State Department personnel in Korea, the American Government accepted the coup as a fait accompli as soon as they were satisfied that Park and Kim, both of whom had earlier flirted with left-wing causes,48 had long since become thoroughly pro-American and anti-communist.49

The KCIA Kim officially founded the KCIA on 19 June 1961, and was appointed as its first director.50 His goal was not only to safeguard the new regime but to create an impregnable power base for himself and the 3,000 former G-2 men that constituted its core personnel.51 Therefore, although the KCIA formally replaced its predecessor under the ousted Myon Chang regime, the Combined Intelligence Research Center, its responsibilities were greatly expanded. The new organization was “to supervise and coordinate both international and domestic intelligence activities and criminal investigation by all government agencies, including that of the military”52 – i.e., to combine all foreign intelligence and internal security functions in one agency.53 To accomplish these extensive tasks, its personnel were well-paid and carefully organized into eight Bureaus coordinated by an executive committee.54 The result, according to expert testimony, was the creation of a “state within a state”55 that was “involved in virtually every aspect of Korean life.”56 This latter remark is more than rhetorical, for although the KCIA has received the most media attention for its external influence operations in the U.S., its primary function has always been to suppress dissent within South Korea.57 In its efforts to intimidate the Korean population and eliminate political opposition, it reportedly relied upon the standard gamut of secret police techniques, including heavy-handed surveillance, kidnapping, assassination, infiltration, provocation, “emergency” arrest and imprisonment, and both physical and psychological torture.58 The expanded operational sphere of the KCIA was demonstrated as early as 1962, when Kim supervised the creation of the rigidly centralized “civilian” Minju Kongwa Tang (Democratic Republican Party, or DRP) for Park and installed himself as party chairman.59 The persuasiveness and intrusive power of the KCIA in South Korea must therefore be taken into account when examining the UC’s political activities and options. Now that the backgrounds of the UC and KCIA have been sketched, I shall attempt to clarify aspects of their relationship. Considering Jong-Pil Kim’s conspiratorial brilliance and his success in establishing an extremely powerful coercive apparatus under his direct control, it is not at all hard to imagine that he “organized” – or more likely reorganized – the UC in order to utilize it politically.60 Even if Moon had been opposed to such an arrangement – and there is little reason

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to suppose he would have been, given his own desire to obtain recognition and support from the Korean political establishment – he could not have forcibly prevented it. Therefore, there is every reason to suspect that Moon and Kim made a mutually beneficial “gentlemen’s agreement” whereby the former would be allowed to maintain and even expand his evangelistic and business activities with official approval in return for permitting his revamped church to be used as a “cover” for a variety of KCIA operations.61 In any arrangement of this type, Kim would obviously have been the dominant party, at least in the early stages. However, as Kim’s own fortunes waxed and waned as a result of factional struggles between his followers and those of his major rivals in the so-called “anti-Main Current” wing of the DRP,62 Moon – whose organization increasingly established semi-independent power bases in Japan and the U.S. – seems to have seized upon these periodic opportunities to enlarge his own operation’s independence. Even so, the heavy hands of the KCIA and other powerful ROK agencies, including the Counter-Intelligence Corps (KCIC) under Park’s direct control,63 would have been in a position to forcibly suppress his church’s enterprises in Korea, as indeed they did if only temporarily, in the wake of the “Koreagate” scandal.64 This interpretation is not mere speculation. According to the Fraser Subcommittee report, there is “a great deal of independent corroboration for the suggestion in [U.S.] intelligence reports that Kim Jong-Pil and the Moon organization carried on a mutually supportive relationship, as well as for the statement that Kim used the UC for political purposes.”65 Herein, my purpose is not to explicate all the ways in which Moon participated in the Korean influence campaign, but only to focus on those particulars that seem to shed some light on the nature of the relations between the UC and KCIA.

KCIA and the Unification Church One of the earliest clues is provided by four English-speaking ROK Army officers who were close to Jong-Pil Kim and were either members or “active sympathizers” of the UC beginning in the mid-1950s – Sang-Keuk Han (a.k.a. Bud Han), SangIn Kim (a.k.a. Steve Kim), Sang-Kil Han, and Bo-Hi Pak.66 The process by which these men became involved with the UC requires some clarification. According to Jean-François Boyer, Pak was introduced to the UC by one of Moon’s most brilliant disciples, Young-Oon Kim, who had met the young Colonel at U.S. Army Headquarters in Korea, where both had jobs. Pak quickly became involved with Moon’s group, although he did not become an official member until 1957, and it was he who elicited the sympathy and support of the other three officers.67 This not only made it possible for Moon to gain a foothold within the military, but also seems to have led to his further politicization.68 Of these four, Pak is the most important.69 He was born on 18 August 1930, entered the Korean military academy on 1 June 1950, fought in the Korean War, attended the U.S. Army’s Infantry Training School at Fort Benning,70 served as liaison to the Chief of the U.S. Advisory Group in Korea at different times between

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1953 and 1961, and was assistant military attaché at the Washington D.C. ROK embassy from 1961 to 1964, where he functioned as liaison between the KCIA and the U.S. intelligence agencies.71 In this latter capacity, he served as one of John-Pil Kim’s “escorts” during Kim’s meetings with (U.S.) CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials in 1962.72 He has long been Moon’s right hand man. Bud Han was a UC member who was also a personal assistant to Jong-Pil Kim and a translator for Park before becoming an ROK diplomat and, eventually a director of Moon’s major U.S. newspaper, The Washington Times.73 Steve Kim was a UC supporter who retired from the Army in May of 1961 to join the KCIA, at which point he served as a “discrete but effective intermediary” between the UC and the Park regime. Later he became the liaison man between the KCIA and U.S. CIA, served as Jong-Pil Kim’s translator during the latter’s 1962 visit to America, and ultimately became the head of Moon’s media group, New World Communications Inc.74 Finally, Sang-Kil Han was a UC sympathizer who served as military attaché at the Washington ROK embassy in the late 1960s, a position involving intelligence work,75 and later became Moon’s personal secretary and the tutor for his children.76 Thus, while in the period preceding and following the Park coup, these four officers were excellently placed to broker relations between Jong-Pil Kim and Moon, the precise nature of their loyalty is impossible to determine. Whose ends were they mainly serving? Were they, as Boyer assumes, devoted followers of Moon who were using their military and intelligence positions to proselytize and increase his influence? Were they promoting both Moon’s and Kim’s purposes, which may have been perfectly complementary? Or were they sent by counterintelligence expert Kim to infiltrate the UC and manipulate it for his hidden purposes? This will probably remain a mystery, as there is circumstantial evidence to suggest all three interpretations and not enough hard data to conclusively resolve the issue. For example, Pak has been a described as a “model Moonie” – obedient and absolutely loyal to Moon.77Yet his intelligence background cannot be lightly dismissed, and it is noteworthy that Kim’s KCIA was later discovered to be infiltrating operatives into Korean-American churches to monitor and manipulate their activities.78 All we can say with certainty is that these four played a major role in the early development of relations between the UC and the founders of the KCIA. However, regardless of the exact nature of these early interactions, there is no doubt that Moon’s fortunes improved dramatically following Park’s coup and Kim’s installation as KCIA director. While other churches in Korea were viewed with suspicion and sometimes even persecuted,79 the UC benefitted as never before. In October of 1962, Jong-Pil Kim met secretly with UC members in San Francisco and told them “he would give their movement political support in Korea, though he could not afford to do so openly.”80 He soon made good on his promise: shortly thereafter the Korean UC was officially registered as a bona fide church and granted tax exempt status by the Park government.81 Later still, T’ong-Il Industries – Moon’s first and most important business venture in Korea – was awarded ROK defense

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contracts to make parts for M-79 grenade launchers, Vulcan anti-aircraft guns, and probably M-16 assault rifles;82 and the Korean government subsidized T’ong-Il and other UC fronts.83 Moon has stated that the Korea of the Park regime was “a country where, if you want to do well, undoubtedly you should have a blessing from the political sector, especially people in power.”84 But this “blessing” is not bestowed cheaply, and there is no doubt that the UC had to grant the government favors and accede to its demands, the most important of which seems to have been Kim’s desire to use the UC as a “cover” for KCIA operations or, at the very least, to enter into a partnership with the UC in promoting mutually desired anti-communist and pro-Park activities. Since there is no evidence that the UC employed front groups conducive to such operations prior to the early 1960s, one can easily suspect that Moon was pressured into “allowing” Kim to reorganize the UC’s organizational structure for these covert political purposes. However, serious lacunae in the available data between 1955 and 1965 make it difficult to demonstrate this conclusively. Up to the former year, all indications are that the UC struggled to win new converts and remain financially viable,85 and under these circumstances one would normally not expect to find a great deal of structural elaboration. Our first real information about UC organization is provided by Chong-Sun Kim, who – presumably on the basis of Korean and Japanese sources – says that Moon had established thirty churches throughout South Korea by July of 1957.86 In the following year, Moon expended considerable effort to establish new UC branches, both in Korea and abroad.87 Sang-Ik Choi was authorized to begin missionary work in Japan88 and Young-Oon Kim was sent overseas to establish new churches.89 In 1959, a new phase of organizational expansion and transformation occurred. Thirty new “evangelical centers” were established to train his followers, the church becoming more hierarchical and disciplined, and by the end of the year seventy churches had been founded.90 It is worth noting that all of this expansion and reorganization was after the recruitment of Bo-Hi Pak.

The UC in the 1960s But it was not until the 1960s – after the Park coup – that the UC began to take on its current, highly elaborate form. According to C-S Kim, a top UC official named Hyo-Won Yu reorganized the church into “a communist-type centralized structure comprising numerous Divine Principle indoctrination centers, executive committees, bureaus, sections and cell organizations.”91 A similar UC structure is described in detail in a 1967 article published by one of Moon’s early associates, Syn-Duk Ch’oi, who must have written it prior to the date Yu is said to have initiated this reorganization.92 Therein she describes an efficient, systematic arrangement involving both an executive headquarters to oversee general, cultural, and business affairs, and a pyramidal parish network reaching from the provincial level down through the district, sub-district, and village levels to the individual evangelist.93 She also indicates that the UC had a highly developed communications system for the transmission of orders and rapid personnel mobilization, a zealous cadre of members

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absolutely devoted to Moon and willing to undergo high work levels and extreme self-sacrifice, and – perhaps most importantly – a type of cross-cutting arrangement of members into horizontal division by sex and age which, when combined with the territorially-based vertical structures, served to enmesh each member in a complex web of organizational control that severely restricted individual freedom of action.94 This parallels the cadre-building techniques utilized by the world’s authoritarian Marxist-Leninist parties,95 and it is therefore hardly surprising when Ch’oi says that “the organization of the T’ong-il church is so systematic that one thinks of communists. They pose as ‘heavenly communists’.”96 Another point of interest is that UC members “cooperated” with village officials and police personnel on the local level.97 The difficulty lies in identifying the true author of this sophisticated organizational framework. One is naturally tempted to ascribe it to the conscious design and action of Jong-Pil Kim, since it seems to conform, in many respects, to the ROK government’s own hierarchical administrative structure.98 Yet this may well be a false assumption, since other New Religions in both Korea and Japan had created similarly elaborate arrangements.99 Did Moon simply copy the hierarchical structure of other New Religions and adapt it for his own purposes, or did Kim later impose it on the UC? Again, it is impossible to say for certain. But it does appear likely that the KCIA chief, who was, after all, an expert on clandestine and covert organizational techniques, introduced Moon to the concept of front groups and perhaps also to the cross-cutting organizational pattern noted previously; and it is certain that the post-coup regime helped the UC expand and prosper. In any case, the final result of this official sponsorship and reorganization is well summarized in the Fraser Subcommittee’s final 1978 report:100 “[Moon is] the key figure in an international network of [front] organizations engaged in economic and political as well as religious activities. [It] is essentially one worldwide organization, under the centralized direction and control of Moon . . . . In the training and use of lower-ranking members, it resembles a paramilitary organization, while in other respects it has the characteristics of a tightly disciplined international political party.” This conclusion is corroborated by the testimony of ex-Moonies like Diana Devine, who confirmed that “[a]ll members of the UC are used interchangeably in any one of the 60 front organizations, as needed or assigned by Moon.”101 One is therefore entitled to assume that Kim had a hand in transforming the UC from a semi-communal (albeit disciplined), impoverished, and relatively unpopular “New Religion” into a political instrument of such sophistication. A couple of examples of joint UC-KCIA operations should be delineated for illustrative purposes. One involved the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF), reputedly Pak’s brainchild.102 This organization was formally established in Washington in March 1964, ostensibly to accord honor to Americans who defended and aided Korea, provide for cultural interchanges, and “foster a mutuality of understanding,

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respect and friendship between the citizens of the United States and Korea.”103 Yet the KCFF had other, covert agendas. Pak told Robert Roland that the KCFF was a “front organization” that was to be used by Moon to “gain influence with wealthy people [and] government officials” and as a UC “fund-raising organization.”104 In a 1963 brochure produced before the KCFF’s founding, its only proposed project was listed as the Little Angels,105 a Korean dance troupe created by Moon.106 Yet this is not the whole story either, for the KCFF was also utilized to raise money for another project sponsored by the KCIA and the Park regime – the Freedom Center (FC) established by the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League (APACL) in Seoul.107 On 1 January 1964, Jong-Pil Kim had been named as the KCFF’s “honorary chairman,”108 and by the spring of that year he had “persuaded” Pak to list the Freedom Centre as the KCFF’s “primary project.”109 Moreover, Pak was granted an “unprecedented” military discharge so that he could take charge of KCFF’s development,110 and other intelligence personnel were also associated with the KCFF, including William Curtin, a former U.S. military intelligence officer who became a KCFF board member and vice president,111 and a KCIA officer named Un-Young Kim (a.k.a. Mickey Kim), who was given a special assignment involving the FC.112 In 1966 the KCIA pressured the KCFF to sponsor another project, the Radio of Free Asia (RFA), which was designed to beam anti-communist propaganda behind the “Bamboo Curtain.”113 The idea was to raise money in the U.S. to pay for the Seoul-based transmissions, the first of which was broadcast on 15 August 1966.114 Although RFA had a titular American chief, its two operations directors were JongPil Kim subordinates and KCIA operatives.115 Furthermore, RFA was allowed to use ROK government facilities “at no cost,”116 and its broadcasts were monitored and partially supplied by the KCIA’s Seventh Bureau,117 which was responsible for psychological warfare. Thus, American citizens were being duped into financing official South Korean propaganda by the KCFF. All of these developments led the Fraser Subcommittee to conclude that from “the early 1960’s through 1978, KCFF served as an important link between the Moon organization and the ROK Government,”118 and that “the influence of Kim Jong-Pil and Moon was present in its establishment and operations.”119 Many other examples of KCIA-UC cooperation can be mentioned. Among the more significant are the establishment of a UC training center at Sootaek-Ri to provide mandatory anti-communist indoctrination to ROK government officials, which has by now “educated” many thousands of Koreans;120 the provision of $50,000 by the KCIA to aid Moon’s attempted takeover of the Diplomat National Bank in New York121; the near launching of an anti-Japanese demonstration in Washington by Moonies under KCIA direction122; the establishment of numerous UC-controlled businesses in South Korea with Park’s support123; the use of official Korean embassy cable channels by Pak124; and the mutual KCIA-UC involvement in the founding of the International Federation for Victory over Communism (IFVC) and its U.S. affiliate, the Freedom Leadership Foundation (FLF).125 From this brief synthesis of masses of evidence uncovered by the Fraser Subcommittee, two firm conclusions can be drawn. First, contrary to the assertions of

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Pak and Moon himself, the UC was intimately involved in the Korean influence campaign directed by elements of the KCIA. Second, the UC was not simply an “agent of influence” for the ROK regime, as some investigators have asserted. As the Subcommittee itself noted, “Moon and his organization acted from a mixture of motives and objectives. Service to Korea was combined with a desire to advance personal and organizational goals.”126 This is supported by other informed testimony. According to Allan Tate Wood, a former FLF leader, Moon spoke of making the Korean government “absolutely dependent” on his services,127 and in one talk Moon said: “My life is not so small I would act as a [K]CIA agent. My eyes and goal are not just for Korea . . . . the world is my goal and target.”128 Therefore, it seems likely that the UC tried to extend its operational independence by taking advantage of factional strife between the several power blocs within Korea that had formed by the 1970s. As the Subcommittee emphasized, the UC’s organizational complex “was affected by shifts among the various factions within the Korean Government.”129 In this connection, it should be noted that Pak had established close relations with other powerful ROK figures besides Jong-Pil Kim, including the head of the Presidential Protective Force, Chong-Kyu Park.130 Thus, although the organizational refinement and economic expansion of the UC were stimulated by the ROK government following the 1961 coup, it would probably be a mistake to view the megalomaniac Moon as a passive lackey.131 In short, although some confusion remains regarding the precise details of the relationship between the UC and KCIA, the intimate connections between the two cannot be denied. Moon’s covert – and indeed overt – political support for one of the world’s more repressive dictatorships,132 in conjunction with its brutal secret police apparatus, provides an excellent example of how the Church functioned in an external social control capacity, since these operations obviously contributed to manipulating and restricting the activities of people outside of the UC itself. This dimension of the Church’s “mission” will be equally apparent when its connection to WACL is examined.

The Unification Church – World Anti-Communist League linkage As will soon become clear, not enough serious research has been devoted to WACL to enable one to fully elucidate the activities of this group, either in general or in relation to Moon’s operations.133 Nevertheless, I shall attempt to sketch some of the links between the two organizations after WACL’s origins and development have been outlined. As Charles Goldman has noted, “the organizational backbone” of WACL was constituted by an earlier formation known as the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League (APACL).134 This latter organization was jointly founded by the governments of Syng-Man Rhee in South Korea and Kai-shek Chiang in Taiwan on 15 June 1954,135 perhaps at the instigation and with the logistical support of the United States.136 Although APACL purported to be a private organization, it was

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organized and largely staffed by active Taiwanese and South Korean intelligence personnel,137 and seems to have been partially funded by profits from Guomindang (GMD) opium-smuggling activities in the “Golden Triangle” of Southeast Asia, which elements of Chiang’s party controlled with (U.S.) CIA assistance.138 APACL’s self-defined goal was to serve as a center for producing and disseminating anticommunist propaganda and to rally non-communist governments in South and East Asia in support of an active coalition against mainland China.139 To accomplish these tasks, it published numerous pamphlets on the “red Chinese menace”140 and sought to make contact with anti-communist regimes and organizations throughout Asia, and, indeed, the entire world.141 In this latter effort it was fairly successful, for it soon obtained the support of hardline factions within the governments of Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand,142 and also established liaisons with right-wing or extreme right-wing organizations outside of Asia, including American groups that formed part of the GMD’s “China Lobby,”143 the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN),144 the Natsional’no Trudovoi Soyuz (NTS: National Alliance of Labor),145 and an umbrella group for Latin American ultras called the Confederación Interamericana de Defensa del Continente (CIADC: Inter-American Confederation for the Defense of the Continent).146 The growing cooperation that ensued resulted in the creation of an international steering committee to coordinate worldwide anti-communist activities known as the World Anti-Communist Congress for Freedom and Liberation (WACCFL),147 which held a meeting in Mexico City in March of 1958 and included representatives from various East Asian governments, the ABN, the CIADC, the American Security Council (ASC),148 and the West German Volksbund fur Frieden und Freiheit (VFF: People’s League for Peace and Freedom).149 This network continued to solidify and expand until, in response to the rapid growth of the left in the first half of the 1960s, it reorganized itself into the World Anti-Communist League in 1966.150 At that point, APACL became its official Asian branch.

WACL develops From the outset WACL tried hard to clothe its crude, visceral anti-communism in a respectable guise,151 and in a later publication it listed its aims as follows:152 “Fight and strive to remove all forms of totalitarianism, including communism, from the face of the earth, wherever they may be found; uphold human rights, most important of which are liberty, freedom of religious beliefs, social justice, and the self- determination of all peoples.” And in fact, some genuinely conservative organizations that have affiliated with WACL promoted a relatively moderate form of anti-communism and probably accepted this disingenuous description as an accurate summary of their own objectives. The token participation of such traditional anti-communist outfits probably explains why “WACL enjoys a general reputation in conservative circles

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as a respectable if largely ineffectual promoter of an outdated 1950’s-era anticommunism.”153 Behind this harmless façade, however, many member organizations pursued hidden agendas and were simply using WACL as a front to make contact with other activists who shared their sympathies and/or as a cover to plan and coordinate joint actions of a violent, repressive nature in various parts of the world. But since these intersecting secret agendas derived from diverse sources, including rival non-communist intelligence services and xenophobic ultra-nationalistic groups,154 they were not always fully integrated or even fully compatible. The development of WACL therefore appears turbulent and schizophrenic, with ‘moderate’ British, Scandinavian, and (sometimes) American factions opposing extremist Latin American and continental European sections; and groups among the latter competing with each other for leadership and influence.155 Shortly after WACL was formally established, its power base purportedly began to shift away from effective South Korean and Taiwanese control into the hands of neo-fascist extremists.156 A series of internal memos produced by WACL members – one by Professor David Rowe of WACL’s former U.S. chapter (the American Council for World Freedom [ACWF]) in 1970, one by Geoffrey-Stewart-Smith of WACL’s former British chapter (the Foreign Affairs Circle) in 1972, one by Professor Stefan Possony of the Hoover Institution and ACWF in 1974, and one by relatively moderate Scandinavian chapters in the late 1970s – acknowledged and complained about the increasing takeover of WACL by anti-Semitic and even some overtly pro-Nazi ultras.157According to Possony, the main group responsible for this shift was WACL’s Latin American wing, the Confederación Anticomunista Latinoamericana (CAL: Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation), whose core comprised members of Los Tecos, a Nazi-tinged ex-Catholic integralist organisation based at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara that was responsible over the years for several terrorist attacks on both rivals and supposed “subversives.”158 The successful entry of CAL reportedly reopened WACL’s membership rolls to numerous other ultra-rightist outfits, many of which were identified in Paul Valentine’s excellent 1978 article in the Washington Post.159 This development led to both the resignation of some less radical WACL sections and the eventual expulsion – in name, if not in substance – of certain more extreme factions, including the CAL, the British hereditarian Roger Pearson’s Council on American Affairs (CAA), and EUROWACL, the “parallel subgroup of European fascists” that he helped organize.160 However this may be, and despite several publicized attempts to expel the remaining extremist chapters and clean up WACL’s image, the organization continues to be a hotbed of “parafascist” intrigue and subversion.161 Some of the expelled organizations simply made cosmetic name changes and were then readmitted with virtually the same personel,162 and even WACL members who had formally opposed or exposed these “neo-Nazi” elements, tacitly accepted their subsequent re-entry.163 Thus, in an official 1984 list of WACL affiliates,164 one still finds “disreputable” groups like Alpha 66, an active Cuban exile paramilitary organization with intimate connections to the CIA,165 the collaborationist ABN,166 and the Crown

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Commonwealth League of Rights, headed by the notorious Australian anti-Semite, Eric D. Butler.167 Even more significantly, among the recent participants at WACL conferences, one can identify numerous extremists with a long history of violence, including Nazareno Mollicone and Pierluigi Concutelli of Italy’s neo-fascist terrorist group, Ordine Nuovo (ON: New Order), which for years has engaged in terrorist bombings and murders forming part of a coordinated “strategy of tension”168; Blas Piñar of Spain’s Fuerza Nueva (New Force), a “right” Falangist organization whose members have been linked to at least one infamous terrorist assault169; Tom Posey and other American “patriots” from CMA, some of whom seem to have been members of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) factions170; Mario Sandoval Alarcón of Guatemala’s “party of organized violence” – the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN: National Liberation Movement) – which played a key role in the establishment of “death squads” throughout Latin America171; Sandoval’s protégé Roberto D’Aubisson of El Salvador’s Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA: National Republican Alliance) party, which has well-documented ties to Salvadoran parallel police commandos172; Dinko Š akić, an Ustaše concentration camp commander in Yugoslavia during World War II and now a member of both the Croatian section of the ABN and an Australia-based, Ustaše-inspired terrorist group called the Hrvatsko Revolucionarno Bratsvo (HRB: Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood)173; a number of South American covert action specialists working for the Argentinian, Bolivian, Brazilian, Chilean, Paraguayan, or Uruguayan secret services in their “Operation Condor” continent-wide assassination operations174; and possibly Stefano Delle Chiaie of Italy’s violent neo-fascist group Avanguardia Nazionale (AN: National Vanguard), one of the world’s most active right-wing terrorists prior to his 1987 seizure in Venezuela.175 These examples, which could be multiplied, explain why Goldman has characterized WACL as “the foremost neo-fascist umbrella organization in today’s world.”176 They also serve to illustrate the truly Orwellian nature of the massive propaganda campaign launched by WACL’s chairman, retired Major General John L. Singlaub of the ACWF, to portray the organization as a haven for democrats and “freedom fighters” (although he admittedly did make some effort to clean it up by expelling CAL).177 This brief overview of WACL provides a springboard for discussing that group’s relationship with the UC, a relationship that – despite Moon’s public attack on it in the mid-1970s, when he accused it of being a “fascist” organization – had been multifaceted but close.178 As has already been noted, South Korean President Syng-Man Rhee was one of the original promoters of APACL, along with Kai-shek Chiang of Taiwan. This was one Rhee project that survived the 1961 military coup,179 for Park soon after decided to establish an APACL-affiliated Freedom Center in Seoul and, as we also saw in in this chapter, he sought to use Bo-Hi Pak’s KCFF to raise funds in the U.S. to support it. This represents the first known link between Moon’s UC and APACL, the organization that shortly thereafter gave birth to WACL. According to Boyer, however, a rivalry to obtain Park’s favor later developed between Moon and the largely anti-Moonist Korean WACL chapter, which the latter ultimately won.180

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The Japanese Unification Church However, the real key to the WACL-Moon link probably lies in Japan, and it is therefore necessary to trace the development of the Japanese UC before trying to clarify this link. The founder of the Japanese branch of Moon’s church was Sang-Ik Choi, who spent much of his youth living in Osaka, Japan. At the end of World War II he and his family were forced to return to Korea, and, since he had studied English in Japan, he obtained a job interpreting for the occupying American forces.181 His father had earlier become a devotee of Tenrikyo, a Japanese New Religion, and after a short anti-religious phase Sang-Ik Choi converted to Christianity and ended up joining the T’ong-Il Kyo in April 1957.182 After doing some missionary work for Moon in Korea, he was sent to Japan to start a UC branch in June of 1958.183 His early efforts met with virtually no success; when he officially founded the church (known in Japan as the Genri Undo) on 10 August 1959, he was its only actual member.184 Finally, after years of frustration he managed to “convert” fifty leaders of the ultra-nationalist Nichiren Buddhist sect, Rissho Kosei-Kai (Establishment of Righteousness Rebirth Association) in late 1962, and with their help the Genri Undo began to grow.185 By 1966, it had developed a “tight organizational structure” that was reflected in a communal “family” lifestyle, a systematized intensive training program, a “corporate” church organization with a national headquarters divided into bureaus, departments, divisions and committees, and a regional system divided into eleven districts and thirty-six prefectural churches.186 Eventually, the Japanese UC became the largest and wealthiest of all Moon’s national branches, and some of the vast funds raised by its members were transferred to the U.S. and used by the American UC in its pro-South Korea “influence” operations.187 Once again, we observe a course of development similar to that which occurred in South Korea. Prior to late 1962, the Genri Undo was impoverished, extremely small, and struggling for its existence. Less than four years later, it had become powerful, highly organized, and well financed. How can one account for this transformation? Although the data does not permit us to clarify all of the details, it would appear that “friends in high places” again played a role in this turnabout, as they did in Korea after the 1961 coup. In the Japanese context, however, such support would likely not have been granted publicity by government officials, but garnered covertly through the machinations of the so-called kuromaku or “black curtains,” a term borrowed from the traditional Kabuki theater that is nowadays used to designate “conspiratorial political bosses” who broker power behind the scenes via a combination of intimidation, bribery, blackmail, brute force, and nemawashi (“binding the roots”), a time-consuming, conflict-reducing process of negotiation.188 According to Kaplan and Dubro, “[a]lthough most political arenas [in Japan] have their kuromaku, the term most often applies to those men on the right – usually the extreme right – who serve as a bridge between the yakuza-rightist underworld and the legitimate world of business and mainstream politics.”189 Our first hint of kuromaku involvement in the development of the UC in Japan is that it was none other than Osami (a.k.a. Henri) Kuboki, an aide to Rissho Kosei-Kai

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president Nikkyo Niwano, and Kaichi Komiyama, the chief of the organization’s Religion Department, whose “interest” in the fledgling Genri Undo (GU) led to the crucial 1962 “conversion” of the fifty sect leaders to Unificationism.190 In addition to occupying an influential position within the Rissho Kosei-Kai, Kuboki was apparently a “yakuza lieutenant” of Yoshio Kodama,191 one of the two most powerful kuromaku in early postwar Japan. The other was Ryoichi Sasagawa, who also took an early interest in the GU and thence became its unofficial “advisor” and the “legal guarantor” of its founder, Sang-Ik Choi, during the latter’s immigration trial in 1963–1964.192 After Choi’s expulsion from Japan, Kuboki and Komiyama took over the leadership of the GU, the former becoming president of the Sekain Kinsutokyo Toitsu Shinsei Kyokai (World Christian Unification Holy Ghost Church) in 1963, the latter establishing its student group, the Zenkoku Daigaku Genri Kenkyu Kai (All Japan Universities Basic Principle Study Association) in 1964.193 To grasp the significance of these events, it is necessary to sketch the background of Kodama and Sasagawa.

Kodama and Sasagawa Kodama was born in Fukushima Prefecture in 1911 and, after receiving some primary and secondary schooling in Korea, returned to Japan, became involved with a long succession of prewar ultra-nationalist and pan-Asian groups – among which was Mitsuru Toyama’s Genyo Sha (Dark Ocean Society), the secret society founded in the late nineteenth century that first grouped extreme rightists and yakuza together194 – and was arrested several times for a variety of subversive and terrorist activities, including planning the assassination of high-level government officials in the mid-1930s.195 Following his release from a third stint in prison in 1937, he used his rightist political connections to obtain various official positions, first at Army headquarters and later with the Information Bureau of the Foreign Ministry.196 His peculiar talents were soon recognized by his superiors, and he was sent to China, Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria, where he undertook pro-militarist covert operations of different sorts, including the establishment of espionage networks in China. Following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Kodama was authorized to create his own apparatus, the Kodama Kikan (Kodama Agency or Organ), which was then granted an exclusive contract to procure strategic materials (especially precious metals) for the Japanese Naval Air Force. In this capacity, he amassed a fortune through bribery and extortion, while simultaneously gathering intelligence, financing the Shanghai office of the Kempei Tai secret police, launching paramilitary actions, and trafficking in opium.197 In August of 1945, he was appointed to the Advisory Council of the post-surrender Prince Higashikuni cabinet, and helped organize the Nihon Kokumin (Japan People’s Party) before being arrested by Allied authorities as a Class A war criminal and incarcerated in Sugamo prison.198 Among his cellmates in Sugamo was Sasagawa, who had likewise been arrested as a Class A war criminal. Sasagawa was born in Osaka in 1899 and, after becoming an Army pilot, founded the prewar ultra-nationalist groups Kukubo Sha (National

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Defense Society) and – with his underling Kodama’s help – the Kokusai Taishu To (National Essence Mass Party).199 The latter had 15,000 black-uniformed members by 1939, and some of these served as operatives of the Kodama Kikan on the Chinese mainland.200 Yet despite his rightist ideological proclivities – he was, e.g., a great admirer and personal acquaintance of Benito Mussolini – Sasagawa was also an opportunist. Thus, throughout the militaristic, repressive period prior to and following the outbreak of war, he reportedly blackmailed wealthy individuals that he discovered to be harboring “dangerous thoughts.” In 1942, he was elected to the Diet (Parliament) on the basis of “a platform of intensified aggression in Southeast Asia.”201 Nevertheless, despite having a background marked by such sordid and in many respects criminal activities, and despite the warnings of some American intelligence officers, who described Kodama as a “grave security risk” who “could easily become a big-time operator in Japan’s reconstruction period,”202 and Sasagawa as “a man potentially dangerous to Japan’s political future” who “chafes for continued power,”203 both men were released from prison in late 1948. This decision was due primarily to the impact of the intensifying Cold War atmosphere on the policies adopted by American occupation authorities. In Japan, the early “demilitarization” phase had given way by early 1948 to the so-called “reverse course” phase, during which more imprisoned or purged rightists were freed and/or “depurged.” Even before this shift, a bitter feud had developed between those officials who were determined to eradicate Japanese militarism, especially personnel in the Government Section under the command of Major-General Courtney Whitney, and those who felt that this policy was counterproductive, too extreme, or “leftist,” particularly the American business interests represented within the “Japan Crowd” and the Military Intelligence (G-2) Section of GHQ headed by rightist sympathizer and hardline anti-communist, Major-General Charles A. Willoughby.204 The latter officer, far from loyally carrying out the anti-militarist policies mandated by SCAPIN 550 of January 1946, actively recruited ultra-nationalists (including wartime police and intelligence officials) and yakuza thugs as informants, strikebreakers, and covert operators.205 It is now generally acknowledged that both Kodama and Sasagawa cut deals with Willoughby’s G-2 and/or other anti-communist groups within (and perhaps also outside of ) the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) bureaucracy.206 Immediately upon his release in December of 1948, Kodama seems to have been recruited by American intelligence.207 Although he performed a variety of covert tasks for his employers, including gathering intelligence abroad and maritime smuggling, his main function was to serve as an intermediary between GHQ and the ultranationalist-yakuza underworld and to help mobilize the latter for espionage and strongarm operations at the behest of the former (or their conservative Japanese political allies).208 Thus, e.g., in 1949 Kodama “led the Meiraki-gumi [gang] against labor unions at the Hokutan coal mine.”209 Moreover, he used the fortune he had accumulated in China and subsequently hidden, which supposedly amounted to 70 million yen (not including the platinum and diamonds he spirited away),210 to covertly influence electoral politics in postwar Japan. To cite just one example,

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he provided 6.5 million yen through an intermediary – ultranationalist gangster Karoku Tsuji – to his Sugamo cellmate Ichiro Hatoyama for the purpose of establishing the Minshu To (Democratic Party), a new conservative party controlled by depurged prewar rightist politicians who were unable to obtain a dominant position in Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida’s bureaucrat-controlled Jiyu To (Liberal Party).211 Following the election of Hatoyama as Prime Minister, the two parties merged in 1955 to become the Jiyuminshu To (Liberal Democratic Party or LDP), the highly conservative pro-American party which has almost single-handedly ruled Japan up to the present day. Since then, Kodama has often brought decisive pressure to bear on the factional struggles within the LDP, including arranging for the reelection of Nobusuke Kishi, another Sugamo cellmate, in 1959, as well as helping Eisaku Sato become Prime Minister in 1964. He also maintained close relations with other LDP politicians, such as the yakuza-connected LDP Vice President Bamboku Ono,212 and his influence did not suffer a major setback until he was identified as the key “fixer” in the Lockheed Corporation bribery scandal.213 In addition to these political activities and his “legitimate” business operations, Kodama also became involved with numerous postwar ultranationalist and yakuza organizations, including the Matsuba Kai (Pine Needles Society), the Kokusui Kai (National Essence Society), and the Gijin To (Righteous Men’s or Martyrs’ Party).214 He served as an advisor to the predominantly Korean yakuza group led by Hisayuki Machii (born Gon-Yong Chong), the Tosei Kai (Eastern Voice Society), and organized the Kofu Kurabu (Friendly Relations Club) in 1965.215 But Kodama’s connections to individual organizations of this type were arguably less significant than his efforts to bring about their cooperation and federation. Perhaps this notion first occurred to him in 1960, when Prime Minister Kishi asked for his help to counter leftist demonstrations that were planned in response to President Eisenhower’s projected visit. In response, Kodama mobilized “more than 18,000 gangsters, 10,000 tekiya (street vendors controlled by gangster or near-gangster bosses), 4,000 “pure” non-gangster rightists, and 5,000 others . . . including war veterans” to augment the forces of the outmanned Tokyo police.216 Although Ike’s visit was ultimately called off, Kodama soon after attempted to make this temporary alliance of the normally splintered far right and yakuza groups more permanent by, e.g., arranging an alliance known as the Kanto Kai (Kanto Society) between seven major Tokyo gangs (which shortly thereafter collapsed),217 facilitating an “expedient alliance” between the Tosei Kai and Japan’s largest yakuza grouping, Kazuo Taoka’s Yamiguchi-gumi,218 and reconciling the latter with Kakuji Inagawa’s Kinsei Kai.219 Perhaps more importantly, Kodama helped to found two major rightist-gangster umbrella organizations, the Zen-Nihon Aikokusha Dantai Kaigi or Zen-Ai Kaigi (All Japan Federation of Patriotic Organizations), and the Seinan Shisho Kenkyu Kai or Seishikai (Youth Ideology Research Association). The former was created in March 1959 by a “network of influential rightists,” including Kodama, who became its first chairman, and Sasagawa, who sat on its governing board.220 Originally it was a violent, loosely structured organization with a vague ideology, but after 1968 its organization was tightened up a bit by a new chairman, ultranationalist Yoshiaki

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Sagoya,221 and it adopted a “unified . . . theoretical system” based on the pure “Japanist” views of Toyama. By 1974, it claimed to encompass 440 rightist-gangster groups whose membership totaled 150,000.222 Although Kodama himself continued to maintain a high-level position within Zen-Ai Kaigi, he became more actively involved with Seishikai, a Zen-Ai Kaigi subdivision established by Kodama loyalists in 1961 that split from its parent body in July of 1969, at which time Kodama became its top advisor.223 Seishikai incorporated a least twenty member organizations, including Machii’s Tosei Kai, and it promoted both “theoretical education” and paramilitary training, ostensibly in preparation for a communist coup attempt.224 In line with this new emphasis on ideological preparation, Kodama also established the Nihon Seinen Koza (Japan Youth Seminar) in April 1967,225 an organization to which Osami Kuboki later became an “advisor.”226 For his part, upon his release from prison Sugamo, Sasagawa persuaded the Japanese government to allow him to set up motorboat races that the public could legally bet on. This proved wildly successful, and with his substantial profits he set up the Japan Federation of Motorboat Racing Associations, which has grossed over U.S. $5 billion per year. Three percent of the annual ticket sales were thence dispensed through a “nonprofit” company he controlled on behalf of the government, the Shipbuilding Promotion Foundation that “employs over 100,000 people and makes a profit of 18 million yen a year.”227 In addition to these economic ventures, Sasagawa “is alleged to head a shadowy syndicate of wealthy [stock market] investors who, by concentrating their resources on a given stock, can make it run up and down like a yo-yo.”228 The profits from this speculation and the other Sasagawa-controlled businesses229 made him one of the world’s wealthiest men, and he disseminated his vast fortune not only for philanthropic causes230 but also to promote or obstruct various LDP factions and leaders. Thus, it is known that Sasagawa assisted Kodama in securing Sato’s election as Prime Minister in 1964, and that he helped Kakuei Tanaka defeat his Kodama-backed LDP rival Takeo Fukuda in the 1972 elections.231 Of greater interest are Sasagawa’s links to ultranationalist and gangster organizations. As early as 1954, he became the director of a reorganized prewar ultra-rightist group, the Butoku Kai (Martial Virtues Association),232 and he was also associated with numerous other “anti-communist” groups, including the Nihon Goyu Renmei (Japan Federation of Veterans’ Associations), the Zen-Ai Kaigi federation, and APACL-Japan and the Moon-linked International Front for Victory over Communism (IFVC), the Japanese branch of WACL. He also boasted of his friendship with Yamiguchi-gumi “godfather” Taoko and, like Kodama, has “reportedly served as a mediator between feuding yakuza gangs.”233 In addition to these known links to yakuza and uyoku (extreme rightist) elements, he was president of the World Karate Federation and its all-Japan Federation, both of which have served, among other things, as legitimate “covers” for gangster and ultranationalist groups.234 Why would these two kuromaku, who were among the most powerful and influential figures in postwar Japanese politics, take an interest in the unpopular, impoverished Japanese branch of an obscure Korean-based religious sect like the

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UC? In my opinion, the key lies in Korea, specifically with KCIA founder JongPil Kim. It has already been noted that Kim had established links with Moon even before the 1961 Park coup, and that following this coup – if not earlier – he had decided to covertly support the expansion of the UC in return for its provision of “cover” for various KCIA operations, both in South Korea and the U.S. It is therefore entirely reasonable to suppose that he hoped to make similar use of the UC branch in Japan, which was at that time unable to make any real headway in recruiting followers. But it still needs to be demonstrated that Kim was in contact with Kodama and/or Sasagawa, and that it was in their mutual interest to aid the foundering Japanese branch of Moon’s organization, Genri Undo. One of the most problematic issues in postwar Asian reconstruction was the so-called “normalization” of ROK-Japanese relations. The harsh and exploitative nature of Japanese colonial rule in Korea from 1910–1945 had led to bitter hostility between the two countries, which inhibited their inability to reestablish mutually beneficial political and economic relations after the war was over.235 These attitudes were exacerbated by both the unwillingness of Japanese leaders to acknowledge the destructive effects of their nation’s occupation of Korea and Syng-Man Rhee’s unshakeable hatred and distrust of Japan, and were manifested in a series of squabbles over specific issues of interest to both countries, including the question of Japanese reparations for damages inflicted on Korea, the return of stolen Korean property, the controversy over the fishing boundary between the two nations, and the problem posed by the Koreans residing in Japan.236 Despite sporadic efforts to resolve these issues, no bilateral agreement could be reached as long as Rhee remained in power. Moreover, his intransigence undermined U.S. efforts to create a regional anti-communist alliance structure in Northeast Asia, whether formally, in the manner of NATO, or informally through “private” organizations like APACL.237 The fall of Rhee thus represented a turning point in ROK-Japan interactions. The short-lived democratic government that succeeded him made overtures toward normalization of relations with Japan, an approach also adopted by the Park regime following the 1961 coup.238 Park and other junta leaders had good economic and political reasons for promoting normalization: they needed Japanese capital to help modernize their country’s economy and hoped to stabilize their strategic position by yielding to American pressure to reestablish better relations with Japan.239 The Japanese government headed by Kishi likewise sought to improve Japan’s investment opportunities and strategic position.240 These official views were to a great extent catalyzed and reinforced by powerful business leaders in both countries, specifically the Korean Businessmen’s Association founded in 1961 by a dozen big businessmen and the “Korea Lobby” in Japan, which included “15 top capitalists” who had established the Japan-ROK Economic Cooperation Organization. It was these latter who financed “key factional bosses” in the LDP, and their political allies included Prime Minister Kishi and Dietman Bamboku Ono, among others241 – the very same rightist politicians supported behind the scenes by Kodama and Sasagawa, who themselves had economic interests in South Korea.242

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Of equal significance for our topic, the envoy selected by Park to open “informal channels” with these pro-normalization elements in Japan was none other than Jong-Pil Kim,243 who travelled to Japan in October of 1962 – immediately prior to his visit to the U.S., during which he promised Moonies in San Francisco that he would secretly support the UC – to meet with various Japanese leaders, including Kodama’s ally Ono. As a result of this visit and a second in November 1962, which Kim undertook on his way home from America, an important step in the normalization process was taken with the formulation of the “Kim-Ohira Memorandum.”244 If all of this were not suggestive enough, Kodama himself was “reputed to have been close to former ROK intelligence chief Kim Chong-p’il and ha[d] been an important channel from Kim to the LDP and Japanese government.”245 Indeed, according to Japanese journalist Eisuke Otsuka, “Kodama arranged a meeting inviting Korean representative Kim Chong-p’il and Kishi, Bamboku Ono, and Ichiro Kono and made them disentangle the trouble [regarding normalization] that had lasted for four years in short order.”246 Kim, Ono, and Kodama were all later implicated in financial scandals involving both countries.247 However, one should not assume that the motives for these contacts were strictly economic. Both Kim and the Japanese kuromaku were concerned with countering communist expansionism, and all three sought to create rightist federations to facilitate this. It has already been noted that Kim, Kodama, and Sasagawa had worked to strengthen domestic anti-communist forces, and some of Kim’s operations abroad have also been discussed. It remains only to show that the latter two men were also actively involved in creating and supporting regional or worldwide groupings like APACL and WACL, and that one of the instruments they made use of – probably at Kim’s urging – was Moon’s UC. Sasagawa was apparently an early backer, if not one of the founders, of APACL,248 and it was he who supposedly first got the idea to “harness Japanese Christians . . . to advance anti-communist ideology.”249 However, it is more likely that it was actually Kim who, after making contact with Kodama (and presumably also Sasagawa), explained that he was reorganizing and planning to use Moon’s church in Korea to cover and help finance various anti-communist political activities initiated by the KCIA, and then suggested that the kuromaku provide similar backing for the struggling UC branch in Japan, the GU. This would not only account for the “conversion” of the Rissho Kosei-Kai members orchestrated by Kodama’s man Kuboki, but also for the rapid subsequent elaboration of the GU’s organizational structure and training procedures noted previously; and it is entirely consistent with what is known about the later development of the links between the Japanese UC and WACL. In July of 1967, about one month before WACL was formally established, Sasagawa hosted the gathering of a “secret cabal” consisting of himself, Moon, and two Kodama underlings – Shirai Tamao, secretary of the aforementioned Nihon Seinen Koza, and Kuboki, at that time both an advisor to the same organization and head of Moon’s GU.250 According to Scott and Jon Lee Anderson, “[t]he purpose of the meeting was to create in Japan a Korean-style anti-communist movement

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that could operate under the umbrella of the World Anti-Communist League and that would further Moon’s global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new facade.”251 Whatever their precise motives may have been, a year later the IFVC, the “principal vehicle for Moon’s anti-Communist activities,” was founded in both South Korea and Japan, where it was known as the Kokusai Shokyo Rengo.252 Almost as soon as it was created, the latter was reorganized as the official Japanese chapter of WACL,253 and within a couple of years it had set up twenty-one branches all over Japan that together had a purported membership of 60,000.254 Its leading officers included Kuboki (president), Sasagawa (“honorary president”), and Kodama (“chief advisor”), and its lower level personnel had from the outset been drawn primarily from the ranks of GU-affiliated organizations like the Genri Kenkyu Kai of Komiyama.255 Boyer has therefore baldly stated that “the Japanese chapter of WACL is Moonist.”256 But this formulation may be at best a half-truth, for although naïve Moonies clearly provided the bulk of the unpaid, docile labor force that performed the duller, more grueling tasks, such as door-to-door political campaigning and fund-raising, the Shokyo Rengo seems to have also served as a focal point for the activities of Japanese ultranationalists and yakuza, if not intelligence operatives. This is an important topic that should be further explored by researchers able to consult Japanese sources, but in any case there is no doubt that the GU was intimately linked to WACL in Japan. For example, in 1970 the Shokyo Rengo, in its capacity as the Japanese branch of WACL, hosted the massive Fourth WACL/Sixteenth APACL Conference in Tokyo, which Sasagawa helped to fund and which was addressed by several prominent Japanese politicians, including Kishi and Sato257; and it remained very active in the affairs of APACL and WACL for many years thereafter, as the participation of Kuboko and/or other Shokyo Rengo leaders at virtually every important subsequent gathering of the two organizations indicates.258 Like the UC-KCIA connection, Moon’s links to WACL provide further evidence of his associations with an international nexus consisting of hardline intelligence personnel, gangsters, leading conservative politicians, and far right extremists, many of whom are in turn members of a bewildering variety of other ‘private’ anti-communist organizations. At the very moment when Moon was publicly disassociating himself from the ‘fascist’ WACL, the Japanese branch of the UC was providing most of the membership of the WACL-Japan through its political front, the IFVC. Nor has this been the only connection between the Moon Organization and WACL, for the former has often cooperated with other WACL chapters, as well as with ultra-rightist groups and individuals that are in some way affiliated with WACL. Indeed, certain front groups of the UC have allegedly participated in blatantly subversive activities and, if only indirectly, in terrorism or other forms of WACL-linked violence.259 Given this background, it should come as no surprise to learn that Moon was also deeply involved in the illegal Nicaraguan contra supply network. Scholars would therefore do well to take the Moonies more seriously on a strictly political level, instead of focusing all of their attention on the UC’s intra-organizational techniques of social control.

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Conclusion This article has attempted to disentangle particular aspects of the Unification Church’s covert activities and linkages. However, this represents only a beginning. There are many other facets of Moon’s political operations that need to be examined more thoroughly, and his organizational complex only constitutes one among dozens, if not hundreds, of “private” groups that worked in tandem or in conjunction with essentially anti-democratic elements within the national security establishments of the U.S. and numerous other nations. Because of their unofficial status, such groups can undertake “plausibly deniable” actions that subvert, circumvent, or directly counter the stated foreign policy aims of formally democratic governments. To the extent that they do so, there is no hope of making said governments genuinely responsive to public participation in deliberations about the conduct of international relations, a task that would be difficult enough even if these groups did not exist. Another issue that was raised – but certainly not resolved – in this discussion of the UC is the extent to which it and similar Cold War anti-communist political groups should really be characterized as independent or private. In the wake of “Contragate,” a theme that has been constantly reiterated in the press concerns the so-called “privatization” of U.S. foreign policy. In many cases, the implication has been that bona fide private organizations made up of concerned citizens are taking it upon themselves to initiate political or even military action because their government is unable or unwilling to do so. Yet this represents a sort of populist idealization of the real situation, since in many cases it is not so much a case of initiatives undertaken by private citizens as it is of initiatives undertaken by more or less disgruntled government officials, particularly those within secretive intelligence and military bureaucracies. At the very least, the process is better described as the “contracting out” of specific tasks by government agencies to sympathetic nongovernmental organizations, which should therefore be viewed as subcontractors rather than independents. Nor should one overlook the possibility that certain ostensibly private organizations are nothing more than front groups for particular intelligence agencies or factions thereof. Ultimately, the only way to ascertain the real situation in specific cases is to examine and analyze each on its own merits. In any case, this phenomenon of “privatization” did not end along with the Cold War. On the contrary, private contractors have since arguably become increasingly important with respect to carrying out activities in support of the foreign policy objectives of the world’s nation-states.

Notes 1 This quote is ironically cited in Ad Hoc Committee of Members of the Unification Church, Our Response to the Report of October 31, 1978 on the Investigation of KoreanAmerican Relations Regarding Reverend Sun Myung Moon and Members of the Unification Church (New York: HSA-UWC, 1979), p. 125. 2 For official government investigations of the Iran-Contra scandal, see U.S. Government, President’s Special Review Board [The Tower Commission] Report, 26 February 1987 (Washington,

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DC: GPO, 1987); and U.S. Congress, Joint Committee, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, with Supplementary, Minority and Additional Views, 100th Congress, 1st Congress, 13 November 1987 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1987). The most revealing of the “unofficial” investigations concerning this scandal are Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration’s Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1987); Jonathan Marshall et al., The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987); and Christic Institute, Affidavit of Daniel P. Sheehan (Washington DC: Christic Institute, 1987), although the Christic document contains a number of exaggerated and unreliable claims. Aside from their rightist political perspective, the most important common denominator of all these particular organizations was the high percentage of “former” intelligence and military (especially unconventional warfare) personnel associated with them. See, e.g., Peter Stone, “Who Says Old Soldiers Fade Away?,” Boston Globe, 30 December 1984, pp. A21, A24. Here I do not mean to suggest that “normal” organizations and “respectable” religions do not manipulate the behavior of their members, for this is undoubtedly part and parcel of the activities of all such institutions. But there are obvious qualitative differences between the type and degree of social control exercised in common or garden-variety organizations – or in society at large, for that matter – and the type of extreme and systematized control mechanisms utilized by bona fide cults. The best introduction to the academic literature and controversies concerning cults is undoubtedly Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins, eds., Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001). On a larger societal level, only Communist China has consciously employed similar methods of “thought reform,” and then only for a relatively short period characterized by extraordinary attempts to mold the “new” Communist man. For more information about these Chinese techniques, see Martin K. Whyte, Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley: University of California, 1975). Note, e.g., the criminal strong-arm tactics adopted by Synanon members vis-à-vis their neighbors during the late 1970s. See Richard Ofshe, “The Social Development of the Synanon Cult: The Managerial Strategy of Organizational Transformation,” Sociological Analysis 41:2 (1980), pp. 109–27. Compare also Robert Kaufman’s conclusions regarding the political attitudes of the Church of Scientology members that he encountered: “Many were reactionary, almost Fascistic, in their political views.” See Robert Kaufman, Inside Scientology: How I Joined Scientology and Became Superhuman (London: Olympia, 1972), p. 31. Of course, he was clearly using the term “fascistic” in the usual imprecise, pejorative sense. Master Speaks [hereafter MS], 17 May 1973, p. 12. These actions received extensive coverage in the mainstream American media during the 1970s. For a good introduction, see Robert Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1980). The Fraser Subcommittee’s investigations were published officially in a series of volumes, and include both extensive hearings and documentation as well as the final report. For information on the UC and KCIA, see especially U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Committee on International Relations, Investigation of Korean-American Relations, Report, 95th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: GPO, 1978) [hereafter cited as KA Report]; U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Committee on International Relations, Activities of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, 94th Congress (Washington, DC: GPO, 1976), parts 1 and 2 [hereafter cited as KCIA-1 and KCIA-2]; U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Committee on International Relations, Investigation of Korean-American Relations, Hearings, Part 4, Supplement (Washington, DC: GPO, 1978), [hereafter cited as KA-4 Supp]. Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 2–6.

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10 See, e.g., John Dart, “New Fundamentalist Coalition Works to Unite Various Groups,” Los Angeles Times, 2 March 1985, section 2, p. 4; and Paul Rauber, “Moon Dance: Paul Cobb and the Unification Church’s Fight for Respectability,” East Bay Express [San Francisco], 23 August 1985. 11 I say “former” because one never knows for certain when or if intelligence operatives actually retire. For more on Pak, see following notes. 12 There is a considerable literature on the UC’s methods of recruitment and behavior control, though much of it is superficial or otherwise problematic. The best introductory book about the UC remains that of Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., Science, Sin, and Scholarship: The Politics of Reverend Moon and the Unification Church (Cambridge: MIT, 1978). A representative sampling of works on Moon might include Barker, Making of a Moonie; Josh Freed, Moonwebs: Journey into the Mind of a Cult (Toronto: Dorset, 1980); David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr., “Moonies” in America: Cult, Church, and Crusade (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979); Marc Galanter et al., “The Moonies: A Psychological Study of Conversion and Membership in a Contemporary Religious Sect,” American Journal of Psychiatry 136:2 (February 1979), pp. 165–70; John Lofland and Frederick Sontag, Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church (Nashville: Abdington, 1977); Allen Tate Wood, Moonstruck: A Memoir of My Life in a Cult (New York: Morrow, 1979); and J. Isamu Yamamoto, The Puppet Master: An Inquiry into Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1977). 13 This document is reproduced in KA-4 Supp, p. 458. 14 KA Report, p. 354. Needless to say, Moon’s supporters have also gleefully pointed out this obvious error. See, e.g., Bo-Hi Pak, Truth Is My Sword: Testimony . . . at the Korea Hearings, U.S. Congress (New York: HSA-UWC, 1978), which is nothing more than a selectively edited publication of Pak’s testimony. For the full version, see KA-4. 15 See, e.g., Sungjoo Han, The Failure of Democracy in South Korea (Berkeley: University of California, 1974), pp. 172–4; Leroy P. Jones and Il SaKong, Government, Business, and Entrepreneurship in Economic Development: The Korean Case (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1980), pp. 30–7; and Kwang Suk Kim and Michael Roemer, Growth and Structural Transformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1981), pp. 21–39. 16 On these “new religions” in Korea, see the special issue of Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch [TRASK] 43 (1967); as well as Myong-Hwan Tak, cited by Everett N. Hunt, Jr., “Moon Sun Myung and the Tong-il,” Dynamic Religious Movements: Case Studies of Rapidly Growing Religious Movements around the World, ed. David Hesselgrave (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1978), pp. 103–27. Therein (p. 103, note 2) Hunt estimates their number at around 250. For their Japanese counterparts (the shinko shukyo), see the fine bibliography by Byron H. Earhart, The New Religions of Japan: A Bibliography of Western-Language Materials (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970). 17 Spencer J. Palmer, “Introduction,” TRASK 43 (1967), pp. 2–7. The quote is from p. 7. 18 Felix Moos, “Leadership and Organization in the Olive Tree Movement,” TRASK 43 (1967), p. 14. 19 Rüdiger Hauth, Vereinigungskirche: “Tong-Il Kyo” im Angriff (Munich: Evangelisches Pressverband, 1978), p. 14. 20 For Moon’s early history, see ibid., pp. 6–11; Barker, Making of a Moonie, pp. 38–43; Bromley and Shupe, “Moonies” in America, pp. 36, 45–50; Jean-François Boyer, L’empire Moon (Paris: Découverte, 1986), pp. 105–17; Chong-Sun Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978), pp. 7–20; Pierre Le Cabellac, Dossiers Moon (Mulhouse: Salvator, 1983), pp. 34–44 and passim; Yamamoto, Puppet Master, pp. 15–21; Syn-Duyk Ch’oi, “Korea’s T’ong-Il Movement,” in TRASKB 43 (1967) pp. 101–4. Of these Kim’s account is based on the most complete Korean and Japanese sources, but is infused with extreme anti-Moon sentiments. For the UC’s own version, see Kwang Yol Yu, “The Church’s Birth in Pusan,” New Hope News, 23 December 1974, p. 24; and Kwang Yol Yu, The Path of the Pioneer: The Early Days on Sun Myung Moon and

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the Unification Church (New York: HSA, 1986), passim. I have been unable to obtain a copy of Moon’s “official” church biography. Yamamoto, Puppet Master, p. 17. In his biography, Moon claims to have received a diploma from Waseda, but others have disputed this. For example, the Japanese newspaper Mainichi reported that his studies were interrupted. See Hauth, Vererinigungskirche, p. 8; Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, p. 9. See especially Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, p. 11, for the pikarume. The year is controversial, although the date was apparently 22 February. Moon says this second North Korean imprisonment occurred in 1948, whereas Kim (ibid., p. 12) and others place it in 1949. In support of the earlier date, see “L’Eglise de L’Unification,” published in issue 7 (April 1975) of the Documents-Episcopat, the bulletin of the French Episcopal Conference, cited by Le Cabellac, Dossiers Moon, p. 35. The source in question says that the North Koreans originally arrested Moon for heretical teachings and because “he was a spy for the President of South Korea.” See Sebastian A. Matczak, Unificationism: A New Philosophy and World View (New York: Learned Publications, 1982), p. 7. Normally, one would assume that this was merely proffered as a post facto justification for his arrest, but it is worth remembering given his later political activities. If Moon was a spy for South Korea, however, it seems odd that the North Koreans would have released him the first time rather than executing him. Boyer insists (Empire Moon, pp. 112–13) that Moon was not arrested for anti-communist activities because he had yet to become an anti-communist crusader. See further ibid., pp. 116–17, 125. I am inclined to agree. Yamamoto, Puppet Master, p. 40; Le Cabellac, Dossiers Moon, p. 36; Hauth, Vererinigungskirche, p. 12; Ch’oi, “Korea’s T’ong-Il Movement,” p. 113. Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 119–20. For the “sex cult” charge, see Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, pp. 12–13; Yamamoto, Puppet Master, pp. 20–1; James Coates, “Moon Church Traced from a Sex Cult,” Chicago Tribune, 27 March 1978; Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit, p. 35; Bromley and Shupe, “Moonies” in America, pp. 48–9. This suggestion was vehemently denied by Bo-Hi Pak in his testimony (Truth Is My Sword, pp. 41–3) and he produced a police report listing the charge as “violation of the military draft law.” But one cannot be certain as to its validity since another charge proffered by the Korean National Police was “forgery of official documents.” (KA Report, p. 353). Others speak of “false imprisonment” of devotees (Tong-A Ilbo newspaper, cited in ibid., p. 353, note 434), expounding a “pseudo-religion” (Hauth, Vererinigungskirche, p. 12), or “injuring public morals” (Ch’oi, “Korea’s T’ong-Il Movement” p. 103). Bromley and Shupe, “Moonies” in America, p. 49. But note that these authors tend to whitewash some of the UC’s least desirable traits and do not have access to the more detailed Korean and Japanese materials, as C-S Kim does. Among these materials are Arai Arao, Nihon no Kyoki: Shokyo Rengo to Genri Undo (Tokyo: Seison Shuppansha, 1971). Moon himself claimed to have been subjected to government repression during this period, but Ch’oi – herself an early Moonie – says that by 1956 Moon and his followers “were no longer regarded by the government as a heretical religious group disturbing the social order.” See Ch’oi, “Korea’s T’ong-Il Movement,” p. 103. Here also, the truth is impossible to clarify, but is clear that the UC was looked upon much more favorably by the post-coup regime. This is clearly implied in the KA Report, pp. 353–5. Compare also Le Cabellac, Dossiers Moon, pp. 153–4, and following notes. For a discussion of the UC’s organization, see the following notes. Ironically, The Divine Principle (DP) was not even written by Moon, but by his brilliant disciple Hyo-Won Eu (who also invented the air gun that made Moon wealthy), though reputedly on the basis of Moon’s “divinely-inspired” thoughts. See Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 118–19; Yamamoto, Puppet Master, p. 19; Eric Pement, “The Mammon in Moon,” in Cornerstone 13:73 (1985), p. 17, note 1. According to UC sources, the original text first appeared in 1952, and a first version was published in 1957. See Barker, Making of

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a Moonie, pp. 38, 264, note 7, citing Chung Hwan Kwak, Outline of the Principle: Level 4 (New York: HSA-UWC, 1980), p. 2. This is corroborated by Michael L. Mickler, “A History of the Unification Church in the Bay Area, 1960–74” (Unpublished M.A. thesis: Graduate Theological Union, 1980), p. 5, who claims that Young-Oom Kim translated The Divine Principle into English in 1956. But due to the presence of some scriptural errors and various offensive passages it was subsequently revised and published anew in 1973. Herein all references to the DP are to the 1973 edition, which was reprinted by HSA-UWC in 1977. According to Boyer (Empire Moon, p. 125), the anti-communist passages in the book were last-minute additions before it was published in 1957. If so, this would be of considerable significance. The following summary is derived from the relevant sections of the DP. For Man’s Fall, see Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 65–97; for Jesus’ failure, see especially Part 1, Chapter 4, pp. 139–63; for the Lord of Second Advent, see especially Part 2, Chapter 6, pp. 497–536 and passim. Those seeking a less tedious acquaintance with Moon’s beliefs can peruse the summaries found in Hunt, “Moon Sun Myung and the Tong-il,” pp. 105–20; and Yamamoto, Puppet Master, pp. 73–93. In this area, Moon departs significantly from the traditional Christian interpretation, which holds that Christ’s death itself absolves Mankind from its sins. Moon suggests that Jesus succeeded in his attempt to facilitate Man’s spiritual perfection, but not in physically restoring human perfection. It is also worth noting that the blame which Moon had ascribed to the Jews for Jesus’ death has been interpreted as blatant anti-Semitism by Rabbi A. James Rudin in his study, though I think this is much overstated. See his arguments in Jews and Judaism in Reverend Moon’s Divine Principle (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1976). Here, it should be noted that Moon does not publicly claim to be the Second Messiah, for he is well aware that such a claim would be rejected by the vast majority of Christians who he wishes to unite under his banner. But this is a subterfuge, for he often implies just that to his followers. See, e.g. Yamamoto, Puppet Master, pp. 87–8; and Barker, Making of a Moonie, pp. 83–4. See also Ken Sudo, 120-Day Training Manual (New York: HSAUWC, no date), p. 160, for an explicit identification of Moon as the Lord of the Second Advent. Pement, “Mammon in Moon,” p. 12. Compare also KA Report, p. 387, subsection (3). Moos rightly notes (“Leadership and Organization in the Olive Tree Movement,” pp. 13–14) that this megalomania is characteristic of many “New Religion” leaders – it is not at all peculiar to Moon. Nor are his notions of Korea’s providential importance and the advent of a Korean messiah, both of which were fundamental to many Korean New Religions, including the influential Chonndog Wan (the so-called Olive Tree Movement) led by Tae-Son Pak. See Palmer, “Introduction,” pp. 6–7. Ibid; and Moos, “Leadership and Organization in the Olive Tree Movement,” p. 14. This interpretation may seem odd, but I do not know how else certain passages on pp. 443–6 of the DP can be interpreted. Thus: “It is only natural for the Satanic world, which is headed toward a communistic society, to advocate socialism. This is because Satan would attempt to realize, in advance, the course of the Heavenly side going toward the socialistic system of economy” (p. 443); again: “The communist world is none other than this non-principled world in a pseudo-form of the Principle in which Satan realized in advance the imitation of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which God is going to restore” (p. 445); and finally: “there will ultimately have to come a socialistic society centered on God” (p. 444). This aspect of the DP was first brought to my attention in the fine article by rightist author Dinesh D’Souza, “Moon’s Planet: The Politics and Theology of the Unification Church,” Policy Review 32 (Spring 1985), p. 32. It should be remembered that classical fascism and Nazism also had pronounced socialistic components in their ideological panoply. Perhaps more relevantly, a similar sort of “reversed communism” has been noticeable in the ideologies of many post-war Japanese ultrarightist movements. See Hirotatsu Fujiwara, “Nationalism and the Ultraright Wing,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 308 (November 1956), p. 77.

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39 DP, p. 491. 40 Yamamoto, Puppet Master, p. 66; Barker, Making of a Moonie, pp. 176–9; Sontag, Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, pp. 185–6. 41 Alain Woodrow, Les nouvelles sectes (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 146. Note that in France, the term “secte” is more or less equivalent to the English term “cult,” rather than the English term “sect,” which has a different meaning. It should also be noted, moreover, that Japan’s Soka Gakkai and other Nichiren Buddhist sects are extremely active in the political sphere, and that the latter are often ultranationalist. See Ivan Morris, Nationalism and the Right Wing in Japan: A Study of Postwar Trends (London: Oxford University, 1960), pp. 140–2. For more on Soka Gakkai, see Noah S. Brannan, Soka Gakkai: Japan’s Militant Buddhists (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1968); Kiyoaki Murata, Japan’s New Buddhism: An Objective Account of Soka Gakkai (New York: Walker/Weatherhill, 1969); and David Hesselgrave, “Nichiren Shoshu Soka Gakkai: The Lotus Eaters in Modern Japan,” in Dynamic Religious Movements: Case Studies of Rapidly Growing Religious Movements around the World, ed. David Hesselgrave (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1978), pp. 129–48; and White. For solid accounts of their electoral party, the Komeito, and its activities, see Ronald J. Hrebenar, “The Komeito: Party of ‘Buddhist Democracy’,” in The Japanese Party System: From One-Party Rule to Coalition Government, ed. Ronald J. Hrebenar (Boulder: Westview, 1986), pp. 147–80; and Arvin Palmer, Buddhist Politics: Japan’s Clean Government Party (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971). 42 Woodrow, Nouvelle sectes, p. 146. Compare also the testimony of Allan Tate Wood, a former leader of Moon’s Freedom Leadership Foundation in KCIA-1, p. 25. Barker, Making of a Moonie, p. 70, also supports this interpretation. 43 The earliest dating is given by Boyer, Empire Moon, p. 125, who attributes this development to the influence of rightist Korean Army officers – including Bo-Hi Pak – that had become associated with the UC around that time. Others place the shift in the 1960s, including Yamamoto, Puppet Master, p. 18 and KA Report, p. 319. The latter points out that this coincided with the KCIA’s attempts to establish a broad anti-communist movement in South Korea. Yet virulent nationalism is characteristic of many of these “New Religions” (Palmer, “Introduction,” pp. 5–7), and it can hardly be doubted that Moon’s imprisonment by the North Koreans evoked personal bitterness toward communism. See Hauth, Vereinigungskirche, p. 30. 44 See KA Report, especially pp. 22–4, 89–113, 354–72; KCIA-1; and KCIA-2. The following summary is based on the material found therein, supplemented by reliable secondary sources like Se-Jin Kim, The Politics of Military Revolution in Korea (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1971), pp. 111–18. 45 Ibid, pp. 96–8; KA Report, p. 19. 46 KA Report, p. 18; Sungjoo Han, The Failure of Democracy in South Korea (Berkeley: University of California, 1974), pp. 170–7. 47 KA Report, pp. 18–19; Kim, Politics of Military Revolution, pp. 93–109. The most detailed blow-by-blow account of the coup is apparently the pro-junta work, May 16 Kunsa hyongmyong ui chonmo (Seoul: Moonkwangsu, 1964). See also Se-Jin Kim, “National Government and Politics in South Korea,” in Government and Politics in Korea, ed. Se-Jin Kim and Chang-Hyun Cho (Silver Springs: RIKA, 1972), p. 73. 48 Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit, pp. 15–16, 20. However C.-S. Kim points out (“National Government and Politics,” p. 63) that Park may have been an anti-communist infiltrator rather than a communist turncoat. 49 KA Report, pp. 18–22. 50 Ibid, pp. 22–3. 51 Ibid, pp. 23, 89; Kim, Politics of Military Revolution, pp. 111–18. 52 KA Report, pp. 22–3, citing Kim, Politics of Military Revolution, p. 111. 53 KA Report, p. 89. This merger was supposedly opposed by the U.S. CIA. See ibid, p. 23. 54 For an organizational description of the KCIA, see Professor Gregory Henderson’s testimony in KCIA-2, pp. 5–9. He compares the KCIA to the Gestapo and the NKVD. See ibid, p. 3.

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55 KA Report, p. 89. 56 Ibid. Compare Jai-Hyup Kim, The Garrison State in Pre-War Japan and Post-War Korea (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978), pp. 195–8; and Kim, “National Government and Politics.” 57 Carolyn Turbyfill, “The KCIA,” Covert Action Information Bulletin 11, December 1980, pp. 14–15; and John Saar et al., “South Korean CIA: Power Grows, Fear Spreads,” Washington Post, 23 May 1976. 58 For documentation see Letters from South Korea (Toyko: Iwanami Shoten, no date); and Pharis Harvey, Human Rights in South Korea (Washington, DC: Center for International Studies, 1980), both cited by Turbyfill, “KCIA,” p. 15. In the same December 1980 issue of Covert Action Information Bulletin, see also Steven Clark Hunziker, “The Case of South Korea,” Covert Action Information Bulletin 11 (December 1980), pp. 9–13. 59 KA Report, p. 23. For details, see especially C. I. Eugene Kim, “The Third Republic,” in Party Politics and Elections in Korea, ed. by C. I. Eugene Kim and Young Whan Kim (Silver Springs, MD: RIKA, 1976), pp. 25–34. Aside from the key role played by JongPil Kim and other KCIA officials, the most distinctive aspect of the new party was its elaborate “two-stem” organization. In addition to a democratic representative stem, Kim established an undemocratic, KCIA-controlled parallel stem known as the Secretariat. As C. I. Eugene Kim notes (ibid., p. 33), “[t]he secretariat structure, as in some totalitarian political systems, could be an awesome instrument of control by one man,” so much so that other military coup leaders organized a DRP faction that opposed Jong-Pil Kim’s political machinations, the so-called “anti-Main Current” group. For more on these DRP factional struggles, see Kwan-Song Kim, The Korea-Japan Treaty Crisis and the Instability of the Korean Political System (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 181–216. 60 In other words, it may have been Jong-Pil Kim who created the disciplined, hierarchical “communist-like” structure that today characterizes the UC. Yet even if he did not, he certainly would have recognized its potentialities for clandestine and covert operations. The precise role that he played cannot be determined until the phases of the UC’s organizational development can be further specified. 61 Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 125 and especially 129; Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit, pp. 39–40. In fact, Kim seems to have made the UC’s subsequent economic growth possible by seeing that its business ventures in Korea were awarded government contracts (Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 139–40) and perhaps arranging for Moon to meet key Japanese financiers like Ryoichi Sasagawa. For more on the Japanese connection, see the following notes. 62 See, e.g. Han, “Political Parties and Elections in South Korea,” in Government and Politics in Korea, ed. S.-J. Kim and Cho; C. I. Eugene Kim, “Third Republic and DRP,” in Party Politics and Elections (Silver Springs, MD: Research Institute of Korean Affairs, 1976), ed. C. I. Eugene Kim and Young, pp. 33–4. It should be pointed here that Korean political factions develop around highly respected “dominant personalities,” who are thence obediently served by coteries of followers. See Kim, “National Government.” Jong-Pil Kim was one such personality. For indications of factionalism within the KCIA, see KA Report, pp. 96, 99 etc. 63 For the KCIA, see Kim, Politics of Military Revolution, p. 156. 64 Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 137–8. 65 KA Report, p. 354. 66 The phrase “active sympathizers” is that of Boyer, Empire Moon, p. 123. 67 Ibid, pp. 122–3. 68 Ibid, p. 125. He claims that these four transformed Moon into the rabid anti-communist that he remained until his death. 69 This short biography is derived from sections of the KA Report; Pak’s own testimony reproduced in Pak, Truth Is My Sword, pp. 2–6; and a biographical sheet passed out at the first conference of CAUSA-USA – a Moon political front – held in San Francisco on 4–8 March, 1985. 70 KA-4 Supplement, p. 468.

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71 Testimony of Robert Roland in KCIA-1, pp. 14–15. Compare Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit, pp. 40–1. 72 KA Report, p. 24. 73 Ibid, p. 354; Boyer, Empire Moon, p. 124. He also served as an aide to several U.S. Eighth Army commanders. 74 KA Report, p. 354; Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 123–4. Steve Kim also “probably” served as Tong-Sun Park’s “control” officer, according to the KA Report, p. 363. 75 This particular staff position frequently serves as a cover for intelligence operatives, and indeed Bo-Hi Pak occupied a similar position from 1961 to 1964. See supra, note 71. 76 KA Report, p. 354; Boyer, Empire Moon, p. 124. 77 Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit, p. 40. 78 KA Report, p. 96. 79 Testimony of Wood, KCIA-1, p. 21; Woodrow, Nouvelles sectes, p. 152. For an example, see Yamamoto, Puppet Master, pp. 27–8. 80 KA Report, p. 355. 81 Ibid; Boyer, Empire Moon, p. 127. 82 For T’ong-Il’s contracts, see KA Report, pp. 366–9. For the weapons produced, see ibid, pp. 326, 368. There is some controversy about the M-16s. 83 Ibid, p. 365; testimony of Jai-Hyon Lee, KCIA-1, pp. 9, 27. 84 MS, 22 September 1974, p. 6; KA Report, p. 384. 85 This is the image one generally finds in both “official” UC sources as well as those that are hostile to the church. See, e.g., Barker, Making of a Moonie, pp. 42–3; and Sontag, Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, pp. 79, 93. 86 Chong-Sun Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon (Washington DC: University Press of America, 1978), p. 15. 87 Boyer, Empire Moon, p. 125. 88 See the following notes for details. 89 Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, p. 17. 90 Ibid. Compare Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 125–6. 91 Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, p. 21. 92 Ch’oi, “Korea’s Tong-il Movement.” In his introduction to the volume in which Ch’oi’s article appears, Palmer (“Introduction,” pp. 9–10) describes her UC background. Since Ch’oi’s description is completely lacking in time references, it is impossible to determine what period it refers to, though it must at least be accurate for the mid-1960s. 93 Ch’oi, “Korea’s Tong-il Movement,” p. 104. 94 Ibid, pp. 104–6, 113. 95 One can easily verify this by consulting the voluminous literature on communist organizational techniques. A particularly thorough description of such an infrastructure (in the Vietnamese context) is provided by Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge: MIT, 1966), especially pp. 109–231. It is also worth noting that many counterinsurgency specialists, e.g., French proponents of guerre révolutionnaire doctrine, have advocated establishing the same sort of cross-cutting structures, so-called “parallel hierarchies,” to counteract revolutionary attempts to mobilize popular support. For an introduction, see Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The Analysis of a Political and Military Doctrine (New York: Praeger, 1964). 96 Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, p. 104. Compare also a 4 January 1985 intelligence memo, reproduced in KA-4 Supplement, p. 460; and Sontag, Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, p. 7, who lists ways in which Unificationism “mirrors” communism. 97 Ch’oi, “Korea’s Tong-il Movement,” p. 106. The UC also paid influential locals to join the church, according to another intelligence memo. See KA-4 Supplement, p. 458. 98 For an outline of the ROK bureaucratic administration, see Cho in Kim and Cho, Government and Politics in Korea, pp. 91–126. 99 Compare H. Neill McFarland, The Rush Hour of the Gods: A Study of the New Religious Movements in Japan (New York: McMillan, 1967), pp. 84–7. Interestingly, the Park

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regime also gave the Olive Tree Movement a “rather free reign,” although it had been persecuted by Rhee and Myong Chang. This movement also developed a highly centralized structure, making one wonder how much the success and organizational elaboration of various New Religions depended upon government patronage. See Moos, “Leadership and Organization in the Olive Tree Movement,” pp. 17–18. KA Report, p. 313. Ibid, p. 334. Pak testimony in KA-4, p. 171. KA Report, p. 323. KCIA-1, p. 34. According to a December 1964 intelligence report, Pak and Bud Han created KCFF to help organize the UC in Washington. See KA-4 Supplement, pp. 459–60. KA Report, p. 324. Ibid, pp. 324–5. For more on APACL, see the following notes. For more on the FC, see the pamphlet Freedom Center (Seoul: APACL-ROK, no date). More interesting is the excerpt printed therein from Jong-Pil Kim’s speech at the 2nd Extraordinary Conference regarding the founding of the FC. Among other things, Kim said: “The Republic of Korea government is willing to give whatever aid is necessary to the establishment and subsequent growth of such an organization.” According to a financial statement in that pamphlet, the ROK government had already contributed US$796,231 for the FC’s establishment, and was engaged in raising another US$830,770 from other Korean sources. See ibid, pp. 35, 54. KA Report, p. 356. Ibid. Ibid, p. 357. This may well have been the “additional assignment” that Pak listed on his U.S. visa application in January 1965 (ibid., p. 364), which would indicate that he was still employed by the ROK government while working for the KCFF, since he took over the latter the very day he was formally discharged from the army. See ibid, pp. 324, 364. Ibid, pp. 118–19, 323. Curtin’s intelligence background is indicated by John Roberts, “Ryoichi Sasakawa: Nippon’s Right-Wing Muscleman,” in Insight (Hong Kong, April 1978), p. 15. He had earlier served as an advisor to the Korean Second Army, and also opened an APACL office in Washington, DC in 1964. KA Reports, p. 356. Mickey Kim was an aide to both Jong-Pil Kim and Chong-Kyu Park, head of the ROK Presidential Protective Force. He also became head of the World Tae Kwan Do (karate) Association, which received KCFF payments (ibid, p. 363). This is interesting in light of the fact that martial arts societies in Japan often serve as covers for underworld yakuza and extreme right groups. See Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 11 as an example. Note also that another important UC member named Jhoon Rhee owns a chain of karate shops in the U.S. (KA Report, p. 317). According to Boyer (Empire Moon, p. 130) Rhee may have been involved in training a private security force for the UC. KA-4 Supplement, p. 462. KA Report, p. 358. Ibid. The first was Kyong-Eup Kim, one of Jong-Pil Kim’s aides and interpreters following the coup. When his KCIA links were discovered in September 1966 (ibid, p. 120) he was replaced by Dong-Sun Kim, yet another KCIA officer. KA-4 Supplement, p. 517. Ibid, pp. 462–3; KA Report, p. 121. Henderson identified the Eighth KCIA Bureau as the one responsible for psywar, but he seems to have been wrong. KA Report, p. 355. Ibid, p. 358. Testimony of Wood, KCIA-1, pp. 32–3. Compare also that of Jai-Hyon Lee in ibid, pp. 8–9. KA Report, p. 386. Ibid, pp. 343–5. See ibid, pp. 325–8.

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Testimony of Jai-Hyon Lee, KCIA-1, pp. 9, 22–3. More will be said about this in the following notes. KA Report, p. 389. Testimony in KCIA-1, pp. 39–40. He described Moon’s method as follows: “You make yourself available to serve. . . . You carry out . . . orders. Then finally when your services are indispensible, then you begin to dictate policy. . . . Basically, it is the ‘I am going to serve you to death’ approach.” MS, 23 February 1977, p. 11. KA Report, p. 352. Compare also ibid, pp. 347–8; and Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 127, 136. He points out that mainstream churches and factions within the ROK Army were leery of, if not overtly hostile to, Moon and the UC. KA Report, p. 100. The PPF formed a power bloc that rivaled the KCIA. Compare the view of Boyer (Empire Moon, p. 133). But one should also remember the prominence in Korea of the so-called sadae, or “serve the stronger” (and abuse the weaker) policy. See Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, p. 58. For South Korea’s human rights record, see Amnesty International, Report of an Amnesty International Mission to the Republic of Korea (London: AI, 1975). As of this writing, only one full-length study has appeared on WACL. See Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Exposé of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986). This is an excellent journalistic overview of WACL activities, particularly in Latin America, but it is no substitute for a detailed historical investigation of the organization. Charles Goldman, “World Anti-Communist League,” Public Eye 2:1–2 (1979), p. 21. This article was originally published in an anthology published by the Danske Vietnamkomiteer, Dokumentationsgruppen, Under dække: Efterretninger om samspillet mellem NATO-politikere, efterretningstjenester og højre-ekstremistiske grupper, ed. Erik Jensen and Petter Sommerfelt (Copenhagen: Demos, 1978), then translated from the Danish by E. C. Reed. Details regarding APACL’s founding and early history can be found in four pamphlets published by the Taiwanese branch of APACL, viz., Development of the Chinese Peoples’ Anti-Communist Movement (Taipei: APACL-ROC, 1956); Development of the Chinese Peoples’ Anti-Communist Movement (Taipei: APACL-ROC, 1957); New Development of the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist Movement (Taipei: APACL-ROC, 1958); and APACL: Its Growth and Outlook (Taipei: APACL-ROC, 1960). According to the first of these, the groundwork for establishing APACL was laid at a 15 June 1954 conference at Chinhae, South Korea, which was attended by representatives from Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. The idea was apparently first proposed by Syng-Man Rhee (APACL, Developments [1956], pp. 1–5), the man hand-picked by the U.S. to head South Korea’s postwar regime. Compare also Richard C. Allen, Korea’s Syngman Rhee: An Unauthorized Portrait (Rutland VT: Tuttle, 1960), p. 188. For the American role in the creation of both the APACL and WACL, see the summary judgement of the Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 54–5. Compare also Frédéric Laurent, L’Orchestre noir (Paris: Stock, 1978), p. 299; and Patrice Chairoff (pseudonym for Dominique-Yvan Calzi), Dossier néo-nazisme (Paris: Ramsay, 1977), p. 461, who claims that both organizations were founded by the CIA and the “special services” of NATO and SEATO. However, although very well-informed, Chairoff is an adventurer and apparent intelligence operative posing, in this case, as a left-wing journalist, so his information must be used with caution. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 47, 51–2. Compare also Goldman, “World Anti-Communist League,” p. 21; Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1980), p. 124; and Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 204, for the involvement of GMD personnel in the Chinese APACL branch.

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138 For GMD control of the lucrative drug trade see Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, pp. 126–45, 246–7, 319–22; Catherine Lamour and Michael R. Lamberti, The International Connection: Opium from Growers to Pushers (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 93–115; Frank Browning and Banning Garrett, “The New Opium War,” Ramparts Magazine 9:10 (May 1971), pp. 32–9. For background information on earlier GMD drug operations, see Jonathan Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927–45,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8:3 (July– September 1976), pp. 19–48. For the CIA’s reported involvement, see McCoy, Politics of Heroin, pp. 90–145, passim. This is even admitted in Christopher Robbins’ rather romanticized history of the CIA’s proprietary airline, Air America, an outfit that was largely responsible for logistical support of those drug smuggling operations. See Christopher Robbins, Air America (New York: Avon, 1979), pp. 225–43. For drug-related funding of APACL, see Goldman, “World Anti-Communist League,” pp. 21–2 and Krüger, Great Heroin Coup, pp. 13, 125, 152, note 47. The latter cites the example of a Laotian APACL official arrested by Parisian police for possession of 60 kilos of heroin. The Andersons suggest that APACL was also partially financed through little-scrutinized CIA discretionary funds and/or U.S. Embassy Counterpart Funds transmitted through Ray Cline, CIA Chief of Station in Taiwan from 1958–62 and later an analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). See Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 54–5. For a highly critical view of CSIS, see Fred Landis, “Georgetown’s Ivory Tower for Old Spooks,” Inquiry 2:16 (30 September 1979). 139 See, e.g., APACL, Development (1956); APACL, New Development, Appendix II, article 3 of the APACL-ROC constitution. 140 For an extensive list of APACL-ROC publications see the back pages of Kuan Chung, A Review of the U.S. China Policy, 1949–71 (Taipei: APACL-ROC, 1971). 141 Scott, War Conspiracy, p. 204. 142 APACL, Development (1956), pp. 14–18. 143 See ibid., pp. 35–6 for a list of China Lobby associated organizations linked to APACL. Compare also APACL, Development (1957), pp. 20–1. For the pernicious influence of the anti-PRC “China Lobby” on American foreign and domestic policies, see especially Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); and Stanley D. Bachrack, The “Committee of One Million”: “China Lobby” Politics, 1953–1971 (New York: Columbia University, 1976). Koen’s excellent study was originally published in 1960, but was suppressed at that time by hardline elements within and outside of the U.S. government, who thence sponsored a polemical publication on the rival communist Chinese lobby in the U.S. See Forrest Davis and Robert A. Hunter, The Red China Lobby (New York: Fleet, 1963). For more on APACL’s American connections see Scott, War Conspiracy, p. 204. 144 APACL, Development (1956), pp. 17–18, 20; APACL, Development (1957), pp. 53–4; and APACL, APACL, p. 50. The ABN was an umbrella group coordinating the activities of various anti-communist émigré organizations from Eastern Europe and other former Soviet-controlled “Captive Nations,” many of whose members had been Nazi collaborators during World War II. See Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 10–45, for some background information on the East European fascists and Nazis who were incorporated into the ABN, which they characterize as the “largest and most important umbrella for Nazi collaborators in the world.” See ibid., p. 35. Compare Chairoff, Dossier néo-nazisme, pp. 420–1. 145 APACL, Development (1956), pp. 19–20; APACL, Development (1957), p. 50. The NTS, whose name was also sometimes translated as the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, was a Great Russian émigré organization that ended up opportunistically cooperating with the Nazis. See Boris Dvinov, The Politics of the Russian Emigration (Santa Monica: RAND, 1955), pp. 117–48. 146 APACL, Development (1957), pp. 30–4. According to Anderson and Anderson (Inside the League, p. 79), the CIADC was a continent-wide “front group” set up by the Mexican anti-Semitic secret society Los Tecos (The Owls) to coordinate parallel police, i.e., “death squad” activities throughout Latin America. Aside from the Tecos, on whom see

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note 159, a key organization behind the CIADC was a Brazilian ultra-rightist group known as the Cruzada Brasileira Anticomunista (CBA: Brazilian Anti-Communist Crusade) headed by Admiral Carlos Penna Botto. See “Groundwork for World Anti-Communist Congress for Freedom and Liberation Laid by Conference in Mexico City,” Ukrainian Quarterly 14:1 (March 1958), pp. 63–76; Goldman, “World Anti-Communist League,” pp. 22–3. Not coincidentally, the Fourth Anti-Communist Continental Congress held by CIADC in Antigua, Guatemala, later that same year also included, “for the first time”, representatives from Taiwan, the ABN, the U.S., and the Middle East. For this see CIADC, IV Congreso Continental Anticomunista: Actas . . . Resoluciones (Guatemala City: TNG, 1961), p. 19. For a full list of participants, see ibid., pp. 413–18. Goldman, “World Anti-Communist League,” p. 22. Despite its official sounding name, the ASC is a private right-wing organization dating from the McCarthy period. It was founded in 1955 as the Mid-American Research Library by former FBI personnel and funded by leading “security-conscious” American corporations. Renamed the ASC in 1956, it originally concerned itself with amassing extensive files on supposed left-wing “subversives,” which were then provided to 3,500 fee-paying firms; but eventually it developed into a powerful “national security” lobby with a variety of front groups and highlevel government connections. See especially the account by ex-FBI agent William W. Turner, Power on the Right (Berkeley: Ramparts, 1971), pp. 197–214. Its members are linked to every organization that subsequently became the official American chapter of WACL. The VFF was another “private” anti-communist group established in the 1950s that had been partially subsidized by the Bonn government. See the detailed study by Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism since 1945 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 323, 356; Matthias Friedel, Der Volksbund für Frieden und Freiheit (VFF): Ein Teiluntersuchung über westdeutsche antikommunistische Propaganda im Kalten Krieg und deren Wurzeln im Nationalsozialismus (St. Augustin: Gardez!, 2001); and Kurt Hirsch, Rechts von der Union: Personen, Organisationen, Parteien seit 1945. Ein Lexikon (Munich: Knesebeck & Schuler, 1989), pp. 218–22, 453. Like the ASC, it collected dossiers on leftists, real or imagined, and, like the ABN, it numbered some ex-Nazis among its staff. The VFF, which reportedly received funding from the CIA, was a component of the international “Peace and Freedom” network, whose epicenter was in France. See, in general, Bernard Ludwig, “Paix et liberté: A Transnational Anti-Communist Network,” in Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks, ed. Luc van Dongen, Stéphane Roulin, and Giles Scott-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 81–95. For more on the French Union Démocratique pour la Paix et Liberté organization, which was also funded by the CIA, see Irwin M. Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1991), pp. 150–1, 293; and René Sommer, “Paix et Liberté? La Quatrième Republique contre le PC[F],” L’Histoire 40 (December 1981), pp. 26–35. Under the leadership of Jean-Paul David, the French branch engaged in both extensive anti-communist propaganda activities and in various lesser-known covert operations. For the Italian affiliate, see Gianni Flamini, I pretoriani di Pace e Libertà: Storie di guerra fredda in Italia (Rome: Riuniti, 2001). Plans for creating something like WACL actually go back to at least 1957, when proposals called for a “world peoples’ anti-Communist Congress.” But WACL itself was not chartered until the Twelfth APACL conference held in Seoul in November 1966, and it was not formally established until 25 September 1967 in Taipei. This was also the date of the first WACL conference, which was attended by 230 delegates from 64 nations and 15 “international anti-communist organizations.” See WACL, Important Documents of the First WACL Conference (Taipei: WACL-ROC, 1968), p. i. For more thorough information on participants at this opening conference, see WACL, Proceedings, First Conference of the World Anti-Communist League (Taipei: WACL-ROC, 1967), pp. 2–12. At the time this article was written, WACL still maintained offices in both Seoul and Taipei. See Joe Conasen and Murray Waas, “The Old Right’s New Crusade,” Village Voice, 22 October 1985, p. 19. On 1 January 1991, following a decision taken in July 1990 by WACL delegates meeting in

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Brussels, WACL was renamed the World League for Freedom and Democracy (WLFD), an innocuous name better suited for the era marking the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Ernesto Cadena (pseudonym for radical Partido Español Nacional Sindicalista [PENS: Spanish National Syndicalist Party] leader Ernesto Milá Rodríguez), La ofensiva neofascista: Un informe sensacional (Barcelona: Acervo, 1978), p. 228. E.g., the WACL charter begins thus: “We, the freedom-loving peoples of the world, being dedicated to the cause of human dignity, peace and democracy based on justice, self-determination and independence of nations . . . are finally determined to preserve justice and freedom and to fight the Communist efforts to enslave humanity.” See WACL, Important Documents, p. 1. Union of International Associations, Yearbook of International Associations 1984/5 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1984), entry F3454. Valentine, “Fascist Spector,” p. C2. Chairoff, Dossier néo-nazisme, p. 461, emphasizes the hidden agendas of WACL, and also provides much material on the rivalries between “allied” Western intelligence bureaucracies throughout his study. Valentine, “Fascist Spector,” pp. C1–C2. For WACL’s schizophrenic membership, see Cadena, Ofensiva neo-fascista, p. 228; and Laurent, Orchestre noir, p. 298. However, one should not exaggerate the contrast between WACL’s earlier “respectability” and recent “degeneration.” As we have seen in previous notes, east European collaborator terrorists became affiliated with APACL very early on through the ABN and NTS, and the personnel of its Asian chapters were far from being democrats or humanitarians. Valentine, “Fascist Spector,” p. C2. In my opinion, however, many of the power fluctuations within WACL are not so much the result of struggles between moderates and extremists, but rather of struggles among operatives linked to rival intelligence services, over control of WACL’s resources and focus. Ibid.; Conasen and Waas, “Old Right’s New Crusade,” p. 22; Laurent, Orchestre noir, pp. 299–300; Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 85–90, 93–103, 138–49. I was unfortunately unable to obtain copies of these memos. See Stefan Possony, “The 1972–3 Leadership of WACL” (unpublished memo to ACWF, 1973). Compare Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 71–2, 78–81; Chairoff, Dossier néo-nazisme, pp. 363–4. The Tecos were represented in CAL through their front group, the Federación Mexicana Anticommunista de Occidente (FEMACO: Mexican Anti-Communist Federation of the West). See Congreso Regional Anticommunista de Occidente, FEMACO: Sus fundación, Sus activadades iniciales (Guadaljara: FEMACO, 1967), for a glorified self-portrayal of the organization’s goals and ideas. For more on the Tecos’ and FEMACO’s links to death squads, see the Jack Anderson columns dated 26 January, 1 February, and 9 February 1984; and Manuel Buendía, La ultraderecha en Mexico (Mexico City: Oceano, 1987), especially the three columns he wrote before his death, which are reprinted on pp. 159–67. Some investigators have recently suggested that the Tecos themselves murdered Buendía after the publication of those articles. See Matthew Rothschild, “Who Killed Manuel Buendia? A Mexican Mystery,” The Progressive 49:4 (April 1985), pp. 22–3. Valentine, “Fascist Spector,” pp. C1–C2. Among these were Italy’s legal “neo-fascist” political party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI: Italian Social Movement), represented by its leader Giorgio Almirante, and the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby, represented by its chief, Willis A. Carto. The only full-length study of the Liberty Lobby is the excellent book by Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). For Carto, see especially George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far Right (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). Conasen and Waas, “Old Right’s New Crusade,” p. 22; Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 96–100. For more on Pearson, see Valentine, “Fascist Spector,” p. C2; David Beresford, “Right-wing Editor for Journal,” The Guardian (London), 9 April 1979, p. 3; and Rich Jaroslovsky, “Racial Purist Uses Reagan Plug,” Wall Street Journal, 28 September 1984, p. 50. The term “parafascist” is borrowed from Peter Dale Scott, who differentiates them from genuine fascists “because their primary concern is neither ideology nor a mass

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movement, but rather to function covertly in the service of, or parallel to, intelligence bureaucracies.” See his introduction to Krüger, Great Heroin Coup, p. 13. However, in the absence of ideology, one may well wonder what makes such people fascists. My own view is that these groups remained ideologically motivated, but that they were willing to make alliances with other types of groups for pragmatic reasons in the interests of forging a common front against real and imagined “communism.” Conasen and Waas, “Old Right’s New Crusade,” pp. 22, 122; Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 255. The primary example was, of course, the Tecos, who dissolved their exposed front groups CAL and FEMACO and created a new one, the Federación de Entidades Democrática en América Latina (FEDAL: Federation of Democratic Entities in Latin America), which then became a WACL member. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 82–91, 153–5, 263–4. Yearbook of International Associations 1984/5, vol. 1, entry F3454. Ibid., vol. 1, entry G1366. Alpha 66 was a prominent anti-Castro paramilitary organization supposedly founded by Cuban exiles in June 1962, and most observers agree that it was one of the most violent and effective of all such outfits. Unlike most Cuban exile groups, like Orlando Bosch’s Omega 7 and the Falangist-inspired Movimiento Nacionalista Cubana (MNC: Cuban Nationalist Movement), which operated primarily within the U.S. and other countries outside Cuba, Alpha 66 generally initiated sabotage and paramilitary raids on the island itself. See, e.g., R. Bruce McColm and Francis X. Maier, “Fighting Castro from Exile,” New York Times Review of Books, 4 January 1981, p. 16. Yearbook of International Associations 1984/5, vol. 1, entry O337. Ibid., vol. 1, entry G0227. For more on Butler and the Australian League of Rights, see Andrew A. Campbell, The Australian League of Rights: A Study in Political Extremism and Subversion (Victoria: Outback, 1978); and K. D. Gott, Voices of Hate: A Study of the Australian League of Rights and its Director, Eric D. Butler (Melbourne: Dissent, 1965). See also the publications of Butler himself, including The Truth about the Australian League of Rights: A. Phillip Adams’ Invitation Accepted (Melbourne: Heritage, 1985); The International Jew: The Truth about the “Protocols of Zion” (Adelaide: no publisher, 1946); and The Red Pattern of World Conquest: Is It Now Too Late to Defeat Communism? (Melbourne: Australian League of Rights, 1961). For its New Zealand analogue, see Paul Spoonley, “The Politics of Racism: The New Zealand League of Rights,” in The Politics of Nostalgia: Racism and the Extreme Right in New Zealand, ed. Paul Spoonley (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1987). Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 9, 282. On the “strategy of tension,” see the sources cited in the relevant chapters of volume 1 of this book; and especially Gianni Flamini, Il partito del golpe: La strategie della tensione e del terrore dal primo centrosinistra organico al sequestro Moro (Ferrara: Bovolenta, 1981–5). For more on ON, see Rosario Minna, “Il terrorismo di destra,” in Terrorismi in Italia, ed. Donatella Della Porta (Bologna: Mulino, 1984), especially pp. 33–5; and Franco Ferraresi, “La destra eversiva,” in La destra radicale, ed. Franco Ferraresi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984), pp. 62–6. To these must be added the extraordinarily valuable revelations of convicted neo-fascist terrorist and “political soldier” Vincenzo Vinciguerra, Ergastolo per la libertà:Verso la verità sulla strategia della tensione (Florence: Arnaud, 1989). Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 101. Fuerza Nueva was established as a legal “national right” political party in the early 1970s, although a journal of the same name and political orientation had already appeared during the 1960s. While not strictly speaking a terrorist organization, a few youthful members of Fuerza Nueva were apparently involved in the 1977 massacre of five leftist lawyers in Madrid, on which see the special edition of Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 5 February 1977. For more on the so-called Atocha massacre, see Alejandro Muñoz Alonso, Terrorismo en España: El terror frente a la convivencia pluralista en libertad (Madrid: Planeta/Instituto de Estudios Económicos, 1982), pp. 80–1; Mariano Sánchez Soler, Hijos del 20-N: Historia violenta del fascismo español (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1993), pp. 192–6; and La matanza de Atocha (Madrid: Akal, 1980).

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170 Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 270. I have not come across any detailed studies of CMA. Most of what is known about the group can be found in scattered newspaper articles. 171 For Sandoval and the MLN, see ibid., pp. 162–86, etc.; Michael McClintock, The American Connection 2: State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1985), pp. 169, 195. 172 Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 193–210. On D’Aubuisson’s links to his country’s parallel police, see especially Allan Nairn, “Behind the Death Squads,” The Progressive (May 1984), p. 19. 173 Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 41, 283. For the HRB’s Ustaše inspiration and operations, see Stephen Clissold, Croat Separatism: Nationalism, Dissidence and Terrorism (London: Institute of the Study of Conflict, 1979), p. 15. Chairoff claims (Dossier néonazisme, p. 433) that the HRB had strong links to both the CIA and NATO’s “special services.” 174 Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 138–49. 175 Delle Chiaie definitely appeared at CAL’s September 1980 conferences in Buenos Aires (Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 147) and may have also attended the Twelfth WACL Conference held in Asuncion, Paraguay in April of 1979, reputedly the most “Nazified” of all WACL meetings. See Fred Clarkson, “Behind the [Contra] Supply Lines,” Covert Action Information Bulletin (Winter 1986), p. 52. For a general but highly partisan overview of Delle Chiaie’s career, see Stuart Christie, Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy/Refract, 1984). For more on AN, see Minna, “Terrorismo di destra,” especially pp. 35–6; and Ferraresi, “Destra eversiva,” pp. 66–71 Compare also the chapter on the “black international” in volume 1 of this study. 176 Goldman, “World Anti-Communist League,” p. 18. However, one should note that Goldman’s use of the term “fascist” is not all precise, a wearisomely typical trait, especially among leftist analysts. 177 Clarkson, “Behind the Supply Lines,” pp. 50, 52. For the CAL expulsion see “WACL Finally Expels One Pro-Fascist Organization,” Public Eye 4:3–4 (Summer 1984), pp. 4–5. Despite these clean-up efforts, Singlaub himself denied that WACL was ever a gathering place for racists and extremists in a letter to New York Times, 19 September 1985. For more on the “new WACL,” see Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 150–1, 252–61. 178 Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 124–5. Note that they dismiss this statement as an example of “heavenly deception” and suggest that it reflected Moon’s anger over his inability to take over WACL. 179 Ibid., pp. 50–4. Indeed, Park and his colleagues revamped the organization and made it into an even more important instrument of South Korean foreign policy than it had been under Rhee. 180 See note 255. 181 Mickler, “History of the Unification Church,” p. 93. Much of Mickler’s information on Choi and the early Japanese UC is based on a transcribed talk with Choi’s first disciple, Michiko Matumoto. 182 Ibid., pp. 93–6. 183 Ibid., pp. 96–8. 184 Ibid., pp. 98–9. Compare also Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, pp. 15–16, for Choi’s early failures. 185 Mickler, “History of the Unification Church,” p. 99; Kim, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, p. 16; and Barker, Making of a Moonie, p. 49. In his masterful study of the Japanese ultra-right, Ivan Morris said that the Rissho Korei Kai, like other Nichiren Buddhist sects, “revealed the type of nationalist fervor that . . . can so easily spill over into the political field.” See Morris, Nationalism and the Right Wing, p. 140. As we shall see, the association between the Rissho Korei Kai and the GU does not seem to have been coincidental. 186 Mickler, “History of the Unification Church,” pp. 99–101. 187 For indications of the Japanese UC’s wealth, see e.g. Boyer, Empire Moon, pp. 159–62; and Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 68.

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188 The quoted characterization is that of Richard J. Samuels, “Power behind the Throne,” in Political Leadership in Contemporary Japan, ed. Terry Edward MacDougall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 1982), p. 128. Curiously, however, only the nemawashi appears in his summary of kuromaku methods. 189 David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan’s Criminal Underworld (Reading MA: Addison- Wesley, 1986), p. 78. For more general background information on these rightist kuromaku, see Koji Nakamura, “The Japanese ‘Godfathers’: A Strange Alliance of Gangsters, Businessmen and Right-Wing Politicians,” Atlas World Press Review 21:11 (December 1974), pp. 16–19; Richard Halloran, “Little-Known Japanese Wield Vast Power,” New York Times, 2 July 1974, p. 2; and John Roberts, “Men Who Brood and Wait,” Far Eastern Economic Review 80:24 (18 June 1973), p. 14. 190 Karl Hale Dixon, “The Extreme Right Wing in Contemporary Japan” (Unpublished PhD dissertation: Tallahassee, Florida State University, 1975), pp. 211–2. 191 Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 125. There is some question in my mind as to whether he was a “lieutenant” of Kodama’s as early as 1962, or whether he only became one later. The precise dating could have explanatory significance. 192 Ibid., p. 68. Compare also John Roberts, “Ryoichi Sasakawa: Nippon’s Right-Wing Muscleman,” Insight (Hong Kong), April 1978, p. 14. 193 Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 212. According to Wolfgang Seifert, the former organization was the “most important of the new anti-communist religious sects” in Japan with links to the extreme right. See Wolfgang Seifert, Nationalismus im Nachkriegs-Japan: Ein Beitrag zur Ideologie der völkischen Nationalisten (Hamburg: Institüt fur Asienkunde, 1977), p. 117, note 26. Later, the Genri Kenkyu Kai claimed to have severed its links to the GU, but this is quite doubtful in view of its simple adoption of a new name. See Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 210–2. 194 Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 32–5. For more on the Genyo Sha, see E. H. Norman, “The Genyosha: A Study in the Origins of Japanese Imperialism,” Pacific Affairs 17 (September 1944), pp. 261–84. 195 The following biographical information is derived from Morris, Nationalism and the Right Wing, especially pp. 443–4; Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 74–83; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 63–9, 78–83; and Seifert, Nationalismus in Nachkriegs-Japan, pp. 139–46. Key Japanese sources on Kodama include Kenji Ino, Kodama Yoshio no Kyozo to Jitsuzo (Tokyo: Sokon, 1970); Eisuke Otsuka, Kore ga Uyoku da (Tokyo: Eru, 1970), pp. 145–54; and Takashi Tachibana, Tanaka Kakuei Kenkyu (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 140–280. Compare Kodama’s own account of his prewar and wartime career in Kodama, I Was Defeated (Tokyo: Booth/Fakuda, 1951). 196 For Kodama’s connections, see especially Hiroshi Hanzawa, “Two Right-Wing Bosses: A Comparison of Sugiyama and Kodama,” Japan Quarterly 23:3 (July–September 1976), pp. 243–5; and Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 76. 197 Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 65–6; Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 76–7; and Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America: The Private Use of Secret Agents (New York: Bantam, 1978), p. 455. For more on the drug trafficking, see Brigadier General Elliot Thorpe, East Wind, Rain: The Intimate Account of an Intelligence Officer in the Pacific, 1939–49 (Boston: Gambit, 1969), p. 219, where Kodama is described as a “tough character . . . who was to the narcotics racket in Japan what Al Capone once was to the liquor traffic in America.” For a basic overview of the Kempei Tai, see Richard Deacon, Kempei Tai: A History of the Japanese Secret Service (New York: Berkeley, 1983). 198 Kodama gave a rather strange account of his imprisonment in his Sugamo Diary (Tokyo: Fukuda, 1960). 199 For biographical information on Sasagawa, see Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa”; Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 98–101; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 79–81; Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 61–3; Morris, Nationalism and the Right Wing, p. 449; and “Sasagawa Ryoichi: Impresario of the Japanese Right,” Ampo 6:1 (Winter 1974), pp. 43–5. Note that this last source contains several errors. 200 Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 10; and Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 98.

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201 202 203 204

205

206 207

208 209 210 211

212 213

214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225

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Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 9. G-2 report of 24 May 1947, cited by Hougan, Spooks, p. 456. Cited by Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 79–80. On this feud, see Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 46; and John G. Roberts, “The ‘Japan Crowd’ and the Zaibatsu Restoration,” Japan Interpreter 12:3–4 (Summer 1979), p. 397. Hans H. Baerwald notes that G-2 could not be relied upon “to track . . . down purgees who were engaging in illegal activities” because of Willoughby’s “outright opposition” to the purge policy. See his article “The Purge in Occupied Japan,” in Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military Government in Germany and Japan, ed. Robert Wolfe (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois, 1984), pp. 188–97. See especially Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 57–63. Many of the recruited ultranationalists served in the notorious Hattori Kikan (Hattori Agency), an “anti-communist spy agency attached to Willoughby’s G-2 section.” According to Roberts, “Japan Crowd,” p. 407, among these was Tetsuzo Watanabe, who became an important figure in APACL and, later, the UC-affiliated WACL branch in Japan. Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” pp. 10–1; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 66. Kaplan and Dubro (Yakuza, pp. 66–9), provide the most details regarding Kodama’s recruitment and use by Willoughby’s G-2 and, later, the CIA. But compare also Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 11; Hougan, Spooks, p. 457; G. Cameron Hurst, “The Tanaka Decision: Tanaka Kakuei and the Lockheed Scandal,” USFI Reports: Asia 19 (1983), p. 4; and Pio D’Emilia, “Non è proprio un Samurai,” L’Espresso 28:49 (12 December 1982), p. 66. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 67–8. Ibid., p. 67. Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 77. For the sum, see Haruhiro Fukai, Party in Power: The Japanese Liberal-Democrats and PolicyMaking (Canberra: Australian National University, 1970), p. 43. For Tsuji, see Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 67. For the LP, DP, and LDP background, see Nobuo Tomita et al., “The Liberal Democratic Party: The Ruling Party of Japan,” in The Japanese Party System: From One-Party Rule to Coalition Government, ed. Ronald J. Hrebenar (Boulder: Westview, 1986), pp. 253–5. See Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 78–9. For Ono’s gangster links, see Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 82. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 101–23; Hurst, “Tanaka Decision,” p. 5; and especially David Boulton, The Grease Machine: The Inside Story of Lockheed’s Dollar Diplomacy (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). Kodama had been a paid agent of Lockheed since 1958 and received US$7 million for his help in arranging the TriStar aircraft deal. Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 79. Ibid., p. 80. Nakamura, “Japanese ‘Godfathers’,” p. 19. Compare also Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 80–1; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 84–6. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 94–5; Florence Rome, The Tattooed Men: An American Woman Reports on the Japanese Criminal Underworld (New York: Delacorte, 1975), pp. 228–9. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 99; Rome, Tattooed Men, pp. 230–1; Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 80. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 98–9. Ibid., p. 87; Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 90. For more on Sagoya’s background, see Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 91–5. Ibid., pp. 90–2; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 87–8. Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 85–6; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 88. Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 86–8; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 88. Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 88–90; Seifert, Nationalismus in Nachkriegs-Japan, p. 122. For more on Kodama’s own political ideology, see the latter, pp. 188–201, 259–65.

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226 Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 69. 227 Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” pp. 8, 11; Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 99; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 80. 228 Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 11. 229 Among other things, Sasagawa has served as a middleman between Japanese oil companies and Middle Eastern oil shaykhs. See ibid., p. 9. 230 Sasagawa himself estimated his personal wealth at US$50 million, according to Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 8. Among the numerous charities and organizations he regularly donated money to was the United Nations! See, e.g., Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 260–1; Fay Wiley et al., “How to Hire some Good News,” Newsweek 97:23 (8 June 1981), p. 67. 231 Halloran, “Little-Known Japanese,” p. 2. 232 For this organization, see Morris, Nationalism and the Right Wing, pp. 242–3. Among its postwar members were Yoshida and Bamboku Ono. 233 Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 80; and Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 12. 234 Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 99; and Hougan, Spooks, p. 459. Not coincidentally, Kodama was head of the Japan Professional Wrestling Association. 235 For the “legacies” of the Japanese occupation, see Chong-Sik Lee, Japan and Korea: The Political Dimension (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1985), pp. 1–22. 236 See ibid., pp. 23–42; Kwang-Bong Kim, The Korea-Japan Treaty Crisis and the Instability of the Korean Political System (New York: Praeger, 1971). 237 Allen, Korea’s Syngman Rhee, p. 188. 238 Lee, Japan and Korea, p. 49. For Rhee’s attitude toward the Japanese see, e.g. Allen, Korea’s Syngman Rhee, pp. 183–90 (especially the quote on 189). 239 See, e.g., Sun-Joo Han, “Policy toward Japan,” in The Foreign Policy of the Republic of Korea, ed. Youngnok Koo and Sun-Joo Han (New York: Columbia University, 1985), p. 172. 240 Lee, Japan and Korea, pp. 47–9. 241 Kim, Korea-Japan Treaty Crisis, pp. 87–90. These same “allies” were also engaged in promoting pro-Taiwan policies through the Ajia Mondai Kenkyu Kai (Asia Problems Research Association) or “A-Group.” See, e.g., Nathan H. White, “An Analysis of Japan’s China Policy under the Liberal Democratic Party, 1955–1970” (Unpublished PhD dissertation: University of California, Berkeley, 1971), pp. 79–80, note 1, p. 80. 242 See, e.g., Seifert, Nationalismus in Nachskrieg-Japan, p. 116, note 20. 243 Han, “Policy toward Japan,” p. 172. 244 For Kim’s visits to Japan see Young Gil Chang, “The Normalization of Relations between Japan and Korea and the Role of the United States’ East Asian Policy” (Unpublished PhD dissertation: Washington, D.C., American University, 1975), pp. 142–5. 245 Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 82. Note also that Kim and Park developed close links with two organizations associated with Kodama, the Matsuba Kai and Machii’s Tosei Kai. For the former, see Albert Axelbank, Black Star over Japan: Rising Forces of Militarism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 101. As regards the latter, note that Machii helped the KCIA kidnap ROK dissident Dae-Jung Kim from a Tokyo hotel in 1973. See Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, pp. 189–97. 246 Cited by Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 82. The reference is to Eisuke Otsuka, Kore ga Uyoku da (Tokyo: Eru, 1970), p. 203. 247 For Ono and Kodama, see Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 81–2; for Kim, see Lee, Japan and Korea, pp. 50–1; and especially Harold C. Hinton, Korea Under New Leadership: The Fifth Republic (New York: Praeger, 1983), pp. 50–1, where it is pointed out that Kim was able to accumulate “an enormous private fortune, partly it appears from presents and bribes offered by Japanese firms eager for favors of one kind or another.” 248 Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 14; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, p. 80. 249 Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” p. 100. 250 Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 69. Compare Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 14. Fred Clarkson claims that Kodama himself was at this meeting, but cites no source

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254 255 256 257

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for this. See his “God Is Phasing out Democracy,” in Covert Action Information Bulletin (Spring 1987). Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 69. KA Report, p. 319. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, p. 69. In this respect it was more successful in Japan than in South Korea. As Boyer has pointed out (Empire Moon, pp. 136–7, 249), the main IFVC branch in Korea was unable to dominate or supplant the APACL/WACL chapter there, due mainly to the hostility of many ROK military leaders to Moon and his UC. Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 101, 214. See especially ibid., pp. 209–12. Boyer, Empire Moon, p. 250. Dixon, “Extreme Right Wing,” pp. 101, 212–14; Roberts, “Ryuichi Sasakawa,” p. 15. A brief message to this conference from Sato was reprinted in WACL/APACL, Important Documents of the Fourth WACL and Sixteenth APACL Conference (Taipei: WACL/APACLROC, 1970), p. 10. To discern this, one has only to peruse various issues of different WACL publications, such as the WACL Bulletin and Asian Outlook. Anderson and Anderson provide numerous examples. Perhaps the most infamous was the reported involvement of another UC political front group, the Confederación para la Asociación y Unidad de las Sociedades de América (CAUSA: Confederation for the Partnership and Unity of the Societies of the Americas) in funding or otherwise aiding the overthrow of the Bolivian government by right-wing military officers, narcotraficantes, Argentine intelligence operatives, and European neo-fascists. See, e.g., LAB/IEPALA, Narcotrafico y Politica: Militarismo y Mafia en Bolivia (Madrid: IEPALA, 1982), p. 125; and Kai Hermann, “Eine Killer-Karriere (5),” Stern 37:24 (6 June 1984). To my knowledge, these allegations were never definitively confirmed.

4 APOCALYPTIC MILLENARIAN GROUPS Assessing the threat of biological terrorism

Introduction As the ostensible millennial date 1 January 2000 approached, there was a heightened sense of anticipation and agitation amongst the members of various types of millenarian and apocalyptic groups, a growth of interest amongst scholars who studied millenarianism and so-called New Religious Movements (NRMs), and increasing concerns about the threat of apocalyptic violence amongst personnel within various security and law enforcement agencies throughout the Western and Westernized world.1 Some of this anxiety, interest, and concern, especially amongst elements of the public at large, was related to a unique potential problem – the unpredictable effects of apparent “Y2K” technical glitches on computerized systems, especially those that might have a significant adverse impact on personal data, financial records, and national security defenses – but the rest was of a more traditional sort: fears about possible catastrophic acts of violence marking the transition to a new millennium, carried out by extremist millenarian groups whose goal was to precipitate various eschatological scenarios or “end times” prophecies.2 Indeed, such concerns were so pronounced that the security agencies of several countries produced reports late in 1999 in order to assess the potential terrorist threats posed by apocalyptic religious groups. The most well-known of these was the so-called “Project Megiddo” report produced by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), but similar reports were also produced by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), various European police and intelligence agencies, and an officially appointed scholarly team in Israel.3 Although no major acts of apocalyptic millenarian violence were actually carried out at the turn of the third millennium CE, an interesting fact that itself requires some explanation, such fears certainly seemed to be warranted at the time.4 After all, during the 1990s several high-profile incidents of violence had in fact been perpetrated by apocalyptic millenarian religious groups, both against outsiders and

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against their own members (whether voluntarily or involuntarily). The first of these incidents involved a sectarian Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) splinter group known as the Branch Davidians based in Waco, Texas, and ended with the fiery deaths of its leader David Koresh and all the other members of the group who had remained inside their compound after it was surrounded and assaulted by federal agencies, first the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) and later the FBI. The second involved a neo-Templar secret society known as the Ordre du Temple Solaire (OTS: Order of the Solar Temple), many of whose members either committed suicide or were murdered between 1994 and 1997 in various locales in Switzerland, the Canadian province of Quebec, and France. The third involved the members of a syncretistic Buddhist cult in Japan known as Oumu Shinrikyō (Aum Supreme Truth), who carried out a series of murders and terrorist attacks using so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” in this case chemical and biological agents, which culminated in the shocking March 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system. The fourth was the seemingly voluntary mass suicide of members of a UFO cult called Heaven’s Gate in a gated community in southern California. Moreover, during the decade that preceded the turn of the third millennium there were other incidents involving armed groups with apocalyptic ideologies, which fortunately did not end in violent confrontations, such as the FBI’s siege of the Freemen compound in “Justus Township,” Montana.5 Some of these cases will again be referred to briefly below in order to illustrate certain important factors that may be relevant in the context of apocalyptic millenarian mass casualty threat assessments. In the analysis that follows, an attempt will be made to identify key indicators that need to be considered when trying to assess the potential threat posed by the acquisition, weaponization, and dissemination of biological agents by apocalyptic millenarian groups, both domestic and foreign. Henceforth this danger will be referred to as a bioterrorist threat.

A note on terminology: millenarianism, apocalypticism, and “apocalyptic millenarianism” Before proceeding with an assessment of the possible bioterrorist threat posed by apocalyptic millenarian groups, it is first necessary to clarify the meaning of various key terms and concepts in order to avoid confusion. The English term “millenarianism” (also sometimes referred to as “millennialism”) derives etymologically from the term “millennium,” i.e., a word that itself stems from the Latin phrase for a period of 1,000 years. Although this etymological association was originally formed on the basis of the thousand-year “Kingdom of God” on earth described in the New Testament Book of Revelation, the term “millenarianism” has since been broadened to such a degree that it now refers not only to this and other Christian eschatological visions, but also to a vast array of other religious and non-religious beliefs about the end of the world as we know it. Essentially, the noun “millenarianism” and its adjectival form “millenarian” nowadays are used for all doctrines that not only predict but also look forward to a fundamental transformation of the existing, unacceptably corrupt, unjust, “sinful,”

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and “evil” world order, followed by a complete transition to a “glorious” and paradisiacal new world order free of all of the problems and conflicts that afflict the current world. Moreover, whatever fate may be thought to befall the bulk of humanity, this transformative process will supposedly result in the earthly “salvation” or “redemption” of those who are regarded as especially “righteous” or deserving.6 As Catherine Wessinger has rightly noted, such millenarian worldviews are likely to “persist indefinitely into the future, because millennial beliefs address the perennial human hope that the limitations of the human condition – conflicted relations, suffering, illness, death – will be overcome once and for all.”7 For certain millenarian religious groups, this process of earthly salvation for the self-styled “elect” is also viewed as a precursor to the eventual divine judgment of their individual “souls” at the “End of Days,” which will determine whether they enter a heavenly paradise or a hellish realm for all of eternity. Indeed, one must distinguish analytically between different types and levels of eschatological, or “end times,” notions of salvation:8 • •

• •

Individual eschatology – the fate of individuals and/or their “souls” on the socalled “Day of Judgment”; Collective eschatology – the fate of members of particular religious or political communities, above all those regarded by their members as “chosen” or “elected,” in the “end times”; Terrestrial eschatology – the fate of the whole world in those “last days”; and Cosmic eschatology – the fate of the entire universe in the “end times.”

These diverse levels of eschatological conceptions are generally combined in complex ways by the members of millenarian religious groups, although the types that are of primary interest in this context – an assessment of the potential for mass casualty violence using biological agents – are collective eschatology and terrestrial eschatology. For secular millenarians, of course, supernatural forces are not involved in any way in their “end times” scenarios, and there is no belief in a true “afterlife,” i.e., another phase of existence in a divine realm that follows death on the terrestrial plane. The English term “apocalypse,” as well as most of its western European counterparts, derives from the classical Greek term apokálypsis, which means the “unveiling” of that which is hidden. As time passed, this word was increasingly applied in the context of hard-to-decipher clues found in various prophetic texts, especially those that foretold the coming destruction of the current “evil” world order. Hence the term “apocalypticism” refers to “a pattern of thought or a world view dominated by the kinds of ideas and motifs found in apocalypses,” i.e., texts containing these kinds of revelations or prophecies.9 Originally, such texts constituted “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”10 Although in antiquity it was commonly believed that such a cataclysmic destructive process was to be carried out

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exclusively by, or at least in conjunction with, supernatural entities, similar themes later appeared in secularized versions which envisioned that “righteous” humans with special destinies, insights, or abilities would alone act to destroy that unjust, reprehensible world and its “evil” masters.11 The term “apocalyptic millenarianism” simply combines those two concepts. In other words, it refers to diverse beliefs which insist that the predicted forthcoming transition from the current “evil” world to a “righteous” new world free of problems will be a cataclysmic or catastrophic one, i.e., one that will be “apocalyptic” in its levels of violence and destructiveness rather than peaceful, and sudden and disruptive rather than gradual. According to Norman Cohn, a leading scholar of medieval millenarian movements, apocalyptic millenarianism has several characteristics: the destruction of the existing world order, and the subsequent transition to a paradise on earth (if only for the “elect”) is envisioned as 1) collective, 2) terrestrial, 3) imminent, 4) total, and – in its religious variants – 5) “miraculous,” or brought on by a recognized supernatural agency.12 To put it another way, there are four principal beliefs associated with apocalyptic millenarianism:13 • • •

•

that the thoroughly corrupt, “evil” world order that now exists will soon be destroyed; that most people will die or suffer horrendously in the course of this cataclysmic process; that a select group of very special people – variously known as the “elect,” the “chosen people,” those who follow the “true path,” those who are “pure at heart,” those who have achieved elevated levels of spiritual awareness, those who are especially “oppressed,” those who obey a messianic savior who supposedly possesses divine inspiration or that embodies the correct ideology, etc. – will survive this cataclysm, and may even have a special role to play in it; and that, after the destruction of the corrupt existing world order, an “earthly paradise” will be created by or for those very special people, which will be free of want, hardship, suffering, strife, oppression, immorality, and everything else that is regarded as “evil.”

The adoption of apocalyptic millenarian worldviews is thus one important factor, amongst many other possible factors, that may predispose particular religious, political, or “psychotherapy” groups to resort to violence against outsiders. Even scholars who tend to adopt a generally sympathetic attitude toward so-called New Religious Movements (NRMs) have acknowledged this.14

Difficulties involved in identifying bioterrorist threat indicators for apocalyptic millenarian groups It should be noted at the outset that there are three main difficulties associated with determining the bioterrorist threat indicators for apocalyptic millenarian groups. First of all, the scholarly literature on past and present apocalyptic beliefs and groups

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is truly vast, as will become clearer as we proceed. It is simply not possible within a restricted time frame to fully access, assimilate, synthesize, and evaluate all of the potentially relevant information that is available in open sources on apocalyptic millenarian doctrines and organizations. As a result, the bioterrorist threat assessment that follows cannot possibly be comprehensive, and it should not be perceived as such. On the contrary, it has proven necessary to adopt a more schematic approach that is designed to highlight and illustrate the key dimensions of the bioterrorist threat that various types of apocalyptic millenarian groups might pose to the United States and its allies. Second, the historical forms that apocalypticism has already assumed throughout the world – and, by extension, the forms that it could conceivably assume in the future – are tremendously variegated.15 Most people in the West are broadly familiar with the Christian apocalyptic themes found especially in the New Testament Book of Revelation, one of the most peculiar books in the King James Bible.16 No one who has read Revelation can ever forget the vivid, hallucinatory images of fearful creatures, ominous signs, terrible phenomena, and indeed catastrophic events that have been prophesied therein.17 Some Westerners are familiar as well with other apocalyptic sections of the Bible, including the Book of Ezekiel and the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, or the “Little Apocalypse” found in Book 13 of the Gospel of Mark (wherein Jesus himself describes a coming eschatological scenario to his followers).18 Since apocalyptic materials are found in the Old Testament, most non-Jews are also at least vaguely aware that there is a Jewish apocalyptic tradition.19 But this is merely one historically influential manifestation of a vast array of existing apocalyptic beliefs. Indeed, not only do apocalyptic themes infuse a large number of the world’s religions, ranging from relatively isolated, small-scale folk religions to more structured religions of world-historical importance such as Islam,20 but they also permeate many other intellectual and cultural contexts, including diverse occultist milieus, Third World anti-colonial movements,21 UFO believers,22 the predominantly secular communist, fascist, and environmentalist ideological milieus,23 and, more broadly still, innumerable dimensions of modern Western popular culture.24 In that sense, virtually everyone interfacing with our interconnected present-day world, including within the U.S., has arguably been exposed to and even subliminally influenced to some degree by apocalyptic thinking, whether directly or indirectly. Hence it would be a mistake to assume that this type of thinking is nowadays narrowly confined to, much less solely associated with, religious “true believers” and fanatics. Third, it must be emphasized that not every group which believes in apocalyptic end-times scenarios, however fervently, is going to be motivated to carry out acts of brutal violence or mass casualty terrorism, with or without the use of biological weapons.25 It is frequently assumed, though rarely explicitly asserted, that all apocalyptic groups are potentially violent, and even some scholars have argued that apocalyptic millenarian beliefs are intrinsically oppositional, if not necessarily violent. For example, David G. Bromley claims that apocalypticism has an “inherently radical nature,” and also that apocalyptic groups “unequivocally reject the

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social order in which they reside and invest their loyalty and identity in a new order whose arrival they view as imminent and inevitable.”26 Yet such an avowedly antistatus quo attitude has not generally been held by the vast majority of, say, religious believers who adhere to “mainstream” religions with apocalyptic themes, many of whom have been quite supportive of the political and social status quo in their respective countries. It has, however, been embraced at times by a minority of fervent apocalyptic millenarians who actively look forward to the destruction of the existing world order which they regard as irremediably “evil,” especially those who feel that they must play a role in the process. In short, an important issue that must be briefly addressed is why only a relative handful out of the thousands of religious, quasi-religious, hybrid, or political groups with apocalyptic doctrines have actually ended up crossing the threshold of violence. As James T. Richardson has argued: [It] may be a necessary, though not sufficient condition, to have some sort of beliefs that are apocalyptic in nature, but it is certainly not a sufficient thing to say that if a group has an apocalyptic belief system, violence is going to happen. . . . Any religious group you are a part of that pays any attention to the book of Daniel or the book of Revelation in the Old Testament is an apocalyptic religious group even if they don’t emphasize it very much.27 It is to this subject – which types of apocalyptic millenarian groups are most likely to employ violence? – that we will now turn.

Ideological indicators: espousal of active apocalyptic millenarian doctrines Different types of millenarianism There are a number of factors that bear upon this issue, which effectively means that the potential security threats posed by apocalypticism, i.e., beliefs in catastrophic or cataclysmic “end times” scenarios, are likely to be much less acute or widespread than is often supposed. First, the majority of the people who adhere to religions with apocalyptic doctrines do not dwell inordinately on those particular aspects of their religion. For example, most Christians do not seem to devote too much time and energy thinking about the apocalyptic scenarios found in the Book of Revelation, though if pressed they generally profess to believe that the scenarios described therein will unfold in some fashion during the “end times.” In the meantime, however, they are mainly focused on their own mundane career and family responsibilities, typically spend only a few hours in church every Sunday, and, if and when they consciously think about their religion, are probably worried more about how to apply the tenets and values reportedly espoused by and embodied in the behavior of Jesus, as they interpret them, in their daily lives. Similarly selective, partial, and wide-ranging approaches to applying religious beliefs, and the tangible

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but divergent effects thereby exerted by those beliefs on the behavior of individual believers, are surely characteristic of most Jews, Muslims, and Hindus as well. In this context, the historian of American apocalypticism Paul Boyer has made some trenchant and highly relevant observations. He rightly notes that most Christians, past and present, “have believed in God’s providential oversight of history and in a final eschatological consummation.”28 This is true, almost by definition, for those who take their religious beliefs at all seriously. On the other hand, he draws useful distinctions between different levels of Christian concern for apocalyptic themes by arguing that the world of prophecy belief can be visualized as a series of concentric circles, at the center of which is a core group of devotees who spend much time thinking about the Bible’s apocalyptic passages and trying to organize them into a coherent scenario . . . . Next in this concentric series one finds those believers who may be hazy about the details of biblical eschatology, but who nevertheless believe that the Bible provides clues to future events . . . This group, comprising many millions of Americans, is susceptible to popularizers who confidently weave Biblical passages into highly imaginative end-times scenarios, or who promulgate particular schemes of prophetic interpretation. . . . In the outer circle are those superficially secular individuals who exhibit little overt prophecy interest, but whose worldview is nevertheless shaped to some degree by residual or latent concepts of eschatology, the theology of last things. One may hypothesize that in times of crisis, or when confronted by particularly troubling world events, members of this group may listen with more than passing attentiveness to those who offer the Bible as a guide to events, or be particularly receptive to ostensibly secular works that are nevertheless apocalyptic in structure and rhetoric.29 As noted previously, the same sorts of distinctions are often observable amongst the believers in other popular mainstream faiths with explicit eschatological narratives. On the other hand, in the case of certain small, sectarian, and/or cult-like groups, every single member may be situated inside the first of the three concentric circles delineated by Boyer. Second, even those religious believers who are particularly obsessed with or concerned about apocalyptic scenarios may interpret this process quite differently. For this very reason, Catherine Wessinger and other scholars have sought to distinguish between what they refer to as “progressive millenarianism,” on the one hand, and “catastrophic millenarianism,” on the other. “Progressive millenarianism,” a relatively recent, post-Enlightenment phenomenon, is the “optimistic belief that the collective earthly salvation will be accomplished by humans working in harmony with a divine (or superhuman) plan,” and thus that the longed-for and anticipated just new world will be established gradually and non-catastrophically, i.e., without the outbreak of widespread destruction and violence and the resulting death of millions.30 “Catastrophic millenarianism” is the much older, far more widespread, and indeed “historically predominant” form of millenarianism, one which foresees the

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imminent catastrophic destruction of the existing world, marked by widespread suffering and death, followed by the creation of an “earthly paradise” for “the elect.”31 Hence “catastrophic millenarianism” is essentially identical to “apocalyptic millenarianism,” and is obviously the type of millenarianism that is of concern herein. However, even fervent apocalyptic millenarians can view their own roles in this coming process, if any, in very different ways. Indeed, one must differentiate between two distinct forms of apocalyptic millenarianism: passive apocalyptic millenarianism and active apocalyptic millenarianism.32 In the former case, the holders of apocalyptic beliefs do not believe that they themselves must carry out certain actions, perform prescribed duties, or fulfill particular responsibilities, since they are convinced that prophesied apocalyptic scenarios are not only divinely predestined, but also that it is the responsibility of supernatural entities operating in both the cosmic and terrestrial spheres to take actions, first to initiate those processes and then to bring them to fruition. For all practical purposes, then, they are essentially little more than passive spectators in an essentially cosmic struggle between the forces of “good” and “evil,” even though that struggle will eventually have catastrophic effects on the terrestrial sphere, at least for most people. Yet even those who are active apocalypticists, i.e., those who believe that they must take certain concrete actions in advance to assure their own salvation, perhaps in order to become members of the aforementioned small select group of “very special people” who are destined to be spared from the coming terrestrial tribulations, do not necessarily believe that they must personally initiate violent actions against designated “evildoers” on Earth. Here one can identify a spectrum ranging from peaceful to violent forms of active apocalyptic behavior. On the peaceful end of the spectrum, some may simply believe that behaving in a more consistently moralistic or puritanical fashion on the basis of strict interpretations of their religious principles is sufficient to guarantee their salvation, a form of active personal behavior that does not require them to commit any acts of violence and may even involve the adoption of a pacifistic attitude. Others may feel that they must physically isolate and thereby protect themselves from the “corrupt” outside world by forming their own small, self-contained communities, instead of taking action to try and forcibly change that “evil” external world. Nearer the middle of this spectrum of active apocalypticism, though leaning more toward the pole of violence, many believers may feel that they have a right to, or even that they must actually make preparations to, defend themselves against possible attacks by these external “forces of darkness.” On the furthest, most violent pole of the activist apocalyptic spectrum, certain believers may feel it necessary to commit corporeal suicide in order to escape from earthly corruption by “freeing” their souls or inner spirits or making some sort of “transition” to a higher plane of existence. Still others may at some point become convinced that they must employ extreme violence against outsiders in order to help “purify” the Earth of evil or otherwise play a vital role in laying the groundwork for the unfolding of eschatological scenarios. In the latter case, obviously, there would be a much higher likelihood that such apocalyptic believers will actually be motivated or driven to carry out acts of brutal violence, since their main goal is to

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eliminate “evildoers,” whether they are non-believers, “apostates,” or simply less committed believers, who are thought to embody sinfulness and corruption and/or are believed to be the human agents of demonic supernatural forces. In practice, this means that only a relatively small subset of apocalyptic millenarian groups is ever likely to cross the threshold of violence. An even smaller subset of those violent apocalyptic groups is likely to be fixated on committing acts of mass casualty terrorism, still fewer will be obsessed with the idea of deploying “hightech” weapons (such as biological weapons) in such mass casualty attacks, and of these an even tinier subset might actually possess or be able to obtain the resources and technical capabilities necessary to turn their apocalyptic fantasies of destruction into reality. That is the good news, and it is very good news indeed. The difficulty, of course, lies in identifying the tiny subset of apocalyptic groups that fall into that rarified category in advance, before they are able to initiate destructive actions in pursuit of their world-transformative goals. The bad news is that this may not always be an easy task. There are several reasons why this task can be difficult. First of all, there are a large number of groups with millenarian worldviews, apocalyptic or otherwise, in various parts of the world. Not even specialists know the exact number, but it is likely to be in the thousands. Second, many of these groups are relatively obscure, if not intentionally secretive, and are thus often hard to identify and investigate. Third, the beliefs and behavior of these types of groups often change over time, sometimes abruptly and dramatically. For example, as a result of changing internal dynamics and/or shifting external circumstances, “progressive” millenarianism can be transformed into “apocalyptic millenarianism,” passive forms of the latter can evolve over time into active apocalypticism, and peaceful forms of the latter may be transmogrified into more violent forms.33 Or, in each of these situations, the shifts could conceivably be in the other direction, although this is perhaps less likely.34 Hence it would be very unwise for observers to assume that a condition of stasis exists within these types of religious or political milieus, or that the attitudes and behavior of particular groups will remain fixed or unchanged in perpetuity. Moreover, it may well be that efforts initiated by governments to monitor, regulate, or crack down on such groups, even if they are entirely warranted and handled with appropriate sensitivity, will inadvertently serve to precipitate or at least hasten the kinds of internal attitudinal and behavioral transformations that may end up resulting in violent confrontations.35 In view of the aforementioned, it should be reiterated that the focus of this bioterrorist threat assessment is not on the mainstream members of various religious communities that hold casual apocalyptic beliefs – rather, it is on those highly committed apocalyptic millenarians who form the core of the first circle described by Boyer. Earlier in his book, he described such committed Christian believers in America in a more explicit way: [they] represent [only] a subset of that vast host of [garden-variety] believers. These are individuals who are deeply preoccupied with eschatology, who place

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it at the center of their theological speculations, and who teach that God at the beginning of time determined a specific, detailed plan for history’s last days – a plan revealed in the Bible with minute particularity, though in symbolic language and veiled images. They are committed (sometimes obsessively so) to elucidating these prophetic mysteries and using them to illuminate and explain the course of contemporary history.36 Yet even this relatively select group of fervent millenarians is far larger than the protagonists that concern us herein, for the latter constitute a much smaller subset of committed apocalyptic millenarians who are strongly motivated to perpetrate acts of violence against designated “evildoers” in order to initiate the prophesied “end times,” the even tinier subset of fanatics who are determined to attack their enemies with biological weapons, and the even more minuscule subset that may actually have the ability to do so.

Scientific or technological fetishism In this context, one other doctrinal factor that should be briefly noted in connection with apocalyptic millenarian groups is “scientific fetishism” or “technological fetishism,” which indicates that certain groups may espouse particular worldviews that cause them to become obsessively concerned with the development of advanced technologies or high-tech devices of various kinds, perhaps including high-tech weaponry. At some point, this sort of obsession could conceivably impel them to try to produce biological weapons. There are, after all, several real-world examples of apocalyptic millenarian culttype groups with doctrines that promote different types of scientific or technological fetishism. The most notorious of such groups is of course Aum Shinrikyō, which became increasingly obsessed with producing or obtaining an array of highly lethal weapons, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. The possibility of carrying out acts of violence in order to generate mass casualties was already being increasingly justified on religious grounds following Aum’s shift from an overly optimistic conception of its future political and cultural role to a darker and far more pessimistic view of an imminent apocalypse, especially in the wake of growing conflicts with the external society and the failure of Asahara Shōkō’s Shinritō (Party of Supreme Truth) candidates to win seats in the February 1990 parliamentary elections.37 However, the rapid rise of the so-called “science lobby” – a faction of Aum members, headed by Murai Hideo and Endō Seiichi, with some advanced scientific training – within Aum’s organizational hierarchy led to the increasing elaboration of destructive, pseudo-scientific fantasies of various kinds.38 This resulted in a form of techno-fetishism that manifested itself concretely in repeated attempts by the group to manufacture and eventually disseminate chemical and biological agents, attempts which culminated in the sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway system.39 Nor was Aum alone in displaying such technological fetishism. Apart from the example of the Rajneesh Movement, the medical component of which likewise

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sought to culture virulent bacteria and acquire samples of the HIV virus and thence carried out biological attacks against potential voters living in Wasco Country, Oregon, specifically by spreading salmonella bacteria in local salad bars,40 one should mention other forms of techno-fetishism displayed by the Church of Scientology (COS) and the International Raëlian Movement, a “UFO religion” established by former French race car driver Claude Vorilhon. In the former case, COS founder L. Ron Hubbard created a supposedly “scientific” self-improvement program called Dianetics, which involved utilizing the “E-meter” (a type of electronic instrument called a Wheatstone Bridge, which measures a subject’s galvanic skin response) in a carefully delineated progression of “auditing” procedures moving upward along the so-called “Bridge to Total Freedom.” The goal was to help humans cope with personal traumas that supposedly prevented them from accurately perceiving the world and thus from achieving their full potential. Hubbard later wedded this process to a bizarre science fiction cosmogony that was not only extended to each individual’s alleged past lives but also traced everything back to prehistoric cosmic traumas that had long ago caused “body thetans” to attach themselves to every human body. In order to free oneself from these attached bundles of body thetans, the spirits of exiled humans whose corporeal forms had been destroyed on Earth 75 million years ago by the galactic Emperor Xenu, it was necessary to proceed forward along the Bridge beyond the stage of “clear,” wherein one had total awareness, and on up through the successive “Operating Thetan” levels until all past traumas were eradicated. It was this “tech[nology]” that key leaders of the COS, who directed its Religious Technology Center, sought to ensure that the organization’s members applied properly and kept secret, both from low level members and outsiders.41 In the latter case, the Raëlians, who believed that human beings had originally been genetically engineered by an advanced alien race known as the Elohim, became obsessed with cloning human beings, so much so that they allegedly set up a cloning company with laboratories called Cloneaid and publicly announced that they had already successfully cloned several humans.42 Since they espoused a “spiritualized” scientific form of creationism involving alien beings, the Raëlians were increasingly motivated to adopt and promote certain advanced scientific techniques and methods which they believed would help them achieve their ultimate millenarian goal: to lay the groundwork for, and thereafter to welcome the return of the benevolent Elohim to Earth.43 Although the group’s cloning claims were surely bogus, and may have constituted little more than a publicity stunt, it is certainly conceivable that some other millenarian group with a similar fixation on genetic engineering but a more violent, apocalyptic vision might end up trying to engineer a highly destructive weapon of some type.

Organizational indicators: presence of authoritarian organizational structures Apart from the adoption of active apocalyptic millenarian worldviews, there are several other factors that might serve to facilitate a religious or political group’s adoption of violence against external “evildoers” and/or their actual ability to carry

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out such violence, with or without the use of biological weapons. One is the fact that many apocalyptic millenarian groups are headed by charismatic leaders who, almost by definition, have an unusual ability to captivate the imaginations and influence the actions of their followers. Another is that many such groups systematically employ an array of deceptive and coercive measures in order to recruit, psychologically enmesh, indoctrinate, manipulate, and ultimately control the thoughts and actions of their followers, in part by undermining their psychological autonomy and their ability to engage in independent thinking. Groups that employ such techniques have often been referred to – quite justifiably, in my opinion – as “cults.” Unfortunately, there has long been a systematic effort by leading NRM researchers to banish the term “cult” from scholarly discourse, one that is still ongoing, and for that very reason it is necessary to devote some attention to the so-called “cult wars,” i.e., disputes between “cult critics” and “cult defenders,” both within and outside of academia.44 These two matters will both be discussed in this section on organizational indicators. The bitter debates amongst academicians over the nature of certain NRMs, and over the very applicability of the term “cult,” may at first glance seem to be little more than yet another arcane scholarly dispute with little relevance to the real world, but in this case nothing could be further from the truth. First, these academic debates are necessarily reflected in the available scholarly literature, which is now dominated by “cult defender” interpretations. Hence intelligence and law enforcement personnel who are responsible for assessing the potential threat posed by these types of groups need to be made aware of the major disputes in this field of study, and above all of the pronounced biases in much of that literature, so that they are not misled by those who are seeking to whitewash the activities of such groups into minimizing the dangers that they might present. Second, this preliminary analysis of the “cult wars” is not only directly relevant to the organizational indicators to be discussed further in this chapter, but is also necessary to help the reader fully comprehend and contextualize those factors.

Prolegomena: the controversies over cults Since the late 1960s, when an ever-growing number of non-mainstream religious and therapeutic movements began to form, establish local branches, and attract followers in modern Western democracies, there have been increasingly heated academic and legal debates concerning the characteristics of and potential dangers posed by certain religious groups identified as “cults.” These polemical debates have not only engendered a good deal of unnecessary ill will amongst scholars who should ideally be constructively collaborating with each other rather than demonizing one another, but they have also seriously impeded an accurate assessment of the nature of various types of sectarian groups, political and psychotherapeutic as well as religious. The resulting conceptual confusion has in turn acted to undermine the ability of government officials, scholars, journalists, and other interested observers to assess accurately and respond appropriately to the potential security threats posed

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by particular groups of this type, among which are numerous apocalyptic millenarian groups. The proliferation of these new movements, especially those of a purportedly religious nature, and their success in recruiting significant numbers of affluent and educated youths, has perhaps unsurprisingly ended up engendering opposition from different religious and social milieus in Western societies, as well as precipitating the formation of active anti-cult lobbying groups by elements within those milieus. Generally, these opposition movements have fallen into two main categories, although certain academicians have recently developed more elaborate typologies of NRM-watching groups.45 The first is the so-called “counter-cult movement” (CCM), which is composed almost exclusively of members of mainstream, conservative, ultra-orthodox, or fundamentalist religious organizations who feel threatened theologically by these NRMs, which they characterize as “heretical” or “satanic” pseudo-religions because of their association with purportedly “deviant” beliefs, doctrines, or rituals.46 The second is the so-called “anti-cult movement” (ACM), which is composed of a much broader cross-section of social elements, including many that are explicitly secular in their orientation.47 The ACM’s opposition to certain NRMs is not based on narrowly theological, doctrinal, or ritualistic differences, but rather derives from its often legitimate concerns about the deceptive and abusive practices that such cults allegedly subject their own members to, practices which have often led the latter to suddenly cut off all contact with their relatives and close friends and behave in other seemingly unusual ways. However, two problems that later developed were that some elements of the intolerant, religiously bigoted CCM later joined and subtly influenced the ACM, a broad-based umbrella movement, and that some within the ACM made the mistake of promoting the hiring of self-styled “deprogrammers” to reverse the indoctrination or “programming” that cult members were thought to have been subjected to. Unfortunately, some of those deprogrammers, most of whom had little or no formal psychological training, began illegally kidnapping members of NRMs and subjecting them to abuses themselves.48 It was in this sensational context, fueled further by the shocking violent crimes committed by certain unconventional groups (such as the Manson Family and Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple), that the bitter legal and scholarly conflicts over “cults” arose.49 As previously noted, the result has been a counterproductive polarization of views between the “cult bashers,” who have adopted overly hostile and at times alarmist views about all sorts of organizations which they refer to as “destructive cults,” and the “cult defenders,” who have adopted overly sympathetic and highly protective attitudes in relation to NRMs of all types, including those which have engaged in well-documented behavior patterns and activities that are blatantly unethical, deceptive, manipulative, exploitative, coercive, criminal, and/or violent. Moreover, the “cult defenders” have not only portrayed the more knee-jerk “cultbashers” from the CCM and ACM as modern-day “witch hunters,” “vigilantes,” or even “terrorists,” but have also sought to stigmatize and therefore delegitimize far more sober and responsible academic critics of cults with those very same pejorative

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labels.50 Over time the animosity between the academic specialists who hold these contrasting opinions has become far more rancorous than in most academic disputes, in part because they frequently derive from the passionate defense of two democratic principles that all too often come into conflict in these peculiar contexts: the freedoms and privileges legally granted to religious groups, including those of an “alternative” or non-mainstream nature, and the constitutional rights and freedom of choice guaranteed to individuals, including those who happen to be members of various unusually manipulative and authoritarian organizations. There are a number of diverse factors that can be identified to help explain why so many NRM researchers have adopted an apologetic or defensive attitude, not only toward the groups they themselves have studied, but also toward other NRMs. Most have more or less straightforward and seemingly moralistic motives, however problematic or naïve those motives may be in certain cases: • • • •

being concerned about mainstream society’s displays of bigotry toward, and potential persecution of, unconventional social or cultural groups; being concerned about potential limitations on or abuses of constitutional religious freedoms; being concerned about both the potential and documented abuses associated with cases of forcible “deprogramming”; being concerned, more broadly, about potential government abuses of power in democratic societies.

Certain prevalent methodological and attitudinal trends common amongst these defenders are, however, considerably less justifiable: •

•

•

•

shifting from necessary empathy to outright sympathy in the course of performing fieldwork or participant observation, i.e., “going native” (which often results in privileging NRM leader, cadre, and member testimony over that of defectors or “apostates”51); exhibiting uncritical if not slavish conformity to “hegemonic” academic fads and fashions in the NRM field, including the adoption of morally relativistic, non-judgmental attitudes, often to an absurd degree, in relation to cult-type groups (but not in relation to cult defectors and critics)52; displaying egregious ignorance about the general characteristics of ideological extremism and naivety about the nature of particular extremist groups, which all too often has resulted in the systematic manipulation of NRM researchers by cult members53; ignoring, at times in a systematic fashion, the authoritarian political agendas and covert political activities of several NRMs, both of which are usually in support of extreme right rather than far left causes.54

Still other motives are far more morally objectionable, inasmuch as they are anything but transparent and in fact serve to compromise scholarly objectivity and integrity:

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obtaining tangible benefits, in terms of privileged access or tangible resources, from the very cult groups being studied, even though this involves clear “conflicts of interest”55; promoting hidden religious or political agendas which, in the name of religious and other democratic freedoms, are in reality intended to shield extremist, totalitarian, anti-democratic groups from scrutiny, criticism, and potential government crackdowns and, more generally, to resist or even roll back “secular humanism,” liberalism, and modernism in the West.56

These varying factors, which have together combined to contribute to widespread “cult defending” within academia, must be recognized and indeed emphasized, since they have exerted a baleful influence on many of the most prolific and influential NRM researchers. Indeed, they help to explain why these academicians have so often preferred to champion the religious freedom of groups instead of the rights of the individuals who are being subjected by certain of those same groups to systematic manipulation and exploitation. In any case, the conflict over these contrasting democratic rights has become most pronounced in the bitter controversy that has arisen over charges that certain cults have employed “mind control” techniques and effectively “brainwashed” their members and adherents.57 In recent years academic “cult defenders” have repeatedly sought to banish the term “brainwashing” from scholarly discourse by undermining the legitimacy of the entire concept, either by attacking straw men (e.g., untenable journalistic caricatures of the process, such as allegations of total “mind control,” that no serious scholar has ever accepted) or by claiming that the early models developed by social scientists in connection with civilians in communist countries or Allied POWs held by the Chinese during the Korean War were inapplicable in the context of NRMs, since the latters’ social control mechanisms supposedly did not include physical imprisonment or coercion. Aside from the fact that a number of cult-like groups have employed physical coercion – up to and including murder – and/or forcible confinement in an effort to control recalcitrant followers, the available evidence indicates that a complex array of manipulative psychological practices can be characterized as coercive, and that if these practices are employed consciously and systematically there is no reason why they cannot be labeled as “brainwashing” or something else, at least provided that scholars carefully delimit the meaning of the terms they employ.58 A fair effort to clarify the meaning of the concept has been made by Benjamin Zablocki, one of the first social scientists to carry out extensive fieldwork on nonmainstream religious and social groups. According to Zablocki, brainwashing is to be understood as nothing more than an orchestrated process of ideological conversion that takes its subjects through a well-defined sequence of social psychological stages . . . the brainwashing conjecture does not assert that subjects are robbed of their will . . . [but rather that] resocialization remaps the values and preferences of the subject so that the subject

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voluntarily chooses to do what the group wants him to do. The goal of brainwashing is to create deployable agents . . . There is nothing in the definition to imply that brainwashing is easy to accomplish, always effective, or impossible to resist . . . [On the contrary,] brainwashing is likely to always remain a relatively rare phenomenon because of the difficulty of achieving a high degree of milieu control and charismatic influence necessary to make it effective [emphasis added].59 Compare the views of Kathleen Taylor, who has argued that “brainwashing is an extreme form of social influence which uses mechanisms increasingly studied and understood by social psychologists, [even though] such influence can vary hugely in its intensity” and effects.60 Later, she rightly emphasizes that it was more than just the systematic application of “a set of [identifiable] techniques” because it was both designed to “refashion [the subjects’] very identities” and inspired by “a dream, a vision of [attaining] ultimate control over not only behavior but thought as well.”61 Even so, in most of the NRM scholarship published between 1987 and the present day, it has become politically correct to “defend NRMs and to attack those who argued that some NRM members may have been brainwashed.”62 Some would go even further than Zablocki and argue that “brainwashing” involves a systematic effort to break down key features of an individual’s personality structure. Indeed, one of the most interesting analyses of “thought reform” in relation to cults has made a useful distinction between social control organizations that attack central elements of the self and those that only attack peripheral elements of the self. Obviously, the former are capable of causing far more psychological damage, both in the short term and in the long term.63 Nevertheless, given the imprecise and alarmist nature of terms like “mind control” and “brainwashing,” and the fact that these terms have so often been sensationalized or applied inaccurately or propagandistically by those who are seeking to attract readers or promote certain agendas, it is perhaps preferable to employ the less emotion-laden term “coercive persuasion” to the well-documented social control processes employed by a variety of bona fide cult-type groups. Even those who are justifiably critical of the all-encompassing, sensationalized concepts of “mind control” and “brainwashing” have acknowledged that “there are techniques that can be used to assault the brain, to try forcibly to coerce people into reversing their beliefs” and that “[m]any of these techniques were indeed used in Korea and are still applied, to some extent, by religious organizations today.”64 In any event, outside of totalitarian societies and prisons, where the highest degrees of authoritarian milieu control are possible, very few small-scale social organizations are able to achieve sufficient levels of milieu control and charismatic influence to successfully engage in “coercive persuasion.” Among those that actually have the capacity to do so are communal religious, political, or psychotherapeutic groups with authoritarian charismatic leaders, especially those that espouse apocalyptic, world-transformative ideologies and whose headquarters or compounds are geographically isolated. Hence the term “cult” can be justly defined as any micro-social organization that is characterized by noticeably authoritarian,

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deceptive, manipulative, coercive, exploitative, abusive, and/or violent social control mechanisms. In effect, cults are totalitarian mini-societies that aim to exert complete control over their followers, not only over the external behavior and daily activities of those followers but also over their consciences, their mental attitudes, and their internal thought processes.65 Once it is recognized that the term “cult,” when defined in this delimited way, can be applied to all types of organizations with these sorts of observable, documented characteristics – whether they are political, religious, psychotherapeutic, or hybrid groups66 – it may at long last be possible to decouple the analysis of such groups from the increasingly sterile and largely irrelevant debates over religious freedom. Moreover, contrary to oft-stated claims, the term “cult” is not only applicable to unconventional, alternative, countercultural, or otherwise non-mainstream political, religious, and psychotherapy groups, since organizations that espouse relatively mainstream, pro-establishment political views or quite orthodox theological interpretations can also exhibit similarly deceptive and/or coercive internal social control mechanisms.67 A “religious cult” can therefore be defined, in the strict sense of the term, as any type of religious group that systematically employs these well-known techniques of coercive persuasion, irrespective of the precise nature of its theological doctrines or rituals. It should not be applied exclusively to “NRMs,” however that term is defined. Therefore, when it comes to assessing whether particular small-scale social organizations, non-mainstream or otherwise, are bona fide cults, or whether they merely display certain cult-like features, all one needs to do is pay careful attention to their internal social control mechanisms and authority structures. This is not all that hard as long as one remains skeptical about the claims of leaders and true believers, is allowed to conduct fieldwork or at least observe the group for a time, is able to obtain detailed inside information from present and former members (above all “apostates” who, having become alienated from their former group, are more likely to retrospectively notice particular manifestations of manipulation and authoritarianism), and knows what telltale signs to look for.68 In the case of sectarian political and religious groups, the following can all be viewed as warning signs:69 • • • • • • • • • • •

authoritarian forms of charismatic and/or rigidly bureaucratic leadership; selective recruitment of psychologically vulnerable targets; initial deception concerning group affiliation and purposes; intense ideological indoctrination; progressive or sudden isolation of new members from external society (especially relatives and friends); confiscation of personal assets; relocation of members to closed, restricted facilities or geographically isolated compounds; exploitation of labor (12-16 hour work days); constant surveillance or enforced lack of privacy; sensory overload; sleep and protein deprivation;

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application of extreme and often degrading forms of peer group pressure, including forced public “confessions”; sexual exploitation; physical abuse and imprisonment, and perhaps even murder.

Religious, psychotherapy, political, or hybrid groups that possess all or most of these characteristics can legitimately be categorized as cults, whereas those that exhibit only a few of these traits can perhaps best be described as “cult-like” or potentially “cultic.” To portray groups with these problematic and potentially dangerous characteristics as nothing more than “harmless” alternative religions or as “innocent” victims of religious bigotry or persecution, as NRM researchers all too often do, defies all logic. However, it is necessary to make a very important qualification at this juncture: even if one can easily recognize such authoritarian characteristics when one encounters them, one must also emphasize that lower level members of even the most coercive and manipulative groups should not be characterized entirely as helpless “victims,” as many cult critics do, since they play an active and often enthusiastic role in their own victimization. Indeed, they normally do not even feel, subjectively, that they are victims unless, at some point, they become seriously disillusioned with or alienated from the group they have joined. In the first place, most individual members have voluntarily joined these types of organizations, even though they may have initially been deceived about their real nature and goals. These recruits are generally people who were in certain respects dissatisfied with the state of the world or with their own lives before joining the group, people who were looking for a “higher” purpose or seeking more meaning from life (spiritually or otherwise), people who were effectively joining a surrogate “family” (however dysfunctional) to escape from existential loneliness, people who were motivated to try and create a “better” world, or – less charitably – people who were, to use social psychologist Erich Fromm’s famous formulation, trying to “escape from freedom.”70 Second, once they joined those organizations, they received what they believed to be various benefits, psychological or otherwise, from membership, such as entering into the close fellowship of like-minded people; working collaboratively with their “comrades” or “brothers and sisters” to forge a new and ostensibly better world; gaining access to hidden knowledge (gnosis), obtaining spiritual “enlightenment,” or developing a more intimate personal connection to supernatural entities; or following the “righteous” path laid out by a charismatic leader who possessed extraordinary talents and abilities. For these and other reasons, many group members continue to maintain a fierce and unshakable loyalty to the group and its leader(s) even after the latter has subjected them to extraordinary abuses or repeatedly made failed prophecies.71 Consequently, it is generally a mistake to portray the members of even the most coercive and violent cult-type groups as if they were merely prisoners who were awaiting “liberation,” like the inmates of Nazi concentration camps or Stalinist gulags. They are more akin to star-crossed lovers who remain in abusive personal relationships without recognizing or acknowledging the

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abusive nature of those relationships. In such a context, NRM researchers should strenously avoid functioning as their de facto “enablers” by claiming, often falsely, that the organizations they belong to are simply misunderstood religious groups that are being unfairly “persecuted” by anti-cult “vigilantes.”

Apocalyptic millenarian organizational types There are three types of organizational structures that are most common in connection with active apocalyptic millenarian groups: groups headed by charismatic leaders, groups with hierarchical and often elaborate bureaucratic structures, and groups organized like traditional secret societies. These three can all be characterized as “pure” or “ideal” types in the Weberian sense, but it is important to emphasize at the very outset that in the real world, they are neither entirely discrete nor mutually exclusive.72 On the contrary, these three types of structures are often commingled in interesting ways and thus can assume different forms and variations.73 Moreover, such groups almost always evolve over time, and in the process various types of hybrid organizations will often emerge or develop.

Groups headed by charismatic leaders In The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, the famous German sociologist Max Weber made a useful distinction between three main types of what he characterized as “legitimate” authority: traditional authority, “rational” bureaucratic authority, and charismatic authority. This basic tripartite distinction has since been adopted, albeit with many refinements and modifications, by many other scholars. In the aforementioned work, Weber defined the term “charisma” as follows: a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.74 For Weber, then, “charismatic authority” was “power legitimized on the basis of a leader’s exceptional personal qualities or the demonstration of extraordinary insight and accomplishment, which inspire loyalty and obedience from followers.”75 Like other types of “legitimate” authority, this type of authority has no intrinsic ethical value, much less any inherent practical implications or effects, since it could in theory manifest itself in positive, neutral, or negative ways. To put it another way, a charismatic leader can be defined as someone with a strong, magnetic personality who is capable of eliciting unusual degrees of loyalty, affection, subservience, dedication, and self-sacrifice from his or her followers.

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Typically, such a leader is also someone who either claims (whether explicitly or implicitly) and/or is believed by his followers • • • •

• •

to be a prophetic figure who has direct contacts with or links to supernatural (or alien) entities; to have a unique ability to interpret “sacred” scriptures, group interests, or important “signs” and symbols; to be able to prophesize or foresee the future course of events; to have a special “calling” or “mission,” or perhaps even to have been chosen by supernatural (or alien) entities, to advance group interests, save the world, or perform other vital tasks for mankind; to possess an elevated level of spiritual enlightenment or awareness; or (for those with a more secular orientation) to have special insights or extraordinary abilities that are far beyond those of normal humans.

However their powers and abilities are specifically described or characterized, the key point is that charismatic leaders are viewed by their followers as being very special and important if not unique human beings. For this very reason, they are able to exert an extraordinary degree of influence over those followers.76 This is relevant to our subject because many groups that espouse apocalyptic millenarian ideologies are headed by charismatic leaders who claim to possess or embody all or some of the special powers, abilities, or qualities enumerated previously in this chapter, a fact that has even been recognized by many NRM researchers.77 It is obvious that the authority of many religious leaders, including those who head groups with cult-like characteristics, was originally charismatic in nature, as the examples of Sun Myung-Moon of the Unification Church, the Reverend Jim Jones of Peoples Temple, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later Osho) of the so-called Rajneesh Movement, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians, Asahara of Aum Shinrikyō, Vorilhon of the Raëlians, Credonia Mwerinde and other key leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda, and Shukrī Mustafa of the Jam‘iyyāt al-Muslimūn (the Society of Muslims, better known in Egypt as al-Takfīr wa al-Hijra [Excommunication and Migration]) all clearly illustrate. The same is true of certain “self-improvement” group leaders like Hubbard of Scientology and Chuck Dederich of Synanon, not to mention leaders of numerous millenarian political groups (such as Adolf Hitler). Some observers have rightly noted that the charismatic qualities of these very leaders helped induce many members of their groups to carry out actions that, under normal circumstances, would have never occurred or been repugnant to them. Indeed, one of the most common images of groups characterized as cults is that they have charismatic leaders. Alas, the reality is not nearly so simple and straightforward. For one thing, even in relatively small millenarian cults headed by megalomaniacal charismatic figures, those leaders usually come to rely upon a small cadre of loyal followers to whom various essential tasks are increasingly delegated (at least

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until such time as those loyalists fall out of favor with the leader). This was true, for example, within the Branch Davidian compound and at Jonestown. For another, charismatic leaders often seek either to facilitate their continued control or ensure the long-term survival of the group they have founded by intentionally establishing more complex institutional structures, structures which can then hopefully continue to operate even after they die. This was clearly the pattern for the COS, the UC, and the Rajneeshees, although Moon had not yet died at the time. Nevertheless, the death of the charismatic founder or leader of cult-like groups, apocalyptic millenarian or otherwise, often leads to internal power struggles between would-be successors, if not to outright organizational schisms.78

Groups controlled by hierarchical, bureaucratized organizational structures A second type of legitimate authority identified by Weber was “legal authority with a bureaucratic administrative staff,” which is marked by the existence of an organizational hierarchy of officials who are assigned to carry out specified duties in accordance with written rules and regulations. This is the type of authority structure that has of course become the norm in modern governments, business corporations, and academic institutions, among many other organized entities. Weber considered this type of authority to be more “rational” than traditional or charismatic forms of authority, although this is arguably only true in a relative sense.79 However that may be, over time many apocalyptic millenarian groups have developed an increasingly elaborate and hierarchical bureaucratic structure ruled in an authoritarian fashion and governed by rigid rules and regulations. In most cases this type of structure developed within groups that were originally created and led by charismatic leaders or self-styled prophets, and thus is reflective of a gradual process that Weber characterized as the “routinization of charisma,” which can occur either during the lifetime or following the death of a group’s charismatic leader.80 This pattern can be observed in many cult-like NRMs with relatively large numbers of followers, including the UC, the Rajneesh Organization, the Raëlians, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), Opus Dei, TFP, and the COS. As illustrative examples, one can point to the organization created by the Bhagwan’s cadres at the Rajneeshpuram compound in Oregon – which not only included the commune administration but also a number of businesses; a police force; an armed militia; other functional components (e.g., legal services); and the Rajneesh Medical Corporation, where biological agents were cultured and housed and biological attacks planned – as well as to the COS – which has a very elaborate structure that encompasses various “bases”; the aforementioned Religious Technology Center, which was established to preserve doctrinal orthodoxy by rigorously controlling the application of the “technology” developed by Hubbard; the Rehabilitation Project Force, which punishes and “re-educates” members of the elite Sea Org[anization] who have allegedly deviated or engaged in “suppressive” (i.e., anti-COS) activities; and the Office of Special Affairs, the COS’s secret service that

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is entrusted with carrying out “dirty tricks” against the group’s real and imagined enemies.81 Often, these types of groups also create a host of front organizations that are ostensibly independent, but which in fact serve a variety of specialized functions for their parent groups, such as raising money by selling goods or providing services, identifying and attracting prospective recruits, doing “charitable” work to obtain external respectability, or perhaps even by carrying out covert actions of various types. Both the COS and the UC have created an unusual number of such front groups.

Groups organized in the fashion of traditional secret societies The third type of organization adopted by certain apocalyptic millenarian groups is modeled on the compartmentalized arrangements developed by certain traditional secret societies, such as particular lodges of “speculative” Freemasons, the Illuminati (Enlightened Ones) in Bavaria, and the Carbonari (Charcoal Burners) in Italy and France, in order to protect themselves against state repression. Although this type of structure has only rarely been adopted by modern NRMs, cult-like or otherwise, certain features of such arrangements have not infrequently been borrowed by clandestine political or criminal groups, including some with apocalyptic millenarian ideologies. A relatively long definition of “traditional” secret societies was presented in a church lexicon by nineteenth-century Catholic theologian Johann Michael Raich, who described them as follows: organizations which completely conceal their rules, corporate activity, the names of their members, their signs, passwords and usages from outsiders or the “profane.” As a rule, the members of these societies are bound to the strictest secrecy concerning all the business of the association by oath or promise or word of honour, and often under the threat of severe punishment in case of its violation. If such a secret society has higher and lower degrees, the members of the higher degree must be equally careful to conceal their secrets from their brethren of a lower degree. In certain secret societies, the members are not allowed to know even the names of their highest officers. Secret societies were founded to promote certain ideal aims . . . . and may be religious, scientific, political, or social.82 Raich’s definition is not entirely satisfactory inasmuch as he implies that this characterization is applicable to every single secret society, which is not the case. For example, not all secret societies attempt to “completely” conceal their rules or activities, much less their actual existence. Moreover, he makes a serious error when he argues further that secret societies can be clearly “distinguished from conspiracies and secret plots which are formed to attain a particular object through violent means.”83 Here again, he ignores the obvious historical fact that certain

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secret societies were either formed specifically in order to facilitate the carrying out of subversive or violent activities, or were at some point unknowingly infiltrated and thence secretly used by extremists or revolutionaries as a cover behind which to carry out such activities.84 These fascinating historical realities should not, of course, be confounded with the plethora of bogus “conspiracy theories” that have been proffered for centuries which falsely attribute sinister, destructive, and world shaking activities to secret societies.85 Although the actual configuration of so-called secret societies in different historical, geographic, and cultural regions has been quite variegated, certain common structural traits must of necessity exist if they can be said to fall within the same definitional category. In the context of this article, the distinguishing feature of the structures of secret societies is that they have both a vertical or hierarchical and a horizontal or inner-outer dimension. On the one hand, dedicated members who pass various pre-established “tests” of loyalty or competence tend to gradually ascend in the organizational hierarchy until they reach higher levels, but at the same time they also tend to pass from the outer circles of the organization through successive onion-like layers until they are admitted into the inner core of the group. As they rise in the hierarchy and penetrate the inner circles, they become privy to more and more secrets, whether about the aims, the doctrines, the rituals, the structure, the membership, or the activities of the organization. In the context of apocalyptic millenarian groups, cult-like or otherwise, the best example of a group organized in the manner of a secret society is the aforementioned Ordre du Temple Solaire, some of whose key members arranged for the murder of supposed “traitors” in their group before committing ritual suicide.86 In typical secret society fashion, the outer circles of the OTS consisted of front organizations such as the Amenta Clubs and the Atlanta Clubs, in which co-leader Luc Jouret offered lectures on New Age themes and alternative health modalities before introducing esoteric information about the so-called “secret masters,” and the Archédia Clubs, “occult (but not truly secret) organization[s] with a quasi-Masonic initiation ceremony,”87 which certain Amenta and Atlanta club members or attendees interested in esotericism were invited to join. The most dedicated members of the Archédia Clubs were then recruited to join the OTS itself, “the true secret Templar organization,”88 which was headed by a Synarchie du Temple (Synarchy of the Temple), composed of influential leaders of the OTS whose identity was kept secret from outsiders and lower level members. Under the Synarchy, a Conseil de l’Ordre (Council of the Order) organized members into various “lodges,” and within each lodge the members were in turn divided into a hierarchy of three initiatory levels – (1) the Frères du Parvis (Brethren of the Courtyard); (2) the Chevaliers de l’Alliance (Knights of the Alliance); and (3) the Frères des Temps Anciens (Brethren of Olden Times) – each of which was in turn subdivided into three grades.89 Moreover, there are numerous other quasi-Masonic, chivalric, esoteric, occultist, neo-Templar, or Rosicrucian orders that appear to be organized in a similar fashion,90 perhaps including the secretive “Satanist” group the Temple of Set (TS), which was founded in 1975 by Michael Aquino, a former U.S. Army psychological warfare

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officer.91 While it is highly doubtful that the overwhelming majority of these types of groups will ever cross the threshold of violence, much less try to acquire lethal biological agents in the process, it remains possible that a violent group organized in this fashion might occasionally appear, or that an initially non-violent group of this type will at some point become increasingly violent in response to changing internal processes or external pressures.

“Closed source” versus “open source” groups One final point is perhaps worth emphasizing in this organization section. Douglas E. Cowan has divided religious groups into two types: “closed source” religious traditions (or groups) and “open source” religious traditions (or groups). The latter are those in which the “fundamental building blocks of the religion . . . are open to adaptation and modification by the religious participants,” whereas the former are those “which restrict deviation . . . either partially or entirely,” i.e., those in which the religious doctrines and rituals, once established by authoritative or “divine” leaders, are thereafter regarded as sacrosanct and unchangeable. Groups that espouse apocalyptic millenarian doctrines, in particular those with a cult-like organizational structure, will almost always fall into the “closed source” category. As Cowan himself notes, for example, the COS is the “quintessential closed source tradition,”92 and the same can be said of most other organizations that can be justly characterized as cults, apocalyptic or otherwise. In these contexts doctrinal orthodoxies, even though group leaders may in fact periodically modify them, are always jealously guarded by those same leaders, who insist that they must be rigidly adhered to by group members. In short, there is a kind of built-in authoritarianism in the apocalyptic millenarian groups that are of concern in this context.

Rhetorical indicators: escalating paranoia, calls for violence, and/or expressions of interest in dangerous biological agents or “weapons of mass destruction” The use of increasingly overheated rhetoric of various kinds is another potential indicator that certain apocalyptic millenarian groups could present future security threats, bioterrorist or otherwise. Although rhetorical violence, no matter how extreme it may be, does not invariably result in the perpetration of tangible acts of violence, it is rare indeed to find that the actual violence perpetrated by organized groups was not preceded by an escalating pattern of rhetorical violence against real and imagined “enemies,” whether internal or external. Hence the existence of such a rhetorical pattern should serve as a “red flag,” i.e., a warning sign of potential trouble to come. In this context, it is perhaps useful to distinguish between two different but related types of dangerous rhetoric. The first is an increase in general statements expressing paranoia about supposed conspiratorial threats to the group or its agenda, which are in turn often coupled with a growing insistence that violence must be employed by group members against the “evil” forces that are believed

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to embody those threats. The second is more specific to the subject at hand: public or private expressions of interest in acquiring or utilizing “weapons of mass destruction” of some kind, or similar expressions focused solely on harmful or lethal biological agents.

Escalation of rhetorical paranoia and calls for violence The historical record indicates that apocalyptic millenarian groups which end up crossing the threshold of violence usually proclaim, announce, or otherwise signal their intentions to carry out acts of violence against the so-called “forces of evil,” however the latter are defined, long before they actually do so. Like other types of political and religious extremists, active apocalyptic millenarians are not shy about expressing their true beliefs, including their beliefs about the omnipresence of enemies who are out to “get them” and the consequent need to take decisive, perhaps even violent action to deal with those enemies. Such sentiments are almost invariably transmitted by leaders to trusted group members, perhaps secretly, but they are also often expressed more publicly. All extremists, virtually be definition, are convinced that they are beset by internal and external enemies who are out to destroy them and prevent them from achieving their ostensibly noble goals. These beliefs are normally manifested in a variety of overlapping ways, from the adoption of Manichean worldviews to expressions of paranoia (albeit usually in the non-clinical sense) to the espousal of elaborate conspiracy theories to a noticeable tendency to dehumanize if not demonize designated enemies. Indeed, the adoption of such conceptual and rhetorical tropes by particular groups almost always precedes their actual employment of violence, and can thus serve as an important indicator or warning sign. This pattern of escalating rhetoric followed by violence is very clear in the cases of innumerable medieval and early modern apocalyptic millenarian groups, the nineteenth century Mahdist uprising in the Sudan, the Nazis and Khmer Rouge, the so-called “Manson Family,” the Peoples Temple, al-Takfīr wa al-Hijra, Aum Shinrikyō, the Rajneesh Movement, the Branch Davidians, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, the OTS, the apocalyptic Shī‘ī organization Jund al-Samā’ (Soldiers of Heaven) in Iraq, and certain Christian Identity groups. It has also been noticeable, fortunately on a much smaller scale, within groups like Synanon, ISKCON, the COS, and certain extremist Mormon sects.

Expressions of interest in “weapons of mass destruction” in general or biological weapons in particular Another obvious indicator of importance in this context would be either clear or coded expressions of interest by apocalyptic millenarian groups in so-called “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), i.e., chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons. In these cases one must endeavor to distinguish

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between a) outright fantasizing or purely wishful thinking along these lines, which would essentially be comparable to saying “I wish I could win the lottery,” as well as b) the making of alarmist threats involving CBRN that are specifically designed to spread disinformation and fear within the enemy camp, and c) more sustained, serious, or concrete expressions of interest, especially during secret sessions, in acquiring or deploying such weapons as a way to deal with or smite designated enemies. If the leaders or spokesmen of such groups make repeated and increasingly frequent statements to this effect, or begin contemplating various measures to make it happen, or actually take concrete steps in this direction, then important moral barriers have likely already been crossed that require the close attention of security forces. The same factors would also be applicable if a group repeatedly expressed an interest in obtaining, weaponizing, or disseminating only harmful or lethal biological agents, as opposed to other kinds of “WMD.” For example, certain high-level personnel in both Aum and the Rajneesh Movement reportedly expressed an ever-growing desire to use harmful biological agents against their opponents before actually taking steps to do so, and the same pattern of rhetorical escalation leading to tangible efforts is no less likely in future cases of this type.

Financial indicators: availability of significant amounts of money and resources It goes without saying that organizations of any type with considerable financial resources are much more likely to have the wherewithal to pursue and achieve their goals than their counterparts with more limited resources. This is true of extremist groups, including those with apocalyptic millenarian ideologies. Although the financial aspects of terrorism have often been overemphasized, since most terrorist actions are in fact relatively cheap to carry out by comparison with other types of military activities, the availability of funding is more important in assessing the potential “WMD terrorist threat” that particular extremist groups might pose. This is because most terrorist organizations would find it prohibitively expensive to manufacture, purchase, or even steal certain types of “WMD,” in particular nuclear weapons. On the other hand, they would not find carrying out relatively crude attacks with certain types of toxic agricultural chemicals or radiological materials to be an undue financial burden, since such attacks would scarcely be more expensive than normal ambushes or bombing attacks.

Demographic indicators: intentional recruitment of trained scientific, military, and intelligence personnel It seems self-evident that apocalyptic millenarian groups with valuable human resources in the form of highly educated members, military or intelligence veterans,

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computer experts, and above all trained scientists are potentially far more threatening should they decide to engage in the research, production, and dissemination of biological weapons than similar types of groups with more paltry resources. The skill sets available to members of a given apocalyptic millenarian group can either be evaluated as a whole or subdivided into several useful subcategories in this context. With respect to the former, such groups are not infrequently composed of individuals who are highly educated and come from relatively privileged social and economic backgrounds in their respective countries. This has certainly been true for the Moonies, the Rajneeshees, the COS, ISKCON, the OTS, and Aum Shinrikyō, and it is likely to be true of many other groups of this sort that are presently much less well known, e.g., a host of Japanese millenarian “new” new religions. Indeed, many self-styled gurus, prophets, and saviors go out of their way to recruit followers who are well-educated and have particular high-order talents, not to mention access to considerable financial assets, because they view such people as valuable resources in terms of helping them to achieve their ostensibly benevolent or divinely inspired goals. It is no accident that so many groups of this type set up shop around college campuses, above all those that are more prestigious and/or attract a wealthier student body, since they generally hope to recruit people from those particular intellectual and social strata. Of course, this depends primarily on the specific nature of the ideology or doctrine espoused by the group’s leader(s): if he is claiming to champion the poor and dispossessed, he may instead focus largely on recruiting the so-called “dregs” of society as rank-and-file members, though even in these cases he will typically also seek to recruit more talented and financially well-off people to serve as his immediate subordinates, agents, or delegates. Attempts by apocalyptic millenarian leaders to mobilize and recruit the poor and dispossessed for ideological reasons, whilst relying primarily on educated cadre for important tasks, can be illustrated by noting the examples of the “socialist” Peoples Temple, numerous Chinese secret societies composed of peasants, medieval European peasant millenarian movements, the Khmer Rouge, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, Shī‘ī jihadist organizations like Hizballāh, and several black American racist apocalyptic millenarian groups, such as the Miami-based Temple of Love headed by Yahweh ben Yahweh (né Hulon Mitchell, Jr.), which brutally murdered fourteen people, both white “devils” and defectors.93 As for specialized subcategories of recruits, those that would be particularly important in this context are highly trained scientific, military, intelligence, or financial personnel. In terms of bioterrorism, it would obviously be of crucial importance for a group to recruit enough members with sufficient levels of scientific and technical knowledge to be able to produce, acquire, weaponize, transport, and/or disseminate selected biological agents. After all, even if an apocalyptic millenarian leader contemplated stealing previously weaponized agents from a facility where they were known to be housed, both the group members who actually handled and transported those materials and those who later endeavored to disseminate them in the course of an attack would need to have an adequate degree

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of knowledge about microbiology, fermentation engineering, and aerobiology in order to achieve their aims. Similarly, a group that recruited several individuals with specialized military training, intelligence experience, high-level financial skills, or IT expertise would also pose a greater danger, both in general and in the context of bioterrorism. Military veterans have certain skills that would enable them to better plan and conduct clandestine paramilitary operations, either to steal lethal biological agents from inadequately secured facilities or to facilitate their effective deployment in a subsequent surprise attack. Well-trained intelligence operatives have the ability to perform a number of vital tasks, including vetting prospective recruits, providing for organizational and operational security, gathering necessary intelligence about the “enemy” (including potential targets of attack), and carrying out successful covert operations of various types. Experienced financial specialists may possess the skills necessary to organize various kinds of money-making ventures, launder money that has been obtained illicitly, network with criminal organizations, and manipulate the banking sector in various useful ways. Computer experts could conceivably also perform a variety of useful tasks, such as hacking into defense systems, disabling security protocols in selected targets, spreading malicious viruses, disrupting the functioning of portions of the Internet, or using steganography to enable group leaders to transmit secret messages to attack cells. In short, the security forces should pay particular attention to apocalyptic millenarian groups that systematically recruit highly educated members, above all those with specialized scientific and operational skills.

Behavioral indicators: stockpiling of weapons and escalation of violent acts, internal or external In terms of behavioral indicators, the progressive stockpiling of weapons and/ or an observable pattern of escalating acts of violence should each be viewed as clear warning signs that future mass casualty attacks may be in the offing, with or without the use of CBRN materials. First, whenever extremist groups of any type make special efforts to accumulate firearms or explosives, even if they are doing so legally or ostensibly for self-defense purposes, it should raise alarm bells. And if they undertake tangible efforts to obtain or manufacture lethal biological agents or other “WMD,” that would obviously be of particular concern in this context. Second, as in cases of escalating talk of violence, escalating acts of violence by such groups have often resulted in the targeting of larger and larger numbers of “enemies,” whether internal or external. In fact, in the case of apocalyptic millenarian groups, especially those with cult-like characteristics, their first acts of brutality and violence have typically been committed against their own members who are thought to have “betrayed” or otherwise harmed the group in some way. Sometimes all of a particular group’s acts of violence have ended up being internally directed, which has occasionally culminated in the organization of mass ritual suicides (as with Heaven’s Gate) or a combination of murders and suicides of members

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(as with the Peoples Temple, the OTS, and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God). The second phase has often been the perpetration of acts of targeted violence against individual external “enemies,” usually non-members or former members (“apostates”) who are open critics, lawyers filing lawsuits, or hostile ACM activists, which is observable in many cases (as with Synanon, the Peoples Temple, Aum, and ISKCON).94 The third and most important phase, though fortunately also the rarest, is when such organizations carry out acts of mass casualty violence against groups of anonymous “outsiders” who are at the very least regarded as expendable in pursuit of their goals, if not as overtly hostile or intrinsically “evil.” Thus the most dangerous behavioral patterns to watch for are normally as follows: • • • •

the stockpiling of firearms and explosives, even for “defensive” purposes; the commission of acts of brutality or violence against individual group members; the commission of acts of brutality or violence against individual non-members (including “apostate” ex-members, who are typically regarded as traitors); the commission of acts of mass casualty violence against larger groups of nonmembers or against designated external “forces of evil.”

This pattern of behavioral escalation often parallels or is directly interlinked with the types of rhetorical escalation previously discussed in this chapter. In practice, what this means is that such groups usually transmit clear signals of their increasingly violent intentions, both rhetorically and behaviorally, well in advance of actually carrying out mass casualty attacks. If these signals can be recognized early enough, it is likely that the authorities will be able to take preventive measures or actions to interrupt or interdict this progressively unfolding sequence of violence.

Conclusions It is now possible to summarize the indicators that should be of most concern regarding the possible future use of biological agents by apocalyptic millenarian groups, indicators that have all been discussed in more detail previously in this chapter. They are: •

•

•

ideological: the adoption of an active apocalyptic millenarian doctrine that justifies or promotes the use of violence against designated categories of outside “evildoers”; organizational: the existence of authoritarian forms of charismatic, bureaucratic, or secret society-type organizational structures, or of hybrids of one or more of these types, above all those with totalitarian cult-like characteristics; rhetorical: escalating paranoia, calls for violence, and/or expressions of interest in obtaining or using “WMD,” especially dangerous biological agents;

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financial: access to significant amounts of money, regardless of whether those funds were obtained legally or illicitly; demographic: the presence within the group of highly educated members, and in particular the intentional recruitment of individuals with scientific, military, intelligence, or computer expertise; and behavioral: the stockpiling of weapons and/or noticeable escalation of tangible acts of violence, whether directed against insiders or outsiders.

To reiterate, groups that exhibit several of these characteristics simultaneously, as some apocalyptic millenarian groups have, should be of particular concern to the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Finally, it should be emphasized that these very same indicators are not only applicable to apocalyptic millenarian groups that might pose a future bioterrorist threat. They would also be applicable if one was trying to determine whether such a group could conceivably pose a mass casualty terrorist threat using only conventional weapons, or if it might have recourse to other types of “WMD” – chemical, radiological, or nuclear weapons.

Notes 1 For the diverse apocalyptic beliefs surrounding the turn of the third millennium CE, see Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn, eds., The Year 2000: Essays on the End (New York: NYU, 1997). 2 For alarmist views, especially in retrospect, about the nature of the threat posed by apocalyptic cult-type groups, see Andrew Hubback, The Prophets of Doom: The Security Threat of Religious Cults (London: Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1996); and Andrew Hubback, Apocalypse When?: The Global Threat of Religious Cults (London: Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, 1997), Conflict Studies #300. The latter institute was the successor of the Cold War-era Institute for the Study of Conflict. Compare also Jean-Marie Abgrall, Les sectes de l’apocalypse: Gourous de l’an 2000 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999), a more interesting study. 3 See Department of Justice, FBI, “Project Megiddo” report, undated [October 1999], available at www.cesnur.org/testi/FBI_004.htm, as well as in its original PDF format on the Internet (albeit no longer on the FBI’s own website); CSIS, “Doomsday Religious Movements,” Report No. 2000/03, 18 December 1999, available at www.csis-scrs. gc.ca/pblctns/prspctvs/200003-eng.asp#tphp; and Ehud Sprinzak, Ya’akov Ariel, Uri Ne’eman, and Amnon Ramon, “Events at the End of the Millennium: Possible Implications for Public Order in Jerusalem. International Report Submitted to the Jerusalem Institute of Israel Studies, September 1999. All three of these reports have also been reprinted in a special issue of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence 14:1 (Spring 2002), which was entitled Millennial Violence: Past, Present and Future and edited by Jeffrey Kaplan. See ibid., pp. 27–93. In that same volume, those three reports were also analyzed by several scholars, including Michael Barkun, Eugene Gallagher, and Benjamin BeitHallahmi. See ibid., pp. 97–144. The reports by other European security agencies have not yet been released publicly. 4 As Kaplan rightly notes, the only serious “millennium plot” in North America that we know about involved jihadists linked to al-Qā‘ida, who planned to enter the U.S. from Canada and carry out a bombing in the terminal of Los Angeles airport. Fortunately, Ahmad Rassām was arrested when he sought to transfer a car full of explosives across

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the U.S. border by ferry. See Jeffrey Kaplan, “Introduction,” in Millennial Violence: Past, Present and Future, ed. Jeffrey Kaplan (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 1. For more on the Montana Freemen and their standoff with the FBI, compare the scholarly account of Jean E. Rosenfeld, “The Justus Freeman Standoff: The Importance of the Analysis of Religion in Avoiding Violent Outcomes,” in Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 2000), pp. 323–44; the insider accounts of Gary Noesner, Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator (New York: Random House, 2010), Chapter 9; and government infiltrators Dale Jakes, Connie Jakes, and Clint Richmond, False Prophets: The First-Hand Account of a Husband-Wife Team Working for the FBI and Living in Deepest Cover with the Montana Freemen (Los Angeles: Dove Books, 1998); and the pro-Freemen account of “Christian Patriot” J. Patrick Shannan, The Montana Freemen: The Untold Story of Government Suppression and the News Media Cover-Up (Jackson, MS: Center for Historical Analysis, 1996). Compare, e.g., Catherine Wessinger, “Introduction: The Interacting Dynamics of Millennial Beliefs, Persecution, and Violence,” in Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence, pp. 4–11; Richard Landes, “Millenarianism and the Dynamics of Apocalyptic Time,” in Expecting the End: Millennialism in Social and Historical Context, ed. Kenneth G. C. Newport and Crawford Gribbens (Waco, TX: Baylor University, 2006), especially pp. 2–16. Wessinger, “Introduction,” p. 6. For that very reason, many scholars have emphasized that crisis conditions are most likely to engender millenarian fantasies and movements. See, e.g., Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1986 [1974]). The English term “eschatology” derives from the ancient Greek word eskhatos (“last”), and refers to ideas about the so-called “end times” or “last days,” i.e., the final events in history or ultimate destiny of humans, and more specifically to the end of the world as we know it, which could refer to the end of the present era rather than the actual destruction of the world. Mitchell G. Reddish, “Introduction,” in Apocalyptic Literature: A Reader, ed. Mitchell G. Reddish (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995 [1990]), p. 23. John J. Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1979), p. 9. This was a special edition (#14) of the journal Semeia. Compare, e.g., Robert Ellwood, “Nazism as a Millennialist Movement,” in Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence, pp. 241–60; Richard C. Salter, “Time, Authority, and Ethics in the Khmer Rouge: Elements of the Millennial Vision in Year Zero,” in ibid., pp. 281–98; Philip Lamy, “Secularizing the Millennium: Survivalists, Militias, and the New World Order,” in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, ed. Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 93–118; Martha F. Lee, “Environmental Apocalypse: The Millennial Ideology of Earth First!,” in ibid., pp. 119–37; and Ted Daniels, ed., A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation (New York: New York University, 1999), Part 1 on “Enlightenment and Secular Millenarianism.” For an interesting recent historical overview of diverse views on the afterlife, see John Casey, After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (New York: Oxford University, 2009). Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University, 1970), p. 15. A virtually identical scheme was previously developed by Yonina Talmon, “Millennial Movements,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 7 (1966), pp. 159–200 (and conveniently summarized on p. 166), but minus the emphasis on supernatural agency. Compare Ted Daniels, “Introduction,” in Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation, ed. Ted Daniels (New York: New York University, 1999), pp. 1–3. Compare, e.g., John Hall and Philip Schuyler, “Apostasy, Apocalypse and Religious Violence,” in The Politics of Religious Apostasy, ed. David G. Bromley (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 141–70; Thomas Robbins, “Sources of Volatility in Religious Movements,”

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in Cults, Religion and Violence, ed. David G. Bromley and J. Gordon Melton (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2002), especially pp. 61–7; Lorne Dawson, Comprehending Cults (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University, 1998), p. 132. For a recent overview of diverse forms of apocalypticism, see Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson, eds., Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). For a useful survey of Christian millenarianism, apocalyptic or otherwise, see Stephen Hunt, ed., Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University, 2001). For an extended popular analysis of Revelation, see Jonathan Kirsch, A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). The account in Revelation was most likely first recited and then written down by a Jew who regarded Jesus as the Messiah, literally the “anointed one” who would return to save his flock. Whilst in a trance-like mystical state, he claimed to have seen, amongst many even odder things, a sealed scroll containing God’s secret plan for the end of the world. He thereby learned that Satan was destined to be cast out of heaven after losing a cosmic battle to the archangel Michael, that Satan’s minions led by the “Beast” (renamed the Anti-Christ in later works) would thence subject Christian true believers to tyranny, persecution, and oppression, that after these seven years of “tribulation” various terrible supernatural, natural, and manmade disasters would occur which served to signal the return of Jesus, who would then descend from heaven at the head of an army of angels and resurrected saints to defeat the Anti-Christ. This event would in turn usher in a 1,000-year period of benevolent terrestrial rule under the aegis of Jesus, and would culminate in the judgment of individual souls at the “end of days.” For a brief overview of these sections of the Old and New Testament, see Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University, 1991), pp. 24–36. Compare Ezek. 37–39; and Dan. 2, 3, 7, 9, 11–12. The first, written in the early sixth century BCE, deals primarily with the future fate of the Jews, who are destined to return to Judea and live there forever, and their various enemies, who will be destroyed by the wrath of God, following the crises associated with the period of the Babylonian Captivity; the second, written in ca. 167 BCE, with the desecration of the Temple by “a king of fierce countenance,” its prophesied re-purification by the Jews, and a cataclysmic battle “at the end of time” in which the [Seleucid] “king of the north” is defeated by divine intervention. According to Boyer (p. 33), these and other Jewish apocalyptic notions were then absorbed into early Christianity, where they then “metamorphosed into a Christian scenario of a worldwide end-time kingdom under the resurrected Christ.” See, e.g., Gershom Gerhard Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971); and John Joseph Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). For the influence of this tradition on Christianity, see James C. VanderKam, The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996). See, e.g., David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2003); and David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 2008); Timothy Furnish, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Ladin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005); Jean-Pierre Filiu, L’apocalypse dans l’islam (Paris: Fayard, 2008); Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shi‘ism (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1981); and Abbas Amanat, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi‘ism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), although the latter tries to “rationalize” a phenomenon which is arguably anything but rational. See, e.g., Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (New York: Cambridge University, 1987).

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22 See Daniel Wojcik, “Apocalyptic and Millenarian Aspects of American UFOism,” in UFO Religions, ed. Christopher Partridge (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 274–300. 23 See, e.g., Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1999); David Redles, Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation (New York: NYU, 2008); and Martha F. Lee, Earth First! Environmental Apocalypse (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1995); as well as the references in note 11. 24 See, e.g., Brenda Brasher, “From Revelation to the X-Files: An Autopsy of Millennialism in American Popular Culture,” Semeia 82 (2000), pp. 281–95. 25 See the insightful analysis of John Walliss, “Millenarianism and Violence in the Contemporary World,” in Expecting the End, pp. 25–47. 26 David G. Bromley, “Constructing Apocalypticism: Social and Cultural Elements of a Radical Organization,” in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, pp. 31, 33. 27 See Richardson’s comments in response to Jean-François Mayer, “Apocalyptic Millennialism in the West: The Case of the Solar Temple,” talk presented at the University of Virginia, 13 November 1998, p. 12, available at www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/ ciag/publications/report_apocalyptic_millennialism_c1998.pdf. 28 Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, p. ix. 29 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 30 Catherine Wessinger, “Millennialism with and without the Mayhem,” in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, pp. 50–1. For more on the historical background of “progressive millenarianism,” compare also Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study of the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley: University of California, 1949); and Theodore Olson, Millennialism, Utopianism, and Progress (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1982). 31 Wessinger, “Millennialism with and without the Mayhem,” pp. 49–50. 32 Drawing a distinction between passive and active millenarians is a much better way to highlight the problem than employing terms such as “pre-millennialism” and “postmillennialism,” as has often been done. First of all, those terms only have significance in the context of Christian apocalyptic conceptions, since they refer to divergent beliefs about whether Jesus will return before or after the creation of the prophesied “thousand year” reign of peace and justice on Earth. Hence they have little or no relevance to other types of apocalyptic conceptions, whether religious or secular. Second, the assumption that “pre-millennial” beliefs invariably involve a “pessimistic expectation of universal catastrophe caused by divine intervention to [first] destroy the world as we know it,” whereas “post-millennial” beliefs involve the “optimistic expectation that human effort working progressively according to a divine plan will bring about the millennium,” is not necessarily valid. See Wessinger, “Millennialism with and without the Mayhem,” p. 49. The corollary view – that the former breeds passivity and fatalism whereas the latter encourages human action – is in fact grossly oversimplified if not largely incorrect. After all, most violent apocalyptic groups believe that an imminent catastrophe is about to befall the existing world, and it is usually that very belief that prompts them to act, often in order to precipitate the anticipated cataclysm which they believe will ultimately lead to the creation of a just new world that will benefit themselves. See further Landes, “Millenarianism and the Dynamics of Apocalyptic Time,” in Expecting the End, pp. 7–9, 14–16, who likewise emphasizes the distinction between passive and active millenarianism, and specifically relates that to the question of just how imminent the anticipated transformation is expected to be. 33 Compare Wessinger, “Introduction,” pp. 10–1. 34 Note, however, that some have emphasized the willingness of certain groups of this type to adopt a less provocative pattern of behavior in relation to the authorities, or even to attempt to collaborate with them. See, e.g., J. Gordon Melton and David G. Bromley, “Challenging Misconceptions about the New Religions-Violence Connection,” in Cults, Religion and Violence, ed. David G. Bromley and J. Gordon Melton (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University, 2002), pp. 51–2, in reference to the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT). This is, indeed, a very common argument amongst NRM scholars, who are often ideologically predisposed to blame the actions taken by the authorities for causing apocalyptic groups to cross the threshold of violence. This was especially true in the wake of the tragedy at Waco. See, e.g., James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco?: Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley: University of California, 1995); and Dick J. Reavis, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1998). Others have foolishly extended that argument to other apocalyptic millenarian groups, including even Aum Shinrikyo, despite the fact that this is a case which illustrates precisely the opposite, i.e., that official neglect of dangerous indicators of an escalation of violent actions by apocalyptic groups, rationalized on the basis of “religious freedom,” can itself potentially lead to catastrophe. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, pp. ix–x. Ian Reader, Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 2000), pp. 126–60. Ibid., pp. 185–7. Ibid., pp. 187–223. For more on this now notorious incident, see W. Seth Carus, “The Rajneeshees (1984),” in Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons, ed. Jonathan Tucker (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000), pp. 115–38; and Win McCormack, ed., The Rajneesh Chronicles: The True Story of the Cult That Unleashed the First Act of Bioterrorism on U.S. Soil (Portland, OR and New York: Tin House Books, 1987), especially pp. 1–6, 210–18, 294–301. The latter book is a collection of critical contemporaneous investigative articles on the activities of the Rajneeshees in Oregon, written by a columnist for Oregon Magazine. For this, compare L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, 2007 [1950]); David G. Bromley, “Making Sense of Scientology: Prophetic, Contractual Religion,” in Scientology, ed. James R. Lewis (New York: Oxford University, 2009), especially pp. 90–8; Mikael Rothstein, “‘His Name was Xenu. He used Renegades. . .’: Aspects of Scientology’s Founding Myth,” in ibid., pp. 365–87; L. Kin [pseudonym], Scientology, More Than a Cult? From Crusade to Rip-Off: The Principles Unveiled (Wiesbaden: ScienTerra, 1991), pp. 33–5, 42–52; and Margery Wakefield, The Road to Xenu: Life Inside Scientology (Raleigh, NC: LuLu, 2010). The latter two authors are former Scientologists, but the first still believes in Hubbard and the Dianetics “tech” but not in the COS, whereas the latter repudiates them all. For this incredible story, see Susan J. Palmer, Aliens Adored: Raël’s UFO Religion (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University, 2004), pp. 177–94. For more on the Raëlians, see George D. Chryssides, “Scientific Creationism: A Study of the Raëlian Church,” in UFO Religions, pp. 45–61. By far the best introduction to the academic controversies over “cults” can be found in Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins, eds., Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001). In this paper I originally characterized such inveterate defenders of cult-like NRMs as “cult apologists,” which is in fact a more accurate term for many of them, but then shifted – mainly to preserve collegial relations with some of them, who I nonetheless like and/or respect for other reasons – to the use of a more neutral phrase, “cult defenders.” Not surprisingly, some of the most prolific and influential “cult defenders” resent being characterized as de facto apologists. See, e.g., James R. Lewis, who claims that “scholars of stigmatized religions” like himself are, “if anything, more skeptical than the average observer [and] strive even harder for methodological objectivity” because they fear presenting sympathetic portrayals of groups that may later unexpectedly resort to extreme violence. See James R. Lewis, Legitimating New Religions (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University, 2003), p. 5. Yet this assertion is belied, not only by his own admission that “[w]ith a few exceptions, I have not been a critic of [controversial new religious

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movements]. Rather, my scholarship has tended to debunk popular [negative] stereotypes” (ibid., p. 1), but also by his vigorous defense of even the most violent apocalyptic groups. See James R. Lewis, “Japan’s Waco: Aum Shinrikyo and the Eclipse of Freedom in the Land of the Rising Sun,” Prevailing Winds 2 (1995), pp. 52–8. See also the special “Aum Shinrikyo and Human Rights” issue of the journal that Lewis edits, Syzygy: Journal of Alternative Religion and Culture 8 (1999), which was devoted to defending Aum Shinrikyō years after the group had carried out the chemical warfare attack on the Tokyo subway system, not to mention a host of other violent crimes. See, e.g., Eileen Barker, “Watching for Violence: A Comparative Analysis of the Roles of Five Types of Cult-Watching Groups,” in Cults, Religion and Violence, pp. 123–48. However, her typology also includes one type of group that adopts a supposedly more neutral posture (viz., academic research centers) and two types of groups that tend to defend cults. Also, she refers to groups that others label “anticult movements” as “cult awareness groups.” See especially ibid., pp. 128–9. For more on the CCM, see the unsympathetic account of J. Gordon Melton, The Evangelical Christian Anti-Cult Movement: Christian Counter-Cult Literature (New York: Garland, 1990). For examples of religiously inspired counter-cult literature, see Bob Larson, Larson’s New Book of Cults (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1989); and Ronald Enroth et al., A Guide to Cults and New Religions (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1983). A leading CCM website is the Apologetics Index site, which can be searched at www. apologeticsindex.org/how-to-use-apologetics-index. For the ACM, see the unsympathetic studies by Anson Shupe and David G. Bromley, “The Modern North American Anti-Cult Movement, 1971–91: A Twenty-Year Retrospective,” in Anti-Cult Movements in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Anson D. Shupe and David G. Bromley (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 3–31; and Anson Shupe and David G. Bromley, The New Vigilantes: Anti-Cultists, Deprogrammers, and the New Religions (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980). A good example of ACM literature is by the founder of the American Family Foundation (and the editor of its journal, the Cultic Studies Journal), Michael D. Langone, Destructive Cultism: Questions and Answers (Weston, MA: American Family Foundation, 1982); and Michael D. Langone, ed., Recovery from Cults: Help for Victims of Psychological and Spiritual Abuse (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). Compare also Flo Conway and Jim Seligman, Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change (New York: Stillpoint Press, 2005), although its focus is considerably broader. One current ACM organization in the U.S. is the CULTinfo network, later renamed the Leo J. Ryan Education Foundation, which emerged after the COS bankrupted the older Cult Awareness Network (CAN), bought its defunct name, and turned it into a pro-COS and pro-cult organization. For more on this, albeit an account that is far too sympathetic to the actions of the COS, see Anson Shupe, “The Nature of the New Religious Movements: Anticult ‘Culture War’ in Microcosm: The Church of Scientology versus the Cult Awareness Network,” in Scientology, pp. 269–81. For a more prominent ACM website, see the [Rick] Ross Institute Internet Archives for the Study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups and Movements, available at www.rickross.com. For radically different points of view concerning the morality, legality, and efficacy of deprogramming, see Ted Patrick, Let Our Children Go! (New York: Ballantine, 1976), a notorious deprogrammer; and David G. Bromley and James T. Richardson, eds., The Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy: Sociological, Psychological, Legal, and Historical Perspectives (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1983). For an overview of this context, see further Jeffrey M. Bale, “The Cult Wars, Part I,” Hit List Magazine 2:4 (November–December 2000), pp. 80–5. Compare Shupe and Bromley, New Vigilantes; and Massimo Introvigne, “Moral Panics and Anti-Cult Terrorism in Western Europe,” Terrorism and Political Violence 12:1 (Spring 2000), pp. 47–59. The latter article not only betrays an abysmal ignorance of what terrorism actually is (an operational technique that invariably involves violence or the

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threat of violence), but also falsely and indeed maliciously labels verbal critics of cults as “terrorists.” 51 For a good example of the academic privileging of the views of NRM leaders and members over NRM defectors or “apostates,” see the extraordinary statement of David Chidester in his Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University, 1988), p. 142: “Accounts by disaffected former members of religious groups are always suspect.” This claim is incredibly biased, since it implies, by contrast, that the uncritically positive portrayals of satisfied current members of religious groups, no matter how self-interested, coerced, or delusional their views might be, are not similarly suspect. He also seems to be suggesting that there is no way to independently verify whether what he dismissively calls the “atrocity stories” told by disgruntled ex-members are true. This too is preposterous given that such “stories” are based upon factual allegations, e.g., about brutality, punishments, abuses, violence, the stockpiling of weapons, financial exploitation, or other manifestations of megalomania or authoritarianism, that can either be confirmed or disproven by in-depth examinations of the available evidence. Compare also James R. Lewis, Apostates and the Legitimation of Repression: Some Historical and Empirical Perspectives on the “Cult” Controversy (Santa Barbara, CA: Institute for the Study of American Religion, 1987), for a similarly biased and dismissive attitude against cult defectors and “apostates.” 52 The astonishing levels of tolerance displayed by certain NRM researchers toward all NRMs, including cult-like groups with well-documented histories of deceptive, manipulative, authoritarian, and aggressive behavior, is in marked contrast to their normal expressions of intolerance toward anyone who criticizes those groups, no matter how accurately and legitimately. For example, in the article bibliography of a Danish researcher writing about the COS, wherein academic NRM literature (including apologetic “cult defender” literature) is listed under the heading “Scholarly Analyses of Scientology,” serious critical studies are placed under the heading “Polemical Works on Scientology – A Limited Selection.” See Dorthe Refslund Christensen, “Inventing L. Ron Hubbard: On the Construction and Maintenance of the Hagiographic Mythology of Scientology’s Founder,” in Controversial New Religions, ed. James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen (New York: Oxford University, 2010), pp. 256–7. Despite this, it should be noted that Christensen’s study is well-researched and not overly apologetic concerning the COS. Note also that half of the contents of a recent volume on NRMs are devoted to articles denouncing “anti-cult” groups: Phillip Charles Lucas and Thomas Robbins, eds., New Religious Movements in the 21st Century: Legal, Political, and Social Challenges in Global Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). This is not at all atypical. 53 Amazingly, NRM researchers typically ignore the intrinsic ideological extremism of many of the groups they study, which indicates either that they do not understand the nature of extremism or that they cannot recognize it when they encounter it. To put it simply, irrespective of their specific doctrinal tenets, extremist ideologies are by definition characterized by Manicheanism (a sharp division of the world into “good” and “evil”), monism (the antithesis of pluralism), authoritarianism or totalitarianism, collectivism, utopianism, hyper-moralism and/or puritanism, conspiracy mongering, and a penchant for demonizing and dehumanizing designated enemies. For the view that “extremism” is a distinct phenomenon with recognizable characteristics, compare John George and Laird Wilcox, American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, and Others (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), pp. 54–62; Gian Mario Bravo, L’estremismo in Italia (Rome: Riuniti, 1982), pp. 7–18; Neil J. Smelser, The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially pp. 58–80; and Jeffrey M. Bale, Chapter 1 in volume 1 of this publication. Compare also Maxwell Taylor, The Fanatics: A Behavioural Approach to Political Violence (London and Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1991), especially Chapter 2, wherein

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“ten features of fanaticism” are listed that are analogous to several of the characteristics associated with “extremism.” 54 Perhaps the most notorious example is that of the Unification Church (UC), better known as the Moonies. Incredibly, the studies produced by NRM researchers on the UC have studiously ignored its covert right-wing political activities, with the exception of the “Koreagate” scandal whereby it attempted to covertly lobby members of the US Congress on behalf of South Korea. Among the UC’s most important covert activities were its collaboration for many years with the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA); its active participation in the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a transnational Cold War anti-communist network that included both hardline elements from various secret services and extreme right-wing civilian organizations (including neofascist groups); and its purported involvement in the 1980 “Cocaine Coup” in Bolivia, which was funded by leading drug barons and carried out by the security forces with the help of multi-national neo-fascist paramilitary organizations. For more on these activities, see the previous chapter in this volume. For more on WACL, see Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Exposé of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986). However, the Unification Church is far from being the only cult-like religious group that has been reportedly involved in covert right-wing political activities. Another such group is the Sociedade Brasileira per la Defesa da Tradição, Família e Propriedade (TFP: Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property) and its branches in other Latin American countries. For more on TFP’s Catholic ultratraditionalist doctrines and activities, see the primary ideological treatise of TFP founder Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (New Rochelle, NY: Foundation for a Christian Civilization, 1980) [a translation of the original Portuguese version, Revolução e contra-revolução]; and TFP, Tradition, Family, Property: Half a Century of Epic Anticommunism (Mount Kisco, NY: Foundation for a Christian Civilization, 1981) [a translation of Meio século de epopéia anticomunista]. For the group’s cult-like structure and thought reform practices, see especially José Antônio Pedriali, Guerreiros da virgem: A vida secreta na TFP (Sao Paolo: EMW, 1985). This work by a former TFP activist was considered so damaging that Plinio himself felt it necessary to issue a lengthy response: Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Guerreiros da virgem: A replica do autenticidade. A TFP sem segredos (Sao Paolo: Vera Cruz, 1985). Note that these bitter polemics corresponded precisely to the period identified by researcher Miguel Martinez as the crucial point in the shift of TFP’s own attitudes toward cults, from denouncing other groups for being “cults” to attacking cult critics after TFP itself was accused of being a cult, and indeed may have played a key role in helping to precipitate that very shift. For TFP’s active collaboration with the dictatorial regimes in Brazil and Chile, as well as its involvement in counterrevolutionary operations elsewhere in Latin America, see the left-wing journalistic exposé by Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People: United States Involvement in the Rise of Fascism, Torture, and Murder and the Persecution of the Catholic Church in Latin America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), especially pp. 294–304. Compare also Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, pp. 78, 140. To cite only a couple of illustrative examples, in Brazil leading TFP members were among the instructors who taught courses at the prestigious Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG: Higher War College), where the brightest junior military officers were trained and where the influential counter-subversive “Doctrine of National Security” was first developed, whereas in Chile the leading ideologist of the Pinochet regime was none other than TFP activist Jaime Guzmán, who was also closely linked to the right-wing paramilitary group Frente Nacional Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Freedom National Front). As yet, only a few Latin America specialists have produced scholarly works on TFP, an astonishing lacuna given the endless profusion of academic studies on “liberation theology” and the Catholic left in Latin America. See, e.g., Thomas Niehaus and Brady Tyson, “The Catholic Right in Contemporary Brazil: The Case of the Society for the Defense

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of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP),” in Religion in Latin American Life and Literature, ed. Lyle C. Brown and William F. Cooper (Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, 1980), pp. 394–409; and Margaret Power, “Transnational, Conservative, Catholic, and AntiCommunist: Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP),” in New Perspectives on the Transnational Right, ed. Margaret Power and Martin Durham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 85–106. Other cult-like right-wing religious groups include the Jesuit-inspired Legionarios de Cristo (Legionaries of Christ) in Mexico, which now has branches in many countries; the paramilitary, pro-Nazi Catholic integralist group Los Tecos (The Owls) based in Guadalajara, Mexico; the Organización Nacional del Yunque (The National Organization Anvil), a Mexican Catholic secret society with paramilitary components that is closely linked to the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN: National Action Party); and the esoteric group Nueva Acrópolis (New Acropolis), founded in Argentina by Jorge Ángel Livraga (1930–1991) but now headquartered in Madrid. See, e.g., “La noche de los Tecos,” El Imperio Secreto website, 27 May 2006, available at http://imperio-secreto.blogspot.com/2006/05/la-noche-de-los-tecos. html; Álvaro Delgado, El Yunque: La ultraderecha en el poder (Mexico City: Plaza y Janés, 2004); Alfonso Torres Robles, La prodigiosa aventura de los Legionarios de Cristo (Madrid: Foca, 2001); and Arbeitskreis gegen die Neue Akropolis [AgNA], Neue Akropolis, Sekten mit braunen Flecken:Vordergründe, Hintergründe, Gegengründe (Hamburg: AgNA, 1997). Of special relevance in this context was the Sociedad Benefactora y Educacional Dignidad (Dignity Charitable and Educational Society), better known as Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony), a German cult founded by ex-Nazi, evangelical Baptist preacher, and so-called “Permanent Uncle” Paul Schäfer that eventually relocated and established itself in a remote area of Linares Province in the interior of Chile. Leaders of this group, in addition to forming paramilitary militias and frequently being accused of the widespread psychological manipulation (via, e.g., forced public confessions) and physical abuse of members as well as the sexual abuse of their children, later collaborated closely with the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA: National Intelligence Directorate), the Chilean secret police, on whose behalf they participated in the detention, torture, and murder of individuals regarded as “subversives” by the Pinochet regime. Moreover, according to American DINA assassin Michael Townley, DINA had begun to transfer the Laboratorio de Guerra Bacteriológica del Ejército (Army Bacteriological Warfare Laboratory) facility on Via Naranja in Santiago’s Lo Curro neighborhood, where DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos (codenamed “Hermes”) had earlier reportedly produced sarin, Bacillus anthracis, and botulism, out to the colony’s large 32,000 acre farm. Townley also claimed that biological experiments were conducted on prisoners at Colonia Dignidad by DINA operatives. For more on Colonia Dignidad, see Bruce Falconer, “Torture Colony,” The American Scholar (Autumn 2008), available at http://theamericanscholar.org/the-torture-colony/; Carlos Basso Prieto, El último secreto de Colonia Dignidad (Santiago: Mare Nostrum, 2002); Friedrich Paul Heller, Colonia Dignidad: Von der Psychosekte zum Folterlager (Stuttgart: Schmetterling, 2003); Friedrich Paul Heller, Lederhosen, Dutt und Giftgas: Die Hintergründe der Colonia Dignidad (Stuttgart: Schmetterling, 2006); Maria Poblete and Frédéric Ploquin, La colonie du docteur Schaefer: Une secte nazie au pays de Pinochet (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Claudio R. Salinas and Hans Stange, Los amigos del “Dr.” Schäfer: La complicidad entre el estado chileno y Colonia Dignidad (Santiago: Debate, 2006); Dieter Maier, “Äusserste Zurückhaltung” – die Colonia Dignidad und die deutsche Diplomatie, 1961–1978. Eine Akteneinsicht im Auswärtigen Amt, Berlin (Nurenberg: Nürnburger Menschenrechtszentrum, 2008); and Gero Gemballa, Colonia Dignidad: Ein Reporter auf den Spuren eines deutschen Skandals (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998). For reports concerning DINA’s CB activities (perhaps including at Colonia Dignidad), compare Samuel Blixen, “Chile’s Mad Scientist,” Consortium News website, 13 January 1999, available at www.consortiumnews.com/1999/ c011399a.html; “Townley reveló uso de gas sarín antes de ser expulsado de Chile,” El Mercurio, 19 September 2006; “Michael Townley fue interrogado por muerte de Frei

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Montalva,” Radio Cooperativa website, 30 March 2005, available at www.cooperativa.cl/ michael-townley-fue-interrogado-por-muerte-de-frei-montalva/prontus_nots/200503-30/114755.html; Jonathan Franklin, “Pinochet ‘sold cocaine to Europe and US,” The [London] Guardian, 11 July 2006, available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/ jul/11/chile.drugstrade. 55 See, e.g., Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., Science, Sin, and Scholarship: The Politics of Reverend Moon and the Unification Church (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1980); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Integrity and Suspicion in NRM Research,” paper presented at the 1997 annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, reprinted in Hit List Magazine 2:5 (March–April 2001), pp. 96–8; and Ian Reader, “Scholarship, Aum Shinrikyo, and Academic Integrity,” Nova Religio 3:2 (April 2000), pp. 368–82. 56 Perhaps the most fascinating and important example of this phenomenon, although by no means the only one, is that of Massimo Introvigne, founder of the Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni (CESNUR: Center for the Study of New Religions) in Turin. Although ostensibly attacking cult critics within and outside of academia on liberal grounds, Introvigne is in fact a right-wing Catholic activist who is a leading member of Alleanza Cattolica (AC: Catholic Alliance), the Italian counterpart of TFP, the extremist ultratraditionalist Catholic group established in South America. For more on AC, compare the insider account of Marco Invernizzi, Alleanza cattolica: Dal sessentotto alla nuova evangelizzazione. Una piccola storia per grandi desideri (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 2004), with those of diverse critical outsiders, such as Giovanni Tassani, La cultura politica della destra cattolica (Rome: Coines, 1976), pp. 206–12; Ugo Maria Tassinari, Fascisteria: Storie, mitografia e personaggi della destra radical in Italia (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2008), pp. 496–8, 660–2; Giuseppe Scaliati, In difesa della tradizione: L’alleanza tra tradizionalisti [cattolici] e neofascisti (Rome: Prospettiva, 2007), Chapter 2; and, more idiosyncratically, Luigi Copertino, Spaghetticons: La deriva neoconservatrice della destra cattolica italiana (Rimini: Cerchio, 2008), Chapters 9 (on CESNUR and AC) and 6 (on TFP). For documentation concerning Introvigne’s long-standing connections to AC and the links between AC and TFP, including investigative reports by left-wing journalists, academic cult critics, and sedevacanze (“vacant seat”) right-wing Catholic activists opposed to TFP (and to various postwar popes whom they view as “heretics”), as well as informed speculation concerning the real agenda of Introvigne and this AC/TFP milieu, whose activities may be linked to sub rosa campaigns against “secular humanism” launched by factions within the Vatican, see Miguel Martinez’ fascinating investigative website dealing with CESNUR and Introvigne, which is available at www.kelebekler.com/cesnur/index.html. Martinez himself has an unusual background, since (among other things) he was formerly an elite member of the rightwing esoteric group Nueva Acrópolis. 57 The term “brainwashing” was apparently first coined by the journalist Edward Hunter, author of Brainwashing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (New York: Pyramid Books, 1951), although it was derived from an actual Chinese phrase, xi nao (meaning “to cleanse the mind”). It was later discovered that Hunter at times functioned as a paid propagandist for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which suggests that his sensationalistic account of Chinese “brainwashing” was designed to stoke anticommunist fears and sentiments during the height of the Cold War. For early, more or less scholarly studies of “brainwashing,” “thought reform,” “coercive persuasion,” and “menticide,” based in part on the experiences of Allied POWs and other captives of the Peoples Republic of China, see, respectively, William Sargant, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957); Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989 [1961]); Edgar Schein and C. H. Barker, Coercive Persuasion: A Socio-Psychological Analysis of the “Brainwashing” of American Civilian Prisoners by the Chinese Communists (New York: Norton, 1961); and Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1961 [1956]).

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58 Indeed, Schein and other investigators emphasized from the outset that, contrary to popular images such as those later depicted in the brilliant 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, the Chinese communists had not developed any terrifying new methods of controlling behavior, but had instead simply combined a number of traditional and well-known techniques designed to weaken prisoner resistance, including interrogation, physical torture, organized group discussions, ritual self-criticism, the use of rewards and punishments, forced confessions, ideological indoctrination, and information control. See Edgar Schein, “The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War: A Study of Attempted Brainwashing,” Psychiatry 19:2 (1956), pp. 149–72. 59 Benjamin Zablocki, “The Blacklisting of a Concept: The Strange History of the Brainwashing Conjecture in the Sociology of Religion,” Nova Religio 1:1 (October 1997), pp. 102–5. 60 Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control (New York: Oxford University, 2004), pp. 3–4. 61 Ibid., pp. 8–9. This means, effectively, that the persistent application of these techniques is essentially a manifestation of totalitarianism, whether they are used on individuals, within the confines of small groups, or on a societal level. For an extraordinary example of the latter, see Martin King Whyte, Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley: University of California, 1983). 62 Zablocki, “Blacklisting of a Concept,” p. 108. 63 Richard Ofshe and Margaret Singer, “Attacks on Peripheral versus Central Elements of the Self and the Impact of Coercive Persuasion,” Cultic Studies Journal 3:1 (1986), pp. 3–24. It should be pointed out that for several years the author of this report served, while still a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, as the teaching assistant for a course on thought reform and cults that was offered by Ofshe. Compare also Philip Zimbardo and Susan Anderson, “Understanding Mind Control: Exotic and Mundane Mental Manipulations,” in Recovery from Cults: Help for Victims of Psychological and Spiritual Abuse, ed. Michael D. Langone (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 104–25. 64 Dominic Streatfeild, Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007), p. 347. (Alas, Streatfeild should have added both sectarian political groups and psychotherapy groups to the last sentence rather than limiting his remarks to “religious groups.”) See further Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, especially pp. 4–5: “Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an image of ‘brainwashing’ as an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things . . . . [However,] the official Chinese Communist program of szu-hsiang kai-tsao (‘ideological remolding,’ ‘ideological reform,’ or as we shall refer to it here, ‘thought reform’) has in fact emerged as one of the most powerful efforts at human manipulation ever undertaken.” 65 It is important to note, however, that even though total control can never actually be achieved within a given micro-social group, much less over an entire society, the mark of totalitarianism is the leader’s aspiration and effort to exert such a complete level of control, not whether he or she succeeds fully. See, in a different context, Jeffrey M. Bale, “Islamism and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10:2 (June 2009), p. 83. 66 For political cults in general, see Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth, On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000); and Cyril Le Tallec, Les sectes politiques, 1965–1995 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). For examples of American political cults, of which there are many, compare the insider accounts of Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (Berkeley: University of California, 2004); and Alexandra Stein, Inside Out: A Memoir of Entering and Breaking Out of a Minneapolis Political Cult (St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press, 2002), both of which deal with sectarian Marxist-Leninist groups. One of the most notorious cult-like political groups in the U.S. and worldwide is the conspiratorial, anti-Semitic Lyndon

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LaRouche organization, which originated in 1968 as a sectarian Marxist grouplet in New York known as the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) and then established a political arm known as the U.S. Labor Party in 1973. However, LaRouche became increasingly paranoid, began organizing acts of violence against other sectarian left factions, and thereafter shifted ideologically to the extreme right in the course of the 1970s. See, e.g., Howard Blum, “The U.S. Labor Party: A Cult Surrounded by Controversy,” New York Times, 7 October 1979; Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (New York: Doubleday, 1987), as well as King’s website, available at www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org; “Hylozoic Hedgehog” (pseudonym), “Smiling Man from a Dead Planet”: The Mystery of Lyndon LaRouche (New York: unpublished manuscript, 2009), an extraordinary piece of research written by a former NCLC member, available on the LaRoucheplanet website at http:// laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Library.UnityNow; and – for the German branch of LaRouche’s Europäischer Arbeiterpartei (EAP: European Labor Party) and its many front groups – Matthias Mletzko, “Die LaRouche-Organisation in der Grauzone zwischen Extremismus, Sektenwesen und politischem Exotentum,” Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie 7 (1995), pp. 61–80; Herbert Knoblauch, Das Geheimnis der EAP: Idee, Geschichte, Programm, Praxis, Hintergrund (Flensburg: W. Weirauch, 1987); and Helmut Lorscheid and Leo A. Müller, Deckname Schiller: Die deutschen Patrioten des Lyndon LaRouche (Reinbeck: Rowolht, 1986). For an example of a hybrid psychotherapy-political cult, see Amy B. Siskind, The Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall Community: The Relationship of Radical Individualism and Authoritarianism (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2003). For two high profile examples of therapeutic “self-improvement” groups that have been accused of having cult-like characteristics, compare Steven Pressman, Outrageous Betrayal: The Real Story of Werner Erhard from est to Exile (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), a critical exposé of Erhard himself (né John Paul Rosenberg) and his aggressive two-weekend Erhard Seminars Training (est) courses; and Analine Marie Powers, Silva Mind Control: An Anthropological Investigation (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), which examines the Silva Mind Control (now Silva Method) courses. Also, certain “alcohol rehabilitation” and “drug rehabilitation” organizations have developed noticeable cult-like characteristics, in particular Synanon. See further Rod Janzen, The Rise and Fall of Synanon: A California Utopia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2001), an overly sympathetic analysis which downplays the group’s increasing authoritarianism and violence; David Gerstel, Paradise, Incorporated: Synanon (San Francisco: Presidio Press, 1983), a good journalistic investigation; Dave Mitchell, Cathy Mitchell, and Richard Ofshe, The Light on Synanon: How a Country Weekly Exposed a Corporate Cult–and Won the Pulitzer Prize (New York: Seaview Books, 1980); and the insider account by William Olin, Escape from Utopia: My Ten Years in Synanon (Santa Cruz, CA: Unity Press, 1980). 67 One example might be the Prelatura Sanctae Crucis et Operis Dei (The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Work of God), better known as Opus Dei (The Work of God), the lay ultra-conservative Catholic organization established in 1928 by José María Escrivá de Balaguer (1902–1975), whose members have formed an integral part of the Spanish political establishment, church hierarchy, and economic elite for decades, especially during and after the era of the Francisco Franco dictatorship. Although it is difficult to find balanced treatments, pro or con, of the organization, Opus Dei has long been criticized for its cult-like internal social control mechanisms by a wide array of people, including radical Falangists, leftists, liberals, and a host of former members. For a good example of the latter type of exposé, see María del Carmen Tapia, Inside Opus Dei: The True, Unfinished Story (New York: Continuum, 2006). For more on Opus Dei, compare Opus’ own publications, such as José María Escrivá de Balaguer, The Way: The Essential Classic of Opus Dei’s Founder (New York: Doubleday, 1982 [1939]) [a translation of Camino], and those of its less critical observers, such as John L. Allen, Jr., Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most

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Controversial Force in the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 2007), with more critical and/or scholarly studies, such as Jesús Ynfante, La prodigiosa aventura del Opus Dei: Genesis y desarollo de la santa mafia (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1970); Daniel Artigues, El Opus Dei en España: Su evolución ideológica y politica (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1971); José V. Casanova, “The Opus Dei Ethic, the Technocrats and the Modernization of Spain,” Social Science Information 22:1 (1983), pp. 27–50; Henry Kamm, “The Secret World of Opus Dei,” New York Times Magazine (8 January 1984), p. 38ff; Giancarlo Rocca, L“Opus Dei”: Appunti e documenti per una storia (Rome: Paoline, 1985); and Michael Walsh, Opus Dei: An Investigation into the Powerful, Secretive Society within the Catholic Church (New York: Harper Collins, 2004 [1989]). A more balanced view of the relative reliability of active member versus ex-member testimony than is typically displayed by NRM researchers, who usually privilege member testimony, is that of Douglas E. Cowan, “Researching Scientology: Perceptions, Premises, Promises, and Problematics,” in Scientology, p. 59: “emic voices [i.e., accounts from people still within the group] are invested voices, and for that reason may not always be the most reliable or the most accurate. . . .On the other hand, etic voices [i.e., accounts from people outside the group, including ex-members] – whether they are obviously disgruntled or merely disinterested – are not any more less reliable necessarily. . . .Recognizing that . . . my contention here is two-fold: first, there must be an [sic] healthy hermeneutic of suspicion displayed toward each side of the debate; but, second . . . as many of these different and disparate voices as possible must be included in a comprehensive research program.” Compare Bale, “Cult Wars, Part I,” pp. 83–4. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Owl, 1994 [1941]). Fromm’s basic argument herein is that for many people, too much personal freedom and autonomy are anxiety-inducing and frightening, which causes them to prefer to place themselves under the authority and control of others, a self-destructive and politically dangerous response which seemingly provides them with more psychological security, at least in the short term. One example of this is the common tendency of prisoners to commit new crimes soon after they are released from prison. Many later admit, when questioned by police or psychiatrists, that they ultimately preferred the regimented life inside prisons, however brutal and degrading it was, to the uncertainties involved in psychologically coping with and/or making a living in the outside world. See, e.g., Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1964 [1956]). For an excellent fictional portrayal of this dynamic, see the 2011 film “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” which illustrates how difficult it is for former members of abusive cult groups to fully break with them psychologically. Compare Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1947), p. 329: “none of these three ideal types . . . is usually to be found in historical cases in ‘pure’ form.” Of course, only two of Weber’s ideal types are comparable to the three types under discussion here. Among other things, Weber specifically noted that charismatic authority could be “routinized” and bureaucratized over time. Ibid., pp. 358–9. According to the concise formulation in the textbook written by Diana Kendall, Jane Lothian Murray, and Rick Linden, Sociology in Our Time (Scarborough, ON: Nelson, 2000), pp. 438–9. For some interesting thoughts on the intrinsically authoritarian nature of these “guru”-follower relations, see Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power (Berkeley: Frog, Ltd., 1993), especially Part 1. For an interesting analysis of the impact of this situation on a group’s potential transition to violence, see especially Lorne L. Dawson, “Crises of Charismatic Legitimacy

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and Violent Behavior in New Religious Movements,” in Cults, Religion and Violence, pp. 80–101. For several illustrative examples, see the case studies in James R. Lewis and Sarah M. Lewis, eds., Sacred Schisms: How Religions Divide (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University, 2009), especially Chapters 8 (on the Church Universal and Triumphant [CUT]), and 12 (on the International Society for Krishna Consciousness [ISKCON]). Such groups may suffer defections and schisms even prior to the deaths of their charismatic leaders, as in the case of the UC and the Church of Satan. See respectively ibid., Chapters 6 and 9. Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, pp. 337–41. Ibid., pp. 363–73. For the organizational structure of the Rajneesh Organization, both internationally and in Oregon, see Lewis F. Carter, Charisma and Control in Rajneeshpuram: The Role of Shared Values in the Creation of a Community (New York: Cambridge University, 1990), pp. 73–118. For that of the COS, see the brief overview in J. Gordon Melton, The Church of Scientology (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books/CESNUR, 2000), pp. 39–52, and the longer treatment in Roy Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom: A Sociological Analysis of Scientology (New York: Columbia University, 1977), as well as the details found throughout the many published accounts by disillusioned former Scientologists, such as Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990), especially parts 4–6; John Duignan and Nicola Tallant, The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology (Dublin: Merlin, 2008); Nancy Many, My Billion Year Contract: Memoirs of a Former Scientologist (no place: CNM Publishing, 2009); Jefferson Hawkins, Counterfeit Dreams: One Man’s Journey Into and Out of the World of Scientology (Cedar Rapids, IA: Hawkeye Press, 2010); Marc Headley, Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (Burbank, CA: BFG Books, 2010); Amy Scobie, Scientology: Abuse at the Top (Puyallup, WA: Scobee Publishing, 2010); and Wakefield, Road to Xenu. It is significant that so many of these exposés were self-published, since it is indicative of the unwillingness of mainstream publishers to risk provoking the wrath and legal harassment of the COS. For the history of the COS’ succession of intelligence services/dirty tricks units, see the fascinating online book-length study entitled “Scientology’s Secret Service: The Hubbard Communications Office, Guardian Office and Office of Special Affairs,” available at www.xenu.net/archive/go/history.htm. “Secret Societies,” Catholic Encyclopedia online, available at www.newadvent.org/ cathen/14071b.htm. Ibid. One of the few historical overviews of revolutionary ideas and movements in modern times that has devoted sufficient attention to the important role played by secret societies, above all as a model for clandestine and revolutionary organizations, is that of James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), especially pp. 86–123. For examples of serious scholarly studies of actual secret societies, see Karl R. H. Frick, Die Erleuchteten: Gnostische-theosophische and alchemistische-rosenkruezerische Geheimgesellschaften bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der Neuzeit (Graz: Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt, 1973); Karl R. H. Frick, Licht und Finsternis: Gnostische-theosophische und freimaurerischokkulte Geheimgesellschaften bis an die Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1975); Helmuth Reinalter, ed., Aufklärung und Geheimgesellschaften: Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1989); René Le Forestier, La franc-maçonnerie templière et occultiste aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1970 [1928]); Jan Rachold, ed., Die Illuminaten: Quellen und Texte zur Aufklärungsideologie des Illuminatenordens, 1776–1785 (Berlin: Akademie, 1984); René Le Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande (Paris: Hachette, 1914); Armando Saitta, Ricerche storiografiche su Buonarotti e Babeuf (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, 1986); Jean

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Chesneaux, Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1971); and David Ownby and Mary Summers Heidhues, eds., “Secret Societies” Reconsidered: Perspectives of the Social History of Modern South China and Southeast Asia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993). Nor should one forget the “covered” Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge in Cold War Italy and beyond, for which see the more than one hundred volumes of material – including the majority (Anselmi) report, five minority reports, documents, and verbatim parliamentary testimony – published by Parlamento, IX Legislatura, Commissione d’inchiesta sulla Loggia Massonica P2 (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1984–7). This particular lodge was implicated in numerous and variegated covert activities, apparently including the promotion of military coups and the facilitation of acts of neo-fascist terrorism. For various conspiracy theories regarding secret societies, see J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (St. Albans: Paladin, 1974), which arguably goes too far in dismissing or downplaying the real conspiratorial activities associated with certain secret societies. Compare also Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, ed., Geheimgesellschaften und der Mythos der Weltverschwörung (Munich: Herder, 1987); and Thomas Grüter, Freimaurer, Illuminaten und andere Verschwörer: Wie Verschwörungstheorien funktionieren (Frankfurt am Main: Scherz, 2006). See further Jeffrey M. Bale, “Political Paranoia versus Political Realism: On Distinguishing between Bogus Conspiracy Theories and Genuine Conspiratorial Politics,” Patterns of Prejudice 41:1 (February 2007), pp. 45–60. For an excellent collection of scholarly articles on the OTS, see James R. Lewis, ed., The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Compare also Jean-François Mayer, Les mythes du temple solaire (Geneva: Georg, 1996); Jean-François Mayer and Elijah Siegler, “‘Our Terrestrial Journey Is Coming to an End’: The Last Voyage of the Solar Temple,” Nova Religio 2:2 (April 1999), pp. 172–96. For journalistic investigations, see Arnaud Bédat, Gilles Bouleau, and Bernard Nicolas, L’Ordre du temple solaire: Les secrets d’une manipulation (Paris: Flammarion, 2000); JeanLuc Chaumeil, L’affaire de la Ordre du temple solaire: Le dossier secret (Benfield: ACM, 2001); and Rosemarie Jaton, En quête de vérité: Ordre du temple solaire (Geneva: Slatkine, 2000). For works emphasizing the intelligence and right-wing backgrounds of certain OTS founders and leaders, see Serge Caillet and Raymond Bernard, L’Ordre rénové du temple: Aux racines du Temple solaire (Paris: Dervy, 1997); and Renaud Marhic, L’Ordre du temple solaire: Enquête sur les extrémistes de l’occulte II (Bordeaux: Horizon Chimérique, 1996). Recently, conspiratorial interpretations have appeared suggesting that the murders were carried out at the behest of powerful political, financial, and criminal interests in France, but as yet the evidence cited for such claims is both sparse and problematic. In the words of Massimo Introvigne, “The Magic of Death: The Suicides of the Solar Temple,” in Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence, p. 146. Ibid., pp. 146–7. For an overview of the organization of the OTS, see Centre Roger Ikor, Les sectes: État d’urgence (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), p. 200. This work was produced by a French ACM organization, but the description of the structure of the OTS therein is derived from OTS source materials. For modern-day chivalric orders, both those that have a genuine historical pedigree and those with a phony pedigree organized by charlatans or fantasists, compare Arnaud Chaffanjon and Bertrand Galimard Flavigny, Ordres et contre-ordres de chevalerie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1982); and Patrice Chairoff [pseudonym for Dominique-Yvan Calzi], Faux chevaliers, vrais gogos (Paris: J.-C. Godefroy, 1985). For the covert political activities of some of these secret societies, see André van Bosbeke (with Jean-Pierre de Staercke), Chevaliers du XXème siècle: Enquête sur les sociétés occultes et les ordres de chevalerie contemporains (Brussels: EPO, 1988). For more on Western esoteric currents, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University, 2008); Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2010); and Arthur Versluis, Magic and

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Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Compare also James Webb, The Occult Underground (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1974); and James Webb, The Occult Establishment (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1976). For various right-wing political manifestations of esotericism and occultism, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: NYU, 2002); Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2003); Eduard Gugenberger and Roman Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, Magie und Politik: Zwischen Faschismus und neuer Gesellschaft (Vienna: Gesellschaftskritik, 1987); Franziska Hundseder, Wotans Jünger: Neuheidnische Gruppen zwischen Esoterik und Rechtsradikalismus (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne, 1998); and Jan de Zutter, Heidendom voor het Blok: Radicaal-rechts in het nieuwe heidendom (Antwerp: Houtekiet, 2000). Note, however, that although the Temple of Set and other “post-Satanist” and “left-hand path” organizations – such as Stephen E. Flower’s Rune-Gild and Thomas Karlsson’s Dragon Rouge – definitely have several ascending initiatory levels, they may be too loosely organized to have assumed the compartmentalized inner-outer structure of a bona fide secret society. Compare, e.g., Graham Harvey, “Satanism: Performing Alterity and Othering,” in ibid., p. 33; and Kennet Granholm, “Embracing Others than Satan: The Multiple Princes of Darkness in the Left-Hand Path Milieu,” in ibid., p. 91. For more on the Temple of Set, see the group’s website at www.xeper.org ; Michael A. Aquino, The Book of Coming Forth By Night (available only to TS initiates), which constitutes the philosophical and occult foundation of the TS and claims – like occultist Aleister Crowley earlier did – that the Christian devil “Satan” was not only real, but was identical to the ancient Egyptian “rebel” god Set; Michael A. Aquino, The Temple of Set (San Francisco: Temple of Set, 2002), a general introduction to the group, available at www.xeper.org/maquino/nm/TOSd11.pdf; Michael A. Aquino, The Church of Satan (San Francisco: Temple of Set, 2009), a lengthy manuscript attacking a rival Satanist group headed by Anton LaVey (for whom “Satanism” was equivalent to the notion “do what thou will,” combined with diabolical window dressing), available at www. xeper.org/maquino/nm/COS.pdf. For additional scholarly articles on modern Satanist groups, see Petersen, ed., Contemporary Religious Satanism. Compare also Chris Mathews, Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Radical Subculture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), especially pp. 83–7. Cowan, “Researching Scientology,” p. 61. Indeed, even cults whose leaders claim to reject doctrinal consistency and even appear to emphasize a “do your own thing” ethos, such as the Rajneeshees, have in fact been quite authoritarian, rigid, and hierarchical in most respects. These contrasts are highlighted in Carter, Charisma and Control in Rajneeshpuram, pp. 37–8, passim. For the Yahweh ben Yahweh cult and its unhinged leader, see Sydney P. Freedberg, Brother Love: Murder, Money, and a Messiah (New York: Pantheon, 1994). Other problematic and potentially dangerous black American groups with racist and/or millenarian fantasies include the Nation of Islam and its many offshoots (above all the so-called Five Percenters), the New Black Panther Party, the MOVE organization of John Africa (né Vincent Leaphart), the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, and the Islamist Jama‘at al-Fuqara’ (Community of the Impoverished). For more on ISKCON, see the academic accounts by E. Burke Rochford, Hare Krishna in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1985); E. Burke Rochford, Hare Krishna Transformed (New York: NYU, 2007); Edwin Bryant and Maria Ekstrand, The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (New York: Columbia University, 2004); and Graham Dwyer and Richard J. Cole, eds., The Hare Krishna Movement: Forty Years of Chant and Change (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), which predictably downplay some of its leaders’ and members’ more sordid, illegal, and violent activities. Compare also the insider accounts of Marvin Yakos, The Roaring Lion of the East: An Inside View of the Hare Krishna Movement (Hazelwood, MO:

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World Aflame Press, 1988); Gabriel Brandis, Servant of the Lotus Feet: A Hare Krishna Odyssey (New York: iUniverse, 2004); and Nori J. Muster, Betrayal of the Spirit: My Life Behind the Headlines of the Hare Krishna Movement (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 2001). The most troubling information is found in investigative journalistic accounts, such as John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson, Monkey On a Stick: Murder, Madness and the Hare Krishnas (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jonanovich, 1988), who focus on the criminal activities linked to Kirtanananda Swami (né Keith Gordon Ham), a leading American disciple of founder Prabhupada and at the time the head of the New Vrindabin community in West Virginia.

5 JIHADIST IDEOLOGY AND STRATEGY AND THE POSSIBLE EMPLOYMENT OF WMD1

Introduction “Those who work without knowledge will damage more than they can fix and those who walk quickly on the wrong path will only distance themselves from their goal.” ancient Arab proverb2 “The aim of carrying out resistance missions and individual jihad terrorism [ jihad al-irhabi al-fardi] is to inflict the largest human and material casualties possible on American interests and its allied countries.” Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri3 “If the objective and subjective conditions materialize, and there are soldiers, weapons, and money – even if this means using biological, chemical, and bacterial [sic] weapons – we will conquer the world, so that ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet’ will be triumphant over the domes of Moscow, Washington, and Paris.” Grand Ayatollah Ahmad Husayni al-Baghdadi4

One of the peculiarities of the literature on “WMD terrorism” is the disparity between the large amount of attention paid to terrorist capabilities and the relatively small amount of attention paid to terrorist motivations.5 As Bruce Hoffman has rightly noted, “the need for a better understanding of the motivations, thought processes, mindsets and historical consciousness of terrorists . . . is essential if the [terrorism] field is to grow in new and beneficial directions, retain its relevance, and provide insightful and thoughtful analysis.”6 Indeed, as Jerrold Post long ago emphasized, “absent a clear understanding of the adversary’s intentions, the strategies

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and tactics developed [to counter them] are based primarily on knowledge of terrorists [sic] technological capabilities and give insufficient weight to psychological motivations.”7 This same observation is likewise true with respect to the ideological motivations and operational objectives of different types and groups of terrorists. Properly assessing the general ideological and strategic objectives of jihadist groups – Islamist groups that are focused on waging jihad bi al-sayf (“jihad with the sword”) or armed struggle against “unbelievers” (including “apostate” Muslims) – much less predicting the precise means they intend to employ in the future to achieve those objectives, is a formidable task.8 At first glance, this might appear to be a counterintuitive if not a nonsensical claim. After all, al-Qa‘ida and the various terrorist organizations and factions with which it has been affiliated have been attacking the United States and its Muslim and European allies for well over a decade, and these attacks should in and of themselves reveal distinctive patterns of action and provide careful observers with a reasonably clear idea of what their operational objectives are. Moreover, Usama b. Ladin, his lieutenants, and his supporters have often publicly announced their supposed political and strategic objectives in an effort to influence the perception and behavior of their enemies and followers. Yet these sources alone cannot, if not properly interpreted, provide observers with a clear picture of al-Qa‘ida’s strategic thinking, including with respect to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) agents and weapons. First of all, the pattern of al-Qa‘ida attacks, to the extent that such a pattern exists and is discernable, has not only evolved over time but must be viewed from the enemy’s own point of view. Second, al-Qa‘ida’s proclaimed rationales for carrying out its terrorist assaults, both those that it has launched in the past and those that it threatens to make in the future, can rarely if ever be taken at face value. These intrinsic problems have been further compounded because intelligence and military analysts in the United States and Europe who are charged with comprehending and interdicting jihadist terrorism have all too often employed entirely secular, materialistic types of reasoning and exclusively Western military frames of reference, above all – whether consciously or not – certain ideas derived from wellknown nineteenth-century military theorists such as the Prussian officer Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831),9 in an effort to explain what it is that al-Qa‘ida is currently up to.10 Unfortunately, this is a classic case of analytical “mirror-imaging,” since to the extent that transnational jihadists operate on the basis of some sort of military logic and rationality, which remains debatable, it is often a logic and rationality rooted in a profoundly religious worldview that is intrinsically nonrational and arguably both utopian and delusional in terms of its intermediate and ultimate aims. Indeed, one might carry this argument further and suggest that al-Qa‘ida is prone to engaging in a peculiar form of “magical thinking,”11 in this case one that is derived from essentially theological precepts associated with Islam. Hence the group’s strategic reasoning, such as it is, is generally based on radically different principles than those that are characteristic of sovereign nation-states or conventional Western military forces.

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Organizational factors Before actually turning to the question of al-Qa‘ida’s strategic concepts and objectives, it is necessary to highlight how the group’s complex organizational structure may affect the implementation of those objectives. Al-Qa‘ida proper is a relatively small organization, numerically speaking, which is divided into two basic levels. First, there are a few dozen members of the Majlis al-Shura (Consultative Council), which is internally subdivided into several committees, one of which is concerned explicitly with military affairs.12 This council effectively constitutes the strategic directorate or officer corps of the group. Second, al-Qa‘ida consists of somewhere between several hundred and several thousand rank-and-file members who take their marching orders directly from leading figures in the Majlis al-Shura.13 That is essentially all there is to al-Qa‘ida as an actual organization. If Bin Ladin or his principal lieutenants wish to organize an attack themselves, they will either employ existing members of al-Qa‘ida’s rank-and-file or recruit suitable volunteers who have already received – or are currently receiving – training from those rankand-file members in the group’s camps. Strictly speaking, if one was limiting one’s analysis to al-Qa‘ida as an organization, it would only be necessary to consider the actions carried out by its rank-and-file members or those seemingly promising individuals who its leaders had recruited specifically to carry out particular operations, wherever in the world they may be operating. Unfortunately, there is much more to the Islamist terrorist threat than that which is represented by the leaders and rank-and-file members of the al-Qa‘ida organization. The issue under consideration here is complicated enormously by two developments. First, al-Qa‘ida has established affiliations with a host of other Islamist terrorist organizations or factions thereof, both within and outside of the Middle East. These affiliated groups and factions have more or less officially embraced alQa‘ida’s transnational jihadist agenda, including its emphasis on attacking the “far enemy,” that is, the United States. At the same time, they have not entirely abandoned their former local, national, or regional concerns and objectives, much less their armed struggles against the “near enemy” in their respective areas. There is no doubt, for example, that proclaimed supporters of a global jihad such as Jemaah Islamiyah (JI: Islamic Association) in Indonesia, the Jama‘at al-Salafiyya li-al-Da‘wa wa al-Qital/Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC: Salafist Group for Preaching and Fighting) in Algeria, the Juma‘a Abu Sayyaf (Bearer of Swords Group) in the Philippines, and the Jama‘at al-Islamiyya al-Muqatila alMaghribiyya/Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain (GICM: Moroccan Islamic Combat Group) are still interested, perhaps even more so, in eventually overthrowing the “infidel” regimes in their own areas or countries. This should not come as a surprise, since despite his advocacy of a worldwide jihad Bin Ladin himself has retained a particular interest in destabilizing the Saudi regime in his own homeland, the “Land of the Two Holy Places,” and Ayman al-Zawahiri still remains embroiled in Egyptian Islamist infighting despite having left Egypt and opted to merge his own “internationalist” faction of the Tanzim al-Jihad al-Islami (Islamic

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Jihad Organization) into the al-Qa‘ida organization to form Qa‘idat al-Jihad (the Base [or Foundation] of the Jihad).14 Moreover, as many analysts have argued, in recent years al-Qa‘ida has transmogrified from an actual, relatively delimited organization into a diffuse ideological current that nowadays serves to inspire hundreds of thousands if not millions of people across the Muslim world.15 Although only a small segment of this radicalized population may end up having recourse to terrorism, the result is an ever-growing increase in the threat posed by alleged “self-starter” groups inspired by Bin Ladin’s ideology – which some have referred to as “Bin Ladinism” – but that seem at first glance to have few if any tangible organizational, operational, or logistical connections to al-Qa‘ida itself.16 For example, some have argued that the 11 March 2004 Madrid bombings and the 7 July 2005 London bombings were carried out mainly by small cells composed of disaffected Muslim citizens or permanent residents who, inspired to respond by the exhortations of al-Qa‘ida and other jihadist spokesmen, endeavored to carry out devastating acts of violence against “infidel” Westerners at home.17 Although Bin Ladin has always claimed, sometimes disingenuously in an effort to conceal the actual operational involvement of al-Qa‘ida, that his primary role was to function as an instigator rather than an actual organizer of jihadist actions, as time goes on this may be more and more the case.18 What this means, effectively speaking, is that would-be “amateur” jihadists with no observable prior associations with al-Qa‘ida or any other established Islamist terrorist groups may suddenly take it upon themselves to translate exhortations made by ideologues such as Bin Ladin and al-Zawahiri into action – whether or not they understand or correctly interpret the strategic aims of those figures. In short, actions taken by individuals who claim to be inspired by Bin Ladin but who may not even be correctly divining his real aims can only complicate the analysis of the objectives of al-Qa‘ida proper. That is why, for the purposes of this study, the focus has been on al-Qa‘ida itself and its more or less “official” organizational branches.

General ideological factors: are al-Qa‘ida’s objectives truly “rational” or “strategic”? There can be no doubt that specific military or paramilitary actions and operations carried out within the context of what is generally referred to as unconventional, asymmetric, or “fourth-generation” warfare, like those carried out in the course of conventional wars, are generally intended to accomplish some objective. Such actions are rarely, if ever, utterly random, purely pathological, entirely whimsical, or so idiosyncratic in their etiology as to be incomprehensible to others. Nor are they generally undertaken with no purpose at all in mind, initiated simply “for their own sake,” or carried out just because of a perceived need to do something, anything. Unless a particular political or military leader has suddenly descended into outright madness, i.e., mental illness in the clinical sense of that term, it must be assumed that his actions are directed toward some purpose. This is all the more true of terrorism

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per se, which by definition involves the carrying out of acts of violence that are specifically intended to influence the perceptions and behavior of wider target audiences. Terrorism is thus indisputably a technique or tactic that various parties adopt for purposive reasons.19 To put it another way, although terrorists and other nonstate actors rarely, if ever, engage in the sort of formal “cost – benefit” analyses that many social scientists futilely seek to model, and their “rationality” may not be comprehensible to outsiders, they normally carry out their acts of violence in order to achieve more or less calculated operational objectives.20 To the extent that this is true, whether terrorists choose to attack targets with CBRN materials and weapons will largely depend – assuming that (1) they have the technical capabilities to do so, and that (2) using such agents is not utterly antithetical to their ideological agendas and/or psychological makeup – on whether the operational advantages that their use might be perceived to confer is seen as outweighing the operational disadvantages that their uses might incur.21 From this perspective, a group’s decision to employ CBRN, like its other decisions concerning targeting weapons and tactics, will often be based on some degree of rational strategic calculation or choice. This does not mean, however, that terrorists are entirely or even essentially “rational” actors. Indeed, it would be incorrect to assume, as many observers have, that extremist groups behave and operate primarily, if not exclusively, in accordance with “rational choice” models, that the important actions they undertake are decided upon only after a careful calculation of “costs and benefits,” and consequently that those whose responsibility it is to counter their nefarious schemes will be able to ascertain their most likely potential targets simply by determining the tangible value of the targets themselves and the objective difficulties any attacker would encounter if they chose to attack those targets.22 Since in the real world it appears self-evident that individuals and organizations rarely, if ever, make decisions based entirely on rational processes and objective calculations, the adoption of such an abstract, hyperrational theoretical approach is not only quite unrealistic, but is more likely than not to yield results that are seriously misleading. Artificially rational decision-making models are even more flawed when applied uncritically or mechanically to predict the behavior of extremist groups, which almost by definition are far more prone to carry out actions for arguably less rational – or at least less discernibly rational – “expressive” reasons than, say, staid business firms, entrenched policy-making bureaucracies, or conventional military units (although these latter entities do not invariably behave rationally either). Indeed, extremist groups tend to carry out acts of violence both (1) for reasons that one can characterize as broadly rational, in particular to produce certain tangible impacts (e.g., cause casualties or physical damage) and/or to provoke certain desired psychological responses in wider audiences (i.e., terrorism proper), and (2) to satisfy more arcane ideological, subjective, impulsive, or partially conscious and hence ostensibly less rational needs.23 These latter “internal” motives, which are herein being characterized as “expressive,” include such things as doctrinal obsessions (e.g., compulsions to attack designated enemies or smite “evildoers,” longings

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to precipitate a prophesied Armageddon, injunctions promoting individual or collective martyrdom, technological fetishism), group pathologies (e.g., excessive insularity, charismatic and/or authoritarian leadership, extreme forms of peer pressure, suppression of internal dissent, “groupthink”), collective emotional impulses (e.g., a burning desire to get revenge, a passion for gaining glory or grabbing the spotlight, a perceived need to demonstrate prowess or outdo rival groups, a desire to evoke past triumphs or tragedies), or – in the case of “lone wolves” – an incalculably diverse range of potential personal idiosyncrasies.24 It is in fact the varying importance, fluidity, and precise configuration of such “expressive” factors that serve to distinguish particular extremist groups from one another, including those operating within the same ideological milieu, and these very distinctions can be crucially important in terms of influencing a group’s selection of targets and/or its chosen methods for attacking those targets. That is why the never-ending flood of terrorist threat assessments that are based primarily on rational choice models or on standard “Clausewitzian” strategic or geopolitical frames of reference, which almost invariably downplay or even ignore altogether the important “expressive” motivational factors that derive from a particular group’s ideologies, internal organizational dynamics, and general emotional orientation (which is in turn strongly influenced by regnant cultural values within their respective societies), are so often misguided or erroneous. As long as this type of analytical “mirror-imaging” of the enemy persists, both inside and outside of the intelligence community, serious flaws in the ongoing assessment of future terrorist threats, whether they involve CBRN weapons or not, are likely to occur. Again, this is not to say that extremist groups are entirely irrational or that they do not usually make various types of strategic calculations, especially on the operational level, where they are often brutally effective, but simply that their reasoning processes and decision-making concerning target selection, weapons selection, and attack modalities are also influenced by a host of other, less predictable and less recognizably rational if not predominantly semi-rational or nonrational factors, including their frequently obtuse ideological proclivities and their often unrealistic ultimate goals. This is especially true in the cases of secular or religious extremists who seek to achieve utopian and arguably delusional aims, that is, those that promote what Lee Harris has referred to as “fantasy ideologies,” whether these envision the forging of preternaturally harmonious, cooperative, strife-free communities on the international level (communists) or the national level (fascists); the creation of racially “pure” havens (white and black supremacists); the extirpation of human “despoilers” of the environment (fringe eco-radicals); the precipitation or hastening of catastrophic “end times” prophecies (apocalyptic millenarians); or the restoration of the Caliphate, the unification of the Muslim umma, and ultimately the Islamization of the entire world (the most radical elements within the global jihadist milieu).25 Nor does the fact that terrorism is by definition purposive meaning that the short-term, intermediate, or long-term goals that the perpetrators of particular acts of violence are trying to accomplish are necessarily realistic, nor that the specific

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actions they carry out will necessarily produce the actual effects that they were designed to achieve. Indeed, in the real world it is very often the case that (1) the ultimate objectives pursued by terrorist groups and states are unrealizable, utopian, and indeed chimerical, and/or that (2) their specific acts of violence regularly produce effects on wider audiences – both potential supporters and designated enemies – which are contrary if not antithetical to those they were aiming for. To the extent that particular parties, whether states or extremist groups, promote phantasmagoric, unachievable goals and regularly miscalculate the impact of and reactions to their acts of violence, they can be characterized as essentially nonrational or, at best, as only being rational within the framework of or in accordance with the tenets of a “fantasy ideology.” It seems obvious that if a violence-prone group begins by embracing absurd notions or fundamentally flawed premises, then even if it acts perfectly logically on the basis of those premises, the results will inevitably be disastrous. Such a group cannot ultimately achieve its desired objectives, no matter how much mayhem it causes, but until it implodes or is effectively neutralized or destroyed it may well be capable of doing a tremendous amount of material and psychological damage to those it has designated as enemies. With this background, the extent to which al-Qa‘ida’s objectives may be considered realistic and therefore realizable can perhaps begin to be addressed. As it happens, influential terrorism analysts cannot even agree on this most basic of questions. Some view al-Qa‘ida through the prism of a traditional Western military perspective, as an essentially rational strategic actor, whereas others argue that the group and its leaders are essentially irrational. Still others seek to forge a middle ground by arguing that although al-Qa‘ida may be said to operate more or less rationally as opposed to completely irrationally, it does so primarily within the restrictive confines of a basically nonrational theological framework. In short, whatever rationality it may display is seriously constrained or “bounded.” The “rationalist” interpretation has been championed by analysts such as George Friedman, founder of the private Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) firm, which generally promulgates a “realist” geopolitical and strategic perspective, and Michael Scheuer, the former head of Alec Station, the “Bin Ladin Unit” within the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Although Friedman acknowledges that al-Qa‘ida ultimately aims to reestablish the Caliphate and restore it to its former position of greatness, an objective that is almost certainly unrealizable, he nevertheless gives the overall impression that Bin Ladin’s organization is an extraordinarily calculating if not a thoroughly rational strategic actor.26 Indeed, he explicitly contrasts the often dramatic but less effective approaches adopted by terrorist groups that were active during the 1970s and 1980s, groups that he considers to have been overly hierarchical and dangerously dependent upon the support of various foreign intelligence services, with the strategic seriousness of al-Qa‘ida. As he puts it, instead of devoting their energies primarily to “making symbolic gestures,” as earlier terrorists purportedly did, al-Qa‘ida “saw itself as trying to put into motion certain political processes that would result in achieving its political goals.”27 This is a rather peculiar statement insofar as it implies, falsely, that earlier generations of terrorists were not trying to set certain processes in motion in order to achieve specific political goals,

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however utopian those goals might have been. In reality, even the most “symbolic” and arguably “expressive” of the terrorist actions in previous decades, such as the demonstrative “propaganda of the deed” assassinations perpetrated by nineteenthand early twentieth-century anarchists, were intended to achieve certain hoped-for political results. Friedman is certainly correct to argue that al-Qa‘ida is much more dangerous than most of the terrorist organizations in the past, but if one were to accept his general portrayal of al-Qa‘ida at face value, one could easily be led to conclude that Bin Ladin has not only carefully planned out every phase of some ostensible strategic “master plan” in advance, but that his terrorist group has so far been singularly successful in carrying out the phases of that master plan and, consequently, in achieving its supposed strategic objectives. These claims are, to say the least, contestable. Scheuer also rightly recognizes and indeed goes out of his way to emphasize that Bin Ladin and al-Qa‘ida are motivated primarily by religious imperatives.28 Yet although he begins with this perfectly sound premise, he inexplicably draws a number of seriously flawed and misleading conclusions. For one thing, he argues that Bin Ladin does not preach or practice an “aberrant form” of Islam, and indeed that the al-Qa‘ida leader is “in the Islamic mainstream.”29 It is true that the Sunni jihadist interpretation of Islam is in many respects highly orthodox, as is typical of strict, literalist fundamentalist interpretations of religious doctrines, but this statement is in certain respects overdrawn inasmuch as it erroneously conflates Islam with Islamism, an inherently radical political ideology with openly imperialistic aims. While it is certainly the case that most of Bin Ladin’s militant interpretations of traditional Islamic concepts and generic anti-“infidel” attitudes are derived from the most authoritative Islamic sources (including key Qur’anic passages and the relevant sections in various collections of ahadith that are considered to be reliable [sahih, literally “sound”]), and that some are widely accepted by Muslims, this does not mean that the latter fully share his puritanical interpretation of the Islamic faith or his theocratic ideology, much less that they generally support his utopian transnational jihadist agenda or his brutal terrorist methods. For another, despite highlighting Bin Ladin’s fundamentally religious motivations, which should have led him to expect the al-Qa‘ida leader to periodically display faith-based and arguably nonrational patterns of behavior, Scheuer, like Friedman, nonetheless proceeds to ascribe far too much rationality and pragmatism to Bin Ladin and his fellow jihadists, especially in his second book. Therein he vehemently denies, despite the existence of masses of evidence to the contrary, that they have an intrinsic and theologically based hatred toward the secular United States, an apocalyptic worldview, or fundamentally unrealistic ultimate objectives.30 Quite the contrary, in fact: “Bin Ladin and most Islamists, therefore, can be said to be motivated by their love of Allah and their hatred of a few, specific U.S. policies and actions they believe are damaging – and threatening to destroy – the things they love. Theirs is a war against a specific target and for specific, limited purposes.”31 From this, it follows that if the United States and its key allies were willing to alter their foolish, counterproductive, oppressive, and exploitive policies toward the Muslim world, Bin Ladin would then cease attacking the West.32 However, as will be argued below, what Scheuer does not

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seem to grasp is that the global jihadists’ “love of Allah” is infused with extremely irrational notions that make their objectives anything but limited or fully rational. This immediately becomes apparent as soon as one carefully examines Bin Ladin’s own pronouncements, provided that the reader is familiar enough with Islam and Islamic history to understand his historical references and code words.33 In marked contrast to this “rationalist” perspective, which might be more aptly characterized as “hyper-rationalist,” both Lee Harris and Ralph Peters adopt the “nonrationalist” perspective in that they emphasize what they regard as the inherently irrational objectives and characteristics of global jihadists such as Bin Ladin. Harris begins by explicitly challenging the appropriateness of using Clausewitzian analytical frameworks to explain the 9/11 attacks, and by extension to understanding al-Qa‘ida’s entire agenda. Instead, he argues that al-Qa‘ida operates in accordance with a “fantasy ideology,” a phenomenon he considers operative whenever “political and ideological symbols and tropes [are] used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy.”34 Many individuals behave at least in part in accordance with their own personal fantasy ideology, but in most such cases – serial killers and other delusional maniacs excluded – they tend to be obnoxious but relatively harmless. However, such fantasy ideologies can become very dangerous indeed when they are embraced collectively by members of a certain group. This can occur when there is a “preexisting collective need” for such a fantasy that stems “from a conflict between a set of collective aspirations and desires, on one hand, and the stern dictates of brutal reality, on the other – a conflict in which the lack of realism is gradually transformed into a penchant for fantasy.”35 Moreover, according to Harris, the groups that are especially prone to adopt fantasy ideologies are those that “history has passed by or rejected – groups that feel that they are under attack from forces which, while more powerful perhaps than they are, are nonetheless inferior in terms of true virtue.” This is why the “theme of reviving ancient glory is an important key to understanding fantasy ideologies.” Just as “uncivilized” Ethiopia served as the prop for Mussolini’s fantasy of restoring the Roman Empire, so too does the United States, cast in the image of an inherently corrupt and imperialistic Crusader power out to destroy Islam, serve as the prop for Bin Ladin’s jihadist fantasy of purifying and unifying the umma, restoring the Caliphate, and regaining Muslim supremacy vis-à-vis the world of “unbelief.”36 From this standpoint, the attacks on 9/11 were not really designed to achieve a concrete strategic objective, but instead constituted a spectacular and symbolic act of theater designed to confirm al-Qa‘ida’s fantasy that a few Muslim martyrs could defeat the “Great Satan” and, in the process, inspire and rouse the Muslim masses in support of that fantasy. Since al-Qa‘ida supposedly “has no strategic purpose in anything [it] does” and is allegedly incapable of making a “realistic assessment,” Harris argues that there is nothing that the United States can do, policy-wise, to “change the attitudes of our enemies – short, perhaps, of a massive nationwide conversion to fundamentalist Islam.”37 However, while the transnational jihadists do in fact adhere to a “fantasy ideology,” this does not mean that they eschew

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strategic calculations. Moreover, Harris commits the very same error that Scheuer makes in that he fails to draw a clear distinction between jihadist ideological vanguard organizations such as al-Qa‘ida and the Muslim masses. Although no changes in U.S. foreign policies are likely to induce those vanguard groups to cease attacking us, the adoption of more sensible policies could very well help to reduce their growing base of popular support. As for Peters, he makes an even harsher judgment about al-Qa‘ida’s supposed rationality. He begins by drawing a relatively hard and fast distinction between what he terms “practical terrorists” and “apocalyptic terrorists.” He argues that the actions of the practical terrorist are “calculated to change political circumstances, while for the apocalyptic terrorist, destruction is an end in itself, despite his extravagant statements about strategic objectives.”38 Practical terrorists “may behave savagely, but they have tangible goals and a logical approach to achieving them,” and although ideology can “dominate their thinking . . . it does not break loose entirely from mundane reality.”39 In contrast, apocalyptic terrorists like Bin Ladin are “mentally divorced from our world and its values . . . view the greater world as their enemy . . . [and] are merciless [because] they view themselves as tools of a divine and uncompromising retribution.”40 Indeed, he goes so far as to claim, with considerable plausibility, that retribution against “unbelievers, heretics, and even their own brethren whose belief is less pure, is the real strategic goal of apocalyptic terrorists, even when they do not fully realize it themselves or cannot articulate it.” Hence “we cannot know apocalyptic terrorists by their pronouncements as well as by their deeds, since much of what they say is meant to make their intentions seem more innocent or justified than they are.”41 For this reason Peters concludes, as Harris did concerning his fantasist, that [n]o change in the world order will ever content the apocalyptic terrorist, since his actual discontents are internal to himself and no alteration in the external environment could sate his appetite for retribution against those he needs to believe are evil and guilty of causing his personal sufferings and disappointments.42 It follows that such people cannot be controlled, like practical terrorists, but instead need to be killed. There are, however, two fundamental problems with Peters’ analysis. First, his two categories of terrorists should be seen as representing Weberian “ideal types” rather than living human beings, who – apart from clinical lunatics – are never either entirely rational or entirely irrational in their behavior. Since in any given case it is difficult if not impossible for observers to artificially separate their “rational” from their “expressive” motives and actions, one simply cannot accept Peters’ overly sharp distinction between practical and apocalyptic terrorists. Second, even extremists who are in fact impelled by their adherence to Manichean ideological or theological doctrines (and perhaps also by personal demons) to smite “evildoers” are at times capable of rational calculation and understanding basic cause-and-effect relationships. Indeed, the historical record is replete with examples

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of violence-prone extremist groups whose members simultaneously espoused delusional worldviews and exhibited a ruthless efficiency on the operational level. Given such acute disagreements among analysts concerning the strategic rationality of al-Qa‘ida, it should come as no surprise to learn that they cannot even agree on the most important fundamental questions. Take, for example, the seemingly straightforward matter of whether al-Qa‘ida carried out the 9/11 attacks with the specific intention, among others, of provoking a massive and hopefully ham-fisted and therefore counterproductive American military invasion of Muslim territories. According to the “rationalists,” this was precisely Bin Ladin’s intention, and certain al-Qa‘ida theorists even retrospectively claimed that this was indeed part of his original plan.43 Yet many other high-ranking al-Qa‘ida insiders have revealed that Bin Ladin had ignored the concerns expressed by his confidants and seriously miscalculated by believing that the Americans would not carry out aggressive actions against the group’s Afghan base and its Taliban hosts. Indeed, there was a good deal of retrospective bitterness and post-facto criticism of Bin Ladin for naively believing his own propaganda about American cowardice and weakness.44 Furthermore, it is also clear that Bin Ladin was himself surprised by the collapse of the Twin Towers, which he did not anticipate despite his relative optimism about the probable success of the “planes operation.”45 This serves to illustrate just how difficult it is to divine the real intentions of the jihadist adversary, especially in lieu of reliable inside information. In any case, in between these overly dichotomous postulations of either full strategic rationality or essential nonrationality lie various middle positions. One version of such a stance, “pragmatic messianism,” has been proffered by Christopher Blanchard, who comes to the following eminently sensible conclusion: Bin Ladin has outlined specific political demands that support the image of Al Qaeda as a pliable, pragmatic political actor. Nevertheless, Al Qaeda’s operational record seems to indicate that its leaders’ commitment to specific national causes and strategic objectives are rhetorical tools designed to elicit support for their broader ideological agenda of confrontation with the West and puritanical reform in the Islamic world.46 Another is the notion of “pragmatic fanaticism” offered by Arabist Michael Doran who, despite making some problematic assertions, ends up concluding that al-Qa‘ida’s “long-term goals are set by its fervent devotion to a radical religious ideology, but in its short-term behavior, it is a rational political actor operating according to the dictates of realpolitik.”47 Although one may question just how rational and wedded to Realpolitik the organization is even in the short term, Doran’s view nonetheless has certain similarities to that promoted herein, which seeks to differentiate between two distinct levels of al-Qa‘ida activity – a “strategic” level that concerns the realism or lack thereof of Bin Ladin’s ultimate goals, and an “operational” level that concerns the group’s actual mechanics of planning and executing attacks. This is arguably a more nuanced approach that seems to better reflect

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the mindset and behavior of al-Qa‘ida and other transnational jihadist groups. From this point of view, al-Qa‘ida can be said to behave rationally on the “strategic” level, at least in part, but that to the extent that this is the case it does so largely within certain historically and culturally conditioned theological and thus arguably nonrational parameters. In contrast, on the “operational” level, al-Qa‘ida often displays considerable sophistication, which allows it to plan and carry out devastatingly effective and often spectacular terrorist attacks that allow the group to achieve its narrowly “tactical” aims, if not to further its unachievable strategic goals. Let us begin by considering the strategic objectives of al-Qa‘ida. The key point that needs to be emphasized is that, far from accepting modern Western conceptions of international law, which presuppose “the existence of a family of nations composed of a community of states enjoying full sovereign rights and equality of status” – the leaders of al-Qa‘ida instead adhere to what they consider – quite rightly – to be authentically Islamic conceptions.48 These conceptions, which were first laid down in the era of the “virtuous forefathers” of the faith (al-salaf al-salih) – Muhammad, his companions, and his “rightly-guided” caliphal successors – in order to govern the relations between the growing Islamic community and non-Muslims, do not involve the recognition of other sovereign states, since “the ultimate goal of Islam was the subordination of the whole world to one [universal] system of law and religion.”49 This “classical” notion has in fact been resuscitated and obsessively emphasized rather than abandoned by today’s jihadists, who regard modern nation-states as artificial creations that the “enemies of Islam” intentionally designed to prevent the restoration of a unified Muslim umma. The first and most important of these traditional Islamic conceptions was clearly articulated in the Qur’an itself: one of the primary responsibilities incumbent upon all Muslims is to spread the divine word of Allah, which was thought to have been revealed directly by the archangel Gabriel to Muhammad, throughout the entire world, since it was ostensibly meant for all of humanity, not restricted to Arabs alone.50 Therefore, whenever the Muslims encountered “unbelievers,” they were admonished to offer them three options: convert to Islam, pay a poll tax ( jizya) and accept a subordinate status (as dhimmi) in a Muslim-dominated society, or prepare to fight.51 Second, the methods Muslims traditionally used to spread and universalize Islam involved a combination of proselytization (da‘wa) and “jihad of the sword for the sake of Allah” ( jihad bi al-sayf fi sabil Allah), i.e., armed struggle for the faith.52 During periods of relative weakness, Muslims tended to rely primarily on da‘wa, but when they were militarily strong, they often waged jihad bi al-sayf in a frankly imperialistic effort to expand the boundaries of the Islamic world by conquest ( fath, literally “opening”) at the expense of non-Muslims.53 Third, on the basis of the examples reportedly set by Muhammad himself or his close companions and successors,54 medieval jurists soon formulated a geopolitical conception that was based upon a clear-cut division of the world into two antithetical parts: the dar al-Islam (Abode of Islam), “territories in which the law of Islam prevails,” and the dar al-harb (Abode of War), “territories under perpetual threat of missionary war.”55 The latter included all of the territories that were not ruled by the khalif

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(Caliph) or an imam in accordance with Islamic law (the shari‘a). In theory, if the rulers who governed portions of the dar al-harb refused to allow Muslims to freely practice their religion within their realms, the leaders of the umma were obliged to wage war against those rulers, defeat them, and incorporate their lands into the dar al-Islam. This was, if taken at face value, a doctrine that postulated a state of more or less permanent war against unbelievers, albeit one that could be periodically interrupted, until such time as they agreed to convert to Islam. In practice, of course, the decision to initiate military action against segments of the dar al-harb was affected by a host of practical considerations, above all the existing correlation of forces between particular Muslim and non-Muslim rulers. Therefore, if non-Muslim rulers were simply too powerful to fight and defeat, or if they freely allowed Muslims to practice their religion, it was not considered necessary to fight them, at least not immediately. In fact, two new categories were developed by jurists to accommodate political and military realities and thereby allow Muslims to avoid having to wage war continually or at once: the concept of the dar al-sulh (Abode of Truce), “territories not conquered by Muslim troops but by buying peace by the giving of tribute, the payment of which guarantees a truce or armistice (hudna, sulh),” and that of the dar al-‘ahd (Abode of the Covenant), territories existing under the temporary proprietorship of non-Muslims that fall neither within the boundaries of the dar al-Islam nor of the dar al-harb.56 Although rejected as legitimate by many influential jurists, these temporary and intermediate categories allowed Muslim rulers to maintain peaceful relations with non-Muslim rulers as long as the latter were not actively engaged in the repression of their co-religionists. However, despite these concessions to reality, in the pre-modern era Muslims were convinced that such arrangements were strictly temporary and that at some point these transitional territories would be incorporated, along with the remaining portions of the dar al-harb, into the dar al-Islam. Indeed, for them “the duty of djihad exists as long as the universal domination of Islam has not been attained,” from which it follows that “[p]eace with nonMuslim nations is . . . a provisional state of affairs only . . . [and] there can be no question of genuine peace treaties” with such states.57 Such uncompromising, expansionist, and imperialistic notions were problematic enough during the extraordinary period of Arab conquest and rapid Islamization that lasted from the seventh to the tenth centuries, but maintaining them today, when the Muslim world is politically, economically, and militarily weak, can only be characterized as delusional and potentially suicidal. That is why most Muslim states, and indeed the vast majority of Muslims, have not only reluctantly abandoned their former universalist and expansionist pretensions but also accommodated themselves to the ever-growing power imbalances between the dar al-kufr (Abode of Unbelief ) and the dar al-Islam, as well as to international norms and institutions that are nowadays accepted throughout most of the rest of the world. Many Muslims may still secretly hope that, with the help of Allah, the status quo ante of Muslim glory and supremacy can one day be restored, but in the meantime they are generally willing to face reality.

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Not so with Bin Ladin and the transnational jihadists, for whom such eminently practical considerations do not count for much. Indeed, despite their often intimate familiarity with the functioning of complex modern Western societies, as well as their willingness to adopt modern technology and their penchant for periodically employing modern-sounding “anti-imperialist” rhetoric of the sort normally associated with the secular revolutionary left and right, the jihadists are essentially living in a seventh-century mental universe. As Walid Phares has rightly noted: The jihadist logic is historicist and theological at the same time. In the mind of its authors, leaders, and militants, the initial rissala (mission) bestowed on the Prophet, and carried on by the caliphs for more than thirteen centuries, is also theirs. . . . The jihadists believe that what was initiated in Muslim history ages ago is still moving forward today, just as it was in the beginning. They also believe that Allah is still commanding them to perform these wajibat, or duties, without interruption. And they are firmly convinced that the enemies of their ancestors as perceived in those times are still the enemies of today, in a war that has not ended for the last millennium and a half. . . . Put simply, in the mind of the jihadists . . . they are in line to fulfill a mission launched centuries ago.58 He adds that “[w]hen Osama bin Ladin traveled to Afghanistan eight centuries later, he was executing the orders of [militant thirteenth-century century scholar] Bin Taymiya: fighting the infidels, reestablishing the pure Islamic state, and laying the groundwork for the return of the Caliphate.”59 Furthermore, having deluded themselves into thinking that their victory over the “atheistic” Soviet superpower in Afghanistan was due solely to their own divinely sanctioned efforts and to the intervention of Allah, as opposed to the operational assistance provided by the Pakistani secret service and the external financial and logistical support they received from the Gulf States and the United States, the “Afghan Arabs” became convinced that with Allah’s help they could also defeat the world’s only remaining superpower, the United States, which they viewed as unremittingly hostile to Islam but inherently corrupt, weak, and decadent. Although Phares acknowledges that it may be hard for Western analysts to accept the fact that “the modern jihadists of al Qaeda and its sister organizations embody thirteenth-century jihad in the framework of twenty-first century global politics,” he nonetheless justly concludes that “this reality explains most of the irrational behavior of modern-day jihadists, including suicide bombers, and the litany of extreme, violent acts and statements for which they have been responsible – which to reasonable people seem to belong to another age.”60 Indeed, it is precisely their failure to recognize this fundamental reality that explains why the “rationalist” interpreters of al-Qa‘ida have mistakenly projected their own modern Western military and strategic analytical frameworks onto the enemy and thereby seriously misconstrued jihadist objectives. Such a perspective is perhaps most clearly expressed by Scheuer, when he insists that Bin Ladin’s struggle has “specific, limited purposes” and is narrowly calculated to deter the Unted States

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from pursuing certain policies. Similarly, he scoffs at the view that al-Qa‘ida has utopian imperialistic goals by arguing that “[a]t this point in history we need worry little about the threat of an offensive and expansionist jihad meant to conquer new lands for Islam and convert new peoples to the faith” since “[s]uch a jihad is the collective – not individual – responsibility of Muslims, and must be called by a Caliph.”61 He also claims that the Islamists are “not so offended by our democratic . . . system of politics, guarantees of personal rights and civil liberties, and separation of church and state that [they are] willing to wage war against overwhelming odds in order to stop Americans from voting, speaking freely, and praying, or not, as they wish.”62 These statements are both analytically problematic and in large part factually incorrect. First, Scheuer accepts Bin Ladin’s assertions that al-Qa‘ida is waging a “defensive jihad” against the enemies of Islam at face value, which makes no sense at all.63 The fact that Bin Ladin and other jihadists are convinced that Muslims everywhere are under attack, when in fact Muslims themselves are so often the party doing the attacking, and that they view American actions as intrinsically anti-Islamic, ignoring the fact that during the 1990s the United States militarily defended Muslims in Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo; criticized brutal Russian policies and actions in Chechnya; and sought to provide humanitarian relief and a measure of security in Somalia, is a sign that they have collective, ideologically derived paranoid delusions and are prone to adopt nonsensical conspiracy theories, not that they have accurately and realistically interpreted world events.64 In this context it should be remembered that political and religious extremists of all varieties almost invariably portray themselves as victims of persecution, oppression, and aggression in order to rationalize and justify their own initiation of violence and aggression against real and imagined enemies. For example, Hitler and Stalin – the two biggest mass murderers of the twentieth century – both portrayed themselves and their nations, also not without some justification, as targets and victims of Western imperialism. Even the worst, most bellicose tyrants and fanatics often manage to delude themselves that they are the real victims, and Bin Ladin seems to be no exception. However, there are also two eminently practical reasons why he might wish to emphasize the ostensibly “defensive” nature of al-Qa‘ida’s struggle against the West. On the one hand, it allows him to exploit the widespread Muslim sense of victimization and thereby mobilize a larger base of public support in the Islamic world, as well as to pose as a resistance fighter against “U.S. imperialism” in order to gain more international sympathy. On the other hand, insofar as he is able to convince Muslims that his jihad really is “defensive” rather than “offensive,” he has better jurisprudential grounds to argue that it is every individual Muslim’s duty to wage this jihad and that doing so does not require the authorization of a Caliph or another accepted Muslim political authority, as is the case with “offensive jihad.”65 Hence, whether he has a “persecution complex” and has therefore actually managed to convince himself that he and his murderous followers are the real victims, or is cynically seeking to elicit the sympathy that is all too often uncritically granted to

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self-proclaimed victims, or a combination of both, it would be naïve to accept Bin Ladin’s statements at face value. This is all the more true given that he has explicitly repudiated his own propagandistic public claims to be waging a “defensive jihad” in the course of internal debates with other Muslims, especially those whom he regards as having abandoned fundamental Muslim principles out of cynicism or cowardice. An excellent illustration of his real underlying agenda, which is in fact to wage “offensive jihad” until the entire “infidel” world is subjected to Islam, can be seen clearly in a letter entitled “Moderate Islam is a Prostration to the West,” which he sent in 2002 in response to the reply by 153 prominent Saudi scholars (“How We Can Coexist”) to an open letter (“What We’re Fighting For”) that had earlier been sent to Saudi Arabia by 60 American intellectuals in the wake of 9/11. In his harsh response to the arguments of the Saudi “court ‘ulama,” Bin Ladin insists that attempts to promote a dialogue between civilizations is “an infidel notion imported from the West verbatim”66 and continues as follows: As for this atmosphere of shared understandings, what evidence is there for Muslims to strive for this? What did the Prophet, the Companions after him, and the righteous forebears [al-salaf al-salih] do? Did they wage jihad against the infidels, attacking them all over the earth, in order to place them under the suzerainty of Islam in great humility and submission? Or did they send messages to discover “shared understandings” between themselves and the infidels in order that they may reach an understanding whereby universal peace, security, and natural relations would spread – in such a satanic manner as this?67 He then goes on to bitterly chastise those scholars for ignoring the Muslim religious duty to wage “offensive jihad”: We never thought that such words [promoting dialogue and understanding] would ever appear from those who consider themselves adherents of this religion. Such expressions, and more like them, would lead the reader to believe that those who wrote them are Western intellectuals, not Muslims! Those previous expressions are true only by tearing down the wall of enmity from the infidels [an allusion to the traditional Islamic doctrine of “loyalty and enmity” (al wala’ wa al-bara’), which mandates that Muslims must always support one another against, and not befriend, “infidels”] and by rejecting jihad – especially Offensive Jihad. The problem, however, is that Offensive Jihad is an established and basic tenet of this religion. It is a religious duty rejected only by the most deluded. So how can they call off this religious obligation [“offensive jihad”], while imploring the West to understandings and talks “under the umbrella of justice, morality, and rights”? The essence of all this comes from right inside the halls of the United Nations, instead of the Divine Foundations that are built upon hating the infidels, repudiating them with tongue and teeth until they embrace Islam or pay the jizya with willing submission and humility.68

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Nor was he finished. After citing the bellicose Qur’anic passage that advocates and justifies frightening or terrorizing the enemy (8:60), the sura and aya that are among those most favored by today’s jihadists, he claims that “whoever refuses the principle of terror[ism] against the enemy also refuses the commandment of Allah, the Exalter, the Most High, and His sharia.”69 So much for the misleading notion that al-Qa‘ida is waging a purely “defensive jihad.” Second, Scheuer is on decidedly shaky ground when he argues that Bin Ladin is “a practical warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon.”70 As several scholars have documented, there is no doubt at all that apocalyptic, messianic, and millenarian themes are common within today’s Sunni jihadist circles, including those close to al-Qa‘ida, just as they have always been intrinsic to the Shi‘i tradition and have been systematically stoked since the late 1970s by certain Khomeini-linked and -inspired Islamist milieus.71 For an example of such themes on al-Qa‘ida-linked websites, note the 9 March 2003 article by Usama ‘Azzam, who made the following statement on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq: Is there anyone who still doubts that we are approaching the end of the world? Does anyone think the hour is far? We are on the eve of the total dismantling that will be followed by our clear victory. . . . After this war, which has no precedence in human history and in the fight between the community of believers and the Devil and his followers, does anyone doubt that these are the days of the Mahdi?72 ‘Azzam then adds the following revealing remark: “I have no doubt that the leaders of the mujahidin of al-Qa‘ida and the Taliban are the owners of the black banners who will assist the Mahdi.”73 In support of these apocalyptic notions, ‘Azzam cited the now-famous work by Abu Qatada al-Filastini, the imprisoned “spiritual leader” of al-Qa‘ida in Europe, Ma‘alim al-ta‘ifa al-mansura (Signs of the Victorious Side). Nor was ‘Azzam alone in predicting imminent “end-of-the-world” scenarios that would pave the way for the prophesied return of the Mahdi, notions which at that moment apparently caught the imagination of many young anti-Western Saudis. See, for example, the postings on the Muntada al-Jinn wa al-‘Afarit Internet forum, a section of which deals primarily with dreams and visions. In the words of the Saudi supervisor of this particular section: These [apocalyptic] visions and their like, many of which were sent to me, propagate the destruction of this evil country [the United States] and the punishments, disasters, and dismantling that will occur there. This is the way Allah deals with oppressors. . . . The punishment of this super oppressor is very close. We ask Allah to heal the hearts of the believers of its influence, and grant the Muslims all of its finance and equipment as booty.74 Indeed, such notions had become so widespread, along with the idea that Bin Ladin himself was the Mahdi, that al-Qa‘ida’s leaders felt compelled to openly criticize

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them, in part because they were afraid that overly optimistic expectations of Islam’s looming final triumph might induce jihadist supporters not to take action and in part, perhaps, because Bin Ladin has never claimed to be the Mahdi and does not seem to believe that he is.75 Thus, in February 2003, on the website of the Markaz al-Dirasat wa al-Buhuth al-Islamiyya (Center for Islamic Studies and Research), a Saudi-based entity closely linked to al-Qa‘ida, an anonymous author leveled an attack on such apocalyptic ideas, firstly by claiming that the ahadith concerning “the black banners that will appear in the East” are very weak (da‘if ), and secondly by advising would-be supporters to “support the jihad against Allah’s enemies rather than harm the jihad and the mujahidin with nonsensical ideas.”76 Perhaps even more tellingly, one of the most supposedly “rational,” “pragmatic,” and “secularized” of the jihadist military analysts linked to al-Qa‘ida, Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, devotes the entire final chapter of his 1600-page strategic treatise, Da‘wa al-muqawwama al-islamiyya al-‘alamiyya (The Call for Global Islamic Resistance), to apocalyptic Islamic prophecies concerning the return of the Mahdi and the cataclysmic “end of days.”77 Hence, although this is an inordinately complex matter that can only be touched upon here, suffice to say that Scheuer is as wrong to deny that there are any apocalyptic tendencies observable in the al-Qa‘ida milieu as Peters is to argue that Bin Ladin and his cohorts are entirely apocalyptic. Third, there is plenty of evidence indicating that the global jihadists are pursuing an expansionist imperialistic agenda, though the cleverer ones like Bin Ladin seek to divert attention from or otherwise disguise their aggressive and expansionist underlying designs by continually harping on their more reasonable and legitimate grievances in an effort to both rally support from the Muslim masses and foment divisions within “infidel” ranks in order to prevent the formation of a common anti-jihadist front.78 However, even in his own public propaganda statements, Bin Ladin regularly juxtaposes seemingly rational and morally justifiable objectives with bizarre theological imperatives that can only be said to “make sense” within an Islamic cultural and historical context that has long since been superseded. Indeed, even the most restrained and proximate demands of al-Qa‘ida and other global jihadist groups – the complete withdrawal of foreign military forces from “Muslim lands,” the abandonment of all Western support for “apostate” Muslim regimes and Israel, the elimination of all “corrupting” Western cultural influences from the dar al-Islam, and the end of Western “exploitation” of Muslim resources, above all the paying of artificially low prices for oil – are in large part non-negotiable and therefore virtually impossible to achieve, whatever their moral merits or demerits might be. Worse still, when one considers jihadist long-term objectives, one has truly entered the realm of total unreality. These long-term goals can be divided into three categories: minimal, intermediate, and maximal. The minimal objective of the jihadists is to “liberate” all Muslim-majority territories that are currently “occupied” by hostile “infidel” military forces, including Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, and “Eastern Turkestan,” which effectively brings them into direct conflict with Israel, the United States, Russia, India, the Thai

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and Philippine governments, and China.79 The intermediate long-term objective of the global jihadists is to recover all of the territory that was once under Muslim control but then subsequently lost to “infidel” powers, including Spain, Sicily and parts of southern Italy, a substantial portion of the Balkans, huge swaths of territory in Turkic Central Asia, all of northern India, and large segments of northwestern China, which adds Spain, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece to their list of enemies.80 Their maximal long-term goal, of course, is the very same one promoted by both the “rightly-guided” Caliphs and several later Umayyad, ‘Abbasid, and Ottoman rulers – to spread the word of Allah to the “unbelievers” (kuffar), by force if necessary, and ultimately to Islamize every corner of the globe at the expense of both the ahl al-kitab and the “polytheists,” which in practice would nowadays amount to completely overturning and transforming the existing world order. As Phares sums it up, al-Qa‘ida aims to humiliate and ultimately destroy America, the military and economic bastion of the dar al-harb, in order to lay the groundwork for Islam’s final triumph over the West and other non-Muslims.81 It was this very decision to shift the target of jihadist terrorism away from the “near enemy” (al-‘adu al-qarib), that is, “apostate” Muslim regimes, and instead strike directly at the “far enemy” (al-‘adu al-ba‘id), the United States, that constituted Bin Ladin’s chief strategic innovation, one that has already had incalculable geopolitical implications.82 Alas, similarly aggressive, expansionist goals were enunciated by virtually all of the Islamist ideologues who served to inspire today’s jihadist groups. For example, in Sayyid Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi’s famous speech from 1939, later published as Al-Jihad fi sabil Allah ( Jihad for the Sake of Allah), one can find the following exhortations: Islam is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals. “Muslim” is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary programme. . . . Islam wishes to do away with all states and governments which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam. . . . Islam requires the earth – not just a portion, but the entire planet – . . . because the whole of mankind should benefit from Islam, and its ideology and welfare programme. . . . Islam is not merely a religious creed . . . but a comprehensive system which seeks to annihilate all tyrannical and evil systems in the world and enforce its own programme for reform which it deems best for the well-being of mankind. . . . The objective of Islamic jihad is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of rule. Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single state or a few countries; the aim of Islam is to bring about universal revolution.83 Compare the remarks of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Jam‘iyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Society of the Muslim Brothers, or Muslim Brotherhood), who stated that “[i]t is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”84 See further the

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following illustrative remarks by fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutub, the most influential of all Sunni jihadist theorists, who contemptuously rejected the concept of “defensive jihad” and repeatedly chastised those who sought to limit jihad in this way as “defeatists”85: Islam is a general declaration of the liberation of man on earth from subjugation to other creatures, including his own desires, through the acknowledgement of Allah’s lordship over the universe and all creation . . . this declaration signifies a total revolution against assigning sovereignty to human beings, whatever forms, systems and situations such sovereignty may take [i.e., against all nonIslamic political systems].86 From this it follows that jihad bi al-sayf must be waged to “establish Allah’s authority and to remove tyranny. It liberates mankind from submission to any authority other than Allah. . . . It wants the system laid down by Allah to replace the [other] systems established by his creatures.”87 Moreover, as far as Qutub and his contemporary jihadist disciples are concerned, this armed struggle against worldwide unbelief or jahiliyya (non-Islamic ignorance and barbarism) “is not a temporary phase but an eternal state – an eternal state, as truth and falsehood cannot co-exist on this earth.”88 Lest anyone doubt that defeating and destroying “infidel” powers and spreading Islam throughout the world is the global jihadists’ ultimate objective, one should – in addition to Bin Ladin’s letter to the Saudi scholars cited in this chapter – consider the inflammatory, unequivocal remarks of the aforementioned Abu Qatada: Muslims’ target is the West. We will split Rome open. The destruction must be carried out by sword. Those who will destroy Rome are already preparing the swords. Rome will not be conquered with the word but with the force of arms.89 Equally explicit are two August 2002 articles penned by Sayf al-Din al-Ansari, which appeared in the al-Qa‘ida-linked journal Majallat al-Ansar (The Magazine of the Supporters) and openly advocated the extermination of infidels by means of jihad. In one such article, he wrote the following: Just as the law of extermination was applied to the infidel forces among the nations in previous days and no one could escape it, so it will be applied to the infidel forces in our day and no one will escape it. Namely, similar to the fate of the Thamud and ‘Ad peoples, so the American state, the Jewish state, and all other infidel countries will surely be destroyed.90 In the second article, he claims that Allah has the power to exterminate the infidels directly, without using intermediaries, but that instead He has laid down that “the infidels’ extermination is part of Islamic law, which is operative until the Day of

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Judgment” and that its “principal element will be fulfilled only at the hands of the believers, meaning through jihad, which is also to be operative until the Day of Judgment.91 This is meant as a direct criticism of those Islamist scholars and organizations which argue that gradual, less violent approaches involving missionary work, education, and the provision of social services are nowadays the preferred methods for expanding the faith and ensuring the ultimate victory of Islam. Nor are such sentiments confined to jihadists with an avowedly global agenda who are focusing on targeting the “far enemy.” One can also find them expressed in unguarded moments by leaders of jihadist groups with a more local or national focus who are currently targeting only the “near enemy,” such as the Harakat alMuqawwama al-Islamiyya (HAMAS: Islamic Resistance Movement) in Palestine. For example, in an 11 April 2008, Friday sermon broadcast on HAMAS’ al-Aqsa television channel, Yunis al-Astal, a cleric and HAMAS Minister of Parliament, made the following remarks to his congregation: Allah has chosen you for Himself and for His religion, so that you will serve as the engine pulling this nation [umma] to the phase of succession, security, and consolidation of power, and even to conquests through da‘wa and military conquests of the capitals of the entire world. . . . Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad. . . . Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which had declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of pigs and apes [i.e., the Jews] in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam. This capital of theirs will be an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, and even Eastern Europe. . . . I believe that our children, or our grandchildren, will inherit our jihad and our sacrifices, and Allah willing, [that] the commanders of the conquest [of the world] will come from among them.92 So much for the naïve notion, expressed by many academicians, that Islamist and jihadist groups with a seemingly “nationalist” focus have no wider global ambitions.93 Furthermore, it should be pointed out that even ostensibly nonviolent Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (HT: Islamic Liberation Party), likewise intend to spread the faith and eventually raise the banner of Islam over the “infidel” world by means of a combination of da‘wa, infiltration and penetration operations, demographic “reconquest,” and/or outright armed struggle ( jihad).94 See, for example, the illustrative remarks of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supposedly “moderate” spiritual guide, Yusuf al-Qaradhawi: Islam will return once more to Europe as a conqueror and as a victorious power after it was expelled twice from the continent . . . I assume that next time the conquest will not be achieved by the sword but by preaching [da‘wa]

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and spreading the ideology [of Islam] . . . The conquest of Rome and the expansion of Islam will reach all the areas where the sun shines and the moon appears [i.e., the entire world]. . . . That will be the result of a planted seed and the beginning of the righteous Caliphate’s return. . . . [The Islamic Caliphate] deserves to lead the umma to the plains of victory.95 Compare further the even more militaristic June 2003 remarks of Anjem Choudary, one of the leaders of the radical London-based group al-Muhajirun (The Émigrés or Exiles), an offshoot of Hizb al-Tahrir: One day the black flag of Islam will be flying over [Number 10] Downing Street. Lands will not be liberated by individuals, but by an army. Eventually there’ll have to be a Muslim army. It’s just a matter of time before it happens.96 How anyone can characterize such extreme views as “limited” in their focus or “defensive” in their aims is beyond comprehension. Indeed, Scheuer fails even to acknowledge, much less give sufficient weight to, al-Qa‘ida’s less-than-rational “expressive” motives for carrying out attacks, above all (1) its religiously grounded obsession with slaughtering and ultimately cleansing the world of “apostates,” “hypocrites,” and “infidels,” and (2) its burning desire to exact revenge against “Crusaders” and perfidious Jews for a host of proclaimed “crimes,” real or imagined, that these “servants of Satan” are supposed to have committed against innocent Muslims. Such atavistic or retributional impulses are well-expressed by numerous al-Qa‘ida – linked spokesmen. For example, in his book Ayman al-Zawahiri perfectly captures both sentiments. He advocates that the mujahidin inflict massive casualties on the enemy whenever possible, since this is supposedly the only language that the West understands, and also clearly reveals his thirst for revenge when he opines that the jihadist movement promises destruction and ruin for the new Crusades against the lands of Islam. It is ready for revenge against the heads of the world’s gathering of infidels, the United States, Russia, and Israel. It is anxious to seek retribution for the blood of the martyrs, the grief of the mothers, the deprivation of the orphans, the suffering of the detainees, and the sores of the tortured people throughout the land of Islam.97 Nor are al-Zawahiri’s sentiments at all unique in jihadist circles. In a December 1998 interview with al-Jazira, Bin Ladin himself openly appealed to Allah to help his fellow jihadists “wreak revenge on the Jews and Crusaders” for their alleged crimes against Muslims.98 Note also the telling remarks of Shaykh Husayn b. Mahmud (the pseudonym for an al-Qa‘ida leader whose writings often appear on jihadist fora): Allah commanded the believers to be firm, forceful, ruthless and radical in killing the enemies who fight against [Islam], and to show them no mercy or

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compassion . . . [Since] this applies to offensive jihad . . . what about [the case in which] the infidels attack the Muslim states, shed blood, violate women’s honor and offend [Islam]? In that case, there is no doubt that they must be struck and killed with even greater ruthlessness, as a lesson to others and in order to fill them with awe for the umma, so that no one will wish to attack Muslims anywhere, ever again. . . . Our righteous forefathers [al-salaf al-salih] implemented [these] principles, and the results were amazing: they gained victory after victory and Allah’s triumph was realized, because they defended his faith and obeyed his command to kill, disperse and smite the enemies of the faith. . . .99 To prevent his readers from misconstruing his open support for extreme violence, Mahmud ended his text by lauding the ruthlessness and brutality of Sayf al-Islam Khattab, the notorious Arab commander who fought and died in Chechnya, and Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, the even more fanatical ‘amir of al-Qa‘ida fi Bilad alRafidayn (al-Qa‘ida in the Land of the Two Rivers, i.e., Mesopotamia).100 Similarly illustrative statements calling for the indiscriminate mass murder of infidels, although ostensibly justified on the basis of reciprocity, can easily be multiplied. Thus Sayf al-Din al-Ansari, in his section of a book entitled Ghazwa 11 Sibtimbir (The September 11 Raid), claimed that the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans in the attacks on New York and Washington, DC, was justified both in accordance with the principle of retaliation and because Islamic doctrine approves the destruction of enemy fortresses, even in circumstances where it may be impossible to distinguish between soldiers and civilians.101 Compare also “The Truth about the New Crusade: A Ruling on the Killing of Women and Children of the NonBelievers,” the draft of an ideological justification for the 9/11 attacks by Ramzi b. al-Shayb, one of the actual hijackers: Concerning the operations of the blessed Tuesday [9/11] . . . they are legally legitimate, because they are committed against a country at war with us, and the people in that country are combatants. Someone might say that it is the innocent, the elderly, the women, and the children who are victims, so how can these operations be legitimate according to sharia? And we say that the sanctity of women, children, and the elderly is not absolute. There are special cases. . . . Muslims may respond in kind if infidels have targeted women and children and elderly Muslims, [or if ] they are being invaded, [or if ] the noncombatants are helping with the fight, whether in action, word, or any other type of assistance, [or if they] need to attack with heavy weapons, which do not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants . . . Now that we know that the operations were permissible from the Islamic point of view, we must answer or respond to those who prohibit the operations from the point of view of benefits or harms. . . . Because of Saddam and the Baath Party, America punished a whole population. Thus its bombs and its embargo killed millions of Iraqi Muslims. And because of Osama bin Ladin, America sur-

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rounded Afghans and bombed them, causing the death of tens of thousands of Muslims . . . God said to assault whoever assaults you, in a like manner. . . . In killing Americans who are ordinarily off limits, Muslims should not exceed four million non-combatants, or render more than ten million of them homeless. We should avoid this, to make sure the penalty [that we are inflicting] is no more than reciprocal. God knows what is best.102 No less radical are the views expressed in a series of public letters by al-Qa‘ida spokesman Sulayman Abu Ghayth, a Kuwaiti shaykh, who argues that the number of American casualties resulting from the 9/11 attacks was not nearly high enough to balance the historical ledger. As he sees it, the mujahidin have a right to kill at least four million Americans (including one million children), displace eight million, and maim hundreds of thousands more, since this is approximately how many Muslim deaths, displacements, and injuries he calculates have been directly or indirectly attributable to anti-Islamic U.S. policies and actions.103 Finally, Saudi scholar Nasir ibn Hamid al-Fahd, in a May 2003 fatwa, approved the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against the United States, since a combination of military necessity and the law of retaliation supposedly gave Muslims the right to kill as many as ten million Americans.104 Even if one discounts the bloodthirsty rhetoric that is the norm on innumerable jihadist websites, one might think that such blatant “official” justifications and open calls for mass murder, revenge, and retribution might temper Scheuer’s overemphasis on al-Qa‘ida’s rationality, but this is not the case. In that sense the attitudes of the “rationalists” are reminiscent of those observers in the 1930s who insisted, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that Hitler had pragmatic goals that could actually be satisfied rather than an irrational hatred of real and imagined enemies, a passionate desire to exact revenge against them, and an outright will to exterminate them. It was precisely their failure to take Nazi ideological fanaticism seriously that led to so many misplaced efforts to appease the German chancellor. The same, alas, is true today inasmuch as many observers and analysts persistently downplay or ignore the intrinsic ideological fanaticism of al-Qa‘ida and other jihadist groups. Unfortunately, the “nonrationalist” interpreters have themselves only gotten things partially right. After all, it is a fairly short step between arguing that the jihadists’ basic worldview is not only archaic and anachronistic but hallucinatory, which is essentially true, and concluding – wrongly – that this means that they are incapable of displaying any strategic or operational rationality. This unwarranted leap is perhaps best epitomized by French scholar Olivier Roy, who like Harris claims that al-Qa‘ida “has no strategic vision” at all, and that “most of its targets have no military or strategic value.”105 To say the least, this is an overstatement, even if one is willing to admit that Bin Ladin’s organization has carried out particular actions in part for ideologically induced “expressive” reasons, such as a compulsion to smite “infidels” or obtain retribution, rather than for purely rational “strategic” reasons.106 Bin Ladin’s ultimate aims, as noted in this chapter, are to unite the Muslim umma, restore the power and glory of the Caliphate, and secure the triumph of the

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dar al-Islam over the dar al-kufr. He recognizes, however, that this objective cannot be achieved until a truly Islamic state is established in the heart of the Muslim world and until the power of the United States is undermined and destroyed, two objectives that are viewed as closely interrelated.107 What, then, is al-Qa‘ida’s basic strategy for accomplishing its ultimate objectives? Since at least the mid-1990s, its principal aim has been to precipitate a titanic “conflict of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West, and in the process create a global Islamic insurgent movement that even the unmatched power and vast resources of America would be unable to cope with or quell.108 In order to accomplish this preliminary aim, al-Qa‘ida carried out a series of provocative attacks marked by increasing lethality, culminating on 9/11, that were intended to goad the United States into launching a massive attack on the Islamic world, which would only serve to confirm Bin Ladin’s long-standing claims that the “Great Satan” and its allies were waging a war against Islam.109 An incautious, brutal response by the U.S. military would in turn hopefully have the effect of arousing the increasingly angry Muslim masses from their slumber and compelling them at long last to answer al-Qa‘ida’s call to wage a “defensive jihad” against the invading “infidels,” who could now be more plausibly seen as trying to militarily subjugate the dar al-Islam and directly exploit its resources. The beauty of this scheme, apart from its breathtaking simplicity, was that it provided the transnational jihadists with a virtual “win-win” situation. If the United States lashed out indiscriminately, on the one hand, or did not react forcefully at all, on the other, it would inadvertently hand a huge propaganda victory to al-Qa‘ida. Only a measured, precisely targeted, and quietly lethal response might have foiled Bin Ladin’s plan, since such a relatively restrained but highly efficacious middle course would have served to demonstrate American power and resolve without causing unnecessary civilian casualties, in the process further radicalizing the Muslim “street” and providing al-Qa‘ida with new recruits.110 For several years the United States actually failed this test, in that it did not respond decisively or effectively to jihadist attacks, thereby repeatedly allowing al-Qa‘ida to display its operational prowess and also serving as an inspiration to both jihadists and other anti-Western Muslims by mistakenly giving them the impression that America really was a weak, decadent “paper tiger” that had no stomach for fighting or taking casualties, just as Bin Ladin had been saying ever since the 1993 Somali debacle. After 9/11, however, by cracking down on rare episodes of anti-Muslim vigilante violence inside the United States and precisely targeting al-Qa‘ida and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, America for a time deprived Bin Ladin of such an easy anticipated victory.111 It was only later, when the U.S. military failed to seal off the retreat of the mujahidin at Tora Bora, thereby not dealing al-Qa‘ida a knockout blow,112 and when the Bush administration embarked on its ill-conceived invasion and occupation of Iraq, that Bin Ladin was handed a golden opportunity to rally his scattered, disillusioned fighters, recruit new generations of mujahidin, and more effectively tap and exploit Muslim popular anger.113 It has been argued previously in this chapter that al-Qa‘ida has extremely utopian aims, rooted in “classical” Islamic juridical and political conceptions about

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the relations between the Islamic world and the non-Islamic world, that could only be achieved in the present era if some unanticipated combination of natural and human cataclysms brought about the collapse of the existing world order. However, this does not mean that Bin Ladin and his principal lieutenants are incapable of formulating particular strategic concepts in an effort to achieve those fundamentally unrealistic goals. In his recent assessment of global jihadist objectives, Thomas Hegghammer argues that there are “five principal categories of actors that shape contemporary global jihadist ideology” and, more narrowly, endeavor to define global jihadist strategy. The first is “represented by the leadership of the ‘old alQa‘ida,’” that is, Bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who communicate primarily through sound and visual recordings diffused on Arab television stations. According to Hegghammer, The statements by Bin Ladin and al-Zawahiri are often quite general in content, and their main purpose seems to be to convince and motivate believers to take up arms against the enemy. Their approximately 40 statements since the Autumn of 2001 have focused on the political reasons to fight the Crusaders. They rarely provide specific strategic or tactical advice, and hence their declarations are always subject to interpretation by other writers.114 This does not mean that they do not discuss specific strategic matters at all,115 but that the primary responsibility for defining and clarifying global jihadist strategy falls to the other four categories, namely, pro-jihadist religious scholars (the ‘ulama al-jihad), actual military and strategic thinkers linked to al-Qa‘ida, members of other active militant organizations (including branches of al-Qa‘ida), and what Hegghammer refers to as “grassroots radicals, i.e., the thousands of anonymous participants on radical Islamist discussion forums on the Internet.”116 In this context, there is no need to devote any attention to the exhortative and juridical materials produced by the jihadist ‘ulama, most of whom have in any case since been arrested by the Saudi or European authorities, nor to focus on the voluminous materials produced by Islamist terrorist groups with their own agendas or by jihadist sympathizers who post all sorts of messages on jihadist forums and blogsites. Rather, what is perhaps most significant is that since 9/11, and especially since the autumn of 2002, the number of texts produced by the third group, which can be broadly characterized as “strategic studies” texts, has increased considerably. In particular, the online magazine Majallat al-Ansar and the website of the Markaz al-Dirasat wa al-Buhuth al-Islamiyya have provided forums for materials of this type. Unlike other jihadist materials, these strategic analyses tend to be more “secular in style, academic in their approach, and objective in their assessments.”117 One indication of this is that the authors of some of these works have evidently examined and analyzed Western military writings, as the example of Sayf al-Ansar’s article on “Fourth Generation Warfare” indicates.118 Hence it cannot be denied that certain al-Qa‘ida military leaders, such as Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi, the now deceased Saudi ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Muqrin, and the recently captured Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, do

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possess a relatively clear strategic vision, one that is informed by years of operational experience. However, the extent to which al-Qa‘ida engages in coherent strategic thinking should not be exaggerated. Three examples should suffice to demonstrate the limitations in al-Qa‘ida’s strategic thinking.119 First, there is a 113-page strategic treatise written by Abu Bakr Naji, Idarat al-tawahhush (The Management of Savagery), which was produced by the aforementioned Markaz and posted in March 2005 on the al-Ikhlas online forum by someone using the moniker “Irhabi3,” that is, “Terrorist 3.” The jihadist strategic plan outlined by Naji is extremely schematic, so much so that one wonders how seriously to take it. He begins by hypothesizing a three-phase strategy. In the first phase, the “vexation and exhaustion” phase, the jihadists will bleed “infidel” forces and rally Muslim youth by means of exemplary targeting (such as the 2002 Bali bombing); in the second, the “management of savagery” phase, they will establish zones under their own control, where they can establish authentically Islamic institutions and impose the shari‘a; and in the third, the empowerment phase, they will extend the three phases and link up various jihadist zones of control until a greater Islamic state has been re-established.120 Among the targeting objectives Naji lists are tourist resorts, “Crusader” banks, and oil installations (in order to force the enemy to expend resources to raise security for refineries, pipelines, and shipping), and he especially advocates striking hard, since a superior enemy can only be defeated by means of economic and military attrition. Second, in another text posted on the Internet, “Al-Qa‘ida’s Strategy to the Year 2020,” Muhammad Ibrahim Makkawi – a pseudonym used by Sayf al-Adl – outlined a similar five-phase strategy.121 In the first phase, the goal was to induce the “ponderous American elephant” to invade Muslim lands. In the second phase, this invasion would in turn anger and galvanize the resistance of the umma, while in the process providing more jihadist recruits. In the third, the conflict with the Crusaders would be expanded throughout the region, thereby trapping and bleeding U.S. forces within a “jihad triangle of horror” running through Afghanistan, currently neutral Iran, and southern Iraq, and then into southern Turkey, southern Lebanon, and Syria. In the fourth phase, the movement would be expanded globally, with the result that independent jihadist cells would spring up autonomously, including in the West. In the fifth and final phase, the United States will become so overextended militarily that its economy will collapse, paving the way for the final victory of the mujahidin over the dar al-kufr. Third, in a 2005 book by journalist Fu‘ad Husayn, which is entitled AlZarqawi, al-jil al-thani li-al-Qa‘ida (Al-Zarqawi: Al-Qa‘ida’s Second Generation), the author purports to describe a strategy for victory that has been carefully outlined by al-Qa‘ida’s own leaders.122 This particular scheme has seven rather than three phases, and is thus even more elaborate – and arguably more of an exercise in wishful thinking – than Naji’s. The first is the “awakening” stage from 2000 to 2003, during which the umma will be awakened from its state of hibernation by the jihadist precipitation of an American invasion of the Muslim world. The

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second is the “eye-opening” stage from 2003 to 2006, during which the United States will open the eyes of the believers by occupying Muslim lands and thence be engaged directly by the mujahidin on Muslim soil. The third is the “standing upright” stage, from 2007 to 2010, during which the jihadist vanguard and the umma will develop the capacity to take effective offensive action, especially in the al-Sham region (Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan). The fourth is the “recuperation of power” stage, from 2010 to 2013, during which apostate Muslim regimes will be overthrown by means of direct combat, thereby accelerating the deterioration of U.S. power and influence in the region. The fifth is the “declaration” and establishment of an Islamic state stage, from 2013 to 2016, during which the Caliphate will be restored even as American and European power declines in relation to that of China, India, and the Islamic world. The sixth is the “all-out confrontation” stage, from 2017 to 2020, during which there will be total war between the dar alislam and the dar al-kufr and the creation of a new balance of power. The seventh and last is the “final victory” stage, after 2020, during which the unbelievers will suffer complete defeat at the hands of the Islamic umma. Interestingly, from the second stage on, the mujahidin plan to “burn” Arab oil in order to deprive the West of vital revenues and to wage a campaign of electronic jihad, that is, cybersabotage, against the U.S. economy. More bizarrely, in the fourth stage they plan to gradually reinstitute the gold standard in order to devalue Western currency, an idea first proposed by Hizb al-Tahrir. What particularly strikes the outside observer is not only the overly schematic and absurdly optimistic “strategy” outlined here, but also the apparent reliance on a vaguely numerological system to determine the length of the successive stages.123 In short, beyond the most rudimentary and seemingly unrealistic projections and prognostications, one finds precious little coherent strategic thinking in these two works.124 Nevertheless, al-Qa‘ida has repeatedly shown itself to be devastatingly effective on the operational and “tactical” levels, irrespective of whether its leaders always display a coherent and realistic “strategic” vision. As is now well known, the principal modus operandi employed by al-Qa‘ida, especially in the major attacks officially authorized by Bin Ladin and his Majlis al-Shura, is characterized by thorough, timeconsuming, and at times meticulous planning; the careful surveillance of prospective targets; and the gradual insertion of operatives into the target zone, followed by the sudden execution of near simultaneous attacks by well-prepared “martyrs” (shuhada), that is, suicide terrorists. These traits were clearly displayed in, among other actions, the destructive 1998 attacks on the two U.S. embassies in Africa, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and the “planes operation” on 9/11, and they have since been adopted by other jihadist organizations that are affiliated with or directly inspired by al-Qa‘ida, for example, by Jemaah Islamiyah in its horrific 2002 and 2005 attacks on areas frequented by tourists in Bali. On the operational level, al-Qa‘ida generally displays a serious, realistic, and fundamentally rational approach. This is illustrated by a series of articles authored by Sayf al-‘Adl, who was appointed head of alQa‘ida’s military committee after the death of Muhammad ‘Atif, that appeared during 2004 in Mu‘askar al-Battar, an important but now defunct al-Qa‘ida military

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and operations journal.125 In one such article, al-‘Adl urged the mujahidin to develop a “creative” and “flexible” attack plan marked by the following characteristics: 1 2 3 4

5

A plan should be reasonable. In other words, alternatives should be examined properly and weighed carefully so that the best of them can be chosen. There should be a major – specific – target and other secondary targets for the operation. The plan should be realistic. It should be coherent, tight, and accurate. There should be no gaps in it. Rather, each part of the plan should complement the other part. It should appear to the enemy as a connected sequence of events. It should be simple. In other words, every member [of the operational cell] should easily understand it and be able to implement it without difficulty.126

Such an approach is unfortunately typical of the sound, realistic (para)military thinking that permeates al-Qa‘ida’s operational and tactical planning. Therefore, no matter how bizarre and absurd the maximal objectives of the global jihadists may in fact be, it would be a terrible mistake to underestimate their undeniably effective operational methods and capabilities. Hence, if the aforementioned notions of “pragmatic fanaticism” or “pragmatic messianism” are in fact applicable to alQa‘ida, they would seem to be particularly relevant in this sense.

Jihadist ideology and the potential employment of CBRN weapons Just as there continue to be disputes among specialists about the overall objectives and strategy of jihadist groups with a global agenda, especially al-Qa‘ida, so too are there ongoing disagreements about whether such groups are likely to employ “weapons of mass destruction” should they manage to acquire or produce them. Although there is no doubt whatsoever that Usama b. Ladin and other leading al-Qa‘ida figures have repeatedly expressed an interest in obtaining CBRN materials, agents, and weapons, nor that the organization has already sought to provide Islamic theological and moral justifications for employing them, has periodically made efforts to acquire them,127 has actually attempted to produce certain of them in makeshift laboratories in Afghanistan,128 and has openly advocated using them against the United States and its “infidel” allies, experts and pundits continue to argue about the likelihood of such an eventuality.129 Most of these debates have hitherto concentrated on whether al-Qa‘ida and affiliated groups actually have or are likely to be able to develop the technical capabilities required to deploy such weapons, but the focus here will instead be on their intentions. One fact that is undeniable is that spokesmen for al-Qa‘ida and associated groups have repeatedly advocated the acquisition, if not always the first or immediate use, of CBRN weapons. The arguments for doing so have generally been based on Qur’anic

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verses and supporting ahadith that explicitly authorize the killing and terrorizing of infidels, coupled with – although barely tempered by – certain Islamic “just war” doctrines concerning the appropriate conduct of warfare fi sabil Allah. These latter arguments are primarily based on two key notions.130 The first is the concept of reciprocity with respect to the enemy – “an eye for an eye” – both in terms of the actual means and the scale of the actions that can and should be employed. In short, if the enemy is said to be behaving barbarously and without restraint or using terrible weapons, then Muslims have the right to use the same brutal methods even if such methods are normally prohibited (haram). The second is based on simple practicality and expediency, in that it would normally be impossible to carry out attacks on enemy territory at all without inadvertently killing women, children, the aged, and the infirm, classes of people that it is normally forbidden to kill deliberately. The same is true for Muslims who happen to reside in areas of the dar al-harb, who according to classical doctrines are enjoined to leave those areas and return to territories of the dar al-Islam so that they will not be “corrupted” by infidels and so that no harm will inadvertently come to them in the course of Muslim raids.131 These themes often appear in statements and texts prepared by jihadists who are trying to provide “Islamically correct” theological and legal justifications for their surprise attacks and depredations against both non-Muslim and Muslim civilians.132 Worse still, their arguments often fall on sympathetic ears given that atrocity stories and conspiracy theories concerning the “enemies of Islam” are so widely disseminated and so often uncritically accepted throughout the Muslim world. Even so, it should be noted that some Islamist intellectuals have severely criticized al-Qa‘ida’s reliance on these arguments to justify its proposed employment of “weapons of mass destruction,” especially nuclear weapons, which indicates that there remain strong differences of opinion even within jihadist circles concerning these weighty matters.133 In addition to basing their rationales for attacking “infidels” on Qur’anic injunctions and the sunna of Muhammad, al-Qa‘ida leaders have also increasingly sought to behave in other “Islamically correct” ways with respect to their designated enemies. For example, stung by the attacks of certain respected Muslim religious scholars who criticized them for carrying out the 9/11 attacks without first calling their enemies to embrace Islam – as is in theory mandated by the Qur’an and other medieval Islamic theological and juridical sources – Bin Ladin and other al-Qa‘ida spokesmen have since repeatedly invited their prospective “infidel” targets to convert to Islam and follow Allah’s true path, thereby satisfying accepted precedents and, at least in theory, giving their “satanic” foes an opportunity to avoid being attacked. Therefore, in his October 2002 letter to the Americans, after enumerating a long litany of alleged U.S. political and moral “crimes” to explain why he was fighting the “great Satan,” the al-Qa‘ida leader explained what he wanted from the Americans: “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam . . . the seal of all the previous religions . . . the religion of jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s word and religion reign supreme.”134 Furthermore, alQa‘ida’s “official” American spokesman, ‘Azzam al-Amriki (né Adam Gadahn), has likewise repeatedly demanded that Americans convert to Islam in order to avoid

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further jihadist attacks. In a September 2006 videotape, Gadahn invited “all Americans and unbelievers to Islam, whatever their role and status in Bush and Blair’s world order,” and then warned them that they had better “[d]ecide today, because today could be [their] last day.”135 More recently, in January 2008, Gadahn again urged Americans to “abandon their corrupt ungodly religion for the simple, moderate, and reasonable religion of Islam.”136 These offers, whether they are simply ignored or are publicly rejected (as Bin Ladin surely knows they will be), serve to open the way, legally and theologically, for jihadist attacks on Americans at any time and any place, including in their own homeland. In any event, Bin Ladin himself has made several pronouncements indicating that he enthusiastically supports the Muslim acquisition of CBRN weapons. For example, in a January 11, 1999 interview with Time magazine, he made the following statement in response to a question about whether he was trying to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons (as the Americans were then claiming): Acquiring [such] weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank Allah for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a [religious] duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims. But how we would use these weapons if we possessed them is up to us.137 Elsewhere in the interview he said that America, which was allegedly “acting on behalf of Israel and the Jews, paving the way for the Jews to divide the Muslim world once again, enslave it, and loot the rest of its wealth,” “should expect reactions from the Muslim world that are proportionate to the injustice they inflict.”138 Once again, one can observe al-Qa‘ida’s shrewd public emphases on the “defense” of the umma and the legitimacy of “proportional” responses to supposed enemy aggression. In June 2002, as noted in this chapter, Kuwaiti al-Qa‘ida spokesman Sulayman Abu Ghayth published a three-part article on the group’s al-Nida‘ (The Call) website entitled “In the Shade of Lances.”139 In the first part, he argues that the world should not have been surprised by the 9/11 attacks, which was “something natural” given that America has tyrannized and oppressed Muslims and other peoples for so long. In the second part, he claims that America “disseminates abomination and licentiousness among the people via the cheap media and vile curricula” and “is the reason for all oppression, injustice, licentiousness, or suppression that is the lot of the Muslims.” Moreover, it is “immersed in the blood of Muslims” due to its support for Israeli “abominations” and its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hence, according to his own calculations of the number of Muslim casualties attributable to American actions, and on the basis of the divinely sanctioned law of reciprocal punishment, he concludes (in the third part of the article) that Muslims have the right to kill 4 million Americans – 2 million of them children – and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.

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Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of [the Americans’] chemical and biological weapons. . . . America knows only the language of force . . . [and] is kept at bay by blood alone.140 Lest anyone think that Abu Ghayth was simply promoting the “legitimate” defense of the umma against U.S. “aggression” herein, note that in part two he openly advocates the standard imperialistic jihadist notion that “the entire earth must be subjected to the religion of Islam – not to the East, not to the West – to no ideology and no path except for the path of Allah.”141 Still another crucially important document is the fatwa authorizing Muslim use of WMDs that was issued in May 2003 by Saudi shaykh Nasir ibn Hamid al-Fahd and posted on his website.142 The arguments al-Fahd uses in this fatwa are the standard Islamic “just war” arguments referred to in this chapter, especially those favored by jihadists because they appear to sanction actions that they fervently wish or actually intend to undertake, that is, attack infidels, “apostates,” and “hypocrites” – that it is permissible for Muslims to retaliate in kind against their enemies, both with respect to means and scale; that it is permissible for Muslims to kill women, children, and the infirm if they do so inadvertently or cannot avoid doing so in the course of military operations against the enemy; and that it is permissible to kill Muslims accidentally in the same context. Moreover, he argues that Muslims are authorized to employ CBRN if it is “necessary”: “If the infidels can be repelled from the Muslims only by using such weapons, their use is permissible, even if you kill them without exception and destroy their tillage and stock.” He also claims that, according to Islamic scholars, “there is no obligation when there is inability; there is no prohibited thing when there is necessity.”143 Elsewhere he goes much further than “shari‘a reasoning” normally allows by arguing that it is permissible to use CBRN weapons “if those engaged in jihad decide that there is benefit in using them,” which effectively eliminates the need to adhere to any jus in bello legal restraints, Islamic or otherwise. Finally, he makes two arguments with respect to WMD, one that is commonly made by Islamists and one that is somewhat more original. The common one is that Muslims are not bound by international agreements, including those banning WMD, simply because such agreements were established by infidels and therefore have “no standing in Islamic law.” The one that is less common is that the term “weapons of mass destruction” has been unfairly restricted by those same infidels to refer solely to CBRN weapons. As al-Fahd cynically observes, if one belligerent “should strike another with tons of ‘conventional’ bombs, killing tens of thousands, this use of weapons would be allowed internationally,” which indicates that the enemies of Islam, including those who previously used chemical or nuclear weapons, “want to protect themselves and monopolize such weapons on the pretext of ‘banning them internationally.’” Finally, in his post-7/7 bombing message to the British and Europeans, Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri likewise resorts to arguments concerning the necessity

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and justness of responding in kind to the West with respect to “destructive” weapons: You have acquired all kinds of destructive conventional and strategic weapons, such as nuclear, chemical and biological, legal weapons as well as weapons that are internationally banned, and you have used all this in your wars against us and against others without any deterrent or any law. Hence, we are serious about acquiring all possible weapons and means and will deal with you the same way, in accordance with our true religion.144 Little needs to be added by way of clarification, since the text is quite explicit. One can see from the previous statements and jurisprudential arguments that al-Qa‘ida has repeatedly claimed to possess, justified the employment of, or threatened to use CBRN materials and weapons. However, even if one was to assume that the group does in fact already have such weapons in its possession, these bellicose remarks do not really answer the question of when and under what circumstances al-Qa‘ida might actually have recourse to deploying them. The two main questions are whether Bin Ladin and his cohorts plan to use them (1) defensively, that is, to deter or repel prospective conventional or CBRN attacks by the “enemies of Islam,” or (2) offensively, that is, to carry out either a tactical or strategic “first strike” against the “far enemy” in their own homelands. These questions are in turn related to the operational issue of whether, capabilities permitting, al-Qa‘ida would be more likely to use CB agents to carry out small-scale attacks on “infidel” forces occupying Muslim lands or in their overseas bases, or spectacular, large-scale attacks with BRN weapons against the homelands of the United States or its European allies. Perhaps not surprisingly, the available indicators of al-Qa‘ida’s short-, medium-, and long-term intentions remain somewhat ambiguous, which has in turn caused outside observers to come to rather different conclusions. For this very reason, it is necessary to discuss al-Qa‘ida’s possible purposes for using CBRN weapons at greater length. There are some indications that the organization had hoped to obtain or develop these weapons, at least in part, for “defensive” purposes, specifically in order to deter the United States and its allies from taking certain extreme military measures against jihadist networks. For example, in a November 2001 interview with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, Bin Ladin made the following claim: I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as [a] deterrent.145 In a subsequent conversation with journalist and terrorism analyst Peter Bergen, Mir paraphrased Bin Ladin’s earlier answer as follows: “We have nuclear deterrence and this is for our defense.”146

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One might easily be tempted to dismiss these claims to have obtained or developed WMD merely for “defensive” or deterrence purposes as blatantly deceptive propaganda, much like the global jihadists’ public claims to be waging “defensive jihad” and be pursuing limited objectives. However, certain inside sources have lent some additional support, however partial, to Bin Ladin’s public “deterrence” claims. First, Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri made the following arguments in a booklet published on November 5, 1999 by the al-Ghuraba‘ Center for Islamic Studies in Kabul: The difference in armament and number between Muslims and their enemies, between the oppressed and the strong, has never been larger. . . . Military logic shows us that it is almost absurd to launch a classical confrontational war to restore the balance of power . . . [Hence] the renascent Islamic forces in . . . Central Asia . . . must attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, bacteriological) in exactly the same way as the aggressive, oppressive world represented by the Jews and the West possesses these weapons. One has to threaten with them [these weapons] and deter the enemy exactly like they [the enemy] have been doing. . . . The Central Asian region has developed factories, and they have raw material for these weapons, which has made a base and a hope for Muslims to acquire these weapons. . . . This is a strategic goal which is within reach, but only Allah knows.147 Similar sentiments were expressed by Abu Mus‘ab in his huge military treatise, where he warns that unless the American public is able to deter its own “Zionist” government from continuing its “aggression on all mankind,” the nations under attack have the right to respond “with all means and reciprocally, including the use of weapons of mass destruction, and [by] breaking the enemy’s back via genocides and the killing of civilians.”148 As is common in jihadist tracts, advocacy of the procurement of dangerous WMD is here justified as an appropriate response to, and a necessary means to counterbalance or even deter, the methods and arsenal of the “infidel” enemy. Second, a disillusioned al-Qa‘ida insider named Abu al-Walid al-Masri, in his book manuscript entitled Qissat al-afghan al-‘arab min al-dukhul ila afghanistan ila alkhuruj ma‘a Taliban (History of the Afghan Arabs from their Arrival in Afghanistan until their Departure with the Taliban), subsequently provided important details about secret discussions that had occurred between “hawks” and “doves” within the group’s leadership circles concerning CBRN weapons. The account of Abu al-Walid in this connection is important enough to be quoted at length: The dreams of the hardline wing in al-Qa‘ida, which sometimes appeared in the forms of demands, dealt with the need and importance of possessing weapons of mass destruction and storing some of them on American territory to be used in a fast and direct response to any American aggression against Afghanistan. . . . The conclusion reached was that al-Qa‘ida must possess weapons for defense, based on what can be obtained or supplied

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in the nuclear, biological, or chemical fields, so that in a crisis, if the other side used weapons of mass destruction, it will not escape a deadly punishment. . . . Another group believed that these types of weapons, if Bin Ladin could obtain them, would [only] be tactical by virtue of their primitiveness and weak destructive capability. However, they will continue to call them “weapons of mass destruction” to create fear. They are primitive weapons with tactical and not strategic capabilities. In other words, using them will give the mujahidin credibility, prestige, and psychological influence. . . . The people close to Bin Ladin believed that these destructive weapons would greatly enhance the combat capability and psychological influence of the alQa‘ida fighters. The most important questions were: if such weapons could be obtained, will they be used against the enemy on Muslim territory or against the enemy on his own territory? Will the enemy forces be targeted by these weapons (if they were obtained), or will the civilians in their country also be targeted? There were different interpretations and views in this respect, and then more questions were asked. Which of these weapons will be more appropriate for the current situation of the mujahidin: the nuclear, chemical, or biological? Should the information regarding the ways of obtaining such weapons remain secret, or should it be disseminated among the mujahidin groups in all the areas? . . . Others raised questions about the possibility of mixing the weapon of suicide action (the only remaining deterrent weapon in the hands of Muslims) and those weapons [of mass destruction]. They noted that the security measures by the enemy have greatly reduced the effect of suicide operations, and the introduction of these weapons could greatly enhance the value of suicide operations and their effect on the enemy. . . . As to the WMD proposals, Bin Ladin did not approve them in the first place and that was obvious from his repeated theory that the United States could not bear two or three strikes from him. But he refused to voice publicly his rejection of the idea, probably because of his extreme politeness with those around him. Another reason was that his right-hand man in al-Qa‘ida, Abu Hafs [al-Masri], led the hawks’ wing and strongly supported the acquisition of new resources, especially WMD. But he did not make up his mind about the strategy of using these weapons, postponing this until they were actually acquired. Abu Hafs took charge of the WMD issue and acted with his known stubbornness and determination.149 This, however, does not fully resolve the matter of al-Qa‘ida’s reasons for pursuing a CBRN weapons’ capability. For one thing, such discussions may well have been context-specific inasmuch as they took place in the periods prior to and after 9/11, when the group’s leaders were particularly worried about just how terrible America’s reaction to the “planes operation” might be. Hence at that time they were heatedly debating the possible development of new weapons or the adoption of other measures that might serve to deter or at least mitigate an overwhelming and decisive U.S. military response. For another, from the account itself it is clear

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that Bin Ladin and his henchmen had not yet come to definitive conclusions about how best to employ such weapons, and that despite being pressured by certain “hawks,” the shaykh preferred to postpone making any final decisions about this until the weapons were actually available in his arsenal. At the same time, references to storing WMD in America in advance of their use could easily open the way to using them as a first strike weapon, and not necessarily in response to threatening U.S. military actions. Indeed, there are numerous other indications that al-Qa‘ida fully intends to, or at least hopes to, carry out “offensive” strikes if and when they do actually manage to obtain or develop CBRN weapons. For example, in an undated handwritten letter addressed to the Americans, al-Qa‘ida “brother” Abu ‘Abdullah al-Kuwayti, after claiming that the jihadists’ war was with “the Jews” and not the American people, warned that if the latter continued to involve themselves in this struggle, “our combat groups, along with our military, nuclear, and biological equipment, will kill hundreds of thousands of people we don’t wish to fight.”150 Despite the transparent attempt to persuade the American public to withdraw support from the Bush administration, this nonetheless constituted a threat to cause mass casualties by using a combination of conventional, biological, and nuclear weapons. Such a threat may, of course, not have been genuine, but simply part and parcel of a crude psychological warfare campaign directed against the United States. Even so, it again suggests that elements within al-Qa‘ida seem to have no qualms whatsoever about killing huge numbers of Americans in their own homeland or about employing WMD to do so. More ominously, on 26 December 2002, Abu Shihab al-Qandahari, a former Yemeni mujahid in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan who served as the moderator of the al-Qa‘ida-linked Internet forum al-Mujahidun, published a short article with the provocative title, “Nuclear War is the Solution to the Destruction of the United States.” The most illuminating sections of this article are reproduced here: Indeed, you did read that [the title] correctly. This is the only way to kill the maximum number of Americans. This is the nuclear terror[ism], which the Americans have never feared. . . . The United States attacked Iraq using weapons that contaminated the lands and water with radiation for thousands of years. It also enhances its bombs with depleted uranium to cause even greater harm to the people and the environment. . . . Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. If the Americans have bombs that no one else owns, al-Qa‘ida is stronger. It owns “dirty bombs” and “bombs with lethal viruses,” which could cover American cities with deadly diseases and turn this nation . . . into a crowd of contaminated and sick people. The coming days will prove that Qa‘idat al-Jihad is capable, with Allah’s help, of turning the United States into a lake of lethal radiation, which would seem like the last days of humanity. It would also prove that al-Qa‘ida is very popular all over the Islamic world. . . . Yes, we will destroy America and its allies because they have used their power for evil against the weak. . . . Their end is closer now, at the hand of the awakening

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[Islamic] youth who, [sitting] astride their steeds, will [in the end] dismount either as victors or martyrs.151 Although the sentiments expressed by Abu Shihab concerning the desire to slaughter and terrorize Americans and destroy the United States are crystal clear, and apparently elicited a favorable response among his radical readers, in an analysis of the text Reuven Paz is right to caution that this incendiary article could represent nothing more than an empty threat, or deliberate disinformation concerning al-Qa‘ida’s supposed possession of CBRN materials, or propaganda aimed at encouraging Islamists and jihadist sympathizers.152 The same cautionary remarks also apply to several frightening statements made the following year in a series of emails to the London-based magazine al-Majalla by Abu Muhammad al-Ablaj, who described himself as the ‘amir (commander) overseeing the “mujahidin training center” for al-Qa‘ida and the Taliban. In a May 2003 email, he made these barely veiled threats: As to the use of sarin gas and nuclear [weapons], we will talk about them then and the infidels will know what harms them. They spared no effort in their war on us in Afghanistan and left no weapon unused. They should not therefore rule out the possibility that we will present them with our capabilities.153 He also said in that same message that al-Qa‘ida “would not rule out the use of sarin gas and the poisoning of the drinking water in American and Western cities.”154 On 27 June, he followed this up by issuing the following warning: Crushing and devastating strikes against America will come at the suitable time. In other words, after wearing it out with injuries our strike must be a knockout. . . . The wings of the U.S. eagle must be clipped. This stage will be followed by the stage of cutting off the veins. The last stage will be the stage of slaughtering according to the Islamic method, and it will be a major surprise for the entire nation.155 Later, in a September 21 article in al-Majalla, al-Ablaj replied thusly to a question from reporter Mahmud Khalil about al-Qa‘ida’s possession and possible use of “strategic biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons”: Is there a sane person who discloses his [operational] secrets? Brother, the strategic weapons are not just [a matter of ] remov[ing] the pin and strik[ing]. If such was the case, then [they] would have been available and [an attack] would have been carried out before the “blessed strike” [9/11]. The matter needs time. Such a massive strategic weapon is bound to have reactions commensurate with its size. It must therefore be used at a time that makes the Crusader enemy beg on his knee that he does not want more strikes and that he will withdraw into himself and occupy himself with his misfortune

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with the tails of shame, failure, and disgrace between his legs and licking his wounds after the utter defeat.156 Elsewhere in that email exchange, al-Ablaj claimed that “action and planning are afoot” and that the United States is “on its way to the abyss, disappearance, and breakdown.”157 Still more bellicose comments were made by al-Ablaj in late December 2003, when he warned that a new al-Qa‘ida strike against the United States was imminent: Let them prepare now for more sorrows and let them prepare the coffins and the largest number of hospitals and graves. The coming days are full of surprises and major events that will make them an historic example. We will teach them painful lessons that they will never forget.158 He then outlined a number of possible attack scenarios that would be “distinguished by lethal strikes in depth,” including the “poisoning of a drinking water plant that supplies an entire U.S. city and using the lethal sarin gas against U.S. human crowds” (as Aum Shinrikyo had done in Japan).159 As in the case of the remarks of Abu Shihab al-Qandahari, those of al-Ablaj may well be nothing more than examples of false jihadist bravado or components of intentional disinformation and psychological warfare campaigns designed to mislead or frighten Western audiences, especially since al-Ablaj made various other assertions that were either undeniably false or arguably fantastic.160 Hence these and other jihadist claims implying that al-Qa‘ida already possesses and/or is simply waiting for the right moment to employ CBRN weapons cannot be taken at face value, all the more so since such weapons have been neither displayed nor used during the intervening period. However that may be, the objective of attacking the U.S. homeland with WMD was explicitly articulated by Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri in an open letter to the U.S. administration published in December 2004, in which he implicitly criticized Bin Ladin for not employing WMD on 9/11 and went on to make other provocative remarks: If I had been consulted in the case of [the 9/11] operation I would have advised them to select aircraft from other countries and to have put weapons of mass destruction aboard them. Attacking America with weapons of mass destruction was – and still is – a difficult and complicated matter, but it is still a possibility in the end, if Allah permits us. More importantly, it is becoming a necessity. . . . if those engaged in jihad establish that the evil of the infidels can be repelled only by attacking them with weapons of mass destruction, they may be used even if they annihilate all the infidels.161 He then went on to claim that “defeating America and ending its ambitions of global hegemony is a matter of life and death for Muslims,” but said this could

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only be achieved in one of three ways. The first was if Allah would “send a calamity down upon it and destroy it by natural disasters, comets, earthquakes, volcanoes, or a drowning flood,” as some scholars have prophesied, but in the meantime he cautioned Muslims not to neglect their duty to continue the fight. The second was in the wake of Muslim resistance and guerrilla campaigns, but this would “require a long period of time and great sacrifices . . . ” The third was through the use of WMD: Finally, the last option: to destroy America through strategic and decisive operations involving weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical, or biological. The mujahidin may be able to obtain these weapons by cooperating with whomever already possesses them, by buying them, or by building and using primitive radioactive weapons known as “dirty bombs” . . . it is not a far cry from justice to adopt the slogan, “Dirty Bombs for a Dirty Nation.” This is practically equal treatment. Let the American people – those who voted for killing, destruction, the looting of other nations’ wealth, megalomania, and the desire to control others – be contaminated with radiation! We apologize for the radioactive fallout. Here, in short, Abu Mus‘ab is looking forward to the destruction of America, if necessary by means of the use of CBRN weapons. Even more revealing, in a 1999 videotaped lecture series entitled “Jihad is the Solution” – that is, long before the post-9/11 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – Abu Mus‘ab had already clearly indicated his desire to carry out a strategic strike on American soil designed to cause mass casualties and widespread psychological trauma. Here are some telling excerpts from one of his lectures: Guerrilla warfare in [infidel] countries should be based upon the infliction of large human losses. This is very important! To cause large human losses! Secondly, in their countries, we have to start thinking about the use of weapons of mass destruction in terrorism. You understand? In their countries, we have to use weapons of mass destruction in terrorism. You add one kilogram of uranium to some explosives and you go and pollute some 50 countries altogether. . . . Why? Because between us and these people there has to be a strategic balance . . . If you take away weapons of mass destruction, there is no parity. . . . These human losses [in their countries] must be caused by weapons of mass destruction. . . . Weapons of mass destruction are nuclear. They are quick and easy and can be obtained from most mafias in the world. This is a strategic weapon. Nuclear weapons have become mafia merchandise. They are sold . . . in Uzbekistan and Pakistan. It is a beautiful and fantastic thing that the uranium sources in the world are located in the region in which we are now moving. Understand? The reservoirs of uranium in the world are in Central Asia.162

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Although Norwegian Arabist Brynjar Lia rightly notes that several of Abu Mus‘ab’s assertions here reveal a lack of technical expertise and effectively gloss over the great difficulties of obtaining, storing, and deploying such materials and weapons, there can be no doubt that the jihadist theoretician would like to be able to carry out acts of terrorism in Western countries using them.163 It is in this context that one must consider a couple of the lesser known actions undertaken or proposed by al-Qa‘ida that seem designed to facilitate the eventual acquisition or deployment of CBRN weapons. First, in an internal document describing the organizational committees within al-Qa‘ida, there is a reference to both a “Nuclear Weapons Section” (qism al-aslaha al-nawa‘iyya [sic]) and a “Special Operations Section” (qism al-‘amal al-khass) within the group’s Military Committee (al-lajnat al-‘askariyya). Under the description of the Special Operations Section, it indicates that the section’s supervisor must “possess the appropriate amount of scientific knowledge which qualifies him for performing his job,” that is, not “less than [that of ] a university graduate,” and, ideally, also be a “military academy graduate.”164 This brief document may assume a more ominous significance given that in his military treatise, Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri specifically advocates the creation of “strategic operations brigades” (saraya al-‘amaliyyat al-istratijiyya) that “must possess knowledge of operational capabilities and be in possession of, and able to utilize, weapons of mass destruction in time of need for either reciprocal treatment or for the strategic termination of the conflict with America.”165 The latter phrase is clearly an oblique reference to an offensive nuclear or biological attack on American soil. This should not come as any surprise considering Abu Mus‘ab’s frequent emphases on the need to cause mass casualties. Although it is very clear that al-Qa‘ida and certain affiliated groups have a great interest in acquiring or producing CBRN weapons, from the conflicting statements provided in this chapter it is still not entirely clear exactly how they might eventually decide to employ such weapons should they ever manage to obtain or produce them. At present there are ambiguous indications that they might be used for deterrence, in a tactical manner on selected battlegrounds (in the case of chemical agents, as some 2007 attacks in Iraq suggest), or in a strategic strike on Western territories, and it may well be that final operational decisions concerning their deployment will not actually be made by key jihadist leaders until they actually have these weapons at their disposal. In this context it needs to be emphasized yet again that it is often simply assumed, especially by uninformed or casual observers and the general public, that the only purpose terrorists might have for employing so-called “weapons of mass destruction” would be to cause mass casualties and massive physical damage. This assumption is generally false.166 First of all, as experts have periodically noted, the only type of weapon included within the category of “weapons of mass destruction” that is actually capable of causing massive physical destruction is a nuclear weapon. None of the other types of WMD, that is, chemical, biological, or radiological (CBR) materials and weapons, are capable of causing such extensive physical damage. Indeed, of these three types of substances, only properly weaponized and

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disseminated biological agents could potentially generate a truly catastrophic number of casualties, meaning a number ranging from the tens of thousands to the millions. In marked contrast, chemical weapons proper, even if deployed in ideal conditions, would be capable of killing at most several thousand people, and the number of people who might be killed or wounded in an attack with a radiological dispersal device or “dirty bomb” would be dependent primarily upon just how powerful the conventional explosives with which the radiological materials were mixed turned out to be (although, depending on the type of radiological materials used, many others could instead be killed by direct exposure to radiation). Second, CBRN materials and weapons can be – and indeed historically have been – used for a wide variety of purposes.167 The most obvious of these purposes, as noted in the previous paragraph, would be to try and inflict mass casualties on declared enemies. However, the most important single factor that would arguably motivate terrorists – in the strictest sense of that term168 – to employ CBRN weapons would be the desire to exert a tremendous psychological influence on one or more target audiences, perhaps including both their enemies, who would be stunned if not cowed, and their supporters, who would be impressed if not inspired. Given the ubiquity of mass casualty Islamist bombings using a variety of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), it seems likely that only attacks using similar types of “conventional” materials that resulted in many hundreds or thousands of deaths would nowadays have the same psychological frisson as successful acts of CBR terrorism, whatever their scale. In that sense CBRN weapons are almost ideally suited for terrorism proper, since their employment is almost guaranteed to exert a disproportionate impact upon the emotional states of the wider audiences that terrorists are by definition trying to influence or traumatize with their acts of violence.169 Finally, in addition to these two primary motivations, there are also a number of other reasons why jihadists might opt to employ CBR materials – to assassinate individual “Crusaders,” “polytheists,” or “apostates” with toxic materials; to contaminate key facilities or vital areas of Western cities; or even because they are generally well-suited for covert delivery.170 Finally, one noteworthy point in this context is that the number of references to WMD is surprisingly limited in available jihadist primary sources. This relative paucity can be interpreted in one of two ways. If one is inclined toward skepticism regarding jihadist claims, one might concur with Paz’s suggestion that this may well be an indication that the development and use of CBRN materials are not operational priorities for al-Qa‘ida and affiliated groups, an interpretation that tends to reinforce the more generalized arguments of those specialists who believe that terrorists are unlikely to employ WMD because they tend to be conservative with respect to both weapons selection and operational techniques. After all, why should veteran terrorist groups bother experimenting with new and dangerous weapons that are difficult to handle and might not actually be effective when they can more easily continue to rely on weapons and techniques that are tried and true, such as IEDs? However, those with a more pessimistic or alarmist disposition might instead interpret the relative absence of discussion about “weapons of mass destruction”

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in jihadist sources as an indicator that key groups within this milieu are jealously guarding vital information concerning their presumably top secret CBRN efforts in order not to provide their enemies with any indications of what they plan to do, as certain comments of al-Ablaj suggest. Although this question will undoubtedly be answered, one way or another, with the passage of time, at present it remains difficult to determine exactly where the truth lies between these contending positions. Lest anyone find the historical patterns of actual CBR terrorism, the relative lack of references to WMD in jihadist sources, or al-Qa‘ida’s reported internal disputes about how to employ these materials to be overly reassuring, it should by now be clear that key figures or factions within the jihadist milieu seem motivated and indeed determined to employ “weapons of mass destruction” – at some point – in a strategic strike against the homeland of the United States or, if that is not possible, one of its close European allies. Their fanatical hatred of “infidels,” their propensity for carrying out spectacular mass casualty attacks, and their oft-stated desire to eradicate “evil” and annihilate the “enemies of Islam” make them especially prone to try to carry out catastrophic attacks of this sort, irrespective of their propagandistic blather about “defensive jihad” and their periodic references to “deterrence.” For that reason, it is probably only their apparent inability to acquire or produce effective CBRN weapons that has thus far inhibited them from attempting such a strike. In any case, the world cannot afford to blithely assume that such weapons will never end up in jihadist hands, much less that those mujahidin who prefer to target the “far enemy” would have serious moral scruples about employing them.

Conclusion In sum, it is precisely the previously noted combination of (1) delusional, utopian, and nonnegotiable goals, which ultimately derive from a theologically based and fanatical “fantasy ideology,” and (2) a ruthless operational efficiency capable of causing tremendous damage, that makes al-Qa‘ida and its affiliates such dangerous and formidable adversaries. If these groups actually had rational, limited, negotiable aims, as Scheuer insists, it would be vastly preferable.171 In that case, compromises could be made by both sides, and it might well be possible to come to some sort of acceptable agreement or settlement that would serve to limit the ongoing campaign of jihadist violence that is nowadays being incited and partially organized and executed by Bin Ladin. No serious observer can honestly believe, however, that even if the United States and its allies suddenly acceded to all of Bin Ladin’s proximate and relatively limited but still expansive demands, that the mujahidin affiliated with al-Qa‘ida and the other Islamist terrorist groups would then be willing to lay down their arms, say “thank you,” and initiate peaceful and mutually beneficial relations with the dar al-kufr.172 Such a naïve illusion, which completely ignores their underlying religious intolerance and fanaticism, can scarcely be reconciled with the ongoing flood of utterly uncompromising statements that Bin Ladin and other jihadist spokesmen have made over the years, above all in Arabic-language materials that most Westerners cannot read. Yet even in his December 1998 interview

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for al-Jazira, Bin Ladin made the following revealing statement: “Every Muslim, from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians. That is part of our belief and our religion.” Or elsewhere in that same interview, when he refers to non-Muslims as mankind’s “devils and demons” and boasts that “we are continuing on this path [of jihad ] until we meet God Almighty.”173 Nor is his meaning any less clear in another interview for alJazira, this one dating from 21 October 2001, when he says that the “disbelieving fornicators” may choose whether or not to fight Muslims, but the latter have no choice but to fight everyone in the “ranks of the Jews.”174 Similar hardline views have also repeatedly been expressed by Shi‘i Islamists, as when the then leader of alAmal al-Islami (Islamic Amal), the Iranian-backed Shi‘i militia in Lebanon, Husayn Musavi, made the following bellicose statement on November 14, 1985: “We are not fighting so that the enemy recognizes us and offers us something. We are fighting to wipe out the enemy.”175 Needless to say, when the only alternatives that presently remain open to Western “infidels” are capitulating and converting to a strict, puritanical version of Islam, on the one hand, or fighting to defend the values, interests, and territories of Western civilization, on the other, there is absolutely no choice but to fight, and to fight ruthlessly and effectively. This, in turn, requires that Western democracies understand the true nature of their enemy, properly interpret his intentions and objectives, and take appropriate countermeasures. Up until now, governments in the West have generally failed on all three counts. In the final analysis, there is one seemingly insurmountable difficulty that faces any state or society that is confronted by hostile, violence-prone religious extremists: their stubborn maintenance of faith that their agendas and actions are “divinely sanctioned,” even in the face of looming defeat and disaster. This is because when things are going their way, they attribute all of their good fortune to the support and will of God, but when things cease going their way, they rarely draw the equally logical but opposing conclusion – that God, in his supposedly infinite wisdom, has decided to withdraw that favor because they have sinned or are otherwise no longer worthy of it. On the contrary, they almost invariably conclude that God is increasing their suffering and misfortune precisely in order to test their faith, and then respond by renewing and redoubling their efforts to achieve their goals. In short, to the extent that they are absolutely convinced that God is on their side and that the enemy is inherently evil and ungodly, they are unusually hard to deter or permanently undermine the morale of. Such an attitude is particularly problematic if such extremists are determined, however long it may take them, to acquire, produce, and deploy CBRN weapons, as some global jihadists seem to be.

Notes 1 Reprinted with permission from “Jihādist Ideology and Strategy and the Possible Employment of WMD” [from Gary Ackerman and Jeremy Tamsett, eds., Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009), pp. 3–59]. In recent years the author has profited from informal interactions concerning (1) the “rationality”

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of political and religious extremists and/or (2) Islamism with a number of specialists, including Gary Ackerman, Sammy Salama, Adam Dolnik (three former colleagues at the Monterey Institute of International Studies), Kevin Coogan, Martha Crenshaw, Walter Laqueur, Bassam Tibi, Lorenzo Vidino, Phil Williams, and Alex P. Schmid, although none of them should be blamed for any errors or presumed to share the interpretations herein. I would also like to thank Douglas Borer at the Naval Postgraduate School for allowing me to offer lectures on these topics in his classes. Proverb quoted by the disgruntled al-Qa‘ida insider Abu al-Walid al-Masri, in the context of a blistering critique of Usama b. Ladin’s strategic blunders in a book serialized by al-Sharq al-Awsat and thence cited by Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University, 2005), 195. Here it applies to the general failure of Western analysts and policymakers to understand the ideologies and objectives of global jihadist networks and, as a result of that failure, their unfortunate pursuit of mistaken and counterproductive policies in the “war against terrorism.” Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, Da‘wa al-muqawwama al-islamiyya al-‘alamiyya [The Call for Global Islamic Resistance], 1381. These remarks were made on al-Jazira by a Shi‘i cleric in Iraq, but one who was an advocate of Sunni – Shi‘i collaboration in resisting the Americans and was therefore exempted from attack back in 2004 (along with Muqtada al-Sadr and Jawad al-Khalisi, other Shi‘i figures with similarly radical views) by the sectarian, rabidly anti-Shi‘i Sunni leader of al-Qa‘ida fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (Al-Qa‘ida in Mesopotamia), Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi. Excerpts from the Grand Ayatollah’s remarks have been translated as “Iraqi Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi Talks of America’s Annihilation and the Muslim Conquest of the World; Declares Support for Nuclear Bombs for Muslim and Arab Countries,” MEMRI #1166, 18 May 2006, available at www.memri.org/ bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP116606. Note, however, that henceforth this chapter will be focused primarily on Sunni jihadist groups with a global agenda, especially al-Qa‘ida “central.” Among the noteworthy exceptions are Jeffrey M. Bale and Gary Ackerman, “How Serious Is the ‘WMD Terrorism’ Threat?: Terrorist Motivations and Capabilities for Using Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) Weapons,” report prepared by the WMD Terrorism Research Program, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2005, Part II on motivations; the two volumes edited by Brad Roberts, Terrorism with Chemical and Biological Weapons: Calibrating Risks and Responses (Alexandria, VA: Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, 1997), and especially Hype or Reality?: The “New Terrorism” and Mass Casualty Attacks (Alexandria, VA: Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, 2000); Nadine Gurr and Benjamin Cole, The New Face of Terrorism: Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), Chapters 4–7; and Gavin Cameron, Nuclear Terrorism: A Threat Assessment for the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), Chapters 2–4. An excellent study on al-Qa‘ida and CBRN that was published just after this article was completed is Anne Stenersen, Al-Qa‘ida’s Quest for Weapons of Mass Destruction: The History behind the Hype (Saarbrücken: VDM, 2008), which addresses the group’s ideological motivations but likewise adopts an appropriately skeptical attitude concerning its CBRN capabilities. Bruce Hoffman, “Foreword,” in Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements and Failures, ed. Andrew Silke (Portland, OR and London: Frank Cass, 2004), p. xviii. Jerrold M. Post, “Prospects for Nuclear Terrorism: Psychological Motivations and Constraints,” in Preventing Nuclear Terrorism, ed. Paul Leventhal and Yonah Alexander (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1987), p. 91. Although this remark is nearly twenty years old and was made solely in reference to nuclear terrorism, the overall situation has unfortunately not changed all that much since then. For every article that discusses terrorist motivations for using WMD, there are dozens of “threat” and “vulnerability” assessments that focus almost exclusively on narrowly technical matters, including the technological capabilities that terrorists would need in order to launch a successful “WMD” attack.

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8 Indeed, even using the term “strategy” is somewhat problematic when discussing relatively small, sectarian extremist groups that rarely if ever field conventional military forces or employ conventional military methods. The word, which derives from the ancient Greek term strategia (meaning “generalship”), has both a general meaning and one that is specifically related to the conduct of military operations. In the general sense, it can be defined as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim,” whereas in a narrowly military context it signifies “the art of planning and directing overall military operations and movements” in a war or campaign. See The Oxford American English Dictionary (New York: G. P. Putnam, 2002), p. 1361. In the latter context, it is usually distinguished from the term “tactics,” which refers to “the art of disposing armed forces in order of battle and of organizing operations, especially during contact with the enemy,”that is, the actual disposition and maneuvering of forces on the battlefield. See ibid., p. 1407. There are, of course, further distinctions that can be drawn between “grand strategy” (which refers to the most general decisions made concerning the deployment of armed forces to achieve national policies), “strategy,” “grand tactics” (which concerns the maneuvering of forces in a particular region prior to engaging in battle), and “tactics,” but these need not concern us here. For our purposes, the terms “strategy” and “strategic” will be used loosely to refer to both al-Qa‘ida’s broader political objectives and the quasi-military operational methods they have opted to employ to achieve those objectives. 9 For more on von Clausewitz’s ideas about war and its relation to politics, see especially Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). For scholarly analyses of his ideas and their influence on modern strategic thought, see Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially Part Two; and Peter Paret and Gordon A. Craig, eds., Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), especially Chapter 7. Clausewitz’s most famous maxim is that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” This alone should imply that his ideas have little or no relation to those held by Bin Ladin. 10 Even al-Qa‘ida military analysts have pointed out the shortcomings of Clausewitzian approaches. Note, for example, the comments of Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi, which in this case concern the impact of al-Qa‘ida’s organizational structure on U.S. military analyses and actions: “America today is facing a huge problem with Clausewitz’s theories. The latter are premised on the existence of a centralized hostile power with a unified command. Assuredly, the mujahidin, with the al-Qa‘ida organization in their vanguard, believe in decentralized organizations. Thus the enemy cannot ascertain the [mujahidin’s] center of gravity, let alone aim a mortal blow at it.” See Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi, “A Lesson in War,” Al-Ansar, 19 December 2002. 11 Magical thinking is a term that seems to have been used first by nineteenth-century cultural anthropologists who sought to explain how members of traditional societies viewed the world, in particular the manner in which they explained natural phenomena in a prescientific context. Perhaps the most notable characteristic of magical thinking has to do with misperceiving or misunderstanding causation processes by, for example, confusing correlation with causation. Several classic examples of magical thinking were provided by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Magic, and Oracles among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), Chapter 2, in which the Azande explained diverse events by attributing them to witchcraft rather than natural causes. 12 This is somewhat misleading, however, insofar as it suggests that the other committees of the Majlis al-Shura are concerned primarily with “nonmilitary” affairs. In fact, what the military committee is concerned with are operational matters, whereas the financial committee and training committees are both concerned with logistical matters, and the so-called fatwa committee is concerned with evaluating the religious appropriateness of the tangible actions to be undertaken by the group.

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13 The precise number of rank-and-file members has fluctuated considerably over time and probably reached its lowest ebb after the U.S. military and its Afghan allies toppled the Taliban regime and drove the surviving al-Qa‘ida fighters across the Afghan frontier into the Pashtun tribal zones of Pakistan. 14 Bin Ladin’s obsession with the apostasy of the Saudi regime and its ongoing persecution of radicals is frequently reflected in his public statements. Likewise, to this day al-Zawahiri is engaged in polemics with former jihadist comrades in Egypt over tactics and their decision to renounce violent struggle. See, for example, his bitter polemics with Muntasir al-Zayyat, which can in part be followed by comparing Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Ladin’s Right-Hand Man (London: Pluto, 2004), especially Chapters 4–8; and al-Zawahiri, Fursan tahta rayat al-nabi‘ [Knights under the Prophet’s Banner], serialized in Al-Sharq al-Awsat in December 2001, parts 8–9. Compare also Gerges, Far Enemy, especially Chapters 3 and 4. 15 See, for example, Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 7–22; Erik Schechter, “Generic Jihad,” Jerusalem Post, 5 December 2003; and Jerry Mark Long, “Strategic Culture, al-Qaida, and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” SAIC report prepared for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 20 November 2006, pp. 3–4. 16 This interpretation has been promoted by Marc Sageman in two influential books, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004) and, with even more force, in Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 17 However, these cells did have links, at least indirectly, to members of certain terrorist networks linked to al-Qa‘ida (respectively, the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain [GICM: Moroccan Islamic Combat Group] and Lashkar-i Tayyiba [Army of the Pure] in Pakistan), and perhaps even to al-Qa‘ida central. For the Madrid bombings as the product of a purely local cell, see Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), pp. 3–16; and, more recently, Scott Atran and Marc Sageman, “The Great Train Bombing,” preliminary draft report, October 10, 2007, pp. 5–12, passim, available at www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/ciag/london/Madrid-Bombing-10Oct07. pdf. For the view that the Madrid cell was in various ways connected to broader jihadist networks, including those linked to al-Qa‘ida, see Lorenzo Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005), pp. 295–340; Jeffrey M. Bale, Jihadist Cells and “IED” Capabilities in Europe: Assessing the Present and Future Threat to the West (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College/ Strategic Studies Institute, 2012), pp. 49–100; and Fernando Reinares, Al-Qaeda’s Revenge: The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center/Columbia University, 2017). The most detailed account of the Madrid bombings is provided in Administración de Justicia, Juzgado Central de Instrucción No. 6, Audencia Nacional, Madrid, Sumario No. 20/2004, April 10, 2006. See further Casimiro García-Abadillo, 11-M: La venganza (Madrid: Esfera de los Libros, 2004); José Maria Irujo, El agujero: España invadida por la yihad (Madrid: Santillana, 2005); Juan Poyatos and Rachid Boutarbouch, Viaje al origen del 11-M: Un análisis criminológico para saber por que? (Mallorca: Centro Balear de Estudios para la Cooperación, 2005); and, for the political effects, Miguel Platón, 11-M: Como la Yihad puso de rodillas en España (Madrid: Esfera de los Libros, 2005). For the ideological background of jihadist animosity toward Spain, see Gustavo de Arístegui, La Yihad en España: La obsesión por reconquistar Al-Andalus (Madrid: Esfera de los Libros, 2005). For the 7/7 bombings, see the recent report by the British authorities, United Kingdom, House of Commons, Intelligence and Security Committee, Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7 July 2005, 11 May 2006 (London: Stationery Office, 2006). See further Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory, The Suicide Factory: Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park Mosque (London: Harper, 2006), especially pp. 269–76; Crispin Black, 7/7, the London Bombs: What went Wrong? (London: Gibson Square, 2005); and Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, The London Bombings: An

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Independent Inquiry (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2006), which, despite the author’s political biases, provides much useful material. New information has recently surfaced which indicates that the London bombers – like their Spanish counterparts – did not appear to have been an entirely autonomous group of disaffected locals, as was originally claimed. On the contrary, two members of the cell had reportedly traveled to South Asia and established direct contact with Pakistani jihadists linked to Bin Ladin. For examples of Bin Ladin’s public and indeed proud claims to function as an instigator of jihadist terrorism, see Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Ladin (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 69 (where he says it is his duty is to motivate the umma to wage jihad against the United States, Israel, and their allies) and 107–108 (where he admits that he incited “martyrs” to carry out the 9/11 attacks in “self-defense,” as well as inciting other attacks on Americans and Jews, which is a religious duty, and says that if this makes him a terrorist, so be it). Compare Daniel S. Gressang IV, “Audience and Message: Assessing Terrorist WMD Potential,” Terrorism and Political Violence 13:3 (Autumn 2001), p. 91: “Terrorist actions are purposive acts, designed to produce, directly or indirectly, expected outcomes. . . . Each act serves a purpose, whether the audience understands that purpose or not.” See especially Martha Crenshaw, “The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as a Product of Strategic Choice,” in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1998), pp. 7–24; Gordon H. McCormick, “Terrorist Decision Making,” Annual Reviews in Political Science 6 (2003), p. 481. Compare, for example, Gurr and Cole, New Face of Terrorism, p. 91. See also ibid., p. 80. Note, however, that these arguments were made in connection with terrorists’ use of CBRN weapons, not in the context of general terrorist targeting. This is the approach that is typically adopted, for example, by the insurance industry. In that context it makes some degree of sense, since the industry is primarily concerned with assessing the objective value of potential targets, as well as determining the probabilities that certain targets or types of targets will be hit, in order to establish economically viable rates. When counterterrorism analysts rely entirely on the same more or less “objective” criteria, however, they are bound to make errors. From the days of Karl Heinzen in the mid-nineteenth century, certain radicals and observers have drawn a distinction between terrorism as a utilitarian and thus a relatively rational act and terrorism as an expressive act, above all an act of personal redemption. See McCormick, “Terrorist Decision Making,” pp. 477–8. Although these two categories are not necessarily discrete, much less mutually exclusive, some scholars rightly emphasize the individual and collective (i.e., group-oriented) psychological functions that terrorism serves rather than only its narrowly instrumental functions. See, for example, Jerrold M. Post, “Terrorist Psycho-Logic: Terrorist Behavior as a Produce of Psychological Forces,” in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1998), pp. 25–40. For one such “expressive” motive, personal glorification, see Albert Borowitz, Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2005). For another, a burning desire to get revenge, see the psychological analysis of Ramond H. Hamden, “Unresolved Trauma and the Thirst for Revenge: The Retributional Terrorist,” in The Making of a Terrorist: Recruitment, Tarning, and Root Causes, ed. James J. F. Forest, 1: Recruitment (Westport, CT: Prager, 2006), pp. 165–75. For the “fantasy ideologies” characteristic of extremists, see Lee Harris, “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology: War without Clausewitz,” Policy Review 114 (August–September 2002), pp. 19–36; and Lee Harris, Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 1–20. His ideas will be discussed in further notes. George Friedman, America’s Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle between the United States and Its Enemies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 28, 33–8. Ibid., p. 58.

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28 Michael Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama Bin Ladin, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2006), pp. xxiii–xxiv, 3–5, especially p. 19: “What must be understood is that what bin Ladin has said and done has everything to do with religion. . . . When U.S. and other Western leaders describe bin Ladin as a terrorist problem, not a religious one, they mislead their publics”; and Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2004), pp. xviii, passim, but especially p. xi: “The war bin Ladin is waging has everything to do with the tenets of the Islamic faith.” Note that this author shares Scheuer’s view that “ideas are the main drivers of human history” and that, as per historian Perry Miller, they are “coherent and powerful imperatives to human behavior.” See ibid., p. xvii. This is even more true for the leaders and members of extremist groups, whose raison d’être, identities, and purposes all derive primarily from their adherence to particular political and religious ideologies. 29 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 30 Ibid., pp. xviii, 8, 16–18. 31 Ibid., p. 17. Compare the politically distorted view of Michael Mann as it appeared in a blurb on the back cover of Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: “Despite his religious rhetoric and the bloody means, Bin Ladin is a rational man. There is a simple reason why he attacked the United States: American imperialism.” The fact that Bin Ladin views the conflict between the believers and “infidels” to be a theological imperative that is “eternal” seems to have utterly escaped the attention of such people. 32 This is the clear implication of his analysis in ibid., pp. 11–15, 17. Compare the argument of Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, Understanding Al Qaeda: The Transformation of War (London: Pluto, 2007), pp. 63–73. This particular work, which (according to a favorable blurb on the rear cover) “provides a much-needed secular understanding of Al Qaeda” [!!!], is very misleading. 33 See, however, the cautionary note by Thomas Hegghammer, “Global Jihadism after the Iraq War,” Middle East Journal 60:1 (Winter 2006), p. 15: “the study of ideology is not an exact science and . . . our current concepts do not adequately capture the complexity of the phenomenon of Islamist militancy.” 34 Harris, “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology,” p. 23. 35 Ibid., p. 25, for this and the two quotes immediately in the following notes. 36 For al-Qa‘ida’s desire to unite the umma, restore the historic power of the “righteous” Caliphate, and wage jihad against “Crusaders” and other unbelievers, compare the remarks of Bin Ladin in his October 21, 2001 interview for al-Jazira, cited in Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World, p. 121; and those of al-Zawahiri in Fursan, part 11. 37 Harris, “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology,” pp. 32–3. 38 Ralph Peters, “When Devils Walk the Earth: The Mentality and Roots of Terrorism, and How to Respond,” in Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World, ed. Ralph Peters (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2002), p. 22. 39 Ibid., p. 23. 40 Ibid., pp. 27–9. 41 Ibid., p. 29. 42 Ibid., p. 30. Peters further argues, persuasively, that since the “health of any religious community can be gauged by the degree to which it rejects these bloody apostles of terror . . . the Islamic world’s acceptance of apocalyptic terrorists as heroes is perhaps the most profound indicator of its spiritual crisis and decay.” 43 For the rationalist view, see Friedman, America’s Secret War, pp. 34–6. Al-Qa‘ida’s own retrospective claims have been reported by journalist Fu‘ad Husayn in his recent biography of Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, Al-Zarqawi, al-jil al-thani li-al-Qa‘ida [Al-Zarqawi: Al-Qa‘ida’s Second Generation] (Beirut: Al-Khayal, 2005), as serialized in Al-Quds al-‘Arabi in May 2005, part 14; and by Bassam al-Baddarin, “Al-Qa‘ida Drew Up Working Strategy Lasting until 2020: Plans for Broad ‘Jihadist Front’ Covering Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon,” Al-Quds al-‘Arabi, 11 March 2005, citing an Internet text written by

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Muhammad Ibrahim Makkawi, “Al Qa‘ida’s Strategy to the Year 2020.” Compare Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of that same newspaper, in The Secret History of al-Qa‘ida (London: Saqi, 2006), pp. 221–2. Compare Gerges, Far Enemy, 191–199; Bari Atwan, Secret History of al-Qa‘ida, p. 180; and the recent book by Abu al-Walid al-Masri, a top Afghan Arab operative, Qissat al-afghan al-‘arab min al-dukhul ila afghanistan ila al-khuruj ma‘a Taliban [History of the Afghan Arabs from their Arrival in Afghanistan until their Departure with the Taliban], which was serialized in Al-Sharq al-Awsat in December 2004, part 2. Abu al-Walid is highly critical of Bin Ladin’s judgment. Similar critiques were leveled against Bin Ladin and other global jihadists by Islamists who have repudiated violence and by jihadists who prefer to focus their efforts on overthrowing the apostate regimes in their own countries. See Gerges, Far Enemy, pp. 200–14, 218–28, 234–340. As his videotaped comments at a private November 9, 2001 dinner in Jalalabad, together with his lieutenants and a Saudi militant and guest named Khalid al-Harbi, clearly indicate. See Ben Fenton, “Damned by his Gloating Smile,” The Telegraph, 14 December 2001. Bin Ladin’s most revealing remarks on that occasion are also cited by Fawaz A. Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007), pp. 206–9. See Christopher Blanchard, “Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology,” CRS [Congressional Research Service] Report, 16 November 2004, p. 5 (italics added). Compare also his further conclusions: “Experience suggests that Al Qaeda’s leaders believe that regular attempts to characterize Al Qaeda’s actions as defensive and religiously sanctioned will increase tolerance of and support for their broader ideological program. The identification of limited political objectives and the implication that their fulfillment will resolve broader grievances may help to mask the group’s underlying ideological agenda.” See ibid., p. 6 (italics again added). Michael Doran, “The Pragmatic Fanaticism of al Qaeda: An Anatomy of Extremism in Middle Eastern Politics,” Political Science Quarterly 117:2 (2002), especially pp. 177–82. Among those problematic assertions are (1) that “[f ]anaticism . . . played no role in al Qaeda’s miscalculation” in launching the 9/11 attacks (based on a disputable analogy between its decision and the miscalculations of the Arab powers in 1967 and Iraq in 1990); (2) that given their religious differences Bin Ladin’s documented cooperation with Hizballah and the Iranian regime in the mid-1990s was ascribable solely to “pragmatism” (ignoring the facts that a) the shaykh has long consciously sought to dampen doctrinal disputes between Sunni jihadists; and b) not all of the factions within that milieu were equally sectarian or hostile toward the Shi‘i); and (3) that al-Qa‘ida, being an allegedly “rational actor,” is “susceptible to the same kinds of analyses that . . . would apply to any other state or political movement in the Middle East” (as if there were no differences between the behavior of religious zealots, secular nationalists, and nationstates!!!). See ibid., pp. 177–8. For the general Muslim rejection of Western and other non-Islamic international laws, norms, and institutions, see Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), pp. 44–6. Furthermore, in theory, Muslims also reject standard Western conceptions of international relations, including notions such as the balance of power and Realpolitik. That this is also the jihadist and al-Qa‘ida view is apparent. See Mary Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 74–5. This is confirmed by the comments of Bin Ladin, who stated that “no sane Muslim should take his grievances to the United Nations” or any other international bodies, which are “infidel, man-made organizations.” See his December 1998 interview for al-Jazira, cited in Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World, pp. 67–8. Compare also the remarks of al-Zawahiri, who argues that the battle between unbelief and Islam is universal, and specifically identifies the U.N., multinational corporations, international communications and exchange systems, international news agencies and satellite channels, and international relief agencies, “which are being used as a cover for espionage, proselytizing, coup planning, and the transfer of weapons,”

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as being in the enemy camp. See al-Zawahiria, Fursan, part 11. Ironically, it is Islamic relief agencies that are often engaged in the sordid activities that he ascribes to their Western counterparts. Khadduri, War and Peace, p. 45. See, for example, Qur’an 9.33. Compare Qur’an 9.5, 9.124, 47.4. The second option was originally confined to believers in the Abrahamic faiths or “people of the book” (ahl al-kitab), that is, Christians and Jews, but was subsequently extended to Zoroastrians and, at various times and places, even polytheists (such as Hindus). In recent years there has been a lot of nonsense written on the subject of jihad, both by Muslims who have intentionally sought to conceal its nature and by naïve academic apologists for both Islam and Islamism. The term jihad is derived from the verbal root jahada, which means to “strive,” “struggle,” or “exert oneself,” especially in the path of Allah. While it is true that a “weak” hadith first cited in an 11th century text by al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, Tarikh Baghdad (which contradicts certain Qur’anic passages [e.g., 4:95], did not appear in any of the six canonical collections of ahadith [al-kutub al-sittah], and indeed has been dismissed as fraudulent, both by many earlier Islamic scholars and by contemporary Islamists), makes a distinction between the “greater jihad,” that is, struggling against the evil within oneself, and the “lesser jihad,” that is, waging armed struggle against unbelievers, and that medieval jurists recognized several distinct categories of jihad (e.g., jihad of the heart, of the tongue, of the hands, and of the sword), the fact remains that in both the ahadith and the early Muslim historical chronicles – apart from texts dealing exclusively with personal piety and Sufism – the term normally refers to armed struggle against unbelievers. See Emile Tyan, “Djihad,” in Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition [hereafter EI2], ed. Bernard Lewis et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983 [1965]), vol. 2, p. 538: “In law, according to general doctrine and in historical tradition, the djihad consists of military action with the object of the expansion of Islam and, if need be, of its defence . . . The notion stems from the fundamental principle of the universality of Islam: this religion, along with the temporal power which it implies, ought to embrace the whole universe, if necessary by force.” For excellent analyses of the evolution of the meaning of jihad, see Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2006); David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, NJ: Marcus Weiner, 1996). In any event, despite the existence of multiple meanings, it is undeniable that radical Islamists invariably use the term jihad to refer to an armed struggle against unbelievers, and also that they have repeatedly sought to transform jihad (bi-al-sayf ) from being a sixth “unofficial” pillar (rukn) of the Islamic faith into one of its official de jure pillars. For the imperialistic nature of the early Islamic conquests, as well as of current global jihadist objectives, see Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2006), especially pp. 1–8, 207–34. Although Karsh is a somewhat controversial figure, it is hard to deny that the term “imperialist” is applicable in this context. The cases that are most often cited as examples of this practice are Muhammad’s invitation to the Persians and Jews to adopt Islam under pain of invasion. See, for example, Muhammad ibn Isma‘il al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Jihad, 147–9, 151. However, the prototypical case is the invitation by a Muslim commander to the people of Yamama. See, respectively, Armand Abel, “Dar al-Islam,” EI2, vol. 2, p. 127; and Armand Abel, “Dar al-Harb,” EI2, vol. 2, p. 126. This bipartite division of the world seems to have first emerged during the ‘Abbasid period, specifically in the later eighth century. See Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and Ridwan al-Sayyid, “The Idea of Jihad before the Crusades,” in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001), p. 28.

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56 See, respectively, D. B. McDonald and Armand Abel, “Dar al-Sulh,” EI2, vol 2, p. 131; and Halil Inalcik, “Dar al-‘Ahd,” EI2, vol. 2, p. 116. 57 Tyan, “Djihad,” p. 539. Compare Rudolph Peters, “Jihad,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 8. This traditional view is clearly accepted by Bin Ladin, who in an October 21, 2001 interview for al-Jazira argued that the clash of civilizations between the dar al-Islam and the dar al-kufr (Abode of Unbelief ) is a reality proven in the Qur’an and ahadith of Muhammad, in contrast to the “fairytale” of “world peace” promoted by the West. Cited in Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World, pp. 124–5. 58 Phares, Future Jihad, pp. 49–50. 59 Ibid., p. 56. 60 Ibid. 61 Scheuer, Imperial Hubris, pp. 6–7. 62 Ibid., p. 8. In reality, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the jihadists are intrinsically and intransigently opposed to virtually every defining characteristic of modern Western civilization, including secularism (above all), pluralism, democracy, individual freedom (especially freedom of choice), materialism, and hedonism (which they regard as “immorality” and “decadence”). For an excellent overview, see Habeck, Knowing the Enemy, Chapter 4. Anything that they perceive as undermining Allah’s rule or sovereignty (hakimiyya), including man-made political systems of all types, is anathema to them. 63 He also fails to point out that Bin Ladin and his cohorts have consistently sought to manipulate the circumstances and terms under which jihad can legitimately be waged. See Gerges, Far Enemy, pp. 3–4. Note also that for the jihadists, as for most medieval jurists, forcibly recovering territories that were once under Muslim control but were subsequently lost to Islam is considered “defensive jihad.” Hence, if the jihadists sought to expel the Spaniards from Spain, the Serbs and Croats from the Balkans, the Russians from Turkic Central Asia, the Chinese from Uighur territory, the Christians from the southern Philippines, and the Indians from Kashmir and other Muslim-majority parts in northern India, from their point of view this would be considered “defensive” rather than “offensive” jihad. 64 For the penchant of the Islamists, and indeed Muslims in general, to believe in a host of absurd conspiracy theories, in the pejorative sense of that term, see Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). For more on the nature of conspiracy theories, see Jeffrey M. Bale, “Political Paranoia v. Political Realism: On Distinguishing between Bogus Conspiracy Theories and Genuine Conspiratorial Politics,” Patterns of Prejudice 41:1 (2007), pp. 45–60. However, the previous remarks are not meant to imply that U.S. policies toward the Muslim world have not often been foolish and counterproductive, or that Muslims do not have many legitimate complaints and grievances about those policies. 65 Compare Long, “Strategic Culture, al-Qaida, and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” 15–16. Still another benefit, according to al-Zawahiri, is that in the context of defensive jihad, “there are no rules or conditions” in the effort to “repulse the invading enemy who corrupts faith and the world . . . he must be expelled by all possible means.” In short, there are no limitations on the methods that might be employed by the mujahidin. See his “Jihad, Martyrdom, and the Killing of Innocents,” The Al Qaeda Reader, translated in ed. Raymond Ibrahim (New York: Broadway, 2007), p. 170. 66 See Usama b. Ladin, “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration to the West,” which has now been translated in ibid., p. 28. 67 Ibid., p. 31. 68 Ibid., p. 32. 69 Ibid., p. 54. A much more elaborate argument in support of terrorism can be found in the military treatise of Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, Da‘wa al-muqawwama, pp. 1374–8. Therein Abu Mus‘ab bitterly attacks Muslim scholars who criticize the jihadist employment of terrorism, argues that terrorizing the enemy is specifically sanctioned in the Qur’an and

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that assassinating enemy leaders is supported by the example of Muhammad, and draws a distinction between what he calls “blameworthy terrorism” (irhab madhmum), the “terrorism of falsehood [irhab al-batil] . . . which inflicts harm [on] and fear among the innocent without true cause,” and “praiseworthy [or blessed] terrorism” (irhab mahmud ), which is “carried out by the righteous that have been unjustly treated . . . [and] removes injustice from the oppressed . . . by terrorizing and repelling the oppressor.” See ibid., pp. 1374–5. Elsewhere, he proudly states “[y]es, we are terrorists towards God’s enemies” (1376), and later devotes a small section to the “strategy of deterrence through terrorism” (1391–1393). Scheuer, Imperial Hubris, p. xviii. See, for example, David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 2005), especially Chapters 6–9, which reveals that such literature is filled with apocalyptic notions stemming from the Christian, Jewish, and – perhaps most surprisingly – secular Western as well as the Islamic traditions; Timothy R. Furnish, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads, and Osama bin Ladin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), especially Chapters 4 and 6; and Jean-Pierre Filiu, L’Apocalypse dans I’Islam (Paris: Fayand, 2008), especially pp. 105–206, 291–289. For earlier Muslim apocalyptic conceptions, see the outstanding study by David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton, NJ: Darwin, 2002). The term mahdi (literally “the [rightly] guided one”) applies above all to the prophesied redeemer of Islam who is destined to emerge and transform the world into a perfect Islamic society before the Day of Resurrection (yawm al-qiyama), at which point he will fight alongside the returned Jesus (who is viewed by Muslims as a prophet of Islam whose Christian followers had mistakenly deified him and otherwise corrupted his authentic Islamic teachings) against the Dajjal (the Deceiver, i.e., Antichrist or false messiah). The word does not appear first in the Qur’an itself, but rather in early collections of ahadith that are considered reliable. See Wilfred Madelung, “AlMahdi,” EI2, vol. 5, pp. 1230–8; and Furnish, Holiest Wars, pp. 10–17. Usama ‘Azzam, “Are the Taliban and al-Qa‘ida those who will Raise the Black Banners?,” al-Da‘wa website, March 9, 2003. Cited by Reuven Paz, “Global Jihad and the Sense of Crisis: Al-Qa‘idah’s Other Front,” undated [but 2003] report, Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, 1, available at www. intelligence.org.il/g_j/rp_d_11_03.html. Ibid. Muntada al-Jinn wa al-‘Afarit website, available at www.jazanvoice.net/vb/forumdisplay.php?s=09676bd441afa83467c79a96220906c1&forumid=32. The name of the website means The Jinn [Spirits] and the Demons. Cited in ibid., p. 2. One work that openly discusses whether Bin Ladin might in fact be the Mahdi is by Ihyab al-Badawi and Hasan al-Zawami, Usama bin Ladin: Al-Mahdi al-muntazar am almasikh al-Dajjal? Harb al-fana’ wa barunat al-CIA [Usama bin Ladin: The Awaited Mahdi or the Dajjal? The War of Extermination and the Barons of the CIA] (Cairo: Madbuli al-Saghir, 2002). Moreover, Furnish argues that Bin Ladin is not only perceived by many Sunnis to be the Mahdi, but that he may even view himself in this way. See Furnish, Holiest Wars, pp. 156–60; and Timothy R. Furnish, “Bin Ladin: The Man Who Would Be Mahdi,” Middle East Quarterly 9:2 (Spring 2002), especially pp. 56–9. “Allah Has Not Assigned Our Umma to Know the Person of the Mahdi Prior to His Appearance,” Markaz al-Dirasat wa al-Buhuth al-Islamiyya website, February 2003, previously available at www.conrado.net/_vit_inf/print.php?id=989&ty=pr&img=no. Cited in ibid., pp. 2–3. Al-Suri, Da‘wa al-muqawwama, pp. 1517–99. Just prior to that chapter, he has a section concerning “omens” that forecast the eventual triumph of Islam, including the West’s abandonment of God and all of the spiritual ills that have allegedly resulted therefrom: intellectual alienation, mental illness, rampant sexuality, alcohol and drug use, high suicide and crime rates, “rebellion in phenomena like the Beatles and the hippies,” and “sexually deviant individuals [homosexuals].” See ibid., pp. 1502–16 [quoted passages from 1507]. The more rational grievances expressed by Bin Ladin have been usefully categorized and summarized by Scheuer in Imperial Hubris, pp. 11–4.

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79 This was essentially the objective of ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam, who sought to form a jihadist “rapid deployment force” that could come to the aid of Muslims being subjected to “infidel” military control. See Gerges, Far Enemy, 135–8. Compare also the key texts of ‘Azzam himself, such as Ilhaq bi al-qafila [ Join the Caravan] (London: ‘Azzam, 2001); and ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam, Al-difa’ ‘an ard al-muslimin, aham furud al-‘ayn [The Defense of Muslim Lands: The Most Important of the Individual Duties] (Jedda: Al-Mujtama’, 1987). Both can also be found online, with partial English translations, on the Islamist Watch Website: www.islamist watch.org. 80 For one illustrative example, note the Islamist obsession to recover control over al-Andalus, that is, Spain. See Arístegui, Yihad en España, especially pp. 119–55. Compare Bin Ladin’s remarks in his December 1994 letter to Saudi religious scholar ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Baz, head of the pro-regime “palace ‘ulama,” which he closes by asking Allah to help the umma re-establish tawhid (belief in the unity of God) in “stolen” Islamic lands such as Palestine and Spain. Cited in Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World, p. 14. 81 Phares, Future Jihad, pp. 134–5, 161–9. Compare al-Zawahiri, Fursan, part 11; and Bari Atwan, Secret History of al-Qa‘ida, pp. 222, who, on the basis of Muhammad Makkawi’s strategic treatise, notes that al-Qa‘ida intends to bring down the United States, just as it previously brought down the Soviet Union, after which an “ultimate, definitive military clash between a mighty Islamic army and the ‘nonbelievers,’ often mentioned by bin Ladin, will result in the victory and global dominance of the Caliphate. This is, at any rate, al-Qa‘ida’s dream.” Italics added. 82 For analyses of this crucial reorientation of jihadist objectives, based primarily upon internal jihadist sources, compare Gerges, Far Enemy, especially pp. 143–50; and al-Zayyat, Road to Al Qaeda, pp. 68–70. 83 Sayyid Abul Al‘a Maudoodi, Jihad in Islam (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 2001 [1939]), pp. 8–9, 19, 24. 84 Cited in Amir Taheri, Holy Terror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1987), unnumbered page directly before introduction. 85 See, for example, Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qur’an, trans. and ed. Adil Salahi (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 2003), vol. 8, p. 266. Compare the similarly intransigent views of Egyptian jihadist Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salam al-Faraj, author of al-Farida alGha’iba, cited in the translation of Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins (New York: Macmillan, 1986), p. 193. 86 Qutb, Shade of the Qur’an, vol. 7, pp. 133–4. 87 Ibid., vol. 8, p. 306. 88 Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Beirut and Damascus: International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations, 1978), p. 139. Compare al-Suri, Da‘wa al-muqawwama, pp. 201–2, though he claims it is the enemies of Islam that cannot abide the coexistence of Islam, rather than vice versa. 89 Abu Qatada, as cited in Philip Webster and Richard Ford, “Extremist Clerics Face Prosecution for Backing Terror,” [London] Times, 14 July 2005. In this passage the term Rome, although based upon an alleged prediction of Muhammad concerning the Muslim seizure of the city of Rome, refers not simply to the capital of Italy and the locale of the Papal States, but to Christendom as a whole, that is, the West. Similar sentiments concerning the coming “opening” (fath), that is., conquest, of the West appear frequently on jihadist websites. 90 Sayf al-Din al-Ansari, “Wa yimhaq al-kafirin [And Exterminate the Infidels],” Majallat al-Ansar 16 (10 August 2002), pp. 4–8, cited by Jonathan D. Halevi, “Al-Qaeda’s Intellectual Legacy: New Radical Islamic Thinking Justifying the Genocide of Infidels,” Jerusalem [Center for Public Affairs] Viewpoints 508 (1 December 2003), electronic 10–11. The ‘Ad and the Thamud were pagan Arab tribes that were totally destroyed by God because they both rejected the efforts of ancient Arabian prophets, respectively Hud (Hebrew ‘Eber) and Salih (Hebrew Shelah), to call them to abandon polytheism and embrace the one true God. Allusions to these stories can be found in the Qur’an 7, pp. 65–7, 11, pp. 58–9, and 26, pp. 124–5, 142–3. Note also that the term al-ansar (the

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supporters) has a very precise and historically important meaning for Muslims, in that it was the name given to Muhammad’s earliest supporters in the town of Medina, in contradistinction to the earliest Meccan Muslims who emigrated with him from Mecca to Medina in 622, who were known as al-muhajirun (the émigrés). Sayf al-Din al-Ansari, “Yi‘adhibuhum Allah bi-‘aydikum,” Majallat al-Ansar 16 (24 August 2002), pp. 4–9, cited in Halevi, “Al-Qaeda’s Intellectual Legacy,” p. 11. Cited in “Hamas MP/Cleric’s Friday Sermon: We Will Conquer Rome, the Two Americas, and Eastern Europe,” MEMRI, April, 14, 2008, available at www.memri.org/bin/articles/ cqi?Page=countries&Area=Palestinian&ID=SP189508. Given HAMAS’ origins as a militarized component of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as its bitter long-standing opposition to the secularism of the PLO (a genuine ethno-nationalist group), it is astonishing that many scholars continue to characterize HAMAS as a “nationalist” group rather than as a religiouslymotivated Islamist group. Although there is no doubt that HAMAS has pronounced nationalist elements in its ideology, which is hardly surprising due to the context within which it is operating, its agenda has always been and still remains primarily religious – to establish a strict, puritanical Islamic state in Palestine and thence expel the Israeli “occupiers” from the al-Aqsa mosque and surrounding regions, at which point certain less circumspect HAMAS leaders (such as al-Astal) evidently hope to continue waging “offensive” jihad until the rest of the world is subjected to Islam. For a secret Muslim Brotherhood plan to gain influence and eventual supremacy in the West via stealth and subversion, see Sylvain Besson, La conquête de l’Occident: Le projet secret des islamistes (Paris: Seuil, 2005), especially Chapters 1–2, 5–7. The actual document, entitled “The Project,” appears in French translation on 193–205. For the universalist and frankly imperialistic objectives of HT, it is sufficient to visit its website, which among other items contains PDF files of numerous pamphlets put out by the group. See www.hizb-ut-tahrir.org. Cited by Halevi, “Al-Qaeda’s Intellectual Legacy,” electronic 4. Cited by Oni Golan, “One Day the Black Flag of Islam Will Be Flying over Downing Street,” Jerusalem Post, 2 July 2003. Another al-Muhajirun member, Abu Yusuf, made the following alarming statement in 2004: “I would like to see the Mujahidin coming into London and killing thousands, whether with nuclear weapons or germ warfare. And if they need a safehouse, they can stay in mine.” Cited in David Cohen, “Terror on the Dole,” Evening Standard, 20 April 2004. This is the very same group that organized demonstrations in Britain in early 2006, ostensibly to protest the Danish cartoons satirizing Muhammad, at which marchers carried signs with messages such as “Islam Will Dominate the World,” “Exterminate Those Who Slander Islam,” “Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust,” “Freedom Go to Hell,” “Europe is the Cancer, Islam is the Answer,” and “Europe You Will Pay, Your 9/11 Is on Its Way!” Al-Zawahiri, Fursan, part 11. Note also that he is a vociferous advocate of the Islamic doctrine of “loyalty and enmity” (al-wala’ wa al-bara’), which enjoins eternal enmity toward, as well as dissociation from, unbelievers. See his treatise, “Loyalty and Enmity: An Inherited Doctrine and a Lost Reality,” in Al Qaeda Reader, ed. Raymond Ibrahim (New York: Broadway, 2007), pp. 66–115. This injunction derives from several rather explicit Qur’anic passages, including 3:28 and 5:51. Cited in Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World, p. 69. Shaykh Husayn b. Mahmud, “Let Them Find Ruthlessness in You,” Sada al-Jihad online magazine, April–May 2007. For English excerpts, see “Senior Al-Qaeda Sheik: ‘May Allah Send Someone Who will Kill them Even More Savagely . . . Tear their Hearts Out . . . Cut Their Heads Off, Tear Them Limb from Limb, and Shed Their Blood in Rivers,’” in MEMRI No. 1635, June 27, 2007, available at www.memri.org/bin/articles. cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP163507. Note, however, that Bin Mahmud points out that one of the benefits of ruthlessly killing the enemies of Islam is to deter others from attacking Muslims. Ibid.

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101 Sayf al-Din al-Ansari, “Ghazawat New York wa Washington,” Ghazwa 11 Sibtimbir: Kitab al-ansar li-muwajahat al-harb al-salibiyya, September 2002, pp. 10–1. In pre-Islamic Arabia, the noun of unity ghazwa (pl. ghazawat) referred to an “expedition, usually of limited scope, conducted with the aim of gaining plunder.” However, after the triumph of Islam, it was used specifically to refer to Muhammad’s expeditions against “infidels.” See T. M. Johnstone, “Ghazw,” EI2, 2, pp. 1055. 102 Cited in Alan Cullison, “Inside Al Qaeda’s Hard Drive,” Atlantic Monthly 294:2 (September 2004), p. 68. 103 Sulayman Abu Ghayth, “In the Shade of Lances: Why We Fight America,” which first appeared on jihadist websites in June 2002. Portions of this text have since been translated into English and published in The Al-Qaeda Documents, vol. 3, pp. 107–10 ed. Ben N. Venzke (Alexandria, VA: Tempest/IntelCenter, 2003). 104 The actual text was formerly available at www.al-fhd.com/rsayl/doc/rsayl.damar.doc. It has been usefully cited and analyzed by Reuven Paz, “Yes to WMD: The First Islamist Fatwah on the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” PRISM Special Dispatches 1:1 (May 2003), pp. 4–7. See the more extensive discussion in the section on possible WMD use. 105 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 294. Compare also pp. 55–6. 106 Here it may be worth briefly discussing the remarks of Norwegian Arabist Brynjar Lia concerning al-Qa‘ida’s rationality. At first sight, he seems to fall clearly within the “rationalist” camp: “In the aftermath of 9/11, it was commonplace to assert that alQa‘ida pursued no underlying strategic plan. The accepted argument was that the obsessive fanaticism of jihadi terrorists, their religious dogmas, their pursuit of martyrdom, and visceral hatred for the West made them blind, and their behavior was not rooted in any kind of rational strategy. While this school of thought still has numerous protagonists, a growing number of studies have already begun to debunk the myth of a non-existent al-Qa‘ida strategy.” See his Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 4. Even so, Lia also emphasizes that Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, the subject of his outstanding book, is atypical inasmuch as he was “a dissident, a critic, and an intellectual in an ideological current in which one would expect to find obedience rather than dissent, conformity rather than self-criticism, doctrinaire ideologues rather than introspective individuals,” and a person who “discarded traditional jihadi rhetoric about God’s promised victory in favor of brutal honesty, putting hard-nosed realism before religious wish-fulfillment and pragmatic long-term strategies before utopianism.” See ibid., pp. 3–4. Despite this, as will become clearer in the following notes, one can find many religiously based arguments and even some apocalyptic formulations in Abu Mus‘ab’s relatively pragmatic and “rational” writings. 107 See the extended discussion of al-Zawahiri, Fursan, part 11. 108 For example, Bin Ladin has explicitly stated that his goal was to “move, incite and mobilize the umma” until such time as it reached a “revolutionary ignition point.” See, respectively, “Usama Bin Ladin’s Message to Iraq,” Al-Jazira, 11 February 2003; and “Bin Ladin Interviewed on Jihad against U.S.,” Al-Quds al-‘Arabi, 27 November 1996. Both of these quotes are conveniently cited in Blanchard, “Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology,” 6. Compare the remarks of Bari Atwan, Secret History of al-Qa‘ida, p. 225: “Al-Qa‘ida wishes to foment a ‘clash of civilizations,’ with Christian fundamentalism opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, resulting in an eventual all-out war between the ‘believers’ and the kafir.” 109 See al-Zawahiri, Fursan, part 11. On this point, many analysts who otherwise disagree seem to concur. See, for example, the remarks of Sarah E. Zabel, “The Military Strategy of the Global Jihad,” U.S. Army, Strategic Studies Institute, Report, October 2007, pp. 6–7: “Strikes against U.S. interests are planned with the intention that they incur a military response. Thus, in addition to the destruction of the direct object of the attack, the jihadis also benefit from drawing U.S. forces into hostile territory, an expensive effort that makes them vulnerable to attrition. At the same time, the barefaced U.S. invasion . . .

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incites Muslim wrath against the invaders” (italics in original). Compare the illuminating remarks of al-Qa‘ida security chief Sayf al-‘Adl on the purposes of the 9/11 attacks, cited in ibid., p. 7. One should, however, keep in mind that claims like al-‘Adl’s were post-facto explanations designed to make the jihadists seem especially prescient. This was explicitly recognized by Bin Ladin himself. See his October 3, 2001 letter to Mullah ‘Umar, where he wrote: “Keep in mind that America is currently facing two contradictory problems: (a) If it refrains from responding to jihad operations, its prestige will collapse, thus forcing it to withdraw its troops abroad and restrict itself to U.S. internal affairs. This will transform it from a major power to a third-rate power, similar to Russia; (b) On the other hand, a campaign against Afghanistan will impose great long-term economic burdens, leading to further economic collapse, which will force America, God willing, to resort to the former Soviet Union’s only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan, disintegration, and contraction.” Cited in Cullison, “Inside Al-Qaeda’s Hard Drive,” 70. Phares, Future Jihad, pp. 166–8. For the factors involved in the U.S. failure to trap Bin Ladin’s fighters at Tora Bora, a military blunder of tremendous import, see Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2004). On the disastrous impact of the invasion of Iraq on support for global jihadism, see, e.g., Benjamin and Simon, Next Attack, pp. xiv, 31–50; and Gerges, Far Enemy, pp. 251–76. There is no doubt that jihadist leaders see the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a golden opportunity to “bleed” the Crusaders and eventually erect an Islamic state in the historic heart of the dar al-islam. See Hegghammer, “Global Jihadism after the Iraq War,” pp. 17–24. Hegghammer, “Global Jihadism,” p. 15. See, for example, al-Zawahiri’s comments on the potential geostrategic impact should the Caucasus fall into the hands of local and global jihadists: “The liberation of the Caucasus would constitute a hotbed of jihad (or fundamentalism as the United States describes it) and that region would become the shelter of thousands of Muslim mujahidin from various parts of the Islamic world, particularly Arab parts. This poses a direct threat to the United States represented by the growing support for the jihadist movement everywhere in the Islamic world. If the Chechens and other Caucasian mujahidin reach the shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea, the only thing that will separate them from Afghanistan will be the neutral state of Turkmenistan. This will form a mujahid Islamic belt to the south of Russia that will be connected in the east to Pakistan, which is brimming with mujahidin movements in Kashmir. The belt will be linked to the south with Iran and Turkey that are sympathetic to the Muslims of Central Asia. This will break the cordon that is struck around the Muslim Caucasus and allow it to communicate with the Islamic world in general, but particularly with the mujahidin movement.” See al-Zawahiri’s Fursan, part 7. Hegghammer, “Global Jihadism after the Iraq War,” pp. 16–17. For the fatawa of the radical ‘ulama, see the book by Shmuel Bar, Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical Islam and the Duty to Jihad (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2006). Ibid., p. 28. Sayf al-Ansar, “Hurub al-jil al-rabi,” Majallat al-Ansar 2 (28 January 2002). Compare also Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi, “Amrika wa mabadi’ al-harb: Bayna al-nazariyya ila altatbiq [America and the Principles of War: From Theory to Practice],” Majallat al-Ansar 24 (2 January 2003). Three unresolved questions concerning the texts cited are (1) whether they amount to different versions of the same basic strategy, which may well be the case; (2) whether they constitute hyper-rationalist post-facto analyses of what has already occurred that are designed retrospectively to display al-Qa‘ida’s supposed “prescience,” together with future optimistic prognostications; and (3) the extent to which they can be said to reflect al-Qa‘ida’s “official” strategy. The fact that they all surfaced around the same time period suggests that there was an effort by the group to make its strategic intentions known. See Abu Bakr Naji, Idarat al-tawahhush, pp. 11–22, for the general scheme, and 23–62, for specifics on how to manage the first two phases. Compare the brief analyses by

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Stephen Ulph, “New Online Book Lays Out al-Qaeda’s Military Strategy,” Terrorism Focus [ Jamestown Foundation] 2:6 (17 March 2005), pp. 4–6; Bruce Tefft, “Al-Qa‘ida Book on Managing Savagery,” Isralert (8 March 2005); and Jarrett M. Brachman and William F. McCants, “Stealing Al-Qa‘ida’s Playbook,” CTC [West Point Counterterrorism Center] Report, February 2006, pp. 6–10. This scheme echoes traditional guerrilla warfare strategies, which likewise involve weakening the enemy and rallying the masses, gradually establishing “liberated zones,” and then expanding those zones at the enemy’s expense until such time as the latter is fatally weakened. In short, this is little more than an Islamic version of the classic “oil spot” strategy. After the establishment of an Islamic state in the third stage, of course, Naji says that Muslims “will begin liberating the earth and humanity from the hegemony of unbelief and tyranny through the power of Allah.” See ibid., p. 61. See the analysis in Bari Atwan, Secret History of al-Qa‘ida, pp. 221–2. Compare alBaddarin, “Al-Qa‘ida Drew Up Working Strategy,” Al-Quds al-‘Arabi (11 March 2005). See Husayn, Al-Zarqawi, parts 14 and 15. This analysis may well represent a synthesis of the two texts cited in note 121, as opposed to being based on other, unspecified jihadist sources. Unfortunately, the author was unable to obtain a copy of the actual book, given its relative scarcity in Western libraries. Note, however, that the less histrionic jihadist proponents recognize that the hoped-for divinely ordained triumph of the umma over the West, above all America, may take decades if not centuries. See, for example, Qutub, Milestones, pp. 7–9; Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, interview, Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 23 January 2005. Ironically, because of the Bush administration’s terrible mistakes in Iraq, the initial phases of these projected schemes seem to be developing according to jihadist projections. Some of his analyses have been conveniently quoted verbatim in Michael Scheuer, “Assessing London and Sharm al-Sheikh: The Role of Internet Intelligence and Urban Warfare Planning,” Terrorism Focus 2:15 (15 August 2005), pp. 6–8. A total of 22 issues of Mu‘askar al-Battar were produced. Sayf al-‘Adl, “Planning Special Operations,” Mu‘askar al-Battar, 13 September 2004. For media reports on al-Qa‘ida’s alleged WMD activities, including the group’s efforts to obtain CBRN weapons or materials, see Kimberly McCloud et al., “Chart: Al-Qa‘ida’s WMD Activities,” Center for Nonproliferation Studies Website, available at http://cns. miis.edu/pubs/other/sjm_cht.htm. Note that this chart only covers the period up to mid-2004, and that many of the claims reported in various media outlets were never actually substantiated. Compare some of the entries in ibid.; Nic Robertson, “Disturbing Scenes of Death Show Capability with Chemical Gas,” CNN, 19 August 2002; Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgens, “A Computer in Kabul Yields a Chilling Array of al Qaida Memos,” Wall Street Journal, 31 December 2001; and Cullison, “Inside Al Qaeda’s Hard Drive,” pp. 61–2. Note also the recent story by Josh Meyer, “Al Qaeda Said to Focus on WMDs,” Los Angeles Times, 3 February 2008, which suggests that in the Pakistan frontier zone the group, under the auspices of its notorious CW expert, Midhat Mursi al-Sayyid ‘Umar (or Abu Khabab al-Masri), “has regenerated at least some of the robust research and development effort that it lost when the U.S. military bombed its Afghanistan headquarters and training camps in late 2001 . . . [and] is once again trying to develop or obtain chemical, biological, radiological or even nuclear weapons to use in attacks on the United States and other enemies.” For more on Abu Khabab, see Evan Kohlmann, “Abu Khabab al-Masri: A Master of Terror,” Counterterrorism Blog, 18 January 2006, available at http://counterterrorismblog. org/2006/01/abu_khabab_almasri_a_master_of.php. This individual was killed in South Waziristan by a CIA drone on July 28, 2008. See “Al Queda Confirms Death of Leading Commander Al-Masri,” Associated Press, 5 August 2008. Compare the alarmist views of Paul L. Williams in a series of books, including Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11 – What the Media and the Government Haven’t Told You (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004); The Al Qaeda Connection: International Terrorism, Organized Crime, and the Coming Apocalypse (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005); and The Day of Islam: The

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Annihilation of America and the Western World (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007), and the perhaps overly sanguine if not dismissive views of Robin M. Frost, Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11 (Abingdon and New York: Routledge/International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2005); and William R. Clark, Bracing for Armageddon? The Science and Politics of Bioterrism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially Chapter 10. For a sober assessment see Brian Michael Jenkins, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008). For an excellent short discussion of these matters, see Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner, “Killing in the Name of Islam: Al-Qaeda’s Justification for September 11,” Middle East Policy 10:2 (Summer 2003), especially pp. 85–90. Therein the authors further parse jihadist arguments concerning appropriate Muslim “rules of engagement and civilian targeting” by listing them under seven “conditions.” For more on these matters, see John Kelsay, Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 59–67; and John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University, 2007), especially 104–10. Kelsay emphasizes that classical Muslim treatises on war “exhibit a strong inclination toward a position one might characterize as ‘military realism,’” since once a war was determined to be “just,” that is, initiated to expand or defend the dar al-Islam, their authors were “willing to grant wide latitude to commanders in the determination of appropriate means” even though such latitude was not “total.” See ibid., 106, in his analysis of Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani’s famous treatise, the Kitab al-siyar. For modern debates between jihadists and their critics over the appropriate aims and means for waging jihad to “resist” the enemy, see ibid., 129–51. For explicit justifications for inadvertently killing other Muslims in the course of waging jihad and carrying out “martyrdom” operations, see al-Zawahiri, “Jihad, Martyrdom, and the Killing of Innocents,” 161–73; and Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, “The Return of Bin al-‘Alqami’s Grandchildren,” speech posted by al-Qa‘ida fi Bilad al-Rafidayn on jihadist message boards on May 18, 2005, originally available (among other sites) on the al-Hisba forum available at www.alhesbah.com/v/showthread.php?t=23027. For an English translation of key excerpts from the latter, see “Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi: Collateral Killing of Muslims Is Legitimate,” MEMRI No. 917, June 7, 2005, available at www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP91705. Note, however, that the Shi‘i are not even considered to be genuine Muslims by the most sectarian Sunni radicals, who therefore have no qualms about intentionally killing them. See “Leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq Al-Zarqawi Declares ‘Total War’ on Shi‘ites, States that the Sunni Women of Tel‘Afar Had ‘Their Wombs Filled with the Sperm of the Crusaders,’” speech translated in MEMRI No. 987, September 16, 2005, available at www.memri. org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP98705, wherein al-Zarqawi refers to the Shi‘i as rafidiyin (literally “rejectors [of the Truth]”), a term often applied by Sunni extremists to the Shi‘i. Such provocative arguments nonetheless generated considerable debate and even outright opposition from other, less sectarian Sunni Islamist circles. For the justifiability of intentionally targeting as well as inadvertently killing categories of “infidels” that Muslims are ostensibly forbidden to attack, see [al-Qa‘ida], “A Statement from Qa‘idat al-Jihad Regarding the Mandates of the Heroes and the Legality of the Operations in New York and Washington,” which was originally posted on the Markaz al-Dirasat wa al-Buhuth al-Islamiyya Website on April 24, 2002 – a text that unfortunately does not appear in the existing collections of English-language translations of al-Qa‘ida statements – see the discussion in Wiktorowicz and Kaltner, “Killing in the Name of Islam,” 76–92. For an example of Islamist opposition to the possible use of nuclear weapons against the United States, see Abu Zabadi, “Religious Grounds for [Launching] a Nuclear Attack,” al-Firdaws Website, April 12, 2007, some excerpts from which (and hostile responses to) can be found in “Is it Legitimate to Use Nuclear Weapons against the West? A Debate on an Islamist Forum,” MEMRI #1538, available at www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi? Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP153807.

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134 See Ibrahim, ed., Al Qaeda Reader, 201–2. 135 “American Al-Qaeda: U.S. Should Convert to Islam,” CNN (3 September 2006), available at www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/09/02/zawahiri.tape/index.html. Excerpts from this address, “An Invitation to Islam,” along with the actual tape, which was produced by al-Qa‘ida’s media company, al-Sahab, can be accessed at Laura Mansfield’s website, lauramansfield.com, available at www.lauramansfield.com/j/zawahiri090106.asp. 136 Adam Gadahn, “An Invitation for Reflection and Repentence,” trans. Laura Mansfield and posted in Jeffrey Imm, “Al-Qaeda’s Gadahn – Transcript of the January 6 Message,” Counterterrorism Blog, 7 January 2008, available at http://counterterrorismblog. org/2008/01/gadahn_010608_transcript.php. 137 Italics added. See Rahimullah Yusufzai, “Osama bin Ladin Lashes out against the West,” Time Magazine (11 January 1999), available at www.time.com/time/asia/asia/ magazine/1999/990111/osama1.html. Note that the last sentence cited in the previous paragraph does not appear on the Time site itself, but rather in an October 7, 2001 version of the interview posted on ABC News, available at www.islamistwatch.org/blogger/ localstories/05-06-03/ABCInterview.html. 138 Ibid. 139 This article has been translated as “Why We Fight America: Al-Qa‘ida Spokesman Explains September 11 and Declares Intentions to Kill 4 Million Americans with Weapons of Mass Destruction,” MEMRI Special Dispatch Series 388, June 12, 2002, available at www.memri.org/gin/printerfriendly/pf.cgi. All of the quotes in this paragraph have been drawn from that source. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid. 142 Nasir ibn Hamid al-Fahd, “Risala fi hukm istikhdam ‘aslihat al-damar al-shamil didh al-kuffar [A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction against Infidels],” May 21, 2003, originally available at www.al-fhd.com/rsayl/doc/rsayl.damar. doc. All the quotes in this paragraph are from this document. 143 Ibid. (italics added). 144 Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, “Message to the British and the Europeans – Its People and Governments – Regarding the London Explosions, July 2005,” posted on various jihadist websites in August 2005, cited by Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, p. 307. Oddly, another version of this “final” Abu Mus‘ab text does not include the passage referring to NBC weapons. See “Abu Musab al-Suri’s Final ‘Message to the British and Europeans,’” Global Terror Alert Website, August 2005, available at www.globalterroralert.com/ pdf/1205/abumusabeurope.pdf. 145 See Hamid Mir, “Osama Claims He Has Nukes: If US Uses N-Arms It Will Get Same Response,” Dawn [Karachi], 10 November 2001, available at www.dawn. com/2001/11/10/top1.htm. In this context, the term “retort” is obviously employed in the archaic sense of “repay.” 146 Cited in Peter L. Bergen, ed., The Usama bin Ladin I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 348. Mir also made a couple of other interesting remarks. First, he emphasized that the al-Qa‘ida leader spoke only about chemical and nuclear weapons, and that he explicitly denied that the group had any link to the post-9/11 Bacillus anthracis letter mailings in the United States. Second, when Mir expressed skepticism that al-Qa‘ida actually had nuclear weapons, al-Zawahiri replied that it was not difficult to purchase them: “If you have thirty million dollars, you can have these kind of [nuclear] suitcase bombs from the black market of Central Asia.” 147 Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, The Muslims in Central Asia and the Coming Battle of Islam, cited and translated by Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, p. 307. Note further that there has been much speculation about Abu Mus‘ab’s involvement, along with Abu Khabab al-Masri, in training jihadists in the use of poisons and chemicals at the Darunta camp. Compare ibid., pp. 299–304; and Paul Cruickshank and Mohamad Hage Ali, “Jihadist of Mass Destruction,” Washington Post, 11 June 2006. Here it is also worth pointing out that Abu Mus‘ab’s reference to former Soviet-controlled areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus as

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a likely future source for nuclear and biological materials is echoed in a letter prepared by Hasan al-Tajiki, the “fifth letter” in a file addressed to al-Qa‘ida’s African Corps and entitled “Hawla al-jihad fi al-qawqaz” [“Concerning Jihad in the Caucasus”], wherein the author argues that Chechen mafia gangs “could let the Muslims of the Caucasus defy ‘strategic impossibility’ and set an historical precedent by becoming the first movement to engage in guerrilla warfare armed with nuclear weapons,” since in theory nothing could “prevent the Chechen mafia from arming its people with nuclear weapons.” Elsewhere he claims that once nuclear weapons become a “people’s weapon” rather than one that is solely in the hands of the superpowers, “history will take a new course . . . ” See Harmony document AFGP-2002–600053, 38, 33, available at http://ctc.usma.edu/ aq.pdf/AFGP-2002-600053-Orig-Meta.pdf. Al-Suri, Da‘wa al-muqawwama, p. 1121. Cited by Bergen, ed., Usama bin Ladin I Know, pp. 342–3. These quotes were combined by Bergen after being drawn from the following two sources: “Al-Sharq al-Awsat Review of a Draft Copy of . . . ‘The Story of the Afghan Arabs’ . . . , Part 1,” Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 8 December 2004, p. 11; and “Al Qa‘ida’s Hawks Sought Weapons of Mass Destruction through Fighter Khattab in Chechnya, Part 2,” Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 9 December 2004, p. 15. See Harmony document AFGP-2002–001120, pp. 1–2, available from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, available at http://ctc.usma.edu/aq/pdf/AFGP-2002001120-Orig.pdf. In that same letter, he claims that al-Qa‘ida has already given some combat groups present in America and Europe the “green light to move.” See ibid., 1. The original Arabic text is no longer available online, but it has been translated both by Reuven Paz on the Israeli International Insitute for Counterterrorism in Herzliya’s Website as “The First Nuclear Threat against the United States,” available at http://212.150.54.123/spotlight/comment/cfm?id=861, and in the book by Williams, Day of Islam, pp. 13–14. Paz, introduction to “The First Nuclear Threat against the United States.” For an analysis of this communiqué from al-Ablaj, see Ben Venzke, “al-Qaeda/al-Ablaj Threat Assessment, volume 1.0,” IntelCenter report, 30 May 2003, p. 7, available at www. intelcenter.com/ATA-PUB-v1-0.pdf. Ibid., 6–7. Mahmud Khalil, “Report on An interview by Email with Abu Muhammad al-Ablaj, al-Qa‘ida Training Official,” al-Majalla, 27 June 2003, pp. 10–1, translation available at http://alphabetcity.blogspot.com/2003/06/al-ablajs-latest-rant-mahmud-khalil-of. html. Mahmud Khalil, “Al-Qa‘ida’s Abu Muhammad al-Ablaj on Bin Ladin, Weapons, U.S. Targets,” al-Majalla, 21 September 2003, translation available at www.whywar.com/ news/2003/09/21/alqaidas.html. Ibid. Mahmud Khalil, “Al-Qa‘ida’s al-Ablaj Warns ‘Zero Hour’ for Strike inside U.S. Has Been Set,” al-Majalla, 28 December 2003, translation available at www.whywar.com/ news/2003/12/28/alqaidas.html. Ibid. Such an attack on America never actually occurred within the period specified as “zero hour.” For example, al-Ablaj falsely claimed responsibility for the sudden failure of the electrical grid in parts of the United States and discussed an alleged al-Qa‘ida plan to cause a catastrophe by setting off bombs on earthquake fault lines or in volcanic zones within the United States. See, respectively, Mahmud, “al-Ablaj on Bin Ladin,” and Mahmud, “al-Ablaj Warns ‘Zero Hour.’” “Communique from the Office of Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri,” 22 December 2004, p. 6. Italics added. For translated excerpts, compare Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, p. 306; and “Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri and His Plan for the Destruction of America: ‘Dirty Bombs for a Dirty Nation’,” 11 July 2005, Global Terror Alert Website, available at www.globalterroralert. com/pdf/0705/abumusabalsuri.pdf. All of the quotes in this paragraph are from the latter source.

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162 Transcript of Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, “Jihad is the Solution” videotape, cited by Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 310–2. Of course, as per usual he justifies the adoption of such destructive weapons and extreme measures by claiming that the infidels are the aggressors who originally established the laws of “barbarous warfare.” 163 For Lia’s cautionary remarks, see ibid., 312. He also points out, quite rightly, that Abu Mus‘ab’s comments may have been designed to play on Western fears, and that the development of CBRN capabilities would require the kind of organizational centralization and hierarchy that is antithetical to his own emphasis on jihadist “leaderless resistance.” See ibid., p. 313. 164 See untitled document, Harmony document #AFGP-2002–000078, p. 9–11, available at http://ctc.usma.edu/aq/pdf/AFGP-2002-000078-Orig.pdf. 165 Al-Suri, Da‘wa al-muqawwama, p. 1400 (italics added). In the HTML Arabic version of the text, this description appears on page 1398. 166 The points emphasized in the next two paragraphs summarize the more extended arguments made in Bale and Ackerman, “How Serious is the ‘WMD Terrorism’ Threat?,” pp. 14–20. 167 This can be determined from even the most cursory perusal of the cases in the former Monterey WMD Terrorism Database, the data from which has now been incorporated into the forthcoming Profiles of Incidents involving CBRN and Non-state Actors (POICN) database at the University of Maryland’s START Center, which will become accessible to researchers in 2018. Therein one can find a plethora of schemes for using CBR agents, most of which involve poisoning or contaminating specific individuals and locales rather than generating mass casualties. 168 The definition of terrorism that I have been using for the past thirty-five years is as follows: “the use or threatened use of violence, directed against victims selected for their symbolic or representative value, as a means of instilling anxiety in, transmitting one or more messages to, and thereby manipulating the perceptions and behavior of wider target audience(s).” In short, terrorism is nothing more than a violent technique of psychological manipulation, and like all other techniques or tactics, it can be – and historically has been – employed by all sorts of protagonists and for a vast array of causes (e.g., by states, on behalf of states, and in opposition to states, by leftists, rightists, and centrists, by the religious and the irreligious, etc.). One qualification that needs to be made, however, is that the term terrorism should only be applied to asymmetric conflicts lest it be confused or conflated with efforts to influence wider audiences in the context of conventional military operations. Note also, in the interests of terminological precision, that the term terror refers to a psychological state marked by fear and anxiety, and must therefore be distinguished from terrorism. There is no such thing as a “terror network,” only a “terrorist network.” 169 Compare the remarks of Jonathan B. Tucker and Amy Sands, “An Unlikely Threat,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55:4 ( July–August 1999), p. 49, wherein some of the reasons for this disproportionate psychological impact are highlighted: “[CBW weapons] are generally invisible, odorless, tasteless, silent, and insidious,” and as a result they tend to “evoke deep human anxieties and instill a qualitatively different type of terror” than, say, sudden explosions. The same is true of radiological contamination. In contrast, nuclear devices are so massively destructive that they would have a huge psychological impact for that reason alone. 170 Indeed, far from being used primarily to inflict large numbers of casualties in catastrophic attacks, CBR materials have thus far generally been deployed in “tactical or discrete attacks” to achieve limited and far more practical effects. See Jonathan B. Tucker, “Lessons from the Case Studies,” in Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons, ed. Jonathan Tucker (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000), p. 267. 171 Compare Harris, “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology,” p. 33. Even Bari Atwan, whose portrayal of Bin Ladin and his group is relatively sympathetic, is forced to admit that “the prospect of opening negotiations with al-Qa‘ida seems remote indeed . . . [although] this

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notion should not be completely ruled out . . . The problem, of course, is that al-Qa‘ida’s demands are global. . . . ” See Secret History of al-Qa‘ida, p. 234. Bin Ladin occasionally gives the impression that he is reasonable and would stop attacking “unbelievers” if only they would cease and desist. In his October 21, 2001 interview for al-Jazira, for example, he said “if our violators stop violating us, there is a way out.” Cited in Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World, p. 126. However, his rare conciliatory statements seem to be designed primarily to sow confusion or dissension within “infidel” ranks. Cited in ibid., pp. 81, 92. Cited in ibid., p. 128. Cited in Taheri, Holy Terror, p. 16. Therein one can find numerous other quotations from Iranian clerics reflecting equally intolerant and extreme attitudes.

6 ISLAMISM AND TOTALITARIANISM1

“A state of [the Islamist] sort cannot evidently restrict the scope of its activities. Its approach is universal and all-embracing. Its sphere of activity is coextensive with the whole of human life. It seeks to mould every aspect of life and activity in consonance with its moral norm and programmes of social reform. In such a state, no one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private. Considered from this perspective the Islamic state [i.e., the Islamist state] bears a kind of resemblance to the fascist or communist states.” Sayyid Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi2

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and even more so since the spectacular terrorist attacks by Qa‘idat al-Jihad (The Base or Foundation of the Jihad) against the United States on 11 September 2001, there has been an ever-growing flood of academic and journalistic publications focused on radical currents of Islam. Although such a focus is clearly warranted given the asymmetric threat that global jihadist groups continue to present to the United States, European countries, and other nations that are crucial pillars of the current international political order (such as Russia, India, and China) – and that locally oriented jihadist groups still pose to incumbent regimes in the Muslim world – much of that literature is arguably problematic if not seriously flawed, sometimes from a basic factual standpoint but even more commonly from a conceptual point of view. Indeed, one might say that anyone endeavouring to learn more about radical Islam will soon find themselves caught between the Scylla of “Islam bashing” and the Charybdis of “Islamist apologism,” two conceptual “monsters” that have only served to obscure the real nature of Islamism and jihadism. In between, but much closer to the latter interpretive pole, lies the problem of “Islam apologism.”3 It is the purpose of this article to highlight these complex issues and, above all, to help clarify the nature of Islamism itself.

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“Islam bashing” nowadays normally takes the form of conflating Islam, one of the world’s most historically important and influential religions, with Islamism, an intrinsically radical modern Islamic political ideology whose distinguishing characteristics will be clarified further in this chapter.4 Or, to be more precise, “Islam bashers” tend to attribute all of the regressive, bellicose, and other undeniably negative characteristics associated with Islamism and its jihadist components to Islam in general.5 The allegation is, explicitly or implicitly, that such characteristics are intrinsic to Islam itself, and therefore that Islamism and jihadism are simply logical extensions – or simple applications in practice – of the authentic tenets and core values of Islam.6 Although it is certainly true that Islamism and its jihadist variants do indeed derive from specific interpretations of Islam, most of which are quite orthodox and hence arguably legitimate whereas some are instead highly idiosyncratic, what the “Islam bashers” fail to acknowledge is that these particular interpretations are by no means the only possible interpretations of core Islamic doctrines, traditions, and values, nor are they necessarily the most authentic, valid, or widely shared interpretations.7 Indeed, the extent to which the interpretations of various Islamist and jihadist ideologues are legitimate is currently the subject of highly charged and often polemical debates amongst recognized scholars of Islamic doctrine and law (the shari‘a). Hence the “Islam bashers” adopt a grossly oversimplified and indeed distorted position concerning Islam that would be akin to viewing the political ideology of Christian Reconstructionism, which is based upon a literalist, intolerant, puritanical, and theocratic interpretation of the Old Testament, as identical to Christianity in general.8 In part as a reaction against this “Islam bashing” tendency, which has oft been driven by prejudicial conservative or right-wing Christian religious dogmas and has unfortunately become more pronounced in the wake of 9/11, and in part due to the hegemony of certain corrosive fads characteristic of the academic study of the Middle East, there has been a widespread tendency amongst academicians in the West not only to whitewash Islam in general, but also – something which is far worse – to apologize for Islamism itself.9 One illustration of the former is the frequent assertion that Islam is a “religion of peace,” despite its long and well-documented history of conquering, subjugating, and aggressively Islamizing huge portions of the world. It is also true, of course, that Islam has always embodied and espoused a complex combination of both tolerant, humanitarian sentiments and intolerant, bellicose attitudes, one of which often predominated depending upon the specific historical context. In this respect Islam has been similar to Judaism and Christianity, two other monotheistic religions that emerged from the same ancient Near Eastern religious tradition. One must therefore ask a hard question: on the basis of what possible criteria can one make the argument that Islam is intrinsically or exclusively a religion of peace (or, for that matter, that it is intrinsically or exclusively a war-like religion, as the “Islam bashers” have generally argued)? Sadly, most of the pundits who peddle this comforting mantra about Islam being a peaceful religion, the implication of which is that radical currents of Islam are totally unorthodox if not heretical, provide little or no evidence to support their extraordinarily one-sided claims, which are regularly being refuted by the actual course of events in the present era.10

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A second variety of “Islam apologism” is the view that all religions are equally prone to produce extremists, a notion that is clearly not supported by the historical record.11 Although virtually all religions are theoretically capable of producing extremists, and most have done so at some point in the distant or recent past, some religions seem to be far more prone to do so than others. No knowledgeable person would argue, for example, that Jainism or Taoism is as likely to produce violent extremists as members of numerous other religions. Indeed, the adherents of pantheistic and polytheistic religions are frequently better able to co-exist with the followers of other religions because, being generally less doctrinaire and sectarian than monotheists, they are more capable of syncretistic borrowing. Thus the ancient Greeks and Romans, who embraced polytheistic religions consisting of a large pantheon of gods with anthropomorphic characteristics, were often willing and able to incorporate the deities of other peoples they encountered into their own pantheons, thereby avoiding the unnecessary generation of religion-based hostility and conflict. In marked contrast, the three Near Eastern monotheistic religions are almost bound to engender animosity or conflict, since their followers generally believe that only their God is the true god, that all other gods are false gods, and that anyone who does not convert to their religion or accept their God is consigned to Hellfire for eternity. Such an attitude is scarcely conducive to the establishment of peaceful, harmonious relations with the followers of other religions.12 Nor is this the end of the matter. One must also make a distinction between missionary monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam and non-missionary monotheistic religions like Judaism. Missionary monotheistic religions insist that it is the duty of their followers to spread their faith throughout the world, whether by means of proselytizing and/or by having recourse to the sword, since they believe that it is meant for all of mankind rather than only a select ethno-cultural community. This attitude is almost guaranteed to generate friction or bring them into outright conflict with the adherents of other religions. In contrast, non-missionary religions, monotheistic or otherwise, believe that their small community has been specifically chosen by God for some important role, and thus not only do not generally try to convert others to their religion but typically even go out of their way to make it difficult for non-believers to convert. Such an attitude creates a host of other intractable social, political, and cultural problems, including excessive insularity and cliquishness, but it is less likely to produce open conflict through the insistence that others adopt the faith whether or not they wish to. Moreover, one final factor distinguishes Islam from Christianity that has arguably caused it to adopt a rather more bellicose attitude toward non-believers – the astonishing initial political and military successes of the early Islamic community and the fact that Muhammad, who as the “seal of the Prophets” and the leader of that community, quickly became a venerated exemplar for other Muslims. It should not be forgotten that Muhammad personally participated in over twenty military campaigns, both against the leading families in Mecca and other caravan towns and against recalcitrant Bedouin nomadic tribes from the interior desert regions of the Arabian Peninsula. Hence unlike Jesus and the early Christian communities, which

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were persecuted for centuries and thus were arguably compelled to adopt a tolerant, pacifistic, non-threatening veneer and to “render [temporal authority] unto Caesar” in order to survive, the early Islamic umma only remained a small, vulnerable group subject to persecution by the Meccan authorities for a period of a dozen or so years, prior to the flight of Muhammad and his muhajirun companions to Medina. From that point on, he and the growing Muslim community and their Medinan allies were able first to check and then defeat their Quraysh rivals from Mecca whilst rapidly expanding their control over other regions of the peninsula. Such a rapid and spectacular trajectory of success, made possible by a series of victorious military campaigns, resulted in a significant shift in the nature of the Qur’anic revelations inasmuch as the tone of the Medinan suras became far more intolerant and bellicose vis-à-vis unbelievers, including other so-called “people of the book” (ahl al-kitab), than that of the earlier Meccan suras. Since an influential interpretation of Islamic theology holds that whenever and wherever they conflict, the later Medinan suras take precedence over those earlier Meccan suras, which is known as the doctrine of “abrogation” (naskh), the jihadists embrace the idea that the early tolerant and peaceful revelations dating from the Meccan period have been abrogated by certain intolerant and warlike passages dating from the Medinan period – especially the so-called “sword verse” (9:5) – which obviously serve to justify their ongoing prosecution of armed struggle against unbelievers ( jihad bi al-sayf ).13 Such belligerent attitudes were further hardened as the pace of Muslim military conquests continued, leading to the destruction of the Sasanid Persian empire, the retreat of the Byzantine empire to the Anatolian heartland, and the rapid subjugation of vast amounts of territory, ranging from southern Spain to most of North Africa, from the Iranian plateau to broad swaths of the steppes of Central Asia, from northern India to the littoral areas of eastern Africa, followed by the conversion of millions to Islam and the establishment of a great civilization under the late Umayyad and ‘Abbasid dynasties. This not surprisingly led to the codification, in the late eighth and ninth centuries, of the classical Muslim conception of international relations whereby the world was sharply divided between the “realm of Islam” (dar al-islam), those territories governed by the shari‘a, and the “realm of war” (dar alharb), those territories not governed by Islamic law. According to this notion, it was the duty of Muslims to expand the “realm of Islam” at the expense of the “realm of war” until the entire world was brought under the aegis of the shari‘a, a notion that officially amounted to a doctrine of perpetual war against “infidels,” who were to be given the stark options of converting to Islam or fighting (or, in the case of the “people of the book,” of converting to Islam, retaining their religion in exchange for the paying of a poll tax [ jizya] signifying their subordinate status as “protected ones” [dhimmi], or fighting).14 Although in practice Muslims were soon forced to adapt and adjust to reality by developing other, less provocative notions due to shifting and disadvantageous correlations of military power, such as that of the “realm of truce” (dar al-sulh), these latter notions were regarded as purely temporary ceasefires or cessations of combat that would eventually be rescinded when the triumphant march of Islam resumed.15 Although most Muslims nowadays recognize that such a

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Manichean division of the world is both inappropriate and unrealistic, it is this very same dualistic and belligerent doctrine that has been enthusiastically embraced by contemporary jihadists, who argue that more moderate interpretations of Islam, perhaps above all by promoting tolerant and peaceful relations between believers and non-believers, violate classical Islamic doctrines that authorize and indeed mandate the prosecution of armed struggle against infidels until such time as Islam achieves dominance over the entire world.16 In short, one could certainly make a strong case that Islam, due to its peculiar and in many respects extraordinary pattern of historical growth, has often been more prone to adopt a hostile and belligerent attitude toward non-believers even than other missionary monotheistic religions, and much more so than the majority of pantheistic and polytheistic religions. For this very reason, it is likewise arguably more prone to produce violent extremists, as is painfully obvious in the present era. That does not mean, of course, that other religions do not also assume violent forms or that these intolerant and bellicose interpretations of Islamic doctrine cannot be effectively challenged and successfully countered by more tolerant and peaceful interpretations, which also find scriptural support in the earlier suras of the Qur’an. A third form of “Islam apologism” is the argument that Islamism has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. Marc Sageman, for example, has asserted that “global Islamist terrorism [is] utterly distinct from Islam.”17 Although Sageman has made some useful contributions to understanding jihadism, this particular argument is completely absurd inasmuch as Islamism is a radical political ideology that is explicitly based upon an unusually strict, puritanical interpretation of Islamic doctrine. Hence Islamism, including jihadism, is inconceivable without reference to Islam, just as Christian Reconstructionism is inconceivable without reference to Christianity. If “Islam bashing” and “Islam apologism” are both unwarranted and problematic, even less justifiable are the inexplicable and often tortuous attempts by both Westerners and Muslims to whitewash and apologize for Islamism, a tendency that is all too common amongst academic specialists on the Middle East. The most common form of “Islamist apologism” is the insistence that there are “moderate” forms of Islamism as well as radical forms.18 Here one must ask two more hard questions: in what way is Islamism truly moderate, and in what possible way can it become so? Can Islamism really be said to be “moderate,” attitudinally, or behaviorally, in relation to, say, the Copts in Egypt, the Christians in Nigeria, the Baha’i in Iran, atheists, homosexuals, or Westernized women in Muslim countries? There are of course innumerable variants of Islamism, just as there are innumerable variants of communism and fascism, but as will be clarified below, all of those variants share certain fundamental views that are intrinsically radical and therefore, by definition, cannot be justly characterized as moderate. Even so, one can and indeed should draw a legitimate distinction between two different types of moderation: moderation with respect to goals and moderation with respect to means, and in this sense one can argue that Islamist movements that reject violent means are more “moderate,” relatively speaking, than those that do not, i.e., the jihadists. However, even those Islamists who eschew or reject violence as their preferred tactic cannot be

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said to espouse truly moderate goals, and in that sense one cannot accurately speak of “moderate” forms of Islamism with respect to their ultimate aims. A second form of “Islamist apologism” promotes the idea that Islamism is essentially a new type of “democratic movement from below,” a kind of justifiable reaction against the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that unfortunately hold sway throughout most of the Muslim world.19 This raises yet another hard question: how is it that an intrinsically anti-democratic and thoroughly regressive anti-modernist ideology like Islamism can be construed as having inspired a “democratic” popular movement simply because it has harshly criticized and bitterly opposed various types of undemocratic incumbent regimes? That would be equivalent to arguing that Marxism-Leninism and fascism, two other intrinsically anti-democratic and totalitarian ideologies, somehow managed to inspire the formation of genuine “democratic movements from below” simply because they leveled serious critiques of and arose in opposition to authoritarian and/or corrupt regimes in their respective countries. The sad truth is that Islamist opposition to the authoritarian regimes in places like Egypt and Algeria, whether violent or non-violent, has never arisen primarily because the Islamists are troubled morally or philosophically by the fact that those regimes are “authoritarian” and “undemocratic” – so too are the Islamists, even the allegedly “moderate” ones – but rather because they consider those states to be “apostate” or “un-Islamic,” as well as because the very same regimes have not hesitated to carry out harsh repressive measures against Islamist groups.20 Nevertheless, all too many of today’s supposedly learned commentators have inexplicably sought to miraculously transform indisputably anti-democratic ideologies and the movements they have inspired into ostensibly “democratic movements from below,” just as medieval alchemists once foolishly sought to transform base materials into precious metals of great value. In both cases, such efforts are in the long run doomed to failure, as is the pursuit of national or international security policies based on making alliances with purportedly “democratic” Islamists.21 The grim truth is that various Western powers have been forging covert geopolitical alliances with Islamists and even jihadists for decades, starting in the 1950s when efforts were first made to collaborate secretly with elements of the Muslim Brotherhood to weaken the secularized and allegedly “pro-Soviet” Arab nationalist regimes of Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir in Egypt and, later, the Ba‘thist regime in Syria. Nor were such covert alliances made only with “moderate” non-violent Islamists, as was demonstrated by the large-scale U.S. military support provided to the Afghan mujahidin (who, absurdly, were reportedly characterized by the Reagan Administration – along with factions of the Nicaraguan contras led by former security personnel from the recently overthrown Somoza dictatorship – as the “moral equivalents of the American founding fathers”).22 Every single one of these cases, even those regarded as “successful” like the Afghan jihad, generated very significant negative “blowback” for the United States and its Western allies, just as earlier covert postwar alliances with intrinsically anti-democratic groups such as former fascists usually did.23 Yet these instructive precedents have generally been ignored, and therefore have not prevented either naïve Western academicians or “realist” former intelligence

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officers from promoting future alliances with allegedly “moderate” or “democratic” Islamist movements.24 A third and related form of “Islamist apologism” is that Islamism, having embodied or at least exhibited supposedly “democratic” and “moderate” forms, can even be seen as an Islamic form of “liberation theology.”25 So it is that an utterly reactionary movement that has sought to suppress personal and collective freedom everywhere that it has assumed any degree of power or control, often violently, has once again been transmogrified by some observers – in a truly Orwellian manner – into a movement of genuine liberation. If the historical record is indicative, no Islamist movement has ever “liberated” anyone other than like-minded religious fanatics – unless one equates “liberation” with the suppression of religious diversity, moral “deviance,” and political dissent, the restriction of minority and women’s rights, the de jure or de facto repudiation of genuine democratic values, and the more or less systematic attempt to control both the external behavior and the very consciousness of believers – and no Islamist regime is ever likely to, either, at least not without jettisoning its core Islamist doctrines.26 To claim that such movements are “progressive” in any way, simply because they oppose Western hegemony, defies all logic. After all, the Italian Fascists and Nazis were also bitterly opposed to AngloAmerican, French, and Soviet “imperialism,” yet no well-informed academician would ever claim that they were a force for “liberation.” Yet that is how some are nowadays portraying the Islamists.27 A fourth form of “Islamist apologism” is the bizarre claim that the “Islamic threat,” terrorist or otherwise, does not really exist or that, at the very least, it has been greatly exaggerated.28 Here it should be noted that during the 1990s, at the very moment in which jihadist terrorism was assuming increasingly dangerous forms, both with respect to its operational capabilities and its geographical extension, high-profile academic figures such as John Esposito and Bruce B. Lawrence were producing books arguing that attempts to associate Islamists with violence were unfair and that the terrorist threat from this quarter was being unjustifiably hyped by Western commentators.29 Similar arguments about the supposedly nonexistent “Islamic danger,” whether from Muslims in general or Islamists, were likewise made by many other commentators, including several in Europe.30 One might have thought that the ongoing escalation of global jihadist terrorist attacks, which culminated in the devastating assaults on 9/11 but have since afflicted many other countries, would have caused many of these “nay-sayers” to rethink their positions and offer public mea culpas, but the ever-increasing ferocity and scope of jihadist terrorism has instead only resulted in the appearance of still more books seeking to minimize the terrorist threat from this quarter and/or insisting that this “construct” has been developed primarily to provide a pretext to justify “imperialist” aggression.31 Having identified the chief interpretive minefields that currently beset the study of radical Islam, whether these embody attitudes that are unduly hostile or inordinately sympathetic to Islam, it is now time to clarify what Islamism actually is. To boil it down to the absolute basics, Islamism can be defined as a right-wing, theocratic,

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totalitarian, and Islamic supremacist political ideology, based upon a strict, literalist, and puritanical interpretation of Islamic scriptures and Islamic law, which has both revolutionary and revivalist features. It can be described as revolutionary because, in order for the Islamists to achieve their stated objectives, the existing international world order would have to be fundamentally transformed if not overturned, either wholly or in part.32 It can be characterized as revivalist because the Islamist goal is to restore the pure, pristine Islamic community that supposedly existed at the time of Muhammad and his companions (sahaba), as well as the first two generations of their successors, the so-called “virtuous forefathers” (al-salaf al-salih) of the faith, set the Islamic umma back on the “straight path” (al-sirat al-mustaqim) from which it has allegedly deviated, transform the “barbarous” ( jahili) contemporary world that is now governed by “satanic” man-made laws and institutions (including democracy), and ultimately extend Allah’s sovereignty (hakimiyyat Allah) over the entire planet by conducting missionary activity (da‘wa) and/or waging armed struggle ( jihad) against “hypocrites,” “apostates,” “tyrants,” “polytheists,” and “unbelievers.”33 Although Islamism is a very diverse and often sectarian ideological milieu, one can nonetheless identify four essential beliefs that are characteristic of all Islamist ideological currents and movements, both Sunni and Shi‘i: an outright rejection of Western secular values, an intransigent resistance to any and all forms of “infidel” political, economic, social, and cultural influence over the Muslim world, a pronounced hostility toward less committed and militant Muslims (who at worst are denounced as “apostates” or even “unbelievers” [the process of takfir], making them potential targets of violence), and an insistence on the establishment of an Islamic order (al-nizam al-islami) or Islamic state (al-dawla al-islamiyya) governed by a rigid, puritanical application of the shari‘a. Since these particular ideas are inherently radical, one cannot legitimately draw a meaningful distinction between “moderate” and “radical” Islamists, at least not in terms of the Islamists’ ultimate objectives.34 Of course, important distinctions do have to be drawn between Islamists based on the aforementioned means or methods that they choose to pursue in order to come to power and promote their agendas. Some employ what can be referred to as the “gradual Islamization from below” strategy, which involves slowly colonizing and aggressively Islamizing civil society by establishing a host of interventionist front groups, as well as “making a long march through the institutions” by infiltrating the state apparatus, a strategy that the Muslim Brotherhood refined and primarily resorted to throughout most of its history. Others instead rely on what can best be characterized as the “violent Islamization from above” strategy, which involves seizing state power via an armed putsch and thence forcibly establishing a totalitarian, theocratic Islamic state (which is favored, almost by definition, by jihadist groups). Still others alternate between both strategies (e.g., certain Islamist groups with distinct “political” and “military” wings, like HAMAS and Hizballah [The Party of God]), which are therefore not mutually exclusive. In all cases, however, the Islamist objective is to establish an Islamic state or an Islamic order governed in accordance with a strict, puritanical interpretation of the shari‘a, a goal that is certainly not “moderate” regardless of the means employed to achieve it. Finally, one must distinguish

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between jihadist groups with a local or national focus, i.e., those that are fighting the so-called “near enemy” (al-‘adu al-qarib), whether they be “infidels” ruling Muslimmajority territories or “apostate” Muslim regimes in their own countries, and those with a global agenda that are determined to attack the “far enemy” (al-‘adu al-ba‘id ), above all the West, such as Qa‘idat al-Jihad and its affiliates.35 It follows from this that Islamists – as defined in the previous paragraph – cannot be genuinely democratic in terms of their underlying values, first because they view democracy as a “satanic” political system devised by Western “unbelievers” that substitutes the sovereignty of man in place of that of Allah and hence is not in accordance with what they regard as authentic Islamic theological and legal precepts – or, at best, as a simple administrative mechanism that is compatible with the “Islamic” institution of shura (consultation) as long as it is restricted in its scope and subordinated fully to the tenets of the shari‘a (which they interpret strictly) – and second because they are monists rather than pluralists inasmuch as they believe that there is only one, proper, divinely inspired and divinely sanctioned way of organizing human relations.36 Since “truth” and “falsehood” cannot be allowed to co-exist on this earth (as Sayyid Qutub and other Islamist ideologues have often emphasized), and all Muslims are responsible for “enjoining the good and forbidding evil,” individuals must not be granted too much personal freedom lest they be tempted to “abuse” that freedom by consciously choosing not to conform to Allah’s will. This intrinsic theological and philosophical opposition to democracy does not mean, of course, that various Islamist groups have not disingenuously proclaimed their acceptance of democratic rules and cynically exploited democratic processes and procedures, such as participating in elections and forming temporary coalitions with other parties, simply in order to facilitate their accession to power, just as other monists and totalitarians like the communists and fascists had periodically done in past eras. However, it would be a terrible mistake to confuse the Islamist manipulation and exploitation of democratic procedures and institutions with an authentic Islamist commitment to democratic values, as many observers in the West have inexplicably done.37 As other observers have rightly noted, Islamism (provided that is not defined imprecisely or overly broadly) can in fact be described as a totalitarian ideology, and Islamist movements inspired by those ideologies can likewise be characterized as totalitarian.38 Some will no doubt object that since the term “totalitarianism” was first developed in post-Enlightenment and indeed post-industrial Europe to describe new types of secular revolutionary ideologies with utopian, world transformative agendas, it cannot be legitimately applied to an Islamic religio-political context where the secularization processes associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment did not occur, at least not until the West began encroaching militarily, politically, economically, and above all culturally upon the Muslim world.39 However, like similar arguments that the term “fundamentalism” is not applicable elsewhere simply because it was first used to describe a Protestant Christian movement that was institutionalized in the United States during the early twentieth century, such an argument is problematic if not spurious. After all, if one

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were to follow that type of restrictive terminological logic to its ultimate conclusions, no term that was specifically developed to refer to or describe a phenomenon occurring in one society (or perhaps in one larger cultural region) could ever legitimately be extended to apply to similar phenomena in other societies, in which case the term “democracy” would have to be restricted to the partial but direct form of democracy in ancient Greece instead of being applied to modern Western representative democracy. Likewise, the term “fascism” would have to be restricted solely to the movement and regime in Benito Mussolini’s Italy instead of being applied to similar movements or regimes in other European and non-European nations.40 Moreover, the essence of totalitarianism does not lie in the specific form taken by the Bolshevik or Nazi states, but rather in the obsessive desire of political extremists of whatever type to exert extraordinary levels of control over both the outward behavior and the inner thoughts of those they claim to represent or someday hope to rule over. On that basis alone, Islamism can be characterized as totalitarian. However, that is not all. In contradistinction to pre-modern Islamic revivalist movements and perhaps also to some Islamic fundamentalist movements – if any of the latter can be said to pre-date modernity, which is the subject of controversy and considerable debate – Islamism is itself a product of modernity.41 For one thing, Islamist movements not only arose in the Muslim world after the political and intellectual impact of the West had been clearly felt, but also after major structural processes were underway that significantly transformed traditional societies in the region, such as industrialization, urbanization, and the development of “mass society.”42 A strong case can be made that Islamism, including its ability to mobilize a mass base of support, would have been inconceivable in the absence of those major social and economic changes. Moreover, Islamism arose specifically in opposition to the multidimensional influence exerted by the West on the Islamic world, including the occupation of Muslim territory by colonial powers and the resulting rule by those powers’ actual or alleged local “agents,” as well as – like earlier Islamic revivalist movements – in opposition to what its ideologues regarded as “corruptions” of or “deviations” from pure Islam. Hence Islamism is indisputably a post-Enlightenment anti-modernist movement.43 For another, despite their seemingly absolute rejection of Western values and their claims to be purely Islamic in inspiration, several Islamist leaders and thinkers were strongly influenced by and indeed borrowed considerably from modern Western political ideologies and movements such as nationalism, communism, and fascism, in particular their techniques of organization (the establishment of front groups and parallel hierarchies), propaganda, ideological indoctrination, and mass mobilization. Sayyid Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi went so far as to openly claim that Islam – read Islamism – was a “revolutionary party” comparable to communism and fascism, Hasan al-Banna was clearly influenced by fascist ideas and organizational techniques, and even the ostensible anti-Western puritan Sayyid Qutub devoted considerable space to emphasizing the vitally important role of the Islamist “vanguard” (tali ‘a) in organizing, mobilizing, and properly “educating” Muslims.44 Although the term tali ‘a does appear in authentic Islamic religious sources, it is hard

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to ignore the similarities between Qutub’s application of the term and Vladimir Lenin’s elitist concept of the revolutionary “vanguard party,” which was also borrowed enthusiastically by the fascists. In other words, it was not only the so-called “Westernizers” in the Middle East, such as the Ba‘thists, who borrowed Western ideas and techniques, but also many anti-Western “rejectionists.” Indeed, far from signifying that Islamism was not totalitarian in its orientation, the fact that the Muslim world did not experience a true internal religious Reformation, much less an intellectual Enlightenment or indigenous process of secularization, may indicate that Islamism could become even more threatening to the West in various respects than the West’s own secular forms of totalitarianism ever were. The reason is simple: rather than carrying the secularization process forward even further, as both the communists and fascists in most respects did or would have done, Islamists both vociferously oppose and tangibly aim to reverse that very secularization process (as do certain extremist Protestant and Catholic movements associated with the Christian right) in the process of restoring a religio-centric Islamic world order. If the Islamists were ever to succeed, which is fortunately very unlikely, they would make sustained efforts to drag the Western world backward into their own thoroughly regressive and reactionary pre-Enlightenment mental universe, and would therefore be driven – like their modernist or quasi-modernist counterparts such as Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, fascism, and Nazism, however “reactionary” or “anti-modernist” they may have been ideologically – to exert extraordinary degrees of control over the actions and thoughts of others.45 In any event, the term “totalitarian” was originally applied by critical observers to the Bolshevik and Italian Fascist regimes, and was thereafter extended to the Nazi regime and other communist regimes. From the very outset, the term signified that the rulers of these regimes aimed not merely to control the external behavior of the people they ruled, like traditional tyrants, autocrats, and authoritarians, but also to get “inside their heads” and transform their internal consciousness and values by means of incessantly promoting an all-encompassing utopian ideology and enmeshing them within a host of party-controlled front organizations. In other words, these new types of totalitarian regimes were infused with ideological fanaticism, driven to thoroughly and violently transform their own nations and ultimately – in most cases – the entire world, and therefore aspired to exert total control over their societies, obliterate the distinction between the public and private spheres, destroy the plethora of voluntary associations that constituted civil society, and thereby bring each and every individual under the direct control of the state and its vast array of institutions.46 To accomplish these totalistic goals, such regimes adopted certain autocratic institutional structures, mechanisms and techniques that were consciously designed to facilitate these desired all-encompassing processes of transformation, including the establishment of single party-run states, the attempted centralization of control over the flow of all information, and the systematic application of state terrorism. Although the notion of totalitarianism was later subjected to criticisms of various types, both scholarly and political, the concept arguably still retains a good deal of validity.47 Even though total control can never actually be

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achieved over a particular society and all of its members, the mark of totalitarian regimes is their aspiration and effort to exert such a complete level of control, not whether they succeed fully. However, what is of concern here is not so much totalitarian regimes, since Islamist movements have only managed to come to power in a handful of countries (Iran, the Sudan, Afghanistan under the Taliban), everywhere with tragic results, but rather the totalitarian ideologies that animate them and the totalitarian movements that their founders organized prior to the establishment of those regimes.48 In short, totalitarian ideologies are the first things to be formulated, and only infrequently become the regnant ideologies of states, and totalitarian movements inspired by those ideologies then periodically emerge, most of which fail to succeed in overthrowing existing regimes and actually seizing power. Needless to say, Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, and Islamism all existed as totalitarian ideologies and totalitarian sociopolitical movements long before they managed to become, in certain instances, the official doctrines of totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian states.49 The ideology of Islamism was first formulated during the third decade of the twentieth century, and the first organized Islamist movements were likewise formed in the 1920s by al-Banna in Egypt and Mawdudi in South Asia. Islamist ideology, as articulated by al-Banna, Mawdudi, Muhammad Rashid Rida, Sayyid Qutub, Muhammad Qutub, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj, ‘Abdallah al-‘Azzam, Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, Abu Qatada, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, various Shi‘i religious authorities or “sources of emulation,” and numerous others, clearly exhibits totalitarian pretensions inasmuch as it not only aims to transform the outward behavior and ritual practices of Muslims, but also their inner beliefs and core values so as to forcibly bring them into conformity with the Islamists’ own peculiarly strict, puritanical interpretations of Islamic scriptures and Islamic law. Despite the occasional efforts of non-violent Islamists to pay lip service to pluralism and democratic processes, almost always for purely tactical reasons, the substance of Islamist doctrines is intrinsically anti-pluralist and anti-democratic.50 Indeed, Islamist doctrines, despite their variability, exhibit all of the characteristics of extremist ideologies in general and totalitarian ideologies in particular: Manicheanism (a sharp division of the world between the forces of “righteousness” and the forces of “evil,” devoid of any shades of gray), monism, hyper-moralistic puritanism, utopianism, collectivism, extraordinary levels of intolerance, high degrees of authoritarianism, paranoia (of the non-clinical type), conspiracy mongering, and a penchant for dehumanizing and indeed demonizing designated enemies.51 Time and space permitting, it would be easy to present innumerable citations from Islamist texts, including those produced by so-called Islamist “moderates” (for example, by spokesmen for the new generation of supposedly “democratic” Muslim Brothers) that exemplify Islamist intolerance and fanaticism and thus serve to display, explicitly or implicitly, its intrinsically totalitarian features. Herein, alas, it will have to suffice to refer the reader to various works, in Western language translations for greater accessibility, which catalogue or summarize the writings of leading Islamist ideologues.52 Those who have previously studied the history of political

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theory (especially the works of Plato and “totalitarian democrat” Jean-Jacques Rousseau), comparative revolutionary ideologies and movements, extremism in general, or totalitarianism in particular – which some Middle East specialists have apparently never done – should have no trouble at all recognizing the totalitarian thrust of Islamist doctrines. Nor should anyone be reassured by the views of sophisticated Islamist spokesmen like Hasan al-Turabi, Rashid al-Ghannushi, Tariq Ramadan, or the other “democratic” reformists within Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, since to the extent that they proclaim their support for democratic processes and procedures, it soon becomes apparent that they regard democracy, hedonistic libertinism, vociferous individualism, and freedom of speech to be anathema, above all if the latter manifests itself in the open criticism or ridiculing of Islam.53 For example, none of these individuals appear to have publicly defended the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s undeniable moral right, in a truly free society, to publish cartoons satirizing Muhammad, much less the right of Geert Wilders to release his short film critical of Islam.54 Nevertheless, these particular individuals are relative pragmatists compared with the more ideologically uncompromising and fanatical Islamists. Furthermore, in consonance with their stated doctrinal tenets, Islamist movements typically begin making efforts to exert total ideological and behavioral control over their own members and followers from the very moment they are established, i.e., long before they obtain enough of a following to challenge or threaten existing Muslim or non-Muslim regimes.55 For this and other reasons, one need not wait until they actually come to power and establish autocratic states to characterize them as totalitarian in their basic orientation. After all, if someone is endeavoring to understand the real nature of particular political or religious movements, it is better to examine their actual behavior very closely, both toward their own members and toward others, than to give undue credence to their sometimes sophisticated propaganda efforts, which may be specifically designed to conceal their actual aims by falsely reassuring outsiders that their intentions are peaceful and that they represent no threat to anyone else. By this measure, Islamist movements can scarcely be said to behave democratically, even internally, since they tend to exercise rigid control over their own cadres and rank-and-file members. Since this de facto behavior is observable almost everywhere, there is little reason to suppose that Islamist leaders would treat outsiders any differently, much less tolerate the presence of serious opponents or troublesome dissidents, should they manage to attain political power, whether through democratic means or otherwise. In short, after taking into account the aforementioned caveats, Islamism can be justly described as the third major totalitarian ideological movement to arise in the course of the immensely destructive twentieth century, along with the Marxist – Leninist form of communism and fascism.56 In the case of Islamism, of course, one is confronted with a theocratic form of totalitarianism rather than with secular forms of totalitarianism (albeit ones with quasi-religious features), as well as with the attempt

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to politicize a genuine religion and to religionize politics, not merely the latter. Cheryl Benard accurately describes the situation when she points out that the Islamists have as their goal an ascetic, highly regimented, hierarchical society in which all members follow the requirements of Islamic ritual strictly, in which immorality is prevented by separating the sexes, which in turn is achieved by banishing women from the public domain, and in which life is visibly and constantly infused by religion. It is totalitarian in its negation of a private sphere, instead believing that it is the task of state authorities to compel the individual to adhere to proper Islamic behavior anywhere and everywhere. And ideally, it wants this system – which it believes to be the only rightful one – to expand until it controls the entire world and everyone is a Muslim.57 Therefore, there is no justification whatsoever for whitewashing, romanticizing, or apologizing for Islamism, just as there were never good reasons to whitewash, romanticize, or apologize for communist and fascist totalitarianism. Nevertheless, although Islamism itself can never become truly democratic, that does not rule out the possibility that individual Islamists may at some point change their fundamental worldviews and thence genuinely embrace democratic and pluralist values.58 Indeed, in response to new life experiences, personal crises, evolving historical contexts, or the learning of painful lessons, some of them surely will change as time passes. If they do, however, they will have effectively abandoned or repudiated core tenets of Islamism and can therefore no longer be accurately described as Islamists. Similarly, former authoritarian communists and fascists who truly abandon their revolutionary, totalitarian pretensions and genuinely adopt democratic values, or at least honestly agree to accept pluralism and abide by democratic processes and procedures, are no longer really Marxist – Leninists or fascists. Rather, they have managed to transform themselves into “social democrats,” “democratic socialists,” “Euro-communists,” “national populists,” and the like, appellations which indicate that at some point they jettisoned their earlier utopian and totalistic agendas. Likewise, in the unlikely event that entire Islamist movements or parties were to undergo a fundamental transformation to the point where they discarded many of their core beliefs, those entities could no longer be legitimately characterized as Islamist either, ideologically speaking. Although key leaders or factions of certain jihadist groups have publicly renounced their former reliance on violence and terrorism, including both al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) and the Tanzim al-Jihad al-Islami (Islamic Jihad Organization) in Egypt, so far there have been few if any examples of Islamist movements, parties, or regimes collectively undergoing such a substantive ideological reorientation that they have ended up enthusiastically embracing true pluralism and authentic democratic values (as opposed to reluctantly tolerating or cynically exploiting formal democratic processes), and there is little reason to suppose that this situation will change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, it will only be when various movements and regimes established by Islamists are

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marginalized or supplanted by genuinely moderate Muslims or democratic secularists that true democracy and pluralism will have a chance to emerge in the Muslim world.

Notes 1 Reprinted with permission from “Islamism and Totalitarianism” [from Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10(2) (June 2009), pp. 73–96] 2 See Abul A‘la Maududi, Islamic Law and Constitution (Delhi: Taj Company, 1986 [1960]), pp. 144–5. He then adds, unconvincingly, that “despite its all-inclusiveness, it is something vastly and basically different from the totalitarian and authoritarian states. Individual liberty is not suppressed under it nor is there any trace of dictatorship in it.” One may well ask, however, how a state that intrudes itself into every aspect of life and that must “be run only by those who believe in the ideology on which it is based and in the Divine Law which it is assigned to administer” can avoid suppressing individual liberty. See ibid., pp. 146–7. 3 It must be said at the outset that simply raising these thorny matters is bound to generate controversy and perhaps even animosity within academic circles, yet such issues are too important not to be addressed in a forthright and honest manner, regardless of who may be offended. However, lest anyone falsely claim that I am exhibiting “anti-Islamic” or “Orientalist” biases simply because I have had the temerity to level criticisms herein against both Islam and Islamism, I feel obliged to note that I am no more critical of Islamism as a political ideology than I am of the regressive, intolerant, obscurantist, and totalitarian political currents deriving from other religious traditions, including those associated with the Christian right in the United States, and Europe, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, Hindu “nationalists,” etc. 4 I prefer to use the term “Islam bashing” to describe this particular anti-Islamic phenomenon, primarily because the term “Islamophobia” has nowadays become a loaded word, like “Orientalism” or “racism,” which Islamists, other Muslim activists, and dogmatic “multiculturalists” regularly use as a virtual epithet to try and de-legitimize, if not slander, all those who criticize, no matter how justifiably, Islamism or aspects of Islam. Moreover, it is a misnomer insofar as it implies that significant numbers of Westerners are irrationally fearful of or hostile to Islam as a religion. Apart from a relatively small number of ultra-traditionalist Catholics, fundamentalist evangelical Protestants, dogmatic Eastern Orthodox Christians, and extremist Orthodox Jews, few if any Westerners are hostile to Islam for narrowly theological or religious reasons. Of course, some Westerners still retain racist or xenophobic attitudes toward Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and other non-white Muslims, just as they do toward non-whites who are not Muslim (though even the prevalence of this type of racism has often been exaggerated for political purposes). Nevertheless, most of the hostility in the West toward Muslims as Muslims stems from the perceived unwillingness of the latter to assimilate, the insistence of their self-styled spokesmen that Western host societies must adjust to Islam rather than vice versa, and the vastly disproportionate amount of terrorist violence that is nowadays committed by Islamists against both Muslims and non-Muslims. As Walter Laqueur has wryly observed, if Eskimos began committing similarly disproportionate amounts of terrorism, there would be an understandable increase in the amount of suspicion and hostility directed at Eskimos, which would then inevitably lead to bogus accusations of “Eskimophobia.” See his review of Michael Gove’s Celsius 7/7 book in The Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 2006. In the face of continued Islamist agitation and jihadist terrorism, unfortunately, it is likely that both racism against non-white Muslims and actual hostility toward Islam will increase in the West. However, two worrisome and dangerous trends that will have a considerable bearing on the West’s future relations with Muslims – widespread Muslim and especially Islamist hostility toward nonMuslims, and “Islam apologism” if not “Islamist apologism” amongst key segments of

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the Western intelligentsia – are rarely discussed at all. These latter phenomena will be discussed further in the following notes. 5 For examples of this “Islam bashing” tendency, see Serge Trifkovic, The Sword of the Prophet: Islam–History, Theology, and Impact on the World (Boston, MA: Regina Orthodox Press, 2007); Gregory M. Davis, Religion of Peace? Islam’s War against the World (Los Angeles, CA: World Ahead, 2006); several pamphlets by Bill Warner and his colleagues, including Center for the Study of Political Islam (CSPI), The Political Traditions of Mohammed: The Hadith for the Unbelievers (Nashville, TN: CSPI, 2006); and Mohammed and the Unbelievers: A Political Life (Nashville, TN: CSPI, 2006); a number of books by Mark A. Gabriel (a Muslim convert to Christianity), including Culture Clash: Islam’s War on the West (Lake Mary, FL: FrontLine, 2007); and several works by Robert Spencer, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World’s Fastest-Growing Religion (New York: Encounter, 2003); and The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (Chicago, IL: Regnery, 2007). The thrust of these books, most of which were written by “concerned” conservative Christians with a theological as well as a political axe to grind, is that Islam per se is the problem, not merely Islamism. To place these authors in the “Islam bashing” category does not mean, of course, that all of their criticisms of Islam are unwarranted, merely that they are clearly not disinterested or neutral observers. For example, Spencer is very knowledgeable about Islamic doctrines, easily wins public debates with his critics (when they are actually foolish enough to debate him), and has published a lot of valuable information (mainly from the international press) on his Jihad Watch website about the most regressive aspects of Islam, about “Islam apologists” in the West, and about jihadist terrorism. 6 For good examples of the conflation of Islam in general with Islamism, see the article that appeared on the “Stop Islamization of America” (SIOA) website (and was subsequently reprinted on Bill Warner’s “Political Islam” website), wherein D. L. Adams, in the course of describing a demonstration held in Copenhagen by a Danish sister organization called Stop Islamisation of Denmark (SIAD), insisted that “Islam is a political ideology,” thereby collapsing the crucial distinction between Islam the religion and Islamism the modern political ideology; this article is available at http://sioanetwork.com/?p=101. See also the film Fitna, which was produced at the behest of Geert Wilders, a “right-wing” Dutch politician who considers mass Muslim immigration to be a threat to Holland and other Western societies. In that film, various citations from the Qur’an and the ahadith (i.e., written collections of oral reports, canonical and otherwise, about what Muhammad allegedly said and did) are juxtaposed with statements by jihadist leaders and spokesmen, in order to suggest that the latter are not only following authentic Islamic injunctions but faithfully applying Islamic tenets by carrying out their violent actions. Ironically, although the jihadists themselves would make the very same claim in other contexts, they have bitterly attacked the film in their propaganda broadsides as an example of “Islamophobia.” The film can be accessed at www.break.com/usercontent/2009/2/Fitna-Documentaryabout-Islam-660675.html. 7 For example, there were not only tolerant interpretations of Islam that dated from the period of its emergence, but also some very important rationalist and philosophically oriented interpretations of the Islamic faith that arose during the medieval period, interpretations that were quite influential at certain historical junctures (such as that of the Mu‘tazila school). There were also various mystical schools of interpretation, which were often viewed as problematic and “deviant” by those with a more orthodox perspective. In the last two centuries, in response to Western influences, several other interpretations of Islam have been competing with traditionalism, puritanical revivalism, fundamentalism, and Islamism, such as neo-rationalism or moderate reformism (sometimes referred to as Islamic “modernism”) and other more liberal, democratic, contextual, or metaphorical interpretations of core religious and legal texts. See e.g., Farhad Daftary, ed., Intellectual Traditions in Islam (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001); Suha Taji-Farouki, ed., Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Mansoor Moaddel and Kamran Talatoff, eds., Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam: A Reader (New

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York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2000), part 1; Charles Kurzman, ed., Modernist Islam, 1840– 1940: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Charles Kurzman, ed., Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), although the editor inexplicably also includes selections from several Islamists who are certainly not “liberal” except in the most relative sense of that term, such as Rashid al-Ghannushi, ‘Ali Shari‘ati, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. In the American context, Christian Reconstructionism (which is also sometimes referred to as Dominion Theology or Theonomy) is the closest analogue, ideologically speaking, to Islamism. Indeed, in the mid-1980s the Reconstructionists and their Christian right allies formed an organization called the Coalition on Revival (COR) that actually advocated employing the term “Christianism” for their doctrines, which would of course be an exact terminological analogy of Islamism. See Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), pp. 39–40. For the views of the Reconstructionists, who consider unbelievers, “[secular] humanists,” and Christians with more moderate interpretations to be the de facto enemies of God and who promote the creation of a totalitarian theocratic state governed by a rigid and puritanical application of ancient Biblical law, cf. Rousas John Rushdoony, Christianity and the State (Vallecito, CA: Ross House, 1986); Rousas John Rushdoony, God’s Plan for Victory: The Meaning of Post-Millenialism: A Chalcedon Study (Fairfax, VA: Thoburn Press, 1977); Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law: A Chalcedon Study (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1977); and Gary North, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991). For various debilitating interpretive trends and intellectual orthodoxies in the academic study of the Middle East, most of which are associated with the academic left, see Martin S. Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001), a polemical but nonetheless insightful study. However, there are also lots of inaccurate ideas about Islam and Islamism being peddled outside the corridors of academe by people on the right, e.g., both by the aforementioned “Islam bashers” and by neoconservatives and old Cold Warriors within policymaking bureaucracies and think tanks. One such idea is that today’s jihadist terrorism is primarily a product of state sponsorship by so-called “rogue regimes” such as Syria, an exaggerated or distorted view that is also promoted by many Israeli hardliners. For a discussion of these conspiratorial notions, in contradistinction to the actual efforts by states to use terrorists as their proxies, see Jeffrey M. Bale, “Terrorists as State ‘Surrogates’ or ‘Proxies’: Separating Fact from Fiction,” Chapter 1 in this volume. Moreover, if truth be told, the primary facilitators of Sunni extremism and terrorism have been regimes allied with the United States, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, not hostile “enemy” regimes (except in the cases of certain Palestinian rejectionist groups, both secular and Islamist). David Bukay has clearly revealed just how one-sided such claims are in From Muhammad to Bin Ladin: Religious and Ideological Sources of the Homicide Bombers Phenomenon (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), especially Chapters 1–3, although he leans too far in the other direction and, in the end, wrongly indicts Islam rather than Islamism (ibid., p. 352). Indeed, Mark Juergensmeyer made such a claim explicitly at a conference we both attended in 2008. This is a notion that he also suggested, at least implicitly, in Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), where chapters are devoted to extremists from diverse religious traditions, all of which are seemingly viewed as equally commonplace, dangerous, and culpable. So too did journalist Christiane Amanpour in her three-part CNN television documentary entitled “God’s Warriors,” which gave equal time to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian fundamentalists. For a recent book in a long line of studies that favorably contrast the relative tolerance of polytheistic religions with the built-in inflexibility of monotheistic religions, see Jonathan Kirsch, God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2005).

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13 For a good short introduction to the doctrine of abrogation, of which there are three main types, see David Bukay, “Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam,” Middle East Quarterly 14:4 (Fall 2007), pp. 3–11. The type that is most important in the present context is naskh al-hukm duna al-tilawa, which refers to the supersession of earlier verses in the Qur’an by later verses. It is a matter of debate whether the concept of abrogation has or has not been the generally accepted interpretation. See, e.g., Hamadi Redissi and Jan-Erik Lane, “Does Islam Provide a Theory of Violence?,” in The Enigma of Islamist Violence, ed. Amélie Blom, Laetitia Bucaille and Luis Martinez (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 30, who claim that classical exegesis canonised interpretations of Qur’an 9:5 in such a way that they superseded or repealed over one hundred more peaceful and tolerant Qur’anic verses. 14 For the classical Islamic doctrine of international relations, see Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1955), especially Chapters 3, 5, 6, and 8. For these basic concepts, see Armand Abel, “Dar al-Islam,” in Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition [hereafter EI2], ed. Bernard Lewis et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983 [1965]), vol. 2, p. 127; and Armand Abel, “Dar al-Harb,” EI2, volume 2, p. 126. This bipartite division of the world seems to have first emerged during the ‘Abbasid period, specifically in the later eighth century. See Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and Ridwan al-Sayyid, “The Idea of Jihad before the Crusades,” in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001), p. 28. For the significance of the jizya and the dhimmi, see Claude Cahen, “Dhimma,” EI2, volume 2, pp. 227–31; and Claude Cahen, “Djizya,” EI2, volume 2, pp. 559–62. 15 For these modified concepts, cf. D. B. McDonald and Armand Abel, “Dar al-Sulh,” EI2, volume 2, p. 131; Halil Inalcik, “Dar al-‘Ahd,” EI2, volume 2, p. 116. 16 See, e.g., the important text attributed to Usama b. Ladin, “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration to the West,” reprinted and translated in Raymond Ibrahim, ed., The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Broadway, 2007), pp. 22–62. 17 See, e.g., Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 37. Cf. also Cenap Cakmak, “Islamic Ideology, Hegemony and Terrorism,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 17 March 2004. 18 Such a simplistic division between “radical” and supposedly “moderate” Islamists has in fact become standard among academicians studying the Middle East. Some have even gone so far as to refer to the latter (i.e., to non-violent Islamists) as “mainstream” Islamist movements and organizations, as if they were normal democratic political parties whose leaders and members were philosophically wedded to democracy. See e.g., Nathan Brown, Amr Hamzawy, and Marina Ottaway, Islamist Movements and the Democratic Process in the Arab World: Exploring Gray Zones (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), p. 3. 19 See, e.g., Raymond William Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), yet another Western academic apologia for the Jami‘yyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Society of the Muslim Brothers, better known as the Muslim Brotherhood) and its offshoots. See the harsh judgment of Kramer concerning this and other misrepresentations of Islam and Islamism in Ivory Towers on Sand (note 8), Chapters 3–4, especially pp. 50–2 (on “democratic” Islamism). 20 See further Walid Phares, The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 188–91. The Islamists’ professed but phony concerns about “authoritarianism” are comparable to, say, the American radical right’s hypocritical (but nonetheless justifiable) defence of “free speech” whenever the government takes measures to suppress its speech, even though many of these same right-wingers would have no hesitation about restricting the free speech of others if they ever attained positions of power. 21 In theory, the idea of allying, whether openly or secretly, with non-violent Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood against jihadist networks might appear to make superficial sense. After all, both Western governments and the Brotherhood are strongly opposed

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to “jihadist Salafist” terrorism carried out against the “far enemy.” However, the two protagonists are opposed to the jihadists for very different reasons. The Brotherhood is certainly not opposed to acts of jihadist terrorism for moral reasons (at least not if they are perceived to be acts of “defensive” jihad) or because its cadre have any genuine sympathy for the West, but rather only because such attacks may end up targeting them or otherwise interfering with their ability to carry out their long-term plans to gradually and stealthily Islamize the territories they reside in, including Western countries. Every time the jihadists carry out an attack in the West, it serves to reawaken the populace to the dangers posed by Islamism, and thus brings the Brotherhood under closer scrutiny as well. In other words, in the wake of such traumatic incidents, both official and journalistic spotlights are, at least temporarily, focused on the activities of a multitude of Islamist groups, including the ostensibly non-violent ones, and this renewed attention often makes it more difficult for them to operate undisturbed and secretly pursue their agendas. Hence non-violent Islamists may at times be willing, for purely instrumental reasons, to work with the authorities in Western countries. Despite this, it can be argued that the gradualist but nonetheless corrosive cultural, social, and political activities of the Brotherhood and the Mawdudists, and perhaps also those of the fundamentalist Tablighis (members of the Tablighi-i Jama‘at [Association for the Propagation of the Faith], an international Islamic organization originally founded in South Asia), represent a far greater danger to the West in the long run than the jihadists do (unless, say, the latter are able to acquire nuclear devices and detonate them in Western cities). For this reason, although Western government agencies will not be able to avoid interacting with non-violent Islamists, they should not collaborate, either overtly or covertly, with the latter Islamists except in the most unusual or dangerous circumstances, and they should never make the mistake of viewing such groups as their trusted allies or as genuine “friends” of the West. 22 Similarly, in 1996 factions within British intelligence allegedly provided covert support to Libyan jihadists, including members of al-Qa‘ida itself, in an effort to kill or oust Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi, the Israelis supported the Harakat al-Muqawwama alIslamiyya (HAMAS: Islamic Resistance Movement) early on in an attempt to weaken the rival Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya (PLO: Palestine Liberation Organization), and according to both insiders and informed observers, components of the socalled “deep state” (derin devlet) in Turkey – perhaps including the Jandarme İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele Merkezi (JİTEM: Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counterterrorism Center), the military’s Özel Harp Dairesi (ÖHD: Special Warfare Department), and the underground paramilitary ultranationalist and pan-Turkist organization Ergenekon (named after a mythical site in the Altai mountains) – at first covertly aided and thence manipulated a fanatical Kurdish Sunni Islamist group known as Hizbullahi Kurdi (Kurdish Hizballah, which is more often referred to – misleadingly – as Turkish Hizballah) so as to divide Kurdish loyalties and weaken the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK: Kurdistan Workers Party). See, respectively, Martin Bright, “MI6 Hired Al Qaeda Men to Kill Gaddafi: Ex-Official,” Dawn [Pakistan], 30 October 2002, available at http://web.archive.org/web/20021105130221/www.dawn.com/2002/10/30/int9. htm, and also “The Shaylergate Files,” NLP Wessex website, available at www.nlpwes sex.org/docs/shaylergatehtm.htm [Shayler is a former MI5 officer who later became a whistleblower and made specific claims about this matter]; Andrew Higgins, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,” Wall Street Journal, 24 January 2009, available at http:// online.wsj.com/article/SB123275572295011847.html, and “Les très secrètes ‘relations’ Israël-Hamas,” Le Canard Enchaîné, 1 February 2006; and “What Is Turkey’s Hizbullah?: A Human Rights Watch Backgrounder,” Human Rights Watch website, 16 February 2000, available at www.hrw.org/legacy/english/docs/2000/02/16/turkey3057.htm, as well as many Turkish-language sources, e.g., Faik Bulut and Mehmet Faraç, Kod adı Hizbullah: Türkiye Hizbullahçılarının anatomisi (Istanbul: Ozan, 1999). All of these secret operations either failed or had very negative consequences in the long term. Hence the expected short-term benefits of these “enemy of my enemy” alliances must always be weighed against the possible long-term ramifications and costs.

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23 See, e.g., Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988). Similar covert efforts to recruit former fascists were likewise made by other former wartime allies, including both Western European countries and Soviet Bloc regimes. 24 See, e.g., Graham E. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Others who have advocated such alliances in the interests of Realpolitik include another former CIA officer, Reuel Marc Gerecht. Antony T. Sullivan has gone much further by arguing that these supposedly “moderate” Islamists are “committed to democratic governance and share cultural concerns held by mainstream American conservatives.” See his paper entitled “Conservative Ecumenism: Politically Incorrect Meditations on Islam and the West,” delivered at The Historical Society conference in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, on 4 June 2004, cited in J. Michael Waller, Fighting the War of Ideas Like A Real War: Messages to Defeat the Terrorists (Washington, DC: Institute for World Politics, 2007), p. 116, note 133. (This is hardly a ringing endorsement, since even if the Islamists did actually share the concerns of certain types of socially and culturally conservative Americans – which is only partly true – that would still mean that they presented a threat to certain fundamental Western freedoms and Enlightenment values.) 25 See, e.g., Ahmad S. Moussalli, Moderate and Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Quest for Modernity, Legitimacy, and the Islamic State (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999). Therein, according to the blurb of the publisher, Moussalli suggests that Sunni “Islamic fundamentalism might prove to be a liberating theology for the modern Islamic world.” Since Moussalli is very knowledgeable and has produced several informative books, it is even more astonishing that he could make such an argument. For similar claims about Shi‘i Islamism, cf. Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (New York: Routledge, 2008), and Michel Foucault, who originally portrayed the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a culturally “authentic” liberation movement – right before the Ayatollahs began systematically exterminating their opponents, both real and imagined. See Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson (both critics from the left), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), especially pp. 69–137 and, for translations of some of Foucault’s key writings and statements on the Iranian Revolution, pp. 179–277. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, no one will apparently ever go broke betting on the astonishing myopia and naivety that will inevitably be displayed by certain circles of Western intellectuals, no matter how brilliant they may be. This is all the more true given the long and often sordid history of their prior apologetics for, and outright romanticization of, both Bolshevism and fascism, two earlier totalitarian ideologies and movements. For these tragic and embarrassing long-standing tendencies, cf. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969 [1928]); Jean-François Revel, The Totalitarian Temptation (New York: Penguin, 1978); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (New Brunswick, NY: Transaction Publishers, 1998 [1981]); and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2003). Cf. also the New Left and “post-communist” glorification of anti-democratic “third worldist" ideologies and movements, which persists to the present day, a phenomenon which has been documented by Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (New York: Free Press, 1986); Caroline Fourest (a self-described supporter of the “antitotalitarian left” who is opposed to the “Third Worldist left”), La tentation obscurantiste (Paris: Grasset, 2005), pp. 33–51; and Pierre-André Taguieff, Prêcheurs de haine: Traversée de la judéophobie planétaire (Paris: Fayard, 2004), who provides numerous examples of the harmful political and moral consequences of uncritically glorifying and supporting all anti-Western movements in the Third World, no matter how reactionary they may be (as the Islamists clearly are). In short, Islamism is the only the latest in a long line of anti-democratic and indeed totalitarian ideologies and movements that have been whitewashed if not championed outright by certain Western (and, for that matter, Muslim) intellectuals. 26 Some may object that the ostensibly moderate and now ruling Adalet va Kalkınma Partisi (AKP: Justice and Development Party) in Turkey, which was founded by certain relatively

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pragmatic “reformists,” is an example of an Islamist regime that has accepted pluralism and democracy. However, this is a contestable claim, one that has often been advanced by “Islamist apologists” within and outside of academia. It should be emphasised that the “moderation” of the AKP stems from two rather unique factors. First, several of its predecessors, the Milli Nizam Partisi (MNP: National Order Party), the Milli Selamat Partisi (MSP: National Salvation Party), the Refah Partisi (RP: Welfare Party), and the Fazilet Partisi (FP: Virtue Pary), were legally banned by secularist elements within the military for maintaining paramilitary wings, promoting the radical Islamization of Turkish society, and thereby threatening the Kemalist state and its secularized constitution. As long as the old guard within the military continued to exert high levels of influence and control over the political process, the AKP had to pursue its Islamization schemes very slowly and carefully. Note, however, that the Islamist movement associated with all of those parties – Milli Görüş, (National Vision) – still remains quite radical. Second, the AKP government must also present a moderate, “democratic,” and “pro-Western” face to the world in order to convince European nations that it is a suitable candidate for joining the European Union (EU), which it is interested in doing mainly for economic reasons. This too forces the party to advance its Islamist agenda with considerable caution and circumspection. Despite these major obstacles, however, the AKP has assiduously, albeit stealthily and subtly, pursued its Islamization efforts – e.g., by subsidizing the establishment of a vast network of religious schools, replacing secularists on high school and university faculties with Islamists, and, most recently, trying to bring key elements of the military to trial for having carried out covert “dirty wars” against the Kurds and other segments of Turkish society, including several Islamist groups. (Although exposing the anti-democratic activities of the security forces would normally be a laudable goal, in this case these efforts are unfortunately motivated by Islamist rancor rather than genuinely democratic sentiments.) In any event, should the AKP ultimately evolve into a party that fully embraces democratic values instead of one that participates actively in democratic processes and even governs but is still largely animated by antidemocratic sentiments, it will no longer be an Islamist party at all. For contrasting interpretations of the AKP, cf. M. Hakan Yavuz, ed., The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy and the AK Parti (Provo, UT: University of Utah Press, 2006), wherein the AKP is presented as having evolved from an Islamist party into a conservative democratic party comparable to Christian Democratic parties in Europe [sic]; and Barry Rubin and Birol A. Yeşilada, eds., Islamisation of Turkey under the AKP Rule (New York: Routledge, 2010), which argues that the AKP, whilst presenting itself as a “centre-right reform party,” is in fact actively engaged in the Islamization and de-secularization of Turkey. Recent events in Turkey demonstrate that the pessimistic views of the latter authors were all too correct. 27 As disillusioned leftist Nick Cohen justly noted, for such people “[a] stance against ‘the West’ or ‘the hegemonic’ absolved all [Islamist] sins.” See What’s Left?: How the Left Lost Its Way (London, UK: Harper Collins, 2009), p. 377. 28 Here I am not suggesting that the Islamist terrorist threat, like earlier terrorist threats, has not been frequently hyped or exploited by those with vested interests, both inside and outside of governments, only that jihadist terrorism has constituted a very real and serious threat for some time. Hence efforts to downplay or minimize this threat, all the more so during an era in which jihadist groups have been regularly carrying out bloody attacks in regions throughout the world (mainly against other Muslims), are at best misguided and at worst thoroughly dishonest. For the exploitation of the terrorist threat, see, e.g., John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); and Ian S. Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), although the former author overstates his case by implying that the jihadist terrorist threat is not particularly serious, a claim that the ever-growing numbers of victims of the jihadists would surely find both astonishing and appalling. 29 John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (New York: Oxford University, 1999); and Bruce B. Lawrence, Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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University, 1998). In support of his claims, Esposito coined the misleading term “secular fundamentalism” (ibid., pp. 259–62) to label those who were justifiably concerned about attempts by Islamists to infuse religion into public life, by force if necessary. Some Islamist spokesmen have since adopted that same handy phrase to try and delegitimize their critics. Cf. Fariba Adelkhah and Alain Gresh, eds., Un péril islamiste? (Brussels: Complexe, 1994); W. A. R. Shadid and P. S. van Koningsveld, De mythe van het islamitische gevaar: Hindernissen bij intergratie (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1992); and Jochen Hippler and Andrea Lueg, eds., The Next Threat: Western Perceptions of Islam (London: Pluto Press, 1995), especially pp. 1–6, 7–31, 116–53. All of these works now seem even more naïve, delusional, and ridiculous than they did when they first appeared. Indeed, a common argument was that Western political elites now allegedly felt compelled to “construct” a new Muslim “enemy” or “Other” in order to justify their maintenance of inflated defense budgets and their attempts to project power abroad following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Hence the new “green” (Islamist) threat was simply being substituted, dishonestly and cynically, for the old “red” (communist) threat. See, e.g., Joseph M. Schwartz, “Misreading Islamism: The ‘War against Terrorism’ and Just-War Theory,” in The Philosophical Challenge of September 11, ed. Tom Rockmore, Joseph Margolis and Armen T. Marsoobian (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 42–70, especially the first two paragraphs. Emblematic of this blatantly partisan approach, whose constant refrain is that “Islamophobic Westerners are unfairly demonizing the innocent Muslim Other,” is the book edited by Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells, The New Crusade: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (New York: Columbia University, 2003). Not surprisingly, these very same themes are regularly emphasized in jihadist and Islamist propaganda. What such interpreters conveniently ignore is that there was a real communist threat during the Cold War (albeit one that was often exaggerated), just as there is now a real Islamist threat (albeit one that is also sometimes exaggerated). See Jeffrey M. Bale, “Jihadist Ideology and Strategy and the Possible Use of WMD,” in Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction, ed. Gary Ackerman and Jeremy Tamsett (New York: CRC Press, 2009), pp. 17–21, for a fuller discussion (albeit specifically in connection with the global jihadists). For the notion of the salaf al-salih, see Ali Merad, “Islah,” EI2, volume 4, pp. 148–50. The concept of jahiliyya, a term that originally referred to the “barbarous” and “ignorant” pagan pre-Islamic era in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, was later applied by both Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutub to the contemporary world. See, e.g., Sayed Khatab, The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb: The Theory of Jahiliyya (New York: Routledge, 2009). For the concept of hakimiyya and its relationship to jahiliyya, see Sayed Khatab, The Power of Sovereignty: The Political and Ideological Philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (New York: Routledge, 2006). Here it should be emphasised that I do not accept the common equation of the terms “Islamism,” “political Islam,” and “Islamic fundamentalism.” In my view, these three terms are not in fact synonymous. First, I would argue that the term “Islamism” should only be applied to the extreme right wing of the political Islam spectrum. Under the rubric of “political Islam,” I would include all of the ideologies and movements that actively aim to politicize Islam or Islamize politics, whatever form this may take, and in that sense one can describe the political Islam spectrum as a very broad umbrella that ranges – left to right – from “Islamic socialism” (not to be confused with Western utopian or Marxian socialism, since it endeavors to reconcile Islam’s traditional emphases on social justice and egalitarianism with modern socialism), to “Islamic liberalism” (not to be confused with “bourgeois” Western liberalism, since its proponents seek to reconcile Western notions of democracy with traditional Islamic – really pre-Islamic tribal – institutions [like the majlis al-shura or consultative council] and customs [such as ijma‘ or consensus]), to “moderate Islamic reformism” (of the sort advocated by Muhammad ‘Abduh, before the Salafiyya movement was transformed into a puritanical current of Islamism by Muhammad Rashid Rida), to the Islamic right. (If one wanted to create a Christian analogy, the “political Christianity” spectrum would encompass “liberation theology” on the left, liberal “social gospel” activism, moderately conservative mainstream Christian groups

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that regularly engage in politics and the Christian right.) Second, one should make a distinction between Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism, since fundamentalists (i.e., those who aim to restore what they regard as the “pure,” “uncorrupted” foundational elements of their religious tradition and to protect that “authentic” tradition from internal “deviations” and external threats) can respond in one of two main ways to the perceived external corruption, “sinfulness” and “evil,” either as “quietists” whose primary concern is to insulate themselves from the external society so that they can practice a “purer” personal form of their faith, or as “activists” who feel that it is their personal duty and obligation to transform that corrupt external world through various means, ranging from aggressive missionary work to the employment of violence. From this point of view, “Islamism” can be viewed as a subset of “activist Islamic fundamentalism” (which basically means that not all activist Islamic fundamentalists are Islamists, but that all Islamists are activist Islamic fundamentalists). See further Jeffrey M. Bale, “Islamism,” in Encyclopedia of Bioterrorism Defense, ed. Richard F. Pilch and Raymond Zilinskas (New York: Wiley, 2005), pp. 296–8. For more on Islamist doctrine(s), compare Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1990); Abderrahim Lamchichi, L’islamisme politique (Paris: Harmattan, 2001); Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1997); and Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World (Albany: SUNY, 1996). See also the contrasting interpretations found in Martin Kramer, ed., The Islamism Debate (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University/Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1997). Cf. Fawaz Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), passim. This shift in targeting priorities from the “near enemy” to the “far enemy,” of course, was the primary strategic innovation associated with Usama b. Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri. As Cohen has noted (What’s Left?, pp. 268–9), like fascism and its “predecessors in the Counter-Enlightenment,” Islamism is “not a rational critique of this or that failure of a democratic government, but an assault on democracy and human rights as malign in themselves.” Or, as he put it elsewhere (ibid., pp. 261–2), “[i]t was the best of the West [that] Islamism was against not the worst, and its detestation of Enlightenment values was nothing new.” Cf. Mary Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), especially Chapters 4–5; and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Inside Jihadism: Understanding Jihadi Movements Worldwide (Kent, WA: Paradigm, 2009), especially Chapter 4. Both authors are focused on jihadism rather than Islamism in general, but apart from bitter disputes over tactics – and the obsessive jihadist emphasis on armed struggle – there is not as much difference between the two as many observers claim, especially as regards their ultimate long-term objectives and their designated enemies. See also Bassam Tibi, “Islamism and Democracy: On the Compatibility of Institutional Islamism and the Political Culture of Democracy,” in this same issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. See, e.g., Bassam Tibi, Die neue Totalitarismus: “Heiliger Krieg” und westliche Sicherheit (Darmstadt: Primus, 2004); Alexandre del Valle, Le totalitarisme islamiste à l’assaut des démocraties (Paris: Syrtes, 2002); Amir Jahanchahi, Vaincre le IIIe totalitarisme (Paris: Ramsay, 2001); Fouad Laroui, De l’islamisme: Une réfutation personnelle de totalitarisme religieux (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2006); Thomas Vollmer, Der militante Islamismus als neuer Totalitarismus: Dschihadistischer Terrorismus und westliche Sicherheitsarchitektur (Saarbrücken: AV Akademiker, 2012); and Mehdi Mozaffari, Islamism: A New Totalitarianism (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2017). The fact that absolutist interpretations of religion can in fact be interpreted as totalistic has been emphasized by Bruce B. Lawrence in his definition of fundamentalism in general: “Fundamentalism is the affirmation of religious authority as holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction; it is expressed through the collective demand that specific creedal and ethical dictates derived from scripture be publicly recognized and

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legally enforced.” See Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), p. 27. (Sadly, Lawrence was wrong, even at that time, to claim [ibid.] that the term only applied to “marginalized protest cadres” in the Muslim world.) If such totalistic qualities can be associated with fundamentalism in general, they are clearly applicable to the explicitly political ideology of Islamism, which demands the establishment of a strict Islamic order or state. See further Jeffrey M. Bale, “(Still) More on Fascist and Neo-Fascist Ideology and ‘Groupuscularity’,” Erwägen Wissen Ethik 15:3 (October–November 2004), especially pp. 381–2 (as well as in Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, and Andreas Umland, eds., Fascism Past and Present, West and East [Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006], pp. 291–3). See, e.g., Mehdi Mozaffari, “The Rise of Islamism in the Light of European Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10:1 (March 2009), as well as his interchange with Ana Soage, pp. 1–18. Although both authors rightly emphasise that Islamism is related in various ways to the parallel rise of communism and fascism, Mozaffari’s claim that the “roots” of Islamism “go back to the High Middle Ages” (ibid., p. 12, note 2) is mistaken. Although many Islamists were influenced by certain ideas associated with the medieval Hanbali theologian Ahmad ibn Taymiyya and other pre-modern puritanical figures, including the eighteenth to nineteenth century Islamic revivalist Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the ideology of Islamism was first developed in the third decade of the twentieth century. Whether fundamentalism is necessarily a post-Enlightenment phenomenon that can be sharply distinguished from earlier puritanical revivalist movements, and whether it must adopt an activist and aggressive posture toward outsiders, are complex matters. For the concept of “mass society,” see William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008 [1959]). Here one must distinguish between “unmodern” and ideologically “anti-modernist.” Neither the Islamists in general nor the jihadists among them are “unmodern” in the sense that they are unwilling or unable to exploit modern Western technologies to further their regressive causes. On the other hand, they are opposed to virtually every idea and value associated with the European Enlightenment movement, and hence are by definition “anti-modernist.” That is why the title of Michael J. Mazarr’s otherwise interesting book, Unmodern Men in the Modern World: Radical Islam, Terrorism, and the War on Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), is rather misleading. Cf. Syed Abul Al‘a Maudoodi, Jihad in Islam (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 2001 [1939]), pp. 8–9, 19, 24; Ana Belén Soage, “Hasan al-Banna or the Politicisation of Islam,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9:1 (March 2008), pp. 21–42; Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumond, “Terror, Islam, and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 13:2 (April 2002), pp. 7–9, who emphasize that both al-Banna and Qutub borrowed “organizational and ideological tools . . . from European totalitarianism” (ibid., p. 9), that Qutub “called for a monolithic state ruled by a single party of Islamic rebirth” (ibid., p. 8), and that the latter’s ideas effectively amounted to “Leninism in Islamic dress” (ibid.); and Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), especially pp. 92–100. Qutub also referred to this Islamist vanguard as al-safwa al-mukhtara (“the chosen elite”). For the Nazis’ complex and schizophrenic attitude toward modernity (which was also true of Italian Fascism, especially given its Futurist component), see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Some have gone even further and argued that Adolf Hitler in fact looked favorably upon several aspects of the French Revolution, which if true would make the Nazis rather more modernist in some respects than is often supposed. See, e.g., Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990). Cf. also Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann, eds., Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991). For some standard works on totalitarianism and totalitarian regimes, see Franz Borkenau, The Totalitarian Enemy (London: Faber and Faber, 1940); Peter F. Drucker, The End

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of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995 [1939]); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004 [1958]); Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), especially pp. 23–52, 96–138. (Ironically, Brzezinski and Kirkpatrick, two well-known analysts of totalitarianism, both advocated providing aid to the Afghan mujahidin, presumably because, although they understood clearly that the Soviet regime had once been totalitarian, they failed to recognise that Islamism likewise had intrinsically totalitarian tendencies.) For more recent scholarly analyses, cf. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. Chapter 6; Hans Meier, ed., Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume 1: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships (New York: Routledge, 2005); and A. James Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). For representative works that include critiques of the totalitarianism concept, see Ernest A. Menze, ed., Totalitarianism Reconsidered (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1981); and Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, especially Chapter 7, on totalitarian ideologies (though one may quibble about certain of their supposedly defining characteristics). Fortunately, Islamist movements with totalitarian agendas have so far mainly been able to seize control in less developed countries with dysfunctional governmental institutions and only rudimentary levels of infrastructure. Hence those movements have lacked the means to erect relatively efficient, well-organized totalitarian regimes comparable to those of, say, the Bolsheviks and Nazis. The main exception, of course, has been Iran. There, though inspired by Imam Ruhallah Khumayni’s absolutist vilayat-i faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist) doctrine, whereby leading clerical figures were to lead a theocratic state, ostensibly as the regents of the Hidden Imam until his return, the Islamists were eventually forced to establish a hybrid regime with some totalitarian, some polycentric, and even some quasi-democratic features in order to consolidate their power. See, e.g., the passages in al-Banna’s and Mawdudi’s writings devoted to democracy, where their occasional professed support for democracy turns out, upon further inspection, to be decidedly illiberal and indeed undemocratic. As Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr has pointed out, for Mawdudi the term “democracy was merely an adjective used to define the otherwise indefinable virtues of the Islamic state.” See Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 86. Cf. also the useful discussion of Marion Boulby, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Kings of Jordan, 1945–1993 (Atlanta, GA: Scholar’s Press, 1999), pp. 129–35, which highlights the many contradictions between “democratic” Islamist rhetoric and the substantive Islamist hostility to pluralism. Therein she cites one former Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood member, who rightly pointed out (ibid., p. 134) that “when [the Islamists] talk about democracy they are talking about theo[cratic]-democracy,” which is of course the antithesis of genuine democracy. Even Fawaz Gerges, who originally sought to downplay the threat of Islamist terrorism before facing reality and focusing on it, admitted that Islamists were their own worst enemies because they were “equivocal about democratic norms, human rights, peaceful relations with the West, and the use of terror in the pursuit of domestic political goals.” See Fawaz A. Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 241–2. The obvious reason for this ongoing equivocation is that the Islamists have never genuinely embraced the first three ideas, and that many have actively promoted the use of terrorism, at least in certain contexts. In short, Islamists generally mean very different things than most Westerners do when they use terms like “democracy.” Here it should also be pointed out that it has long

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been common for the most anti-democratic, illiberal and totalitarian communist parties and regimes to call themselves democratic, as with the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea (DPRK), even though the term was devoid of actual substance or, at least, had a completely different meaning. 51 For the concept of extremism and its characteristics, see John George and Laird Wilcox, American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, and Others (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), pp. 54–62; Gian Mario Bravo, L’estremismo in Italia (Rome: Riuniti, 1982), pp. 7–18; Neil J. Smelser, The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially pp. 58–80; and Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Perennial, 2002 [1951]), though “true believers” are even more common within sectarian vanguard parties than the mass movements they aspire to lead. Cf. also Maxwell Taylor, The Fanatics: A Behavioural Approach to Political Violence (London and Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1991), especially Chapter 2, wherein “ten features of fanaticism” are listed that are analogous to several of the characteristics others have associated with “extremism.” 52 Cf., e.g., Hasan al-Banna, translated and annotated by Charles Wendell, ed., Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949): A Selection from the Majmu‘at rasa’il al-Imam al-shahid Hasan al-Banna (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978); Olivier Carré and Michel Seurat, eds., Les Frères musulmans, 1928–1982 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001); Sayyed Abul Mawdudi, A Short History of the Revivalist Movement in Islam (Selangor, Malaysia; Islamic Book Trust, 2002 [1st edn., 1963]); Albert Bergesen, ed., The Sayyid Qutb Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007); Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj, translated and analysed by Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East (New York: Macmillan, 1986); Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Islamic Awakening between Rejection and Extremism (Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2007); and the Ayatallah Khumayni, translated by Hamid Algar, ed., Islam and Revolution 1: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (New York: Kegan Paul, 2002). 53 All of these individuals have been characterized by academicians as liberals, democrats, or moderates. See, e.g., Tim Niblock, “Foreward,” in The West and Islam: Western Liberal Democracy versus the System of Shura, ed. Mishal Fahm al-Sulami (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. vi, where he opines that “the views expressed by al-Turabi are largely compatible with Western democracy” [sic]; Azzam S. Tamimi (himself an Islamist and leading member of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group), Rashid al-Ghannushi: A Democrat within Islamism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Ian Hamel, La vérité sur Tariq Ramadan: Sa famille, ses réseaux, sa stratégie (Paris: Favre, 2007). Alas, such characterizations could only be true relative to other Islamists who are even more extreme (or perhaps simply more honest), since all of the figures previously mentioned have proven to be very adept at disguising their immoderate underlying agendas. For example, apart from being the “spiritual advisor” of a brutal Sudanese Islamist regime until his own arrest and expulsion, the supposed “liberal” al-Turabi reportedly endeavored to forge a joint antiWestern alliance between violent Sunni and Shi‘i Islamists in the mid-1990s, so much so that he allegedly brokered meetings between the leaders of al-Qa‘ida, then ensconced in the Sudan, and other jihadist organizations, including Hizballah (not to mention Iranian intelligence operatives). See further Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989–2000 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003), especially Chapter 3. For Western academic attempts to portray al-Ghannushi as a “democrat,” efforts that the Tunisian himself undermined because of his rhetorical support for extremists and his conspiratorial anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic, and anti-secular sentiments, see Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand (note 8), p. 53. As for Ramadan, many people are familiar with his works that are designed for Western consumption, which are both fairly sophisticated and relatively moderate in their orientation. See, e.g., Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University, 2004). Alas, far fewer Westerners have read his other works, which present significantly less moderate views, such as Tariq Ramadan, La foi, la Voie et la résistance (Lyon: Tawhid, 2002); Tariq

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Ramadan, Jihād, violence, guerre et paix en islam (Lyon: Tawhid, 2002); and Tariq Ramadan, Dār ash-shahāda: L’Occident, espace du témoignage (Lyon: Tawhid, 2002). Fewer still are aware that he employs a “double discourse,” one that is designed to appeal to and allay the concerns of well-meaning Western intellectuals, and another that is far more radical and designed to rally the support of Muslims living in the West. On this, see Caroline Fourest, Frère Tariq: Discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan (Paris: Grasset, 2004); Paul Landau, Le sabre et le Coran: Tariq Ramadan et les Frères musulmans à la conquête de l’Europe (Monaco: Rocher, 2005); and Ralph Ghadban, Tariq Ramadan und die Islamisierung Europas (Berlin: Hans Schiler, 2006). For analyses of the views of the “new” Muslim Brotherhood reformists in Egypt, cf. Israel Elad-Altman, “Democracy, Elections and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,” in Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, ed. Hillel Fradkin, Husain Haqqani and Eric Brown (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, 2006), vol. 3, pp. 24–37; and Mohamed Fayez Farahat, “Liberalizing the Muslim Brotherhood: Can It Be Done?,” Arab Insight 2:6 (Winter 2009), pp. 11–23. 54 Of course, all too few governments, newspapers and intellectuals in the democratic West made serious efforts to express solidarity with, much less tangibly support, the free speech of their Danish colleagues either, one of the most stunning examples of Western pusillanimity in the long and sad recent history of Western attempts to appease, not only Muslims in general but also Islamist demagogues (who had cynically exploited and intentionally manufactured the “cartoon crisis” in the first place). Cf. Ralf Dahrendorf, “Today’s Counter-Enlightenment,” Project Syndicate website, 2006, available at www. project-syndicate.org/commentary/dahrendorf55/English. For more on the Danish cartoon controversy, see Mohamed Sifaoui, L’affaire des caricatures: Dessins et manipulations (Paris: Privé, 2006), especially Chapters 4–5. The key figure in generating the worldwide Muslim hysteria about these cartoons was an Islamist cleric residing in Denmark named Ahmad Abu Laban, who even went so far as to sponsor the production of several phony Muhammad cartoons in order to inflame Muslim passions. 55 See, e.g., Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1967]), especially part 2 and pp. 300–6, for the Brotherhood’s organizational structure and its emphasis on obedience and internal discipline. Even believers in Muslim Brotherhood “moderation” have been forced to admit, in response to hardliner victories in the 2008 “elections” for the organization’s shura in both Jordan and Egypt, that Islamism, like “many religious and ideological movements,” [is] “structurally biased against the moderate and reform camps within them, which accounts for their marginalization and limited influence.” See Amr Hamzawy, “The Islamist Conundrum,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 17–23 July 2008. 56 This does not mean, as some polemicists and propagandists who have peddled the notion of “Islamo-fascism” would have it, that Islamism is actually a form of fascism. Since fascism (as per Zeev Sternhell and others) is a secular revolutionary ideology combining radical nationalism and non-Marxist socialism (or, in the case of its most notorious but highly atypical Nazi variant, overlaying both nationalism and socialism with biological racism and eugenics), and Islamism’s principal enemy is Western secularism, it is absurd on the face of it to characterize Islamism as a form of fascism. For the same reason, it is misleading to attempt to draw too close a comparison between communism and Islamism, as William Rosenau has sought to do in his otherwise excellent analysis, “Waging the War of Ideas,” in The McGraw–Hill Homeland Security Handbook, ed. David G. Kamien (New York: McGraw–Hill, 2005), pp. 1135–6. Cf. also the idiosyncratic but often insightful interpretation of Laurent Murawiec, The Mind of Jihad, 2nd edn. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and especially Pandora’s Boxes: The Mind of Jihad,Volume II (New York: Hudson Institute, 2007), where the significance of the historical links between communism and Islamism has been greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, it is true that various components of the radical Western right and left view Islamism sympathetically because all of these ideologies share certain common enemies: Israel (if not Jews), American “imperialism,” democracy, and capitalist “globalization.” On this, see Taguieff,

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Prêcheurs de haine (note 23); Cohen, What’s Left?, Chapter 10; Bernard Henri-Lévy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the New Barbarism (New York: Random House, 2009), especially Chapter 6; and George Michael, The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2006). 57 See Cheryl Benard, Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003), p. 7. Unfortunately, she refers not to Islamists in this passage but rather to Islamic “fundamentalists,” since she confusingly claims that the former term – see ibid., p. 3, note 3 – is “used by different authors to describe either the fundamentalists or the traditionalists.” Islamists are invariably Islamic fundamentalists, as noted here, but they are the rivals and indeed often the enemies of Islamic traditionalists (a term which implies that one accepts much of the vast corpus of Islamic jurisprudence as essentially authoritative rather than ignoring or rejecting it and instead relying – or at least claiming to rely – solely on the Qur’an and ahadith as sources of theology and law, as the Islamists do). 58 As, e.g., Ed Hussain and a few other Islamist extremists have done. See his book The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left (London: Penguin, 2007). Hussain has since become an anti-Islamist activist.

7 DENYING THE LINK BETWEEN ISLAMIST IDEOLOGY AND JIHADIST TERRORISM “Political correctness” and the undermining of counterterrorism

“[I]f your enemy is a terrorist and he professes to be an Islamist, it may be wise to take him at his word.” Ralph Peters1 “Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. . . . Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalists over others. . . . We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia’, a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion [with the] stigmatisation of those who believe in it.” ‘Together Facing the New Totalitarianism’ Writers’ Manifesto2 “Muslims need to become free of totalitarian Islam and the least the West can do in support is not concede an inch of its own hard-won freedom in quest of a false peace with Islamists.” Salim Mansur3 “The jihadists appear to be right: we [in the West] are weak, self-indulgent, unsinewed by political correctness, in thrall to sentimental and utopian notions, ripe for the plucking. Too many years of soft living and even softer thinking.” David Solway4

Introduction Ever since the jihadist terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, Western policymakers, mainstream media organs, and even academicians have been reluctant to highlight the key role played by Islamist ideology in motivating jihadist terrorist attacks. This is all the more peculiar given that, as is typical of ideological extremists,

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the perpetrators of these attacks themselves openly and indeed proudly emphasize the central role played by their religious beliefs, specifically their strict, puritanical interpretations of Islamic scriptures (i.e., the Qur’an) and their supposed emulation of the exemplary words and deeds of Islam’s prophet Muhammad (as recorded in the six canonical hadith collections), in motivating their violent actions. One might imagine that the gap between the oft-professed motivations of the Islamist perpetrators and the assessment of their motivations by Western analysts would be closing with the passage of time, all the more so given that jihadists have since carried out thousands of acts of terrorism in various regions of the world. Yet in fact the exact opposite has occurred: the more acts of jihadist terrorism that are carried out, in which the perpetrators clearly reveal their ideological motivations, the more insistently key Western elites refuse to give credence to those motivations. It should be remembered, for example, that the official 9/11 Report prepared by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States did not avoid referring to the sponsors’ and perpetrators’ religious motivations, and indeed often used accurate descriptive terms like “radical Islam,” “Islamic fundamentalism,” “jihadists,” “Islamists,” and “Islamism” (even if the section on the apparent involvement of certain Saudi officials in the plot was almost completely redacted and details about the egregious failures of certain government agencies were suppressed).5 Since then, however, various Western government officials and media outlets have instead repeatedly sought to banish the use of terms like “jihadist” and “Islamic terrorism” from public discourse, thereby effectively acting to conceal the core ideological motivations of our Islamist adversaries in an era characterized by explicitly ideological contestation and ideologically motivated asymmetric warfare.6

The 2013 Jihadist terrorist attacks in Boston and Woolwich as examples These ongoing problems were illustrated yet again in the wake of the 2013 jihadist terrorist attacks in Boston (15 April) and Woolwich (22 May). Beginning with Boston, the refusal of many commentators to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in motivating the bombings reached new heights. As usual, most expressed unwarranted perplexity about the motives of the perpetrators, even as evidence increasingly mounted that their mother Zubeidat, Tamerlan, and eventually Dzhokar Tsarnaev had all adopted radical interpretations of Islam – i.e., Islamism – which had inspired the two sons to carry out the attacks.7 Yet reporters and government officials kept publicly wondering, wringing their hands, and agonizing about “how” and “why” the Tsarnaev brothers, who appeared to be “normal” kids, were not mired in poverty, had seemingly become Westernized and integrated into American society, and, in the case of Dzhokar, had been an excellent student with many friends, could have been induced to carry out such a heinous act. The question itself reveals a shocking level of ignorance about the normal motives of insurgent terrorists, since it assumes that they must either display clinical psychopathologies (i.e., be “crazy”) or be poor, disadvantaged, and/or disenfranchised in order to

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perpetrate acts of terrorism, even though research has shown for decades that most members of terrorist groups are no more prone to having such psychopathologies than non-terrorists and that there is no direct correlation, much less any primary causal link, between poverty and immiseration and a propensity for terrorism.8 On the contrary, most insurgent terrorists (especially, but not exclusively, those in key leadership, ideological, and operational positions), like extremists in general and other self-styled revolutionaries, tend to be from relatively privileged strata of their own societies, tend to have above average intelligence, and tend to have benefitted from higher levels of education than most of their countrymen. Even after it emerged that Tamerlan had become increasingly religious (along with his mother), had forced his converted American wife to wear a headscarf, had posted jihadist materials online, had argued with less radical (but by no means moderate) imams at a local mosque, and may have interacted with North Caucasus mujahidin during a recent visit to Dagestan, pundits and officials continued to profess ignorance about the bombers’ motives. Note, for example, the comments of Secretary of State John Kerry: “I think the world has had enough of people who have no belief system . . . but who just want to kill people because they don’t like what they see.”9 Since when, one might ask, is Islamism not a belief system? And even after the wounded and captured Dzhokar admitted to interrogators that the bombers had been motivated by their religious worldviews, three apparently uncomprehending journalists nonetheless wrote the following lines: “Based on preliminary written interviews with Dzhokar in his hospital bed, U.S. officials believe the brothers were motivated by their religious views. It has not been clear, however, what those views were.”10 Perhaps the authors of this article suspected that the attacks had been inspired by Mormonism or Buddhism rather than by radical interpretations of Islam. Even President Barack Obama initially characterized the bombings, bizarrely, as a “tragedy,” as if they had been the result of some sort of natural disaster rather being the product of human ideological fanaticism.11 The legions of academic “Islam apologists” and “Islamist apologists” also immediately weighed in after the Boston bombings, as usual in a desperate effort to absolve Islam in general or Islamism in particular from bearing any moral, intellectual, or political responsibility for motivating the attacks.12 Apart from their standard claims that Islam does not sanction and is therefore incompatible with terrorism, claims that are frankly absurd given that so many Islamists (and other Muslims) regularly cite well-known Qur’anic passages,13 Muhammad’s own reported actions, and the military conquests of the “rightly-guided” Caliphs and their successors to justify ongoing acts of aggression, violence, and terrorism against “infidels,” these self-styled experts also insisted that the Tsarnaevs were not really devout Muslims motivated by their interpretations of the Islamic religion. According to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, for example, the Tsarnaevs were “secular ex-Soviets” rather than “observant Muslims,” and were simply “on an adolescent homocidal (sic) power trip, dressed up like al-Qaeda, the way the Aurora [Colorado] shooter was wearing an arsenal and dressed up like Batman.”14 Actual evidence for this bizarre claim was, as one might expect, never forthcoming.

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Likewise, for University of North Carolina professor Omid Safi, the “few pieces [of information] we have do not exactly add up to a life of pious observance of Islam. Their high school friends talk about the two brothers getting together, drinking, and smoking pot. . . . We have seen this before, in the case of the 9/11 hijackers who visited strip clubs and got loaded up on alcohol before committing their atrocities – again, not the action of Muslim role models.”15 These types of arguments are not only misleading but factually incorrect, in the same way as claiming that a neo-Nazi could not be “real” Nazi extremist if he turned out to be a homosexual, given that homosexuality is officially viewed as “degenerate” in Nazi ideology – is it really necessary to refer here, say, to gay SA leader Ernst Röhm or gay German neo-Nazi Michael Kühnen? – or that a devout Christian pastor could not really be a fanatical “true believer” if he was at some point discovered hiring prostitutes or snorting cocaine, since these are considered “sins” by both Catholics and Protestants. The reality is that ideological extremists, being characteristically flawed human beings, can rarely live up to the ostensibly “higher” moral standards that they try to impose on everyone else, that new “born again” converts to religions have often lived hedonistic or even criminal lifestyles before their conversions, that even the most devout jihadists operating in the West are often explicitly instructed by their trainers to behave just like “decadent” Westerners so as not to draw undue attention to themselves (as, e.g., is the case for members of al-Takfir wa al-Hijra [Excommunication and Migration] and Qa‘idat al-Jihad [The Base, or Foundation, of the Jihad]), and that most Muslims believe that the worldly sins of believers who die as “martyrs” fighting on behalf of Islam will be instantly forgiven by Allah, who will then automatically grant them entry to the highest level (firdaws) of Paradise ( janna). Hence the periodically “un-Islamic” moral behavior displayed by would-be or actual jihadist terrorists hardly signifies that they are not motivated to carry out their violent actions as a result of embracing extremist interpretations of Islam.16 Yet another example of the ongoing attempts by various left-of-center commentators to minimize, obscure, or deny the Islamist ideological motivations of the Tsarnaevs was the BBC’s Panorama investigative report entitled “The Brothers Who Bombed Boston,” wherein it was suggested that Tamerlan was merely a “Muslim of convenience” and instead emphasized that he had likewise possessed some American “right-wing extremist literature,” specifically publications espousing white supremacy (one of which argued that “Hitler had a point”), antigovernment conspiracy theories concerning the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks, and warnings about the “rape of our gun rights”; also found were materials about U.S. drones killing civilians, the alleged plight of Muslims imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, and literature about what motivated mass killers and “how the perpetrators murdered and maimed calmly.”17 Alas, this information has already been exploited by certain political websites so as to imply that Tamerlan might not have really been an Islamist radical after all.18 However, there is no reason to suppose that these new discoveries have any bearing on the nature of Tamerlan’s ideological beliefs. First of all, Islamists are themselves right-wing religious extremists, so it is hardly surprising that they would

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embrace certain ideas and tropes peddled by other types of anti-Western, anti-“New World Order,” anti-democratic, and anti-Semitic extremists, including “infidel” right-wingers from the West. After all, ideological cross-fertilization between different extremist milieus is quite common, especially in the context of conspiratorial beliefs.19 Second, Islamists have long avidly absorbed and disseminated Nazi and pro-Nazi anti-Semitic literature, which is in fact openly sold in Islamist bookstores and book stalls throughout the Muslim world (including those in certain mosques and Muslim enclaves in the West), which – together with the extensive and welldocumented historical pattern of collaboration between influential Islamists and the Nazi regime – explains why they are so often enamored with Hitler and his anti-Jewish (and anti-gay) exterminatory policies.20 Third, many Muslims are prone to embrace conspiracy theories of various types, in particular those that attribute sinister secret machinations to Jews, the U.S. government, various European powers, Russia, and India. Therefore, it is understandable why so many uncritically accept nonsensical 9/11, London, Madrid, Bali, and Mumbai conspiratorial scenarios regarding attacks that were actually perpetrated by jihadists, as well as no less bogus claims that other high profile acts of terrorism (such as the one carried out by Timothy McVeigh) were likewise “false flag” operations covertly conducted by the U.S. government or the Israeli secret services.21 This is another of the many psychological defense mechanisms that all too many Muslims conveniently adopt in order to absolve themselves and/or Islam from shouldering any moral responsibility for jihadist terrorist crimes and atrocities, and that Islamists systematically promote in efforts to further demonize their principal “infidel” enemies. That is precisely why both Western right-wing extremists (e.g., Michael Collins Piper, Lyndon LaRouche, David Duke, Bradley R. Smith, and Gerald Fredrick Töben) and left-wing Western conspiracy theorists (e.g., Thierry Meyssan of the Réseau Voltaire [Voltaire Network] and former professor and Muslim convert Kevin Barrett) are typically welcomed with open arms at “Holocaust denial” or “9/11 Truth” fora organized by Islamists, whether private associations (e.g., the now defunct Arab League “think tank” formerly based in Abu Dhabi, the Zayid Center for Coordination and Follow-Up) or governments (such as that of Iran).22 Finally, it is no mystery why Islamists like Tamerlan should possess partisan materials denouncing drone attacks and conditions at Gitmo, or literature on mass murders in cases where they are motivated to commit such acts themselves. Thus the exploitation of these “revelations” by the BBC and others only serves to illustrate the moral bankruptcy and distorted political priorities of many self-styled “progressives,” whose primary concern is never about the actual victims of acts of terrorism, protecting national security, or the ongoing threat posed by jihadist terrorists, but is rather to shift the blame away from the actual Islamist perpetrators of violence and/or their professed ideological motives and onto preferred villains like the domestic far right, “imperialist” Western governments, Israel, or “white males.”23 Turning now to the sadistic murder of an unarmed, off-duty British soldier named Lee Rigby by two jihadists in Woolwich, British Prime Minister David Cameron was quick to insist, without providing any actual evidence for these claims,

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that it constituted a “betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to this country,” and that “[t]here is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.”24 Similarly, fellow Conservative Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, hastened to state that “it is completely wrong to blame this killing on the religion of Islam,”25 although, like the PM, he studiously ignored the obvious fact that particular interpretations of Islam clearly inspired the attack. Similarly, British comedian Russell Brand opined that the killer was “a nut who happens to be Muslim”; hence “[b]laming Muslims for this is like blaming Hither’s moustache for the Holocaust.”26 Brand did not, however, explain why blaming Islamist ideology for inspiring the Woolwich attack would be any less accurate than blaming Nazi ideology for inspiring the Holocaust. Predictably, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella group reportedly dominated by pro-Mawdudist Islamists, also immediately claimed that this was “a barbaric attack that had nothing to do with Islam,”27 and as per usual the MCB and several other UK Islamist organizations – like their American counterparts – immediately began focusing their energies, not on challenging or criticizing radical interpretations of Islam (which they themselves espouse in one form or another), but rather on sounding the alarm about a possible “wave” of “Islamophobic” retaliatory violence, as they invariably do in the wake of jihadist terrorist attacks.28 Yet oddly enough, like tens of thousands of other Islamists throughout the world, the Woolwich perpetrators apparently never realized that waging “individual jihad terrorism” (to use the phrase coined anew by Syrian jihadist strategic thinker Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri) was actually “un-Islamic,” since one of those two Nigerian Islamists yelled “Allahu akbar,” paraphrased a passage in the Qur’an, and declared that “[w]e swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.”29 Indeed, one very inconvenient fact that Muslim and Western “Islam apologists” and “Islamist apologists” are never able to explain satisfactorily – if Islam really is the inherently tolerant, “progressive,” and peaceful religion that they insistently claim it is (which the historical record generally belies) – how and why all of the Islamists, as well as millions of other Muslims, invariably “mis”-interpret their core religious doctrines and scriptures in a similarly intolerant, bellicose, regressive, and imperialistic fashion. And why, for that matter, do so few ostensibly “moderate” Muslims openly, persistently, and genuinely denounce the Islamist interpretation of Islam, even in Western countries, where they have the freedom to do so?

Possible reasons for denying the key role of Islamist ideology in acts of jihadist terrorism There are three possible explanations for the failure of so much of the Western intelligentsia to acknowledge the Islamist motivations of the perpetrators of acts of jihadist terrorism like those in Boston and Woolwich. The first is the belief that political ideologies and religious doctrines do not influence the behavior of terrorists at all, which would mean that other factors – psychological, narrowly political, economic, etc. – must invariably be responsible for that behavior. Such a view, which some “social scientists” actually seem to accept, is not only preposterous on

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its face but is completely contradicted by the historical record. The second is the supposition that political ideologies and religious doctrines sometimes influence the behavior of insurgent terrorists, but that unlike in other contexts this is not true in cases of Islamist terrorism. Those who assert that particular interpretations of Islam do not actually serve to motivate jihadist terrorists, in spite of the fact that the latter invariably proclaim that they are acting fi sabil Allah or “in the cause of Allah” (as, for example, Moroccan Islamist Muhammad Buyari repeatedly did after he brutally murdered Dutch film director Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004), have yet to provide any credible evidence to the contrary. The third is the conviction that, even though it is obvious that Islamist ideology does influence the behaviour of jihadist terrorists, it is simply better not to admit this publicly. Naturally, those who hold the latter view should be forced to explain how this ongoing denial of reality could possibly be helpful in terms of responding to the terrorist threat from this quarter. Whatever the explanation in specific instances, the fact is that if either of the two aforementioned acts of jihadist terrorism had been high-profile attacks carried out by, say, domestic right-wing extremists, Western media and law enforcement officials would have not only immediately recognized, but also displayed no reluctance whatsoever to identify, the key motivational role played by the noxious ideological beliefs of the perpetrators.30 Indeed, for months or even years afterward they would be insistently hyping the real or imagined dangers posed by the homegrown radical right, as the examples of Timothy McVeigh, David Copeland, and Anders Behring Breivik all serve to illustrate.31 In marked contrast, those same media and officials usually downplay or even conceal the much greater subversive and security threats presented by the Islamic radical right (i.e., Islamists), whether its cadres are operating at home or overseas. The very same pattern is unfortunately displayed by a myriad of private “watchdog” organizations whose stated purpose is to monitor the activities of the radical right, which typically exaggerate the threat posed by the domestic far right whilst systematically ignoring the more serious threat posed by Islamist networks, including terrorist cells, that are active in their own and other Western nations.32 Thus, it is mainly in cases where radical interpretations of Islam are undeniably the inspiration for brutal acts of terrorism that Western media, academic, advocacy, and key policy-making elites continue to display a stubborn and perverse reluctance to acknowledge this publicly. Such a blatant display of hypocritical double standards is surely not coincidental. This phenomenon of willfully ignoring or dismissing the importance of the ideologies motivating our primary enemies is arguably unprecedented in modern history. Apart from assorted naïve or dissimulating intellectual apologists for leftwing and right-wing totalitarianism, Western democratic elites did not hesitate to highlight the central role played by Marxist-Leninist, Fascist, and Nazi ideologies in motivating the systematic acts of state repression, persecution, and violence carried out by the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, or Nazi Germany, nor in fueling the brutality and violence carried out by those same extremist ideological movements before they had managed to seize state power. Indeed, recognizing, understanding, and countering the doctrinal tenets and appeal of those ideologies was a key factor that enabled

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the West to defend itself effectively and ultimately prevail in its struggles against these three would-be totalitarian movements and regimes. As Sun Tzu and innumerable other strategic thinkers throughout the centuries have rightly emphasized, it is virtually impossible to counter and defeat an adversary if one does not understand his underlying beliefs and motives, however bizarre or delusional those beliefs and motives may in fact be, since they greatly affect his strategic and even operational decisions. Why, then, do Western policy-makers and opinion-shapers still stubbornly persist in denying reality with respect to the baleful role played by Islamist ideology in influencing the observable behavior of Islamist organizations, including the jihadist groups and networks that constitute an ongoing terrorist threat? There are several apparent reasons for this continued Western unwillingness to face reality. First, Westerners grow up and live in, and thus are unavoidably socialized within, relatively materialistic human societies, in multiple senses of that term. Therefore, they are naturally prone to ascribe similarly materialistic motivations to all of their adversaries from other cultures, including political or religious extremists from the Muslim world, instead of taking their ideological and religious beliefs seriously.33 That is why Western analysts so often wrongly assume that ideological extremists are really motivated by narrowly material interests or a naked thirst for power rather than by their stated beliefs, which some falsely claim are nothing more than convenient rationalizations. It is also why they continue to argue, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that really existing problems like poverty or the lack of democracy are the actual underlying causes of Muslim radicalization and violence. On the basis of this egregiously myopic and wrong-headed perspective, for which there is virtually no evidentiary support and a great deal of evidentiary disconfirmation (especially in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring,” which has thus far mainly degenerated into an “Islamist Winter,” just as more knowledgeable people had predicted from the outset),34 it follows that the provision of more foreign aid and the introduction of democratic procedures like elections is the solution to that radicalization and violence. Here, as in so many other cases, one can observe the phenomenon of “mirror imaging,” in which the analysts in question simply project their own characteristic motivations and modes of thinking uncritically and therefore naïvely onto others instead of carefully examining and trying to empathize – albeit not sympathize – with the actual beliefs, cultural values, and motivations of their adversaries. Second, more than a decade after 9/11, there still remain shocking levels of ignorance in the West about the nature of Islam as a religion, about the basic outlines of Islamic history, about tribal social structures in the Muslim world, and about the doctrinal characteristics of Islamism, an extreme right-wing, intrinsically antidemocratic, and indeed totalitarian twentieth-century political ideology deriving from an exceptionally strict and puritanical interpretation of core Islamic religious and legal doctrines.35 Islamism is only one of many possible interpretations of such doctrines, of course, but it is by far the most intolerant, aggressive, belligerent, and imperialistic of all of those interpretations. Moreover, at the present time it appears to be growing exponentially in popularity at the expense of more moderate interpretations of Islam (as the electoral successes of Islamist parties in the Palestinian

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territories, Iraq, Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, and regions of Pakistan have repeatedly demonstrated). Hence most Westerners, including influential policy-makers, journalists, and academicians, simply do not possess the requisite levels of expertise to comprehend the extremist ideological beliefs and thoroughly regressive cultural values of our Islamist adversaries, much less to distinguish between genuinely moderate Muslims and extremists employing deception and disinformation. Worse still, following the reprehensible example set by various activist academicians (above all Palestinian literary critic Edward Said), a majority of the Western professoriate in the field of modern Middle East Studies – in contradistinction to the far more serious scholars of medieval Islam – appear to have avidly embraced overtly biased, hopelessly one-sided, and blatantly ideological (if not propagandistic) interpretations of Islam and Islamism, interpretations which have resulted not only in blaming the “imperialist” West for most if not all of the Muslim world’s problems and in the systematic whitewashing of Islam itself (for example, as a “religion of peace” or at least a religion that is no more prone to intolerance or violence than any other religion), but also in the patently absurd characterization of Islamist movements that have eschewed violence for purely tactical reasons as “moderate” and “democratic.”36 These same engagés experts have also repeatedly argued that a tiny, fringe minority of violent jihadists has “perverted” or “hijacked” Islam in pursuit of agendas that are supposedly “un-Islamic,” when in fact the jihadists are Islamists whose interpretations of Islam are far more often orthodox than “heretical” in relation to the “classical” medieval Islamic jurisprudential tradition, above all in regard to conceptions of international relations between Muslims and “infidels.”37 Last but not least, many of these academicians have systematically sought, together with dissimulating Islamist activists and clueless or dishonest members of self-styled anti-fascist groups, to demonize all those who have adopted a more critical perspective about Islam or Islamism as bigoted, hate-filled “Islamophobes,” no matter how justifiable and well-documented their criticisms of Islam and Islamism may be.38 From this blinkered perspective, everyone who has concerns about various undeniably regressive aspects of Islam and/or is sounding the alarm about the threat posed by Islamism, no matter how legitimately, must ipso facto be afflicted with some sort of clinical psychopathology, i.e., an irrational “phobia” about Islam.39 Alas, it is precisely these “Islam apologists” and “Islamist apologists” in academia who have been providing classroom instruction to future journalists and government officials in recent decades. It is therefore hardly surprising that the latter would so often internalize and then subsequently regurgitate the exact same misinterpretations.

Political correctness However, the main reason for the West’s ongoing unwillingness to identify Islamist ideology as the primary source of the jihadist terrorist danger, other security threats, and a plethora of growing socio-cultural problems involving Muslims, has to do with the present era’s ever-more pervasive climate of myopic, self-destructive “political correctness.” This is a well-known term that has come to refer not only to the uncritical

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if not slavish following of political “party lines,” but also to insistent displays of rigid moral self-righteousness and puritanism, humorlessness, and intolerance (if not outright hatred) directed against, as well as an undemocratic impulse to demonize and suppress, the opinions of anyone who does not share one’s own biases and agendas. Such blatantly illiberal behavior is typically justified – as intolerance, fanaticism, and repressive attitudes and behavior almost invariably are – as being in the interests of the “greater good.” Many different forms of “political correctness” exist, including those associated with ideologues on the political and religious right. But herein we are concerned with the now hegemonic self-styled “progressive” forms operating within academia, the media, and government, which emanate primarily from morally puritanical “liberals” (which once was a contradiction in terms), sectarian leftists, radical “feminists” (of the deluded sort who argue that the wearing of a niqab or a burqa by Muslim women should be viewed as a sign of “freedom of choice” rather than recognized as either an indication of coercive male Muslim misogyny or a sartorial expression of regressive Islamist beliefs), multiculturalist ideologues, and assorted antiWestern or anti-white minority group activists (including Islamists). These self-appointed “guardians of public morality” have organized a multitude of advocacy groups which, much like the official and unofficial medieval “witch hunters” who systematically but falsely accused individuals of being “heretics” and “witches” in order to justify persecuting them, constantly smear all those who disagree with their social and political views, often equally falsely, as “sexists,” “racists,” “homophobes,” “xenophobes,” “bigots,” “haters,” and “Islamophobes.” The goal of the former is to demonize the latter, delegitimize their opinions, and even provide a legal basis for prosecuting them under bogus “hate speech” or libel laws, thereby effectively endeavoring to criminalize dissenting opinions that they regard as beyond the pale. If these all too common impulses to generate “moral panics” and legal persecution were not bad enough, insofar as they represent a clear and present danger to freedom of speech and expression in Western democracies, “political correctness” is also typically characterized by blatant hypocrisy and double standards in that it systematically apologizes for, or even seeks to justify, the very same or even worse behavior, whenever it is manifested by supposed “victims,” that it excoriates when it is manifested by alleged “oppressors.”40 In the context of Islam, Islamism, and jihadist terrorism, “politically correct” circles in academia, the media, and government have been insistently peddling the unsupportable view that neither Islam in general nor any conceivably “legitimate” interpretation of Islam can be blamed for acts of terrorism committed by Muslims, even though the perpetrators themselves haughtily declare otherwise.41 However, not everyone who is taking this position is doing so for the same reasons. On the contrary, the motives of the various “Islam apologists” and “Islamist apologists” are often fundamentally incompatible. Here are some illustrative examples: •

well-meaning but naïve political or religious liberals are doing so in the name of promoting greater tolerance and preventing discrimination against innocent Muslims (which are, in principle, worthy goals);

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multiculturalists are doing so in the name of promoting ethno-cultural “diversity” and justifying continuing high levels of Third World immigration or asylum;42 sectarian leftists, minority activists, and some radical neo-fascists in Europe are doing so in order to shift the blame from the actual terrorist perpetrators and onto Western “imperialism” or “Zionism” for supposedly “provoking” Muslim violence; self-styled “anti-fascist” groups are doing so in order to more easily justify denouncing their designated enemies from the supposedly “Islamophobic” domestic right; Islamists are doing so in order to mislead gullible “infidels” about their ongoing pursuit of anti-democratic, anti-Western, and Islamic supremacist agendas; other Muslims are doing so in order to shield certain features of Islam from any criticism or blame, no matter how well-deserved; and Western governments are doing so in an ultimately futile effort to win Muslim “hearts and minds,” both at home (in large part for domestic electoral purposes) and abroad, by convincing conspiracy mongering Muslims that they are not waging a “war against Islam.”

Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists from most of these milieus – and many others as well – are busily insisting that Islamists, despite overwhelming evidence of their responsibility, are not even the real sponsors or perpetrators of acts of jihadist terrorism.43 As a result, all of these milieus are increasingly prone, for their own respective and sometimes disingenuous reasons, to try and “protect” Islam and Muslims from criticism by abusively labeling all critics of Islam and Islamism as “Islamophobes.”44 In practice, then, these diverse circles of Western “Islam apologists” and “Islamist apologists” are unwittingly functioning as “useful idiots” – or, as per the reformulation of Richard Landes, as no less idiotic “useful infidels”45 – for radical right, totalitarian Islamists, who are mercilessly exploiting their abysmal ignorance, misplaced good will, or political myopia for their own sordid and sinister purposes.

The impact of “political correctness” on Western counterterrorism policies and actions Alas, the concrete effects of all of this naïveté, self-delusion, and outright dissimulation are very dangerous indeed, especially in the context of counterterrorism. The West has now reached the point where the very elites entrusted with defending it are increasingly unwilling even to acknowledge the nature of the threat posed by Islamism, despite the fact that Islamists all over the world are openly and indeed continually denouncing the West as a mortal enemy that must be defeated, subjugated, and ultimately converted to their strict, puritanical version of Islam. The only debate among the Islamists is how this commonly shared objective can best be achieved, i.e., whether by means of armed jihad, the approach favored by terrorist groups such as al-Qa‘ida, or by means of gradual processes of infiltration, implantation,

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and subversion in which the Islamists establish ideological hegemony over Muslim migrant communities, are appointed as representatives of those communities (usually with the unwitting aid of Western governments), and carve out shari‘acompliant areas within the bosom of Western societies. The latter approach (which is already well underway, especially in certain areas of Europe46) has been favored by the Jam‘iyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Society of Muslim Brothers, better known as the Muslim Brotherhood), Saudi Wahhabis, and South Asian Mawdudists.47 Indeed, instead of publicly identifying the Islamists as the implacable enemies of the democratic, pluralistic West, as in fact they are, key Western elites have increasingly adopted an “Islamist apologist” stance, deluded themselves that the “non-violent” Islamists can be our “allies” against terrorism, and therefore unwisely endeavored to collaborate or “partner” with them in Egypt and elsewhere.48 (This policy is every bit as foolish and counterproductive as if we had opted to “partner” with the Nazis during the Weimar Republic or with Japanese ultranationalists in the 1930s rather than at least tacitly supporting their opponents, be they authoritarian, democratic, or quasi-democratic.) Indeed, such ill-conceived notions now constitute the basis of many U.S. and E.U. policies toward the Muslim world, especially in the wake of the “Arab Spring.” The grim reality is that Western collaboration with Islamists is nothing new, given that the U.S., Britain, and several other Western or democratic countries (including Israel) covertly supported Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood against rival Arab nationalists and leftists throughout the Cold War era. The reason is that these religious reactionaries were simplistically and short-sightedly perceived through only one prism: as a useful bulwark against communism and Soviet influence within the Muslim world.49 Even worse, some Western regimes periodically supported armed jihadist groups, as the U.S. did with the Afghan mujahidin, the British reportedly did with jihadist terrorist groups opposed to Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi, and the Israelis initially did with the Harakat al-Muqawwama al-Islamiyya (HAMAS: Islamic Resistance Movement), actions that in every case led to serious “blowback” that grievously harmed the West and its allies and mainly benefited the Islamists.50 Yet unlike the Islamists, who have continued to cleverly exploit “infidel” gullibility so as to obtain various types of tangible aid, the West has seemingly not learned any lessons at all from its repeated foreign policy failures vis-à-vis the Muslim world. However, “political correctness” has now apparently replaced Realpolitik as the driver of Western pro-Islamist domestic and foreign policies. In past decades, it was often geopolitical hardliners within the intelligence community who had advocated supporting the Islamists against secular anti-colonialist movements. Those hardliners naïvely believed that they could easily manipulate the Islamists into functioning as their de facto agents against common Cold War enemies, after which they could abandon or dispose of them as they wished. In reality, they themselves were often conned and played for fools by the Islamists. But unlike today’s delusional policy-makers, these hubristic Cold War Realpolitiker rarely mistook the Islamists for genuine “moderates” or closet “democrats.” Hence the post-Cold War adoption of inaccurate and egregiously sanitized “politically correct” attitudes about Islam and

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Islamism, which has all too often reflected a misguided bipartisan consensus in the United States, has resulted in even greater Western foreign policy blunders and has now reached the point where it is arguably undermining, if not compromising or sabotaging, the future security of the West.51 Both neo-conservatives and liberal internationalists have fundamentally misconstrued the nature of Islam and Islamism, with the result that both have uncritically promoted simple procedural “democratization,” if necessary by force, as the solution to the multifaceted problems in the Muslim world, many of which are in fact mainly the product of the continuing debilitating influence of regressive social, cultural, and religious values. Moreover, both the Bush and Obama administrations, and those of both Labour and the Conservatives in Britain, have foolishly allowed Islamist operatives and front groups, often portraying themselves – like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – as Muslim “civil liberties” organizations, to exert a baleful influence on the development of Western security and military policies.52 Illustrative contemporary examples in the U.S. include Islamists like Rashad Hussain (Obama’s Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation [OIC] and a Deputy Associate White House Counsel working on “Muslim outreach” and national security), Dalia Mogahed [correct transliteration: Mujahid] (Obama’s Muslim Affairs Advisor to the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group), and numerous other activists who are reportedly associated with Muslim Brotherhood front groups.53 Islamist influence has especially manifested itself in three interrelated spheres, where it has predictably created both conceptual and policy problems. The first problem, and by far the most serious manifestation of Islamist influence, is that Islamist activists have increasingly been allowed to vet the instructional materials related to Islam and Islamism that are being used to train Western intelligence and military personnel. This has progressed to the point where they have actually succeeded in having certain contract instructors fired who they claimed, at times falsely, were “anti-Islamic.”54 In reality, any criticisms at all of Islam or Islamism immediately make someone, in the eyes of such activists, “Islamophobic” or “anti-Islamic,” even if those criticisms are partially, largely, or entirely warranted. Be that as it may, it is surely an unprecedented situation that our declared Islamist enemies, despite usually operating under the cover of barely disguised front groups, are nowadays being allowed – with the witless and pernicious help of the “useful infidels” who uncritically accept their disingenuous talking points – to decide what official training materials can and cannot be used to describe and analyze fellow Islamists. Imagine, if you will, that the U.S. government had allowed members of the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization, to vet its training materials related to Nazism or Nazi Germany prior to World War II, or if it had allowed members of Soviet-backed front organizations to vet its training materials related to communism or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. That is essentially what is occurring at the present time with respect to non-state Islamism and jihadist terrorism, as certain documents released by the FBI in response to a Freedom of

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Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Judicial Watch clearly indicate.55 Why would any responsible government allow its own enemies to exert any influence whatsoever over the selection of its training materials for security personnel, as the Islamists have been trying to do with considerable success ever since 9/11?56 All the more so since the Islamists and the “Islamist apologists” they have hoodwinked are explicitly endeavoring to delegitimize any analytical approach or statement that raises Western awareness of what the former are up to by labeling them, a priori, as “conspiracy theories.”57 Only a government that is hopelessly blinkered by “political correctness” would adopt such a self-destructive and potentially suicidal course of action. Indeed, the other two problems to be highlighted are in large part the predictable result of actively soliciting advice from Islamist activists about how to frame security issues involving Muslims. The second is the adoption and continued employment of euphemistic, misleading terminology to describe jihadist terrorism. As is wellknown, after 9/11 the Bush administration adopted the pithy phrase “war against terrorism” to describe America’s conflict with jihadist terrorists. Yet the “war against terrorism” formulation was problematic inasmuch as one cannot wage a war against an operational technique, just as one cannot wage a war (other than metaphorically) against an inanimate object like “drugs” or a social phenomenon like “poverty.” As some have sardonically pointed out, the “war against terrorism” phrase would be equivalent to characterizing the war against Nazi Germany as a “war against blitzkrieg [operational techniques],” which would obviously have been risible. Nor is the post-9/11 conflict one between Western democracies and all of the world’s terrorists, i.e., non-state groups and states that frequently resort to the use of terrorist techniques. On the contrary, the conflict that has been going on since 9/11, and that in fact predated those attacks by more than two decades, is between “infidel” governments (including supposedly “apostate” Muslim governments) and Islamists, first and foremost those who rely primarily on armed jihad to achieve their goals. Yet Bush and his advisors, in an attempt to convince Muslims that they were not waging a war against Islam, generally promoted the notion that Islam itself was a “religion of peace” and, as a consequence, also refused to identify Islamism as the enemy in their public statements, in the way that U.S. presidents and officials had previously identified Communism and Fascism as the primary enemies of democracy.58 Under Obama the terminology for the Islamist enemy has again been changed, this time to “violent extremism,” which is certainly preferable to the ill-defined “terrorism.” Yet once again, the U.S. is not currently fighting against all forms of violent extremism in the world, but primarily against a certain type of violent Muslim radicalism (i.e., jihadism). Officials in the Obama administration have repeatedly acknowledged that al-Qa‘ida and its affiliates are their enemy, thereby stating the obvious, but they have also increasingly endeavored to eliminate references to “radical Islam” or “Islamism” in official national security and strategic documents and, as will become clearer below, have stubbornly refused to publicly label their enemies as “Islamists,” “jihadists,” or “Islamic terrorists.” This was ostensibly done to facilitate

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“outreach” to Muslim communities and to avoid giving “offense” to Muslims in general. However, there is no good reason to believe that non-Islamist and antiIslamist Muslims would find such accurate descriptive terminology “offensive” in any way (since they themselves often use it), any more than non-Nazi and anti-Nazi Germans would have been “offended” by the Allies identifying National Socialists as their enemies. Nor is there any reason to suppose that criticizing Islamists would in any way inhibit “outreach” efforts to genuinely moderate, pro-democratic Muslims who are themselves opposed to Islamism – on the contrary, it would likely embolden such Muslims to speak out publicly and contribute to the forging of a common ideological, social, and political bulwark against mutual enemies. In any case, referring to Islamists and jihadists euphemistically and misleadingly, and not acknowledging the motivational centrality of their interpretations of Islam, does not change their nature or behavior one iota. The third problem, which is directly linked to and indeed reinforced by the two aforementioned problems, is the persistent and otherwise inexplicable refusal of key Western officials to link terrorism carried out by religiously inspired Muslims in any way to Islam, or even to Islamism, both in their public statements and in their intelligence assessments. John Brennan, then Senior Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, attempted to explain and justify this approach in a 6 August 2009 speech at the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). On that occasion, he exclaimed that President Obama did not consider this struggle to be a “fight against jihadists” because “[d]escribing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term ‘jihad,’ which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve” as well as “reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.”59 Built into those remarks of Brennan, who then served as Director of the CIA, are two unwarranted assumptions. The first is that Muslims will be looking to “infidels” to determine what the term jihad signifies and whether al-Qa‘ida and other Islamist terrorist organizations can be justly characterized as jihadists, which is an absurd proposition given that no terminology adopted by U.S. officials, negative or positive, is going to significantly affect Muslim perceptions of al-Qa‘ida and other Islamist organizations. After all, even Muslims who are opposed to al-Qa‘ida’s totalitarian goals and/or its brutal methods have not generally claimed that the group’s fighters are not really mujahidin, even if they view them as being misguided or dangerous. Furthermore, even the anti-Islamist and anti-jihadist themes and rhetoric disseminated by more or less autocratic Muslim governments (e.g., denigrating jihadists as khawarij or Kharijites, in reference to members of a puritanical Muslim sect who broke away from and later assassinated ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth “rightly-guided” Caliph), which were often formulated by regime-friendly Muslim clerics and therefore tended to be more relevant and have more resonance than anything Westerners might devise, have not appreciably affected general Muslim attitudes toward Islamism. (On the contrary, only the systematic targeting of innocent Muslim civilians – but not, alas, their no less innocent non-Muslim

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counterparts – and the rigid imposition of brutal hudud punishments has served to discredit the jihadists in the eyes of many Muslims.) The second assumption is that it is what U.S. officials say in public fora, rather than what tangible policies the U.S. actually ends up adopting, that will somehow matter most to Muslims, which is no less illogical. Indeed, given that the U.S. has never been waging a “war against Islam,” either prior to or in the wake of 9/11, any Muslims who believe that it has, as the Islamists clearly do, are in effect living in a conspiratorial fantasy world that has no correspondence with reality. Hence proclaiming this self-evident fact publicly is not likely to alter their distorted perceptions. Nevertheless, Brennan’s speech set the tone for innumerable other pronouncements made thereafter by Obama administration officials. Indeed, even under oath, in the course of being subjected to direct questioning before congressional committees, several such officials stubbornly continued to deny that which is patently obvious to everyone who has not willfully placed their heads in their sand. Rather than citing selected quotes from the transcripts, it is much more revealing to provide the URLs to their testimony so that readers can directly observe the extent to which these government officials sought to evade the questions or engaged in bizarre verbal contortions in order to avoid acknowledging the obvious: that radical interpretations of Islam have motivated, and are continuing to motivate, acts of jihadist terrorism. Here, for example, is former Attorney General Eric Holder, who, among other absurdities, claimed that Yemeni-American imam and al-Qa‘ida operative Anwar al-Awlaqi espoused a doctrine that was “not consistent with the teachings of Islam”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOQt_mP6Pgg And here is Paul Stockton, then Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Security, refusing to admit, and in fact stubbornly denying, that the U.S. is at war with “violent Islamist extremism” (not to mention insisting that he is not being “politically correct”): www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU6n1mrpAGY One might therefore assume that it would be impossible even to satirize such behavior, but somehow the Fox News channel managed to do so here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpM8qk3t52A Sadly, this particular satirical skit is right on target. The deleterious practical effects of willfully failing to recognize, or obstinately refusing to correctly identify, the Islamist motives of the jihadist perpetrators on the West’s counterterrorist efforts can easily be documented. For one thing, the motives of past plotters and perpetrators of jihadist terrorism, including “martyrdom operations,” have all too often been systematically mischaracterized.60 In contrast to all other types of violent ideological extremists, when it comes to the acts of violence

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planned or carried out by Islamists, especially but not exclusively “lone wolf ” actions, the tendency of journalists, academicians, and law enforcement spokesmen has almost invariably been to minimize or deny the crucially important and often publicly articulated religio-ideological motivations of the perpetrators and instead to claim, falsely, that the individuals in question were motivated solely by various idiosyncratic personal grievances deriving from their psychological alienation, social isolation, socio-political disgruntlement, and/or mental illness. Perhaps the most egregious and illustrative example of this peculiar tendency can be observed in the official response in relation to the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim U.S. Army major who on 5 November 2009 carried out a jihadist terrorist attack against fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas, killing 13 and wounding 32. It soon became evident that Hasan had embraced al-Qa‘ida’s “jihadist Salafist” ideology, had periodically espoused its tenets in both classroom oral presentations and private conversations with other soldiers, had established email contact in order to solicit advice from Anwar al-Awlaqi, had prepared a card identifying himself as a “Soldier of Islam,” had given away his possessions and engaged in Muslim purification rituals on the eve of the attack, and had shouted “Allahu akbar” while firing his weapon at nearby soldiers.61 One might therefore assume that every honest and informed observer would conclude that his attack had been ideologically motivated, and indeed that it was clearly an act of “individual jihad terrorism” of the sort advocated by Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri and al-Qa‘ida’s Inspire English-language magazine, which al-Awlaqi had played a very important role in creating and editing prior to his death in a 30 September 2011 drone strike. However, high-ranking political and military officials at once hastened to present a radically different interpretation that essentially attributed Hasan’s murders to psychological problems and personal grievances, an absurdly distorted conclusion that was later slavishly echoed in the Department of Defense’s “after action” report on the Fort Hood shootings. The main purpose of this distortion, as usual, was to minimize the crucial motivational role played by Hasan’s Islamist interpretations of Islam. So it was that the President himself and other government spokespeople immediately endeavored to absolve Islam of any responsibility for the attacks. For example, in his eulogy for the shooting victims, Obama opined that although it “may be hard to understand the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. . . . we do know [that] no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts.”62 The President thereby conveniently ignored the many Medinan-era Qur’anic passages, the ones that are widely viewed as having “abrogated” the more tolerant Meccan-period suras, that urge Muslims to fight, slay, and subjugate “infidels.” One might at least suspect that a reluctance to face facts would be much less likely to afflict the U.S. military than other components of the American government, but unfortunately “political correctness” has also increasingly been embraced by the Joint Chiefs of Staff since the 1990s. Indeed, in his own remarks, Army Chief of Staff General George W. Casey, Jr. sounded more like a multiculturalist ideologue or a “diversity” bureaucrat than a commander worried primarily about protecting his troops

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from future jihadist attacks by radicalized Muslim soldiers: “I’m concerned that this increased speculation [about Hasan’s Islamist motivations] could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. . . . As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”63 Other military officers and “expert” witnesses in court also expressed doubts that Hasan was an extremist who had carried out a terrorist attack, albeit without presenting any reliable supporting evidence or enumerating any credible reasons. Because of this systematic unwillingness to confront unpleasant but thoroughly documented realities, it should come as no surprise that the only oblique reference to Islam or Islamic extremism in the official Department of Defense report on the Fort Hood attack occurred within an extraordinarily narrow context: “Finding 2.7: DoD policy regarding religious accommodation lacks the clarity necessary to help commanders distinguish appropriate religious practices from those that might indicate a potential for violence or self-radicalization.”64 This seemingly willful blindness will likely continue to make the U.S. military ill-prepared to cope with, or respond effectively to, future jihadist terrorist threats emanating from within its own ranks or the ranks of its ostensible Muslim “allies” in Afghanistan. MuslimAmerican soldiers have already planned or carried out several attacks on their fellow soldiers, and there have also been increasing numbers of attacks by members of the Western-trained Afghan security forces on coalition troops in Afghanistan (socalled “green on blue” attacks). Unless Western governments are willing to publicly identify and confront the underlying motivations behind these attacks, there are bound to be more successful attacks of this nature in the future.65 Indeed, a seemingly growing inability or unwillingness even to recognize the ideological motivations of the perpetrators makes it all the more difficult for Western security services to interdict future jihadist attacks of any sort. Evidence of this ongoing problem of blindness to the dangers of radical Islamic beliefs can easily be deduced from the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Even before March 2011, when the Russian Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB: Federal Security Service) had alerted its American counterparts about the possibility that Tamerlan had adopted radical interpretations of Islam, he had already come to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In congressional testimony in June 2013, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III revealed that Tamerlan’s “name had come up in two other cases” whose nature he did not explain, but acknowledged that those two cases, which were apparently not related to terrorism, had then been closed until the Russian warning “refocused” the Bureau’s attention on him.66 Yet he nevertheless insisted that the FBI agent(s) who conducted the subsequent investigation of Tamerlan had been thorough, and that there was nothing else that could have been done legally, which is doubtful given that Mueller also admitted before Congress that prior to the bombings the Bureau had visited Tamerlan’s mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), not in the context of investigating Tamerlan, but only in order to conduct “outreach” to Muslims.67 And here is how the FBI officially characterized its investigation after receiving the information that Tamerlan “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer. . . . [who] had changed drastically

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since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States . . . to join unspecified underground groups” in the Caucasus68: “In response to this 2011 request, the FBI checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical [Islamist] activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history. The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members. The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government.” Even if one assumes that the FBI agent(s) in question followed these procedures diligently, which is entirely possible, it is nonetheless easy to postulate that anyone familiar with the nature of Islamism, the central role it plays in motivating acts of jihadist terrorism, and the various indicators of Islamist ideological radicalization could have found ample evidence of such radicalization in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Was it not already clear, as later became obvious, that his mother had also become radicalized, that he was espousing Islamist doctrinal tenets to certain family members, friends, and at the mosque, that he was no longer drinking and smoking for religious reasons, and that he had compelled his wife to wear a headscarf ? Or did all of those telltale activities begin only after the FBI questioned and investigated him? The answer to the latter question is unequivocally “no.” According to many diverse but convergent indications, it is now abundantly clear that Tamerlan had become increasingly radicalized from 2008 on, i.e., three years before the 2011 FBI investigation.69 Indeed, growing forensic evidence suggests that Tamerlan may have been involved (along with Dzhokar and Ibragim Todashev, another Chechen who was later shot and killed while being questioned by FBI agents) in the brutal knife murders and near beheadings of three men (at least two of whom were Jewish) in Waltham, Massachusetts, on 11 September 2011, exactly ten years to the day after the 9/11 attacks.70 Given that one of the murdered men had been a close acquaintance of Tamerlan, that there was no evidence of forced entry, and that marijuana and money were strewn all over the bodies, the police concluded that the victims had known their killers and that robbery was not the motive for the slaughter. Hence it increasingly looks as though this triple murder of hated “infidels” might have been carried out by the future Boston bombers in order to memorialize the 9/11 attacks, and that it might also have served as a kind of practice run to test the courage and religious faith of the perpetrators. Later, in early 2012, Tamerlan spent six months in Dagestan, where he definitely met twice with members of one radical Salafist group (the Soyuz Spravedlivykh [Union of the Just], with which his third cousin Magomed Kartashov was associated).71 Moreover, given that he began posting many comments supportive of and videos produced by the Imarat Kavkaz (IK: Caucasus Emirate) on his You Tube and Facebook pages as soon as he returned to

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the U.S., he may likewise have made contact or interacted with IK-linked jihadist organizations during his visit to the Caucasus.72 Such contacts may have further induced him, whether indirectly or directly, to carry out the 15 April 2013 bombing attacks with his younger brother.73 Not only had the earlier FBI investigation missed all of these rather obvious indications of growing Islamist radicalization, the Bureau inexplicably failed to keep track of the subjects of that investigation even after one of them became increasingly linked to known jihadists and had traveled overseas to a terrorist hot zone.74 One can therefore conclude that the failure to give proper weight to and/or recognize the bombers’ Islamist ideological motivations, both before and after the bombings, contributed mightily to the failure of the American security services to prevent this particular attack, as well as to learn any valuable lessons from it that might help them interdict future jihadist acts of terrorism. If so, there is no doubt that “political correctness” in the counterterrorism sphere has deadly consequences. And, sadly, that the delusions it encourages will likely “kill” again.

Conclusion This brings us to the real nub of the problem: the longer that key Western elites persist in mistakenly denying the central role played by Islamist interpretations of Islam in motivating jihadist terrorist attacks, the less likely they will be able to prevent future attacks from this quarter. Until Western intelligence, military, and law enforcement personnel are provided with accurate information about the history and core religious doctrines of Islam and the intrinsically extremist nature of Islamism, and until they are taught how to distinguish between Muslim moderates and Islamist extremists (including those who are posing as moderates) and learn how to recognize the many telltale signs of Islamist ideological radicalization, they will generally be unable to identify prospective jihadist terrorists in advance.75 Nor will they be able to respond effectively to the stealthy “civilization jihad” being waged by certain Islamist organizations that have abandoned violence for tactical reasons, albeit only to pursue their intrinsically anti-democratic agendas via seemingly legal means. It should also go without saying that relying on Islamist activists for “advice” about how to deal with the threat posed by Islamism is not only preposterous but utterly self-defeating. Among the justifications for promoting these “politically correct” inanities about Islam and Islamism is a professed desire to “reach out” to rather than antagonize the Muslim world, as well as to avoid inadvertently encouraging Westerners to adopt a hostile, discriminatory, or persecutory attitude toward Muslims. While the latter goal of discouraging retaliation against innocent Muslims, especially in the wake of successful mass casualty terrorist attacks like 9/11, is perfectly justifiable, the fundamental question is whether ignoring or downplaying the role of Islamist ideology in motivating jihadist terrorists, or avoiding any and all legitimate criticism of Islam itself, will end up having these salutary effects. Quite possibly, they will have the exact opposite effects, since they are so at variance with observable realities.

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And even if they did have those desired effects, could this one social benefit possibly compensate for the innumerable other intellectual, political, social, cultural, and security problems that have already materialized, and that will no doubt become even more acute, as a consequence of systematically concealing troubling facts about Islam, certain Muslim communities in the West, and Islamism? Perhaps the best short definition of reality is “that which exists irrespective of what one believes.” Hence persisting in promoting or even foolishly believing in falsehoods about Islam and Islamism cannot possibly be the solution to any real world problems, above all the threat of jihadist terrorism. On the contrary, it is only by honestly confronting the most regressive and otherwise problematic aspects of Islamic religious teachings and the destructive patterns of tribal solidarity (‘asabiyya) that exist throughout the Muslim world, as well as by highlighting the insidious anti-modernist and anti-democratic agenda of Islamism, that the West can morally encourage and empower secularists, liberal Muslim reformers, and other anti-Islamist Muslims who are resisting the most puritanical, intolerant, bellicose, and reactionary elements in their own societies. Surely this should be the primary goal of Western democracies in the current ideological and political struggle, just as in the past it had generally induced them to support, with successful outcomes, a vast and diverse array of anti-fascist and anti-communist forces during the other great ideological conflicts that characterized the twentieth century. After all, it is a matter of vital importance, both for the non-Muslim world and for the Muslim world itself, that anti-Islamist forces ultimately triumph over the Islamists in their intellectual and moral struggle for the “soul” of Islam.76 Hence the West should not be adopting policies of any kind, either domestic or foreign, that have the effect of tangibly aiding or morally legitimizing the Islamists. Sadly, almost every policy option that the U.S. has embarked upon since 9/11, whether it be the misguided confrontational policies of the neo-conservatives during the Bush administration or the overly conciliatory but no less delusional policies of the Obama administration, has thus far only served to empower the West’s Islamist enemies at the expense of its friends in the Muslim world.77 Indeed, in the years since the “global war on terrorism” was officially declared, the West seems to have learned no fundamental lessons about the essential nature and oft-professed aims of our Islamist enemies, jihadist or otherwise. There is absolutely no excuse for this ongoing, persistent, and seemingly willful blindness, given that certain analysts and officials have been sounding the alarm for many years. For example, on 1 December 2005 U.S. Marine Corps General Peter Pace, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a speech at the National Defense University in which he commented on the Bush administration’s recently released National Strategy for Victory in Iraq report.78 In his remarks, Pace correctly emphasized the “need to understand the nature of the jihadist enemy.”79 And despite the naïve and overly optimistic tone of the report itself, Pace made the following perfectly accurate comments: “I say you need to get out and read what our [ jihadist] enemies have said. Remember Hitler. Remember he wrote Mein Kampf. He said in writing exactly what his plan

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was, and we collectively ignored that to our great detriment. Now, our enemies have said publicly on film, on the Internet, [that] their goal is to destroy our way of life. No equivocation on their part. They’re not saying if you stay home, we will not come after you. They are saying their goal is to rid the Middle East of all foreigners. Then, overthrow all governments that are not friendly to them, which means every single one of those governments. Then, to use that base as a way to spread their terrorism and their oppression across the globe to include a map that shows 100 years from now that the entire globe will be under their domination.”80 These statements, which can easily be documented on the basis of Islamist – not just jihadist – primary sources,81 should have been taken fully to heart by the American military and policy-making establishments, as well as by the Western political “commentariat.” Unfortunately, Pace’s admonitions were largely ignored rather than followed, with the result that the West’s understanding of the enemy’s motives and goals in 2013 seems actually to have deteriorated further, having become corrupted by even more Orwellian rhetoric and “magical thinking” thanks to the pernicious ongoing efforts of Islamist activists and their academic “apologists” to sanitize or conceal basic historical, political, and doctrinal facts about Islam and Islamism. Unless that situation changes dramatically, which means that a multitude of blatantly false but au courant “politically correct” notions will have to be jettisoned, the United States and its democratic allies will never be able to develop effective policies or strategies to cope with their extremist Muslim enemies, whether they are armed jihadists or subversive “stealth” Islamists who have concluded that resorting to violence is not the best way, at least at the moment, to pursue their Islamic supremacist objectives.

Notes 1 Ralph Peters, “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars,” Journal of International Security Affairs 16 (Spring 2009), available at www.securityaffairs.org/issues/2009/16/peters.php. 2 “Together Facing the New Totalitarianism,” reprinted in full as “Writers Statement on Cartoons,” BBC News, 1 March 2006, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ europe/4764730.stm. This manifesto was originally published in the satirical left-wing French magazine Charlie Hebdo in response to the hysterical “Muhammad cartoon” controversy in Denmark (and beyond), which had been provoked, exploited, and exacerbated by Islamist fanatics so as to curtail, by means of intimidation and violence, freedom of speech in the West. All of the signatories of this manifesto were left-leaning intellectuals. This and other evidence of left-wing opposition to Islamism should cause sober observers to question both the fraudulent accusations of “Islamophobia” so often proffered by Islamists and self-styled “anti-fascists” and the histrionic claims of certain right-wing “Islam bashers” and “left bashers” regarding the existence of an ostensibly monolithic “green-red” alliance. The issue of “Islamophobia” will be dealt with at more length in the Chapter 7 notes. For examples of simplistic polemics about “green-red” alliances, see David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004); and Jamie Glazov, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror (Los Angeles: WND Books, 2009), even though both highlight some real-world past and present examples of collaboration between the international left and radical Muslims, including Islamists. See further notes 43 and 32.

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3 Salim Mansur, “How the West Was Duped,” Toronto Sun, 14 February 2009, available at www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/02/14/8389986-sun. html. 4 “David Solway Interview,” Arts & Opinion 9:3 (2010), available at www.artsandopinion. com/2010_v9_n3/solway-20.htm. 5 See United States Government, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Final Report (Washington, DC: GPO, [22 July] 2004), p. 363, available at www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf: “Our enemy is twofold: al Qaeda, a stateless network of terrorists that struck us on 9/11; and a radical ideological movement in the Islamic world [i.e., Islamism], inspired in part by al Qaeda, which has spawned terrorist groups and violence across the globe. The first enemy is weakened, but continues to pose a grave threat. The second enemy is gathering, and will menace Americans and American interests long after Osama bin Ladin and his cohorts are killed or captured. Thus our strategy must match our means to two ends: dismantling the al Qaeda network and prevailing in the longer term over the ideology that gives rise to Islamist terrorism.” However, a few lines further on (ibid.), this perfectly accurate conclusion was in part compromised by the claims that “Islam does not teach terror[ism]” and that Islamism is a “perversion of Islam, not the great faith itself,” problematic public relations themes that have since been widely emphasized and promoted instead of the sober assessment in the earlier passage. 6 See, e.g., [U.S.] Society of Professional Journalists, “Guidelines for Countering Racial, Ethnic and Religious Profiling,” Society of Professional Journalists website, 6 October 2001, available at www.spj.org/divguidelines.asp. Along with many other “politically correct” recommendations (e.g., “[s]eek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing Americans mourning those lost in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania”), the Society urged its members to “[a]void using combinations such as ‘Islamic terrorist’ and ‘Muslim extremist’ that are misleading because they link whole religions to criminal activity” [a claim that is baseless provided that one actually distinguishes “Islamic terrorists” and “Muslim extremists” from the vast majority of other Muslims]; “when writing about terrorism, [to] remember to include white supremacist, radical anti-abortionists and other groups with a history of such activity” [why should this be necessary if such facts are irrelevant to the context of a story concerning jihadist terrorists?]; to “[a]void using terms such as ‘jihad’ unless you are certain of their precise meaning. . . . The basic meaning of ‘jihad’ is to exert oneself for the good of Islam and to better oneself ” [a definition that, while not technically false, is very misleading – see note 59]; and to “[a]sk men and women within targeted communities to review your coverage and make suggestions” [perhaps OK in theory, but in practice a suggestion that will result in journalists consulting self-styled Muslim “spokesmen,” who often turn out to be dissimulating Islamists]. The BBC has promoted similar recommendations, and even goes so far as to suggest that reporters avoid using the term “terrorism.” See BBC, “Language When Reporting Terrorism: Guidance,” October 2010, available at www. bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/page/guidance-reporting-terrorism-summary. Perhaps the most egregious example of the use of Orwellian language in connection with jihadist terrorism was the attempt by former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to re-designate “Islamic terrorism” as “anti-Islamic activity.” See James Slack, “Government Renames Islamic Terrorism as ‘Anti-Islamic Activity’ to Woo Muslims,” Daily Mail, 17 January 2008, available at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-508901/Governmentrenames-Islamic-terrorism-anti-Islamic-activity-woo-Muslims.html. This initiative stemmed from the naïve view, based primarily on wishful thinking (as well as misguided concerns about alienating “mainstream Muslim opinion”), that violent Islamists, i.e., jihadists, “were behaving contrary to their faith, rather than acting in the name of Islam.” Yet as Canadian conservative Mark Steyn wryly observed in a New York Sun column on 28 January 2008, calling jihadist terrorism “anti-Islamic” could only make sense “in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during

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the Blitz was an ‘anti-German activity.’” This column was later reprinted in his book, Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West (Woodsville, NH: Stockade Books, 2009), p. 147. Nevertheless, a similar assertion was reportedly made by former U.S. commander General Stanley A. McChrystal in his 30 August 2009 Initial Assessment of the war in Afghanistan, wherein he advocated that in the “more forceful” strategy now to be employed by the International Security Assistance Force, Afghanistan (ISAF), the Afghan insurgents should be “exposed continually for their cultural and religious violations, antiIslamic and indiscriminate use of violence and terror[ism] . . . . and flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran.” See Andrew G. Bostom, “McChrystal, Tocqueville, and the Koran: The Postmodern ‘COINage’ of a Failed Policy,” PJ Media website, 29 June 2010, available at http://pjmedia.com/blog/mcchrystal-tocqueville-and-the-koran-the-postmodern-coinage-of-a-failed-policy/ [emphasis added, JMB]. However, I was unable to find those particular quotes in the declassified version found at http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/Assessment_Redacted_092109.pdf. While one can surely make a case that various types of excesses and atrocities commonly associated with today’s jihadist terrorism violate classical Islamic “just war” conceptions – in theory, if not always in terms of actual historical practice – it is nonetheless utterly Orwellian to characterize jihadists as “anti-Islamic.” Whether such a rhetorical approach could be useful, even within the limited context of information warfare, remains doubtful given that “infidels” lack the credibility and authority, in Muslim eyes, to decide what is “Islamically correct.” On Islamic “just war” doctrines in relation to contemporary Islamism and jihadism, see John Kelsay, “Islamist Movements and Shari‘a Reasoning,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10:2 (June 2009), pp. 121–34. Cf. John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2007), for a broader treatment. 7 By Islamism, I am referring specifically to the radical right pole of the “political Islam” spectrum, which is only one of many possible interpretations of core Islamic doctrines. The term “political Islam” is not synonymous with “Islamism” per se, as many assume, but instead covers all of the Islamic ideologies and movements that explicitly aim either to politicize Islam or to Islamize politics. It therefore encompasses, from left to right, “Islamic socialism” (which should not be confused with Western-style socialism), “Islamic liberalism” (which should not be confused with Western-style liberalism), “conservative Islamic reformism,” and “Islamism” (the Islamic extreme right). Islamism can best be defined as a right-wing, theocratic, totalitarian, and Islamic supremacist political ideology with both revolutionary and revivalist features. More specifically, the principal ideological characteristics of Islamism – in all of its diverse and often sectarian Sunni and Shi‘i forms – are an outright rejection of Western secular values, an intransigent resistance to “infidel” political, economic, social, and cultural influence on the Muslim world, a pronounced hostility toward less committed and militant Muslims (who are often denounced as “apostates” or even “unbelievers” [in a process known as takfir]), and an insistent demand for the establishment of an Islamic state governed by a rigid, puritanical application of the shari‘a. Since these particular ideas are inherently radical, one cannot legitimately draw a meaningful distinction between “moderate” and “radical” Islamists, at least not with respect to their ultimate, Islamic supremacist objectives, even though they do disagree amongst themselves, often vehemently, about the means that should be employed to achieve those objectives (e.g., about whether or not to rely primarily on violence). See further Jeffrey M. Bale, “Islamism and Totalitarianism,” in this same volume. Cf. also Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1990); Abderrahim Lamchichi, L’islamisme politique (Paris: Harmattan, 2001); Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1997); Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Islamic World (Albany: SUNY, 1996); Martin Kramer, ed., The Islamism Debate (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University/Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1997); and the Hudson Institute publication series, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology.

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8 See, e.g., Paul K. Davis and Kim Cragin, eds., Social Science for Counterterrorism: Putting the Pieces Together (Santa Monica, CA: RAND National Defense Research Institute, 2009), p. xxiv: “Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.” Cf. also Claude Berrebi, “The Economics of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: What Matters and Is Rational-Choice Theory Helpful?,” in Social Science for Counterterrorism: Putting the Pieces Together, ed. Paul K. Davis and Kim Cragin (Santa Monica, CA: RAND National Defense Research Institute, 2009), pp. 152–69. Nevertheless, all too often, many analysts, officials, and advocacy groups are still prone to insist, for varying reasons, that the actions of violent, ideologically-motivated extremists are really attributable either to poverty or to mental illnesses of some type rather than to their stated beliefs and motives. For a bald-faced assertion that poverty is “directly connected to the proliferation of . . . terrorism and insurgency,” see Jake Harriman, “Linking Extreme Poverty and Global Terrorism,” New York Times, 13 March 2012, available at http://kristof.blogs. nytimes.com/2012/03/13/linking-extreme-poverty-and-global-terrorism/?_r=0. For several examples of decisions by American courts to portray ideologically motivated jihadists, especially “lone wolf ” jihadists, as “insane” or “mentally incompetent” rather than as the religious extremists that they usually are, see Teri Blumenfeld, “Are Jihadists Crazy?,” Middle East Quarterly 19:2 (Spring 2012), pp. 3–13, available at www.meforum. org/meq/pdfs/3190.pdf. Unfortunately, such errors or legal stratagems, even when contemptuously repudiated by the defendants themselves, have repeatedly led to the acquittal of the perpetrators on the most serious charges. No less inaccurately, many right-wing “Islam bashers” were quick to deny that Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik had been in any way influenced or inspired by their own hostile attitudes toward Islam and left-wing elites, even though Breivik explicitly and sometimes repeatedly cited them in his 1,518-page “manifesto,” 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Instead, they too have resorted, in order to protect and defend themselves, to the convenient but misleading argument that his actions were more or less the product of “insanity” or “psychopathology,” thereby downplaying the undeniable ideological motivations behind those actions. Cf., e.g., Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch’s interview comments on a BBC Newshour broadcast, 27 July 2011, available at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hz34g, where he characterized Breivik as a “nutcase” and a “psychopath”; “Statement of Geert Wilders Concerning the Massacre in Norway,” Jihad Watch website, 26 July 2011, available at www.jihadwatch.org/2011/07/statementof-geert-wilders-concerning-the-massacre-in-norway.html, who likewise labeled the killer as a “madman” and a “psychopath;” and “Baron Bodissey” (pseudonym for Edward S. “Ned” May), “Not a Madman, But a Psychopath,” Gates of Vienna website, 27 July 2011, available at http://gatesofvienna.net/2011/07/not-a-madman-but-a-psychopath/, where it was also argued that Breivik was a “psychopath,” and that the “psychopath’s world contains nothing but himself. ” Although it can scarcely be doubted that the writings of certain of the most histrionic Islam opponents had affected Breivik’s attitudes, there is one crucial difference that must nonetheless be emphasized here: none of the critics of Islam or Islamism cited by Breivik has ever advocated carrying out acts of violence against Muslims – to my knowledge, the most provocative statements that they have made are to warn of a possible future civil war between native Europeans and violent, unassimilated, West-hating Muslims, and to accuse multiculturalist European elites of effectively engaging in treasonous behavior for placing the interests of immigrants and asylum seekers (especially Muslims) above those of their own citizens. In contrast, the Islamist ideologues who inspire jihadist terrorists regularly urge Muslims to wage armed jihad against, conquer, subjugate, enslave, and/or exterminate the “infidel” enemies of Islam. In any case, resorting to simplistic and often spurious “psychological” explanations to explain the violent actions of ideological extremists has the unfortunate effect of diverting attention away from the core worldviews that inspire their actions – worldviews which desperately

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need to be understood if one wants to develop effective counterterrorism – and, obviously, effective counter-extremism – measures and strategies. Italics added. Tracey Jan, “Suspect Returned from Russia ‘With a Willingness to Kill People,’ Kerry Says,” Boston Globe, 24 April 2013, available at www.bostonglobe.com/ news/politics/2013/04/24/secretary-state-john-kerry-says-tamerlan-tsarnaev-returnedfrom-russia-with-willingness-kill-people/59mtQpCSKTKk38udnyybSI/story.html. Italics added. Adam Goldman, Eric Tucker, and Matt Apuzzo, “Dead Boston Subject Influenced by Mysterious Radical,” Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, 23 April 2013, available at www. news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130423/NEWS/130429851/1006. However, President Obama soon acknowledged that they were in fact acts of terrorism, and at the memorial service for the MIT police officer slain by the bombers, Vice President Joseph Biden ascribed the murders to “two twisted, perverted, cowardly, knockoff jihadis.” Whether or not those various adjectives are applicable, he at least was honest enough to label them “jihadis.” For more on the notions, and the characteristic manifestations, of “Islam apologism” and “Islamist apologism,” see Bale, “Islamism and Totalitarianism.” Concerning the former, cf. Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz, The Raft of Mohammed: Social and Human Consequences of the Return of Traditional Religion in the Arab World (New York: Paragon House, 1988), pp. 2, 5: “We have a whole host of [Western] voices whose single concern, when Islam is in question, is to prettify, to transform, to ameliorate, to exculpate, all at the expense of accuracy. . . . Most of them . . . have felt obliged, in writing or speaking about Islam, the Muslim world, or the Arabs, to adopt an attitude in which an excess of reverence, deliberate omissions, or worse, distortion or servility, have damaged truth, scholarship, and most seriously mutual understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.”; and Marxist French Islam scholar Maxime Rodinson, “The Western Image and Western Studies of Islam,” in The Legacy of Islam, ed. Joseph Schacht and C. E. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University, 1974), p. 59: “The anti-colonial left, whether Christian or not, often goes so far as to sanctify Islam and the contemporary ideologies of the Muslim world. . . . Understanding has given way to apologetics pure and simple.” Unfortunately, these harmful and dangerous apologetic trends have become even more pronounced in recent decades, especially since the 9/11 attacks, an event that should have had the effect of curbing them. For verses of the Qu’ran that explicitly refer to armed fighting, see Nationaal Coordinator Terrorismebestrijding, Ideologie en strategie van het jihadisme (The Hague: National Coordinator for Counterterrorism, [December] 2009), pp. 78–83. Juan Cole, “Pot and Partying: Top Ten Signs the Tsarnaev Brothers Weren’t Pious Muslims,” Informed Comment website, 27 April 2013, available at www.juancole.com/2013/04/ partying-tsarnaev-brothers.html. Perhaps the only recent claim about Islamists that is more wildly inaccurate than this one – excepting the notion peddled by some academicians that Sunni and Shi‘i Islamism constitute new forms of “liberation theology” – was that of former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, who in 10 February 2011 testimony before Congress characterized the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a “very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam. They have pursued social ends, [the] betterment of the political order in Egypt, etc.” [Italics added, JMB]. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=POwd44zH9GA. The erroneous nature of this characterization was so obvious that the following day Jamie Smith, then director of public affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), attempted to spin Clapper’s remarks by saying that what he actually meant was that the Brotherhood “makes efforts to work through a political system that has been, under Mubarak’s rule, largely secular in its orientation – he is well aware that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a secular organization.” See “Office of the Director of National Intelligence ‘Clarifies’ Remarks on the Muslim Brotherhood,” ABC News, 10 February 2011, available at http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/02/office-of-the-directorof-national-intelligence-clarifies-remarks-on-muslim-brotherhood/. That is clearly not

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what Clapper’s remarks implied, however, since they had the effect of whitewashing the nature of the organization. 15 Omid Safi, “10 Essential Points about the Boston Marathon Bombers,” in his “What Would Muhammad Do” blog, Religion News Service website, 20 April 2013, available at http://omidsafi.religionnews.com/2013/04/20/10-essential-points/. For misleading claims concerning the Boston attacks, however, perhaps nothing can top the “analysis” of the Director of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the University of California at Berkeley. See Hatem Bazian, “Boston Bombing, Islamophobia and Sudden Ignorance Syndrome,” Islamic Human Rights Commission website, 19 May 2013, available at www.ihrc.org.uk/news/comment/10523-boston-bombing-islamophobiaand-sudden-ignorance-syndrome, who personally slanders several Islam and Islamism critics – and by extension virtually everyone else who expresses concerns about Islamism and jihadist terrorism – as a “racist,” a “McCarthyism like” witch hunter, a Muslim “hater,” a “bigot,” an “Islamophobe,” and a committer of collective “crimes” against Muslims. In short, the Tsarnaevs’ crimes in Boston, “horrific” as they were, pale into insignificance in comparison to the alleged (thought) crimes committed by those who correctly highlighted the brothers’ Islamist ideological motivations. Indeed, Bazian is prone to apply the term “Islamophobia” to virtually everyone who is opposed to the Islamist agenda, including other Muslims, as he does in his article “Egypt, the ‘War on Terrorism’ and Islamophobia,” al-Jazira website, 20 August 2013, available at www.aljazeera. com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/201381916528829808.html, wherein he accuses the Egyptian military of “seeking legitimacy through Islamophobia” for having ousted the “democratically elected” Brotherhood from power. 16 According to recently published U.S. government documents, e.g., between 5 November 2001 and 4 February 2002, while he was imam of the now notorious Dar al-Hijra mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, Islamist extremist and al-Qa‘ida operative Anwar al-Awlaqi paid over $2,000 to hire prostitutes in the Washington, DC, area. One of those liaisons occurred the night before he gave a presentation at the Pentagon in connection with a Department of Defense “outreach” effort to supposedly “moderate” Muslims. Al-Awlaqi had also reportedly hired “escorts” when he lived in San Diego in the 1990s, as well as during visits to Florida. See “Terror Leader Awlaki Paid Thousands for Prostitutes in DC Area, Documents Show,” Fox News, 2 July 2013, available at www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/02/terrorleader-awlaki-paid-thousands-for-prostitutes-in-dc-area-documents-show/. Note also that pornography is often found on the computers of Islamists and jihadists, including Usama b. Ladin himself. See, e.g., Scott Shane, “Pornography Is Found in Bin Ladin Compound Files,” New York Times, 13 May 2011, available at www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/world/ asia/14binLadin.html?_r=0. Using Safi’s logic, this would mean that neither the actions of al-Awlaqi or Bin Ladin could have been motivated by their extremist interpretations of Islam because they were not proper “Muslim role models.” 17 Hilary Andersson, “Tamerlan Tsarnaev Had Right-Wing Extremist Literature,” BBC, 5 August 2013, available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23541341. It is now known that Tamerlan obtained these materials from an embittered 67-year old disabled man, Donald Larking, who was a client of Tamerlan’s mother Zubeidat, who was then making a living in the U.S. working as a home health aide for the elderly. See Alan Cullison, “Boston Bombing Subject Was Steeped in Conspiracies,” Wall Street Journal, 6 August 2013, available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323420604 578649830782219440.html; and Connor Simpson, “Meet the Man Who Supplied Tamerlan Tsarnaev with Right-Wing Literature,” The Atlantic Wire, 6 August 2013, available at www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/meet-man-who-gave-tamerlan-tsarnaevhis-right-wing-literature/68020/. Under Larking’s influence, Tamerlan reportedly began reading copies of the weekly American Free Press – the successor of the defunct newspaper The Spotlight, formerly published by Willis Carto’s right-wing, populist, anti-Semitic (and bankrupted) Liberty Lobby organization – and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the notorious Tsarist forgery that has long been very popular with Islamists and other

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types of anti-Semitic extremists. Tamerlan was also a fan of conspiracy websites like Info Wars and, of course, jihadist websites. Parenthetically, it should be noted that certain conspiratorial writers for the American Free Press, such as Mark Dankof and Mark Glenn, are also contributors to Iran’s English-language Press TV channel. For the Liberty Lobby and Carto, see Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); and George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far Right (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2008). For more on the background and history of the Protocols, see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981); Pierre-André Taguieff, Les Protocoles des sages de Sion: Faux et usages d’un faux (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Eva Horn and Michael Hagemeister, eds., Die Fiktion von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung: Zu Text und Kontext der “Protokolle der Weisen von Zion” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012); and Richard Landes and Steven Katz, eds., The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York and London: New York University, 2012). 18 “Tamerlan Tsarnaev, White Supremacist? Boston Bombing Suspect Had ‘Extreme Right-Wing Material,’” Huffington Post [UK] website, 5 August 2013, available at www. huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/08/05/tamerlan-tsarnaev-white-supremacist_n_3706693. html. The falsity of this suggestion is revealed in a more recent article, wherein Larking, the provider of the domestic right-wing materials to Tamerlan, emphasized that the latter “was very, very religious. He believed that the Koran was the one true word and he loved it.” Indeed, Tamerlan even persuaded Larking, a lifelong Catholic, to convert to Islam, after which the elderly American began attending the Islamic Society of Boston mosque and grew a beard (which the Chechen, who had started referring to Larking, fondly, as “Dawud,” thence helped him trim). See Sally Jacobs, “Tsarnaev Friend Tells of Beliefs in Conspiracies,” Boston Globe, 8 August 2013, available at www.bostonglobe.com/ metro/2013/08/07/unlikely-friendship/xQao9NHjkUvtvhTcK1uwCL/story.html. 19 Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), especially Chapters 2 and 11. In this particular case, Larking indicated that Tamerlan believed, like so many other Islamists and extremists with a conspiratorial worldview, that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job and that the [U.S.] government had pulled it off.” And according to his landlady, Joanna Herlihy, Tamerlan had given her a copy of the Protocols, saying that it was a “good book.” See Jacobs, “Tsarnaev Friend Tells of Beliefs in Conspiracies.” None of this should be surprising, since both extremists themselves and scholars have long recognized that extremists from diverse ideological milieus tend to have much more in common with each other, in terms of their psychological make-up and fanatical attitudinal mindset, than they do with moderates who are much nearer to their own political sphere. 20 See, e.g., Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven, CT:Yale University, 2011); Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, Le croissant et la croix gammée: Les secrets de l’alliance entre l’Islam et le nazisme, d’Hitler à nos jours (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990); David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad (New York: Cambridge University, 2010); Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos, 2009); Emmanuel Sivan, Islamic Fundamentalism and Antisemitism (Jerusalem: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University, 1985); Wolfgang Benz and Juliane Wetzel, eds., Antisemitismus und radikaler Islamismus (Essen: Klartext, 2007); Hans-Peter Raddatz, Allah und die Juden: Die islamische Renaissance des Antisemitismus (Berlin: WJS, 2007); and Clemens Heni, Antisemitism, a Specific Phenomenon: Holocaust Trivialization, Islamism, Post-Colonial and Cosmopolitan AntiZionism (Berlin: Critic, 2013), Chapters 3 and 9. But cf. also Michael Berenbaum, ed., Not Your Father’s Antisemitism: Hatred of the Jews in the Twenty-First Century (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2008). However, the widespread acceptance of European, including Nazi, anti-Semitic notions in the Muslim world was greatly facilitated by the indigenous Islamic tradition of anti-Semitism, which dates back to the era of Muhammad’s earliest conflicts

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with Jewish tribes in Medina. Cf. N[orman] A. Stillman, “Yahūd,” in Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition, ed. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002), vol. 11, pp. 239–42; Neil J. Kressel, “The Sons of Pigs and Apes”: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2012); Philippe Simonnot, Enquête sur l’antisémitisme musulman: De ses origines à nos jours (Paris: Michalon, 2010); Carlo Panella, Il “complotto ebraico”: L’antisemitismo islamico da Maometto a Bin Ladin (Turin: Lindau, 2005); and the collection of texts in Andrew G. Bostom, ed., The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008). For a detailed account of Muhammad’s activities in Medina, see W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Oxford University, 1956). For a genuinely liberal Muslim’s analysis of Islamic anti-Semitism, see Tarek Fatah, The Jew Is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths That Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010). For an interesting but controversial revisionist interpretation, see Ahmad Barakat, Muhammad and the Jews: A Re-Examination (Delhi: Vikas, 1982), which subjects the standard account in Ibn Ishaq’s biography (sira) of Muhammad to critical scrutiny. Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998). Cf. also Matthew Gray, Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World: Sources and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2010), who adopts a different explanatory framework. See, e.g., Nazila Fathi, “Holocaust Deniers and Skeptics Gather in Iran,” New York Times, 11 December 2011, available at www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/world/middleeast/11cndiran.html?hp&ex=1165899600&en=89a54e1e0974643d&ei=5094&partner=home page&_r=0; [Meir Amit] Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Center for Special Studies, “Holocaust Denial as a Tool of Iranian Policy. The Holocaust Denial Conference in Tehran: Overview,” undated, available at www.terrorism-info.org.il/data/ pdf/PDF_06_360_2.pdf, which contains an appendix listing the participants at the 2006 conference on pp. 16–20; Stephen E. Atkins, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), Chapter 11; Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “Backgrounder: The Zayed Center,” ADL website, 15 September 2003, available at http:// archive.adl.org/anti_semitism/zayed_center.asp; Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “Iran ‘Hollywoodism’ Conference Partners with U.S. and International Anti-Semites, Conspiracy Theorists,” ADL Official Blogs website, 5 February 2013, availalble at http://blog.adl. org/international/iran-hollywoodism-conference-partners-with-u-s-international-antisemites-conspiracy-theorists. Note also the sparsely attended 11 September 2013 “Million American March Against Fear” (originally designated the “Million Muslim March”) rally in Washington, DC, which was organized by the American Muslim Political Action Committee (AMPAC), a group formed by Islamist extremists and “9/11 Truth” conspiracy theorists who have links both to HAMAS and to left-wing, pro-Islamist demagogue George Galloway, an MP for the disreputable Respect Party in Britain (which was created primarily by Islamists and Trotskyist activists from the sectarian Socialist Workers Party). The ideas animating the rally were that Muslims are being unfairly scapegoated, targeted, and persecuted by the U.S. government, which itself was behind the 9/11 and other alleged “jihadist” terrorist attacks. See Ryan Mauro, “Million Muslim March on 9/11 Linked to Islamist Radicals,” Clarion Project website, 22 August 2013, available at www. clarionproject.org/analysis/million-muslim-march-911-linked-islamist-radicals. See, e.g., David Sirota, “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” Salon.com website, 16 April 2013, available at www.salon.com/2013/04/16/lets_hope_ the_boston_marathon_bomber_is_a_white_american/, whose claims about double standards concerning the reportage of acts of terrorism are not only manifestly false, but amount to a complete inversion of reality. “Woolwich Attack: David Cameron’s Full Statement,” The Guardian, 23 May 2013, available at www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/23/woolwich-attack-david-cameron-statement. Cited in Sam Jones, Ben Quinn, and Conal Urquhart, “Woolwich Attack Prompts Fears of Backlash against British Muslims,” The Guardian, 23 May 2013, available at www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/23/woolwich-attack-backlash-british-muslims.

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26 Russell Brand, “Blame This on Madness . . . Not Muslims,” The Sun, 26 May 2013, available at www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4942468/Blame-this-on-madnessnot-onMuslims.html#ixzz2UTukG2DV. For a broader and humorous critique of such “Islam apologist” or “Islamophilic” intellectual foolishness, see Douglas Murray, Islamophilia: A Very Metropolitan Malady (New York: em Books, 2013), Kindle edition. 27 Italics added. Cited in Cassandra Vinograd and Paisley Dodds, “Brutal Attack in London Blamed on Radical Islam,” Associated Press, 22 May 2013, available at http://news. yahoo.com/brutal-attack-london-blamed-radical-islam-003607343.html. For Mawdudist domination of the MCB, see Anthony McRoy, From Rushdie to 7/7: The Radicalisation of Islam in Britain (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006), pp. 171–3. 28 “Muslim Groups Fear ‘Wave of Attacks’ in Wake of Woolwich Murder,” Huffington Post UK website, 6 June 2013, available at www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/06/06/woolwichattack-muslim-groups-fear-wave-of-attacks_n_3394287.html?utm_hp_ref=uk. Such attacks in fact rarely materialize, except for some reprehensible but relatively minor incidents of opportunistic thuggery and destructive vandalism. See, e.g., “Muslim Group Monitoring ‘Hate Crimes’ Loses Funding for Lying,” Clarion Project website, 13 June 2013, available at www.clarionproject.org/news/muslim-group-monitoring-hate-crimesloses-funding-lying. Despite the exaggerated claims of both Islamist and self-styled “antihate” organizations like Faith Matters, which tend to uncritically accept the claims of real or imagined Muslim victims and which clearly have a vested political interest in exaggerating the number and seriousness of such acts, thus far there have been only a handful of truly dangerous post-Woolwich retaliatory incidents, e.g., one involving an arson attack on the Grimsby Islamic Cultural Centre while worshippers were inside. It goes without saying that even one serious attack of this type is one too many and that the perpetrators of documented acts of anti-Muslim violence should be severely punished whenever they are identified, just as the Muslim perpetrators of anti-Semitic or other types of “antiinfidel” violence should be. But there seems to be much greater governmental, media, and academic concern in Britain, inexplicably, about a few dozen right-wing “yobs” in the English Defence League (EDL) than there is about jihadists. As Douglas Murray rightly asks, “Islamophobia Is a Government Priority: What about Islamism?,” The Spectator, 25 April 2013, available at http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/douglas-murray/2013/04/ islamophobia-is-a-government-priority-what-about-islamism/. See, e.g., Jon Garland and James Treadwell, “‘No Surrender to the Taliban’: Football Hooliganism, Islamophobia and the Rise of the English Defence League,” paper prepared for the 2010 British Society of Criminology conference, Leicester, UK, pp. 19–35, wherein it is argued (in the Abstract, p. 19) that the EDL “poses the most serious threat to public order and community cohesion since the heyday of the [fascist] National Front in the 1970s.” From this blinkered perspective, one apparently need not worry at all about jihadist terrorism or Islamist provocateurs from pro-jihadist groups like Shariah4UK, Islam4UK, or Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) posing any threats of this type, even though it was in fact a hostile, insulting March 2009 public demonstration in Luton organized by yet another al-Muhajirun (The Émigrés) successor organization, Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama‘a (People of the Sunna and the [True Muslim] Community), against British troops who had returned from Iraq that actually precipitated the creation of the EDL (ibid., pp. 20–2). Indeed, in that same paper, phrases like “radical Islam,” “extremist Islam,” and “Islamic extremism” are at times placed in quotes, as if they were purely imaginary constructs generated by “Islamophobic” hooligans and fascists. For more on al-Muhajirun and its offshoots, see Catherine Zeta Raymond, Al Muhajiroun and Islam4UK: The Group behind the Ban (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, [May] 2010), available at http://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/1276697989CatherineZaraRaymondICS RPaper.pdf. Shariah4UK now also has branches in other European countries. See, e.g., Emerson Vermaat, “Shariah4Belgium and Shariah4UK: Small But Dangerous Islamist Fringe Groups,” Pipeline News website, 12 June 2012, available at www.pipebombnews. com/2012/jun/14/Shariah4Belgium-Shariah4UK-Small-But-Dangerous-Islamist.html.

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29 Moreover, it later emerged that the murderous fanatic who made these statements, Michael Adebolajo, had been a member of the banned pro-jihad Islamist group, al-Muhajirun – which thereafter simply kept renaming itself to circumvent periodic bans – whose leaders, ‘Umar Bakri Muhammad and Anjem Choudary were both quick to praise his atrocious act. See Dominic Evans, “Exiled Cleric Who Taught UK Knifeman Praises ‘Courage,’” Reuters, 24 May 2013, available at http://news.yahoo.com/exiled-cleric-taught-ukknifeman-praises-courage-112658347.html. Indeed, according to Kenyan anti-terrorist police unit head Boniface Mwaniki, in 2010 Adebolajo (then using the name Michael Olemindis Ndemolajo) was personally preparing to train and fight with, and had also sought to recruit other young Kenyans for, the al-Qa‘ida-linked Somali jihadist group, the Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujhahidin (Mujahidin Youth Movement). The Kenyan authorities then arrested and deported him to Britain, where he changed his name to Adebolajo. See Tom Odula and Sylvia Hui, “Suspect in Savage Slaying of U.K. Soldier Was Previously Arrested in Kenya in Terror Probe,” National Post [Canada], 25 May 2013, available at http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/05/26/suspect-in-savage-slaying-of-u-k-soldierwas-previously-arrested-in-kenya-in-terror-probe/. 30 Unfortunately, this too may now be changing, and also for the worse. In recent years, elements of the domestic American far right – militia groups, right-wing talk radio conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, fringe Tea Party activists, and hard right Republicans in the House of Representatives – have all been engaged in strenuous efforts to delegitimize the government’s threat assessments of the domestic radical right and, even more dangerously, to impede U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies from monitoring paramilitary militia groups and anti-abortion extremists. Here the emblematic example is the case of a Department of Homeland Security intelligence analysis produced by Daryl Johnson, wherein he warned that the economic downturn, the election of Obama, concerns about gun control, and changing demographics in the U.S. were leading to a dangerous resurgence of the radical right, including the meteoric growth of militia groups which could pose a real terrorist threat. See Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Rightwing Extremism: Recent Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment (Washington, DC: GPO, [7 April] 2009), available at www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf. In short, he was simply stating that which is patently obvious and easily documentable. But in response, a hysterical campaign was launched by the aforementioned groups to demonize Johnson, a straightlaced and very conservative Mormon, as someone trying to push a “left-wing” agenda against supposedly “patriotic” Americans, and to put congressional pressure on DHS to repudiate the report and stop identifying the radical right as a potential security threat. Sadly, DHS rapidly caved in to this malicious campaign, and refused to defend Johnson and support his analysis. This incident has apparently made U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies more reluctant to sound the alarm about or aggressively investigate the domestic radical right (in part out of fear that House committees will cut their funding). This troubling story has been recounted in detail by Daryl Johnson in his book, Right-Wing Resurgence: How a Domestic Terrorist Threat Is Being Ignored (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). American right-wingers were also in an uproar about another document, the Department of Homeland Security’s Reference Aid: Domestic Extremism Lexicon (Washington, DC: GPO, [26 March] 2009), available at www.fas.org/irp/eprint/lexicon.pdf, even though the definitions contained therein – apart from the emotion-laden, propagandistic term “hate group” (one that has long been promoted and often applied indiscriminately by anti-fascist “watchdog” organizations), which should be discarded once and for all and replaced with more precise designations – are generally accurate, cover diverse types of extremists, and should therefore be unobjectionable to any reasonable person. So it is that dangerous militia groups are now also successfully playing the “victim” card, just as the Islamists have long been doing, by accusing people who are justifiably concerned about their activities of launching “witch hunts” and “persecutions” against them. The obvious

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question is why U.S. security agencies, working under the direction of the relentlessly “progressive” Obama administration, cravenly capitulated to this sort of illegitimate pressure from both types of extreme right milieus, given that such a response only served to inhibit their counterterrorist efforts. 31 Note, e.g., the attempts by Social Democratic elites and “anti-fascists” to exploit the terrorist acts of Breivik so as to exaggerate the security threat posed by the domestic radical right, as well as to demonize all critics of Islam and Islamism, for which see Bruce Bawer, The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate about Islam (New York: Broadside, 2012), Kindle edition. As Bawer justly summarizes the situation (ibid., at 27% and 35%), “all too many members of the Norwegian cultural elite made use of this atrocity as an opportunity to launch personal attacks against their longtime ideological adversaries – whom they unhesitatingly linked to the perpetrator of these unspeakable crimes. . . . Of course, it is a common practice on the far left, not only in Norway but elsewhere, to use guilt by association to smear one’s opponents and delegitimize their views, even as one hypocritically refuses to ‘jump to conclusions’ in obvious cases of Muslim fanaticism. . . . [so] they lost no time in turning Breivik’s actions to their advantage, brazenly maintaining that because he had opposed multiculturalism and the Islamization of Europe, everyone else who held such views also bore a share of the responsibility for his monstrous actions.” Emblematic of this dishonest approach was the op-ed by two Norwegian bien pensant icons, Jostein Gaarder and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, “A Blogosphere of Bigots,” New York Times, 28 July 2011, available at www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/GaarderEriksen.html?_r=0, which accused various people who claim to defend “enlightened values,” including openly gay moderate liberals like Bawer, of being members of the “new right.” As if individuals like Bawer – such as indefatigable defender of Muslim women and Islam critic Hege Storhaug of the Human Rights Service in Norway, who has been similarly vilified by other Norwegian leftists and multiculturalists – were comparable to right-wing rabble-rousers like Pamela Geller, a histrionic American blogger, activist, and Islam critic. Moreover, social anthropology professor Th. H. Eriksen is the quintessential multiculturalist, postmodern “West-hating Westerner,” as many of his comments in various fora reveal. A key figure in a multiculturalist research group at the University of Oslo and a local candidate in 2011 for the Oslo Miljøpartiet de Grønne (Green Environmental Party), he openly stated that the “most important white spot [i.e., research task] is to deconstruct the [white European] majority and to do it so thoroughly that it can never be called the majority any longer. . . . Something like that could contribute both to understanding and liberation.” See Lorenz Khazaleh, “Håper på fem nye Culcom-år,” on the website of the aforementioned research group, 18 June 2008, available at www.uio. no/forskning/tverrfak/culcom/nyheter/2008/hylland-eriksen.html. Elsewhere on that same website, in a description of one of its major projects, it is stated that the group does not share the “normative agenda” of government and commercial interests to “integrate” immigrants, but rather will investigate the “volatile and contested concept of Norwegianness and [the] ways in which notions of Norwegianness is [sic] used discursively to exclude or include ambiguous persons (i.e., minority members resident in the country).” Eriksen and his colleagues believe, then, that existing ideas about Norwegian identity are intrinsically problematic, if not racist, and that efforts to encourage immigrants to adopt “locally hegemonic (‘Norwegian’) values” violates those immigrants’ so-called “cultural rights.” See “Programbeskrivelse,” available at www.uio.no/forskning/tverrfak/culcom/ forskning/programbeskrivelse/. It follows that Eriksen thinks that indigenous Norwegians – and, by extension, Europeans in general – do not have any “cultural rights” that are worth preserving and defending, in contrast to those of non-European immigrants. Hence Eriksen perfectly illustrates Mark Steyn’s argument that “[n]on-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud” that was “conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own; it is, thus, the real [cultural] suicide bomb.” See Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, DC:

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Regnery, 2006), p. 194. Cf. Paul Edward Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2002), p. 14: “In the new multicultural as opposed to conventional multiethnic situation, the state [along with multiculturalist ideologues such as Eriksen] glorifies differences from the way of life associated with the once majority population. It hands out rewards to those who personify the desired differences, while taking away cultural recognition and even political rights from those who do not.” 32 Worse still, most “anti-fascist” organizations have thus far tended to uncritically accept and disseminate the propaganda about “Islamophobia” being peddled by Islamist front groups, with whose cadres they often collaborate in smearing even serious critics of Islam and Islamism. (Although it is definitely not true, as some Islam critics have claimed, that Islamists invented the term “Islamophobia” [which was actually first coined in the early twentieth century, if not before], the International Institute for Islamic Thought [IIIT], an Islamist think tank created by Muslim Brotherhood activists, reportedly adopted and enthusiastically promoted its usage in order to demonize and delegitimize critics of Islam and Islamism. See the congressional testimony of black American Muslim ‘AbdurRahman Muhammad, a former member of the IIIT, cited in “Moderate Muslims Speak Out on Capitol Hill,” Investigative Project on Terrorism website, 1 October 2010, available at www.investigativeproject.org/2217/moderate-muslim-speak-out-on-capitol-hill, who stated that IIIT officials had “decided to emulate the homosexual activists who used the term ‘homophobia’ to silence critics” and viewed the term “Islamophobia” as a useful way to “beat up their critics.” Cf. Claire Berlinski, “Moderate Muslim Watch: How the Term ‘Islamophobia’ Got Shoved Down Your Throat,” Ricochet website, 24 November 2012, available at http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Moderate-Muslim-Watch-How-the-TermIslamophobia-Got-Shoved-Down-Your-Throat, who rightly argues that the “association of anti-Islamism – the noblest [contemporary] form of liberal anti-totalitarianism – with gay-bashing rednecks in the grip of a psychosexual panic was not just one of those linguistic accidents of history, in other words” (even though she falsely claims therein that the IIIT “invented” the term). So it is that the declared enemies of fascism have foolishly – or, at times, cynically and disingenuously – given aid and comfort to their “anti-infidel” Islamist enemies, the most dangerous and deadly of contemporary right-wing extremists. For different manifestations of collaboration between elements of Western radical left or right milieus and Islamists, cf. Alexandre del Valle, Verdi, rossi, neri. La convergenza degli estremisti antioccidentali: Islamismo, comunismo, neonazismo (Turin: Lindau, 2009); George Michael, The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006); and Gary Ackerman and Jeffrey M. Bale, “The Potential for Collaboration between Islamists and Western LeftWing Extremists: A Preliminary Theoretical and Empirical Overview,” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5:3 (2012), pp. 151–71. Furthermore, there are also geopolitical alliances between “revolutionary” states whose leaders embrace different extremist ideologies, such as Shi‘i Islamist Iran and quasi-fascist “Bolivarian” Venezuela. See Sean Goforth, Axis of Unity: Venezuela, Iran, and the Threat to America (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2011); and Gustavo de Arístegui, Contra Occidente: La emergente alianza antisistema (Madrid: Esfera de los Libros, 2008). 33 Cf. Ralph Peters, “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars”: “The willful ignorance within the American intelligentsia and in Washington, D.C [as well as, it must be added, in Ottawa and most European capitals] . . . extends to a denial of the essential qualities of our determined enemies. . . . . The problem is religion. Our Islamist enemies are inspired by it, while we are terrified even to talk about it. We are in the unique position of denying that our enemies know what they themselves are up to. They insist, publicly, that their goal is our destruction (or, in their mildest moods, our conversion) in their god’s name. We contort ourselves to insist that their religious rhetoric is all a sham, that they are merely cynics exploiting the superstitions of the masses. Setting aside the point that a devout believer can behave cynically in his mundane actions, our phony, one-dimensional analysis

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of al-Qaeda and its ilk has precious little to do with the nature of our enemies – which we are desperate to deny – and everything to do with us. . . . . Thus we insist, for our own comfort, that our enemies do not really mean what they profess, that they are as devoid of a transcendental sense of the universe as we are.” See also Bruce Thornton, Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow Motion Suicide (New York: Encounter Books, 2007), p. 110: “These clearly expressed religious motives [of jihadist terrorists], however, consistent with centuries of Islamic theology, jurisprudence, and practice, nonetheless were never accepted at face value. Instead, they were reduced to expressions of some psychological trauma connected to inequitable social and economic conditions.” For a good introduction to what our jihadist enemies actually believe, see Mary R. Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2007). Cf. Jeffrey M. Bale, “Jihadist Ideology and Strategy and the Possible Employment of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction,’” in Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction, ed. Gary Ackerman and Jeremy Tamsett (New York: CRC/Taylor & Francis, 2009), in this volume; and Jeffry R. Halverson, H. L. Goodall, Jr., and Steven R. Corman, Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), for the recurring themes emphasized in Islamist ideological statements, treatises, and websites. 34 See, e.g., Bassam Tibi, The Sharia State: Arab Spring and Democratization (New York: Routledge, 2013). Time will no doubt tell, but the July 2013 ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood from power in Egypt may only have temporarily delayed, rather than reversed, the onset of a possible Islamist “dark age” in the region. 35 Cf. Michael Whine, “Islamism and Totalitarianism: Similarities and Differences,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 2:2 (Autumn 2001), pp. 54–72; Bale, “Islamism and Totalitarianism”; Bassam Tibi, “The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism and Its Challenge to Europe and to Islam,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8:1 (2007), pp. 35–54; Bassam Tibi, Der neue Totalitarismus: “Heiliger Krieg” und westliche Sicherheit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 2004); Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2012), Chapter 8; Alexandre del Valle, Le totalitarisme islamiste à l’assaut des démocraties (Paris: Syrtes, 2002); and the “Together Facing the New Totalitarianism” manifesto (see note 2). 36 Cf., e.g., Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001); Ibn Warraq (pseudonym for a secularist and former Muslim “apostate”), Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007); and Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2008). If anything, these academic biases and delusions have become even more pronounced in the wake of 9/11. See Clemens Heni, Schadenfreude: Islamforschung und Antisemitismus in Deutschland nach 9/11 (Berlin: Critic, 2011). Note also the recent comments by Thomas Hegghammer, a leading expert on jihadist terrorism: “There are virtually no [academic] jobs for terrorism researchers. And if you look at Middle East studies, you will not find a single person on the faculties in the Middle East studies departments that work on terrorism. Some of them dabble in it, but nobody specializes in it.” [Italics added, JMB]. See Beth McMurtrie, “Terrorism Experts Sought by Public But Not by Academe,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 June 2013, available at http://chronicle.com/article/Terrorism-Experts-Sought-by/1 39957/?key=QD8lJldmPSxFbS4yMD4SZG5VP3xsYRp3ZnJHY3t1bl9UFQ. The comments made in the same article by Nader Hashimi, Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, are sadly illustrative of the biases within the Middle East field: “If you were to focus exclusively on [terrorism], you’d be reinforcing the stereotype that there’s something intrinsic to the region that produces violence, that it has to do with culture or Islam or Near Eastern civilization.” The implications of this revealing statement are that neither interpretations of Islam nor the mores of various tribal cultures in Muslim countries have any relationship whatsoever to jihadist terrorism, which is every bit as absurd as claiming, as the “Islam bashers” all too often do, that the Islamic religion and Middle Eastern cultures are uniquely conducive to generating terrorism. Unfortunately,

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the misleading characterisation of non-violent Islamists as “moderate” or “democratic” has almost become the norm in academic and policy-making circles, even though it erroneously confuses or conflates means with ends. 37 For those rather Manichean, belligerent conceptions, see Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1955), especially Chapters 3, 5, 6, and 8. Cf. these more or less canonical medieval notions with the very similar ideas espoused in the text written by Usama b. Ladin (or, at least, prepared under his direction), “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration to the West,” in The Al Qaeda Reader, ed. and trans. Raymond Ibrahim (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), pp. 17–62. On the other hand, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s argument justifying “martyrdom operations” (suicide attacks) published in the same volume, “Jihad, Martyrdom, and the Killing of Innocents,” pp. 137–71, departs significantly from “classical” Islamic “just war” doctrines and relies primarily on “weak” (da‘if ) hadiths or problematic analogies. 38 Here again one can see the usual bizarre “politically correct” double standards at work. If Christian or Jewish conservatives, reactionaries, and right-wing extremists were promoting political, social, and cultural initiatives designed to facilitate the furtherance of fundamentalist, theocratic agendas and thereby transform secular Western societies, none of these “Islam apologists” of the ostensibly “progressive” sort would be adopting such a charitable attitude toward them, much less docilely submitting to or actively assisting them. On the contrary, they would be sounding the alarm and vigorously opposing every single initiative promoted by the Christian and Jewish religious right – and justifiably so. It is only in the case of Islam that such “progressives” suddenly jettison their secularism and become embarrassingly solicitous and supportive of undeniably regressive religiocultural values, to the point where they devote almost all of their time and energy to denouncing critics of Islam and Islamism rather than anti-Western, anti-secular Muslim conservatives, traditionalists, or Islamists. 39 At this point more needs to be said about the propagandistic term “Islamophobia,” which – together with similarly problematic neologisms like “homophobia” and “Judeophobia” – has a built-in conceptual bias insofar as it suggests that critics of Islam and Islamism who are branded thusly must necessarily have an irrational “phobia,” i.e., an “extreme fear of or aversion to” Islam, one that is both allegedly groundless and effectively pathological. After all, according to the psychiatric and medical literature, the term “phobia” refers to a clinical psychological anxiety disorder, specifically an irrational fear about something specific that causes distress and is typically debilitating for the phobic individuals, one that is in the same “class” as panic disorders and post-traumatic stress disorders. Cf. Lea Winerman, “Figuring Out Phobia,” [American Psychological Association] Monitor on Psychology 36:7 (July-August 2005), at http://www.apa.org/monitor/ julaug05/figuring.aspx ; and “What are Anxiety Disorders,” American Psychiatric Association website, at https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/anxiety-disorders/ what-are-anxiety-disorders. Typical physical symptoms of phobias, according to the latter organization, include dizziness, trembling, increased heart rate, breathlessness, and nausea. See Kendra Cherry, “What is a Phobia?,” VeryWell website, 8 June 2017, at https:// www.verywell.com/what-is-a-phobia-2795454 . Even the most inveterate and dishonest purveyors of the “Islamophobia” trope rarely if ever explicitly claim that it is a clinical condition, although the use of the term subtly suggests that it is. The most influential definition and analysis of the meaning of the term “Islamophobia” was produced by a left-wing British organization, the Runnymede Trust, which describes itself on its own website as “the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank.” See http://www. runnymedetrust.org/about.html . Its description of the term is found in Gordon Conway, Islamophobia, a Challenge for Us All: Report of the Runnymede Trust Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia (London: Runnymede Trust, 1997), esp. pp. 4–11. In this publication, the author creates a simplistic and dichotomous “either/or” scheme to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Islam and “Islamophobia.” The problem, however, is that neither of the binary (“open” and “closed”) options that are presented for making such

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a distinction are necessarily accurate characterizations of Islam. Unfortunately, this major flaw has not stopped other activists and ideologically engaged academicians and journalists from uncritically adopting the Runnymede Trust’s scheme. To what extent is this pejorative term really applicable? First, being concerned about and critical of a totalitarian right-wing ideology like Islamism no more signifies that one is “Islamophobic” than being concerned about Nazism makes one a “Germanophobe.” Second, apart from certain circles of Christian and Jewish extremists who consider Islam per se to be a “satanic” or “heretical” religion – usually the very same fanatics who also demonize “secular humanism” using similar terms – few if any in the West have a “phobia” about Islam as a religion, i.e., are irrationally fearful of Islam for narrowly theological reasons. Third, certain regressive and intolerant aspects of Islam itself, not just Islamism, present real and ongoing problems for the West, and are therefore both matters of legitimate concern and deserving of criticism. Hence although it is true that many Westerners have developed negative attitudes toward Islam, especially since the onset of jihadist terrorism symbolized most dramatically by 9/11, the question is whether those negative attitudes are warranted, i.e., whether they are not only understandable but justifiable responses to real problems and actual threats posed by elements within the Muslim community, or whether they are instead based on irrational prejudices against Muslims and are therefore unwarranted. Certain people may well fall into the latter “Islam-hating” or “Muslim-hating” category, such as Qur’anburning Florida pastor Terry Jones, American right-wing radio talk show hosts Glenn Beck (also a convert to Mormonism), Michael Savage (né Michael Weiner), and Bryan Fischer, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (the Coptic maker of a crude anti-Muhammad film), assorted extremist Tea Party activists and “know nothing” nativists in the U.S., and various fringe European fascist groups (although other fascists are actually pro-Islam or even pro-Islamist), but most Westerners who have concerns about Islam are clearly responding to the very real problems and dangers it presents. Is it “Islamophobic,” for example, to associate Muslims with terrorism and other security threats during an era when jihadist groups are carrying out vastly disproportionate amounts of terrorism in various regions throughout the world? Is it “Islamophobic” to be concerned when Islamist activists demand the introduction of shari‘a-based laws that are directly contrary to Western laws and Western secular Enlightenment values? Is it “Islamophobic” to be concerned about high immigrant and Muslim crime (as well as welfare dependency and birth-) rates when it is a statistical fact that both immigrants from the Third World, including Muslim countries, and Muslims born in Europe are responsible for committing very disproportionate amounts of crime, especially violent crime? Is it “Islamophobic” for Westerners to want to preserve and defend their own cultural mores and civilizational values in the face of certain Muslim religio-cultural practices that are antithetical to those mores and values, e.g., polygamy, blatant male domination of women, forcible female genital mutilation, “honor killings,” arranged marriages with pre-pubescent girls, etc.? (Why, after all, is it OK for non-Westerners to want to preserve their cultures, but not OK for Westerners to want to preserve theirs?) Is it “Islamophobic” to be concerned about the ongoing efforts of Islamists to criminalize all criticism and satirical treatments of Islam, i.e., to restrict freedom of expression in Western societies, not only by labeling such criticisms as “Islamophobic” but by engaging in outright intimidation and acts of violence? Is every Westerner who expresses such legitimate concerns in fact a “nativist,” “racist,” “xenophobe,” “right-winger,” or “Islamophobe”? The answer to these questions is clearly “no.” Indeed, as Walter Laqueur has wryly observed, if Eskimos began committing disproportionate amounts of terrorism, there would be an understandable increase in the amount of suspicion and hostility directed at Eskimos, which would then inevitably lead to bogus accusations of “Eskimophobia.” See Laqueur’s review of Michael Gove’s Celsius 7/7 book in The Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 2006. Nevertheless, according to the ever-growing and increasingly histrionic “anti-Islamophobia” network, anyone who has such justifiable and indeed commonsensical concerns is a priori nothing more than a bigoted Islam-hater

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or a racist. Needless to say, the application of the term “racism” is particularly ridiculous in this context, since Muslims are members of a multi-ethnic community of religious believers (the umma) – one that includes many whites – rather than a specific racial group. See also Pascal Bruckner, Un racisme imaginaire: Islamophobie et culpabilité (Paris: Grasset, 2017). Finally, perhaps those morally sensitive souls who profess to be so concerned with stigmatizing and discriminatory “phobias” should really be paying far more attention to the irrational Muslim hatred of “infidels” (or “infidelphobia,” though I personally reject the use of the term “phobia” in these contexts) – not to mention the brutal, systematic official and unofficial persecution of religious minorities in so many contemporary Muslim countries – which is a built-in characteristic of Islamism and is also vastly more widespread and problematic than so-called “Islamophobia” is ever likely to become. Here is a suggestion for those who know nothing whatsoever about Islam: start with the “loyalty [towards Muslims] and enmity [towards ‘infidels’]” (al-wala’ wa al-bara’) doctrine, deriving from Qur’anic passages (e.g., 3:28, 4:89, 5:51), that is so vociferously espoused by Wahhabis and other Islamists (e.g., Shaykh Muhammad Sa‘id al-Qahtani, Al-Wala’ wa’l-Bara’ According to the Aqeedah of the Salaf, Part 1 [Mecca: Kashf al-Shubuhat Publications, 1993], available at www.kalamullah.com/Books/alWalaawalBaraal.pdf, which was originally an M.A. thesis written under the direction of Muhammad Qutub, Sayyid Qutub’s brother, and other professors at ‘Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia) and embraced in part by all too many Muslims. Cf. the enthusiastic support within al-Qa‘ida for this same intolerant, “infidel” hating al-wala’ wa al-bara’ notion, as reflected in “Al-Qaeda Releases ‘Standards of Friendship and Enmity in Islam’ . . . ,” MEMRI website, 26 September 2013, available at www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/7428.htm. Of course, as two Canadian critics of the term “Islamophobia” have rightly pointed out, “one doubts that a formulation like ‘infidelphobia’ will gain traction anytime soon.” See Jackson Doughart and Faisal Saeed al-Mutar, “Opinion: Stop Calling Criticism of Islam ‘Islamophobia,’” National Post, 26 September 2012, available at http://life.nationalpost.com/2012/09/26/opinion-stop-calling-criticism-of-islam-islamophobia/. Ironically, the only real “phobia” on display in this context is the phobia about “Islamophobia” itself, for which British journalist Andrew Anthony has coined the term “Islamophobiaphobia.” See his book The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (London: Vintage, 2008), Chapter 10. Others have introduced the term “Islamofauxbia” into the lexicon. 40 Since the proponents of “politically correct” viewpoints are, much like religious fanatics, “true believers” who are impervious to contrary evidence or logical counterarguments, Lucien Samir Oulahbib has justly characterized “political correctness” as a “cryptoreligion.” See his Le politiquement correct français: Épistémologie d’une crypto-religion (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012). 41 This is why it has become practically unavoidable for serious researchers – myself included – to consult, in addition to a wide variety of primary sources that become available (e.g., Islamist publications and trial materials), the websites of assorted conservative and right-wing “watchdog” groups whose self-appointed mission is to monitor the activities of Islamist networks operating in the West, just as those who study the Western radical right find it necessary to consult the websites of left-leaning anti-fascist “watchdog” groups. In both cases, it is the factual information presented on those websites, not their agenda-driven interpretations of that information, which generally proves to be most useful for research purposes. (I should also hasten to add that, apart from their concerns about problematic aspects of Islam, their opposition to radical Islam, and their alarm about ongoing Islamist subversion of Western law enforcement and counterterrorism efforts, I rarely share the views promoted on those conservative or rightist websites about other social and political matters [e.g., their knee-jerk hostility toward “liberalism” or their unwavering support for Israel no matter what the context or circumstances].) Sadly, one reason why it has become increasingly necessary to make use of right-leaning sources about Islamism is that so many liberals and leftists have completely abdicated their own politico-moral responsibility to monitor the Islamic radical right, either due to

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egregious ignorance about the nature of Islamism or because of their narrow pursuit of partisan ideological agendas. As atheist Sam Harris has put it, less charitably, “the political correctness of the Left has made it taboo to even notice the menace of political Islam [i.e., Islamism], leaving only right-wing fanatics to do the job.” See his “Response to Controversy, Version 2.3,” Sam Harris website, 7 April 2013, available at www.samharris.org/ site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/. If one changed his word “only” to “mainly,” that statement would be all too accurate. In a sane world, one would expect Western liberal and left-wing “watchdogs” of the domestic and international radical right to be paying much closer attention to Islamist and jihadist activities, which are intrinsically antithetical to their own professed “humanitarian” and cosmopolitan values, than would many elements of the Western right, which ironically share certain ultra-conservative social and cultural values with the Islamists (such as opposition to abortion, homosexuality, evolution, women’s rights, sexual liberation, drug use, secularism, coddling criminals, etc.). (Note, e.g., conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who argues that Muslims are justifiably opposed to and disgusted by a West, supposedly dominated by liberal elites, that is promoting irreligiosity, sexual licentiousness, and “anti-family” values, and that this understandably provoked jihadist terrorists to carry out the 9/11 attacks. See his The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 [New York: Broadway Books, 2008].) Instead, these “politically correct” self-styled “progressives,” like the Islamists themselves, are all too quick to denounce conservative anti-Islamist “watchdog” organizations, often tendentiously, as “Islamophobic.” 42 Here it is important to distinguish between multiculturalism as a social and demographic phenomenon, i.e., the intermingling of people from different ethno-cultural backgrounds, and multiculturalism as a partisan political ideology. For critiques of the latter, see Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle over Multiculturalism Is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Countries, and Our Lives (New York: Vintage, 1995), for the U.S.; Salim Mansur, Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism (Brantford, Ontario: Mantua, 2011), for Canada; Patrick West, The Poverty of Multiculturalism (London: Civitas/Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2005), for Britain; Fabien Ollier, L’idéologie multiculturaliste en France: Entre fascisme et libéralisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), for France; Alex P. Schmid, ed., De multiculturele samenleving: Smeltkroes of kruitvat? (Driebergen: Synthesis, 1996), for the Netherlands; and Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt, Les pièges de la culture: Les contradictions démocratiques du multiculturalisme (Geneva: Mētis, 2012), for Europe. The ideology of multiculturalism, which is based on the aggressive promotion of collectivist racial and gender identity politics (for everyone other than heterosexual white males, of course), not only constitutes a threat to individual freedom, but also to universalist ideas, for which see Caroline Fourest, La dernière utopie: Menaces sur l’universalisme (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009). Others have argued, quite rightly in my opinion, that the ideology of multiculturalism has evolved into a new kind of “political religion” whose regressive and divisive tenets can no longer be questioned by “respectable” people. See Mathieu BockCôté, Le multiculturalisme comme religion politique (Paris: Cerf, 2016). It is noteworthy that although proponents of multiculturalist dogmas invariably view themselves as “progressive,” the ideology they espouse is arguably a right-wing ideology inasmuch as it views individuals not as actual living, breathing people who should be judged on their own merits and can freely choose to adapt, reject, or transcend elements of their own ethno-cultural heritage, but rather solely as imagined “representatives” of their own ethno-cultural groups, to which are ascribed certain intrinsic characteristics. Cf. Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind (New York: Columbia University, 1995), parts 1–3 (although I do not support his own condescending display of cultural conservatism and elitism in part 4). In the case of non-Western groups, the characteristics of the supposedly innocent and victimized “Other” are paternalistically romanticized and glorified by multiculturalists, whereas Westerners are instead demonized as inherently guilty “oppressors” who are forever obliged to apologize for and take steps to “right” the collective “wrongs” they have allegedly perpetrated. (This latter “guilt-by-association”

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calumny would be justly recognized and denounced as unfair or even “racist” if it were applied to any human group other than white Westerners.) So it is that multiculturalists display the most blatant double standards by insisting that all non-Western cultures must be “respected” or “celebrated” and never criticized, no matter how objectively regressive, intolerant, and barbarous they may be, whilst continually denigrating their own culture and encouraging others to blame the West for all of their own problems. In short, they adopt a flaccid, nauseatingly sappy moral relativism vis-à-vis supposedly “oppressed” members of non-Western communities, who are always portrayed as “innocent victims,” but a rigid, denunciatory moral absolutism vis-à-vis ostensibly “privileged” Westerners. As several critics of multiculturalism have rightly noted, this amounts to a kind of paternalistic de facto racism insofar as it treats non-Westerners like virtual children without moral agency, who cannot therefore be expected to adhere to the same impossibly high moral and behavioral standards that are insistently demanded of Westerners. Such a reprehensible double standard directly conflicts with the authentically liberal view that every individual and human group should be judged according to the same standards of morality and legality with respect to their behavior. In any case, for some examples of how multiculturalist dogmas are sabotaging Western resistance to Islamists, see Bruce Bawer, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (New York: Anchor, 2010), for the West in general; Melanie Philips, Londonistan (New York and London: Encounter, 2006), especially pp. 57–76, for the UK; and Abigail R. Esman, Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning over Democracy in the West (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), for the Netherlands. For critiques of post-1960s “Third Worldism,” which essentially involves the excessive romanticisation of Franz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth,” see Bruckner, Tears of the White Man; Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2010); Caroline Fourest (a self-described supporter of the “antitotalitarian left” who is opposed to the “Third Worldist left”), La tentation obscurantiste (Paris: Grasset, 2005), pp. 33–51; and Pierre-André Taguieff, Prêcheurs de haine: Traversée de la judéophobie planétaire (Paris: Fayard, 2004), who provides numerous examples of the harmful political and moral consequences of uncritically glorifying and supporting all anti-Western movements in the Third World, no matter how reactionary they may be (as the Islamists clearly are). Taguieff has also produced a brilliant diagnosis of the hypocritical pretentions of today’s imagined “anti-reactionaries” among the Western intelligentsia, who are nowadays so prone to label those who disagree with their own views as “new reactionaries,” in Les contre-réactionnaires: Le progressisme entre illusion et imposture (Paris: Denoël, 2007). 43 Here I am referring to the vast, tendentious, often delusional, and sometimes purely mercenary or dishonest literature claiming that undeniable acts of jihadist terrorism, such as the 9/11 attacks, the 2002 Bali bombings, the 2004 Madrid bombings, the 2005 London bombings, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, etc., were actually covert “false flag” operations carried out by whomever the particular conspiracy theorists – usually Western leftists, Western right-wingers, anti-Semites, anti-Western “Third Worldists,” “Islam apologists,” “Islamist apologists,” or Islamists – consider to be key actors within the villainous cabal that is supposedly manipulating or controlling world events from behind the scenes. Among those that have been singled out in these cases are the Bush administration and/ or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Israeli MOSSAD and its alleged neoconservative “agents,” Indonesian military intelligence, the Spanish intelligence services, the British security service (MI5), and Hindutva extremists. For illustrative examples, see David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch, 2008); Webster Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 2006), for 9/11; segments of Glen Clancy’s “Fool Me Twice” video “documentary” for the 2002 Bali bombings, available at www. youtube.com/watch?v=n4jCabkjukE; Bruno Cardeñosa, 11-M: Claves de una conspiración (Madrid: Espejo de Tinta, 2004), for 3/11; Nick Kollerstrom, Terror on the Tube: Behind the Veil of 7/7: An Investigation (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 2012), for 7/7; and Jonathan Azaziah, “26/11: Mossad Terrorizes Mumbai,” Mask of Zion website, 4 January 2011,

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available at www.maskofzion.com/2011/01/2611-mossad-terrorizes-mumbai.html, for 11/26. According to this ever-growing flood of conspiratorial literature, the alleged sponsors or perpetrators of these mass casualty terrorist attacks were not the Islamist jihadists who were “officially” blamed (and who proudly took credit for several of them, including 9/11), but rather the various sinister aforementioned behind-the-scenes forces. And if any jihadists happened to be involved, they were simply dupes or double agents working for the “real” conspirators. Certain more serious journalistic investigations have unearthed some valuable new information and/or revealed some problematic lacunae in the “official” accounts of these incidents, but they have neither undermined the overwhelming evidence substantiating the general thrust of those accounts nor made a convincing case for their preferred alternative explanations. See, e.g., Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9–11 Cover-Up in Florida (Venice, FL: MadCow Press, 2004); and José María de Pablo, La cuarta trama: Verdades y mentiras en el caso del 11-M (Madrid: Ciudadela, 2009). 44 Note, however, that this transnational “anti-Islamophobia industry,” which has been busily churning out masses of both naïve misinformation and malicious disinformation about critics of Islam and Islamism, typically fails to make clear distinctions between a) bigoted “Islam-hating” ignoramuses, b) severe critics of Islam in general, for more or less legitimate reasons, and c) astute, knowledgeable people whose primary goal is to defend Enlightenment values, individual freedom, and democratic pluralism from the threat of Islamist totalitarianism. Moreover, Islamist activists themselves often play the most prominent, albeit frequently behind-the-scenes, role in enunciating this industry’s characteristic themes and talking points. For representative examples of this sort of tendentious “progressive,” Islamist, or “anti-fascist” literature, which tend to ignore both the aforementioned distinctions and the very real threats posed by Islamism, see Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012); Wajahat Ali et al., Fear, Inc: The Islamophobia Network in America (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, [August] 2011), available at www. americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2011/08/pdf/islamophobia.pdf; Thomas Cincotta, Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, Public Services, and the Threat to Rights and Security (Somerville, MA: Political Research Associates, 2011), available at www.publiceye.org/liberty/training/Muslim_Menace_Complete.pdf; Muslim Public Affairs Council, Not Qualified: Exposing the Deception Behind America’s Top 25 PseudoExperts on Islam (Los Angeles, CA: MPAC, undated [2013]), available at www.mpac.org/ assets/docs/publications/MPAC-25-Pseudo-Experts-On-Islam.pdf; David Williams and Nick Lowles, The ‘Counter-Jihad’ Movement: The Global Trend Feeding Anti-Muslim Hatred (London: Hope Not Hate, 2012); Øyvind Strømmen, Det mørke nettet: Om høyreekstremisme, kontrajihadisme og terror i Europa (Oslo: Cappelen, 2011); and the Loonwatch website (which is arguably the most dishonest and malicious of them all). However, the supposed “Islamophobia network” that these groups virulently denounce and demonize is no more monolithic, and no less diverse, than its “anti-Islamophobia” counterpart. Indeed, the organizations and individuals critical of or opposed to Islam and/ or Islamism, far from being composed exclusively of right-wing extremists, as the “antiIslamophobes” falsely claim, comprise a vast and diverse array of people on all sides of the political spectrum. First, there are the outright “Islam haters” and “Muslim haters,” who truly deserve to be censured (albeit not censored), some of whom were identified in note 39. Second, there are the “Islam bashers” that make up the so-called “counter-jihad” movement, who generally (and foolishly) fail to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, and sometimes even argue, preposterously, that there is no such thing as Islamism. See, e.g., Robert Spencer, “Islam and Islamists,” Jihad Watch website, 21 October 2011, available at www.jihadwatch.org/2011/10/islam-and-islamists.html. That is the equivalent of arguing, equally absurdly, that there is no difference between Christianity in general and literalist, extremist, and theocratic interpretations of Christianity, e.g., Christian Reconstructionism. This “counter-jihad” movement admittedly includes several problematic far right organizations and even some extremists with a quasi-fascist orientation or

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background, such as elements of the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party in Belgium, the Bürgerbewegung pro Deutschland (BpD: Pro-Germany Citizens’ Movement) in Germany, various European “ethno-pluralist” movements inspired by the intellectual nouvelle droite (e.g., the Bloc Identitaire [Identitarian Bloc] in France, and the Identitäre Bewegung [Identitarian Movement] in Germany), the EDL in Britain (and some of its foreign counterparts), and the Sverigedemokraterna (SD: Sweden Democrats) party in Sweden, as well as others with a radical right-wing religious agenda, including assorted Protestant fundamentalists (e.g., Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, the Christian Action Network, Christian Concern in the UK, Lt. Gen. [Ret.] William “Jerry” Boykin, evangelical Christian ex-Muslims like Mark Gabriel, Sam Solomon, Imran Firasat, Reza Safa, and Nassim Ben Iman, including self-proclaimed ex-Muslim terrorists [Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Anani, Kamal Saleem]), ultranationalist Eastern Orthodox Christians (e.g., the Serbian author Srđa [Serge] Trifković, the Laíkos Orthódoxos Synagermós [LOS: People’s Orthodox Rally] party in Greece, the now banned Otačastveni Pokret Srpski Obraz [OPSO: Serbian Honor Patriotic Movement] and Serbski Narodni Pokret 1389 political party [1389 Serbian National Movement, a name commemorating the year when Serbian armies lost a heroic battle against the Ottoman Turks at Kosovo Polje]), Orthodox Jewish extremists affiliated with the haredim or “messianic Zionist” milieus (e.g., David Yerushalmi), and Catholic ultratraditionalist circles (e.g., Chrétienté-Solidarité in France, the La Yijad en Eurabia/La Sexta Redoma website in Spain). However, it also consists of much less radical conservative or rightist individuals (e.g., Geert Wilders [who is in fact liberal on most social issues], Mark Steyn, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, Bat Ye’or [pseudonym for Gisèle Littman], Oskar Freysinger, Fjordman [pseudonym for Peder Jensen], Brigitte Gabriel, David Wood of Answering Muslims.com), and organizations or websites (e.g., Jihad Watch, Gates of Vienna, the Brussels Journal, the Center for Security Policy, the Clarion Project, Document.no, Politically Incorrect [Germany], Front Page Magazine, Vlad Tepes, Creeping Sharia, Islam Versus Europe), which often post interesting and important information despite their conservative or right-wing biases. Third, there are assorted “centrists,” including relatively moderate conservatives (e.g., John Rosenthal, David Solway [an ex-leftist Canadian poet and writer who is nowadays moving ever-further to the right], Daniel Johnson, Aldo-Michel Mungo of Les Résistants, Hallgrim Berg, Leslie S. Lebl), classical liberals (e.g., Bruce Bawer, Andrew Anthony, atheist Pat Condell), genuinely moderate Muslims, ex-Muslim secularists, or Arab Christians who are both painfully familiar with Islamism and sometimes highly critical of Islam itself (e.g., Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mamoun Fandy, Tarek Fatah, Chahdortt Djavann, Ibn Warraq, Mohamed Sifaoui, Wafa Sultan, Salim Mansur, Chala Chafiq, ‘Ali Sina, Naser Khader, Irfan al-Alawi, Zuhdi Jasser, Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, several exIslamist Muslims from the Quilliam Foundation in the UK, Walid al-Kubaisi, Raymond Ibrahim, Magdi Cristiano Allam, Antoine Sfeir, Walid Phares, Kamal Nawash, members of the secularist Zentralrat der Ex-Muslime [Central Council of Ex-Muslims] in Germany and other European countries), and moderately conservative anti-Islamist watchdog or reporting groups (e.g., the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch, the Global Muslim Brotherhood website) that are roughly comparable in their focused approach (though not in their levels of dishonesty and maliciousness) to the aforementioned agenda-driven anti-fascist watchdog groups. Fourth, there are left liberals and leftists opposed to “political correctness” and Islamist totalitarianism, such as the signers of the Euston Manifesto in the U.K., the “new atheists” (e.g., Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasrin), and a number of academicians, journalists, artists, and intellectuals (e.g., Bassam Tibi, Nick Cohen, Paul Berman, Kurt Westergaard [almost murdered, and the object of other murder plots, by jihadists], Caroline Fourest, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Kanan Makiya, Pascal Bruckner, the late Theo van Gogh [murdered by a jihadist], Alain Finkielkraut, Lars Hedegaard [almost murdered by a jihadist], Salman Rushdie [under the perpetual threat of death from Islamists], Gregorius Nekschot [pseudonym for a Dutch cartoonist], Lars Vilks [almost murdered by jihadists], Helle Merete Brix, Oriana Fallaci

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[who admittedly crossed the line into “Islam bashing” or even “Muslim hating”], Robert Redeker, Daniel Krause, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Philippe Val, Afshin Ellian, the publishers of Charlie Hebdo [whose office has been attacked and firebombed by jihadists]). (I should also note, for the record, that I myself am a classical liberal, a radical individualist, an unabashed secularist, a member of the anti-PC and anti-totalitarian left, and a countercultural rebel, and that I voted – albeit, in retrospect, mistakenly and foolishly – for Obama in both 2008 and 2012, which means that my harsh criticisms of his policies with respect to Islamism herein are by no means motivated by partisan animus.) Thus the fact that most “anti-Islamophobes” are so intent on portraying everyone who is highly critical of Islam, particular aspects of Islam, and/or Islamism, as a “fascist hatemonger” is therefore quite revealing, both about their intellectual dishonesty and about their underlying fanaticism. It is bad enough that conservatives of various types are being indiscriminately slandered as “fascists,” but so-called “anti-fascism” has truly reached a point of total moral bankruptcy and indeed utter lunacy when both anti-Islamist Muslims and liberal or left-leaning critics of the totalitarian Islamic radical right are also regularly being falsely and maliciously smeared as “Islamophobes,” “right-wing extremists,” and “racists.” For an example, see the reply by atheist Islam critic Sam Harris to such calumnies, “Response to Controversy, Version 2.3.” Cf. Jeffrey Tayler, “Richard Dawkins Is Not an Islamophobe,” Salon.com website, 24 August 2013, available at www.salon. com/2013/08/24/richard_dawkins_is_not_an_islamophobe/; and Hartmut Krauss, ed., Feindbild Islamkritik: Wenn die Grenzen zur Verzerrung und Diffamierung überschritten werden (Osnabrück: Hintergrund, 2010), a collection of left-of-center authors who oppose both Islamic obscurantism and the hysterical demonization of critics of Islam. 45 Richard Landes, “From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21st Century ‘Intellectuals,’” Augean Stables website, 8 June 2010, available at www. theaugeanstables.com/2010/06/08/from-useful-idiot-to-useful-infidel-meditations-onthe-folly-of-21st-century-%E2%80%9Cintellectuals%E2%80%9D/. Cf. Karen Jespersen and Ralf Pittelkow, Islamistes et naïvistes: Un acte d’accusation (Paris: Panama, 2007); and Bawer, New Quislings, at 82%, who justly refers to such people as “tools of the Islamists.” The only question is whether they are witting tools or unwitting tools. 46 See, e.g., Lorenzo Vidino, Hisba in Europe?: Assessing a Murky Phenomenon (Brussels: European Foundation for Democracy, [ June] 2013), available at http://europeandemocracy. org/images/stories/Media/Hisba/Hisba_in_Europe.pdf, although the author intentionally errs on the side of caution in his conclusions. The term hisba (“verification”) is short-hand for the Qur’anic injunctions (3:104, 3:110, 7:157, 9:71, etc.) urging Muslims to “command the good and forbid evil” (al-amr bi al-ma‘ruf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar), which Salafists and Islamists generally interpret as giving them authorization to compel other Muslims (as well as subjugated “infidels”) to behave in strictly shari‘a-compliant, “Islamically correct” ways, if necessary by force. For a detailed analysis of this doctrine, which was generally interpreted historically to mean that the Muslim state had the primary responsibility for enforcing hisba within the umma, see Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University, 2000). However, modern Islamists have instead all too often taken it upon themselves, either as individuals or members of small groups, to prevent and/or punish what they regard, very expansively, as “un-Islamic” behavior, including in Western countries. See, e.g., Roel Meijer, “Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong as a Principle of Social Action: The Case of the Egyptian al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s New Global Religion, ed. R. Meijer (London: Hurst, 2009), pp. 189–220. 47 For indications of the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term plans for waging a “CivilizationJihadist Process” so as to “Islamize” the West, cf. the revealing documents discovered in the wake of raids on suspected Islamist terrorist funding entities in both Switzerland and the U.S. The first, which was discovered in the course of the November 2001 Swiss raids on the Bank Al-Taqwa (founded by Muslim Brotherhood activists) and its Ikhwani directors’ homes, was entitled “Nahwa istratijiyya ‘alamiyya li-al-siyasat al-islamiyya” (“Towards a Worldwide Strategy for Islamic Policy”), for which see Sylvain Besson, Le

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conquête de l’occident: Le projet secret des islamistes (Paris: Seuill, 2005), pp. 191–205 (in French translation). This 14-page document (dated 1 December 1982), which outlined a multifaceted 12-point strategy to “establish the reign of Allah on Earth,” was subsequently summarized and republished in an English translation by Patrick Poole, “The Muslim Brotherhood ‘Project,’” Front Page Magazine, 11 May 2006, available at http:// archive.frontpagemag.com/readarticle.aspx?artid=4476. The second was a 16-page strategy document discovered during raids conducted in connection with the case of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a HAMAS front based in the U.S., for which see Muhammad Akram, “Mudhakkara tafsiriyya al-hadaf al-istratijiyya al‘amm li al-jama‘at fi amrika al-shamaliyya” (“An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America”), 22 May 1991, available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/20.pdf (firstly in the original Arabic, and then in English translation). In addition to outlining what Akram viewed as the Brotherhood’s agenda and methods for achieving its goals in the U.S., this document also conveniently listed various organizations that were controlled by or closely associated with the Ikhwan (ibid., p. 15), which revealingly included many of the most prominent and influential Muslim-American organizations. Thus the very first organization on that list is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), for which see Steven Merley, “Extremism and the Islamic Society of North America” (no place: unpublished “confidential” report, [February] 2007), available at www.globalmbwatch.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/04/20080127_extremism_and_isna.pdf. [A third document that is often cited in this context, which is referred to as the “Muslim Brotherhood Underground Movement Plan,” does not in fact appear – on the basis of the incomplete nine-page English-language translation prepared in connection with the Holy Land Foundation trial – to be a Brotherhood document at all, but rather a Saudi intelligence memo concerning the Ikhwan’s strategy in Saudi Arabia, including its involvement with the Islamist, anti-regime Sahwa (Awakening) movement. For this document, see Center for Security Policy, Muslim Brotherhood Case Study: Documentation (Washington, DC: CSP, undated), pp. 37–46, available at http://suhailkhanexposed.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ MB_Case_Study_Evidence.pdf.] Whether those first two documents simply reflected their well-connected authors’ own proposed objectives or delineated a coherent overall strategy that was to be adopted by various organizations formed by Brotherhood activists remains unclear, although it would surely be a mistake to view these organizations as being centrally directed in some tight conspiratorial fashion. Be that as it may, many of these Brotherhood-linked groups are still operating openly and largely unimpeded in America today. Similar networks of such organizations exist throughout Europe, where their apparent goals are likewise to undermine, destroy, and eventually supplant Western civilization. Cf., e.g., Johannes Grundmann, Islamische Internationalisten: Strukturen und Aktivitäten der Muslimbruderschaft und der Islamischen Weltliga (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2005), pp. 15–74; Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West (New York: Columbia University, 2010); Barry Rubin, ed., The Muslim Brotherhood: The Organization and Policies of a Global Islamist Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Chapters 7–11; Xavier Ternisien, Les Frères musulmans (Paris: Fayard, 2005), pp. 187–323; Nina Nowar, Ramadans Erben: Die Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland e.V.(IGD) (Hamburg: Diplomica, 2012), especially. Chapter 4; Udo Ulfkotte, Heiliger Krieg in Europa: Wie die radikale Muslimbruderschaft unsere Gesellschaft bedroht (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2007); Fiammetta Venner, OPA sur l’Islam de France: Les ambitions de l’UOIF (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2005); and Lhaj Thami Breze, Qu’est-ce que l’UOIF? (Paris: L’Archipel, 2006). The best history of the Brotherhood remains that of Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University, 1993 [1969]). Cf. also the useful recent contribution of Jeffry R. Halverson, Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood, Ash‘arism, and Political Sunnism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), especially Chapters 3–4. Perhaps predictably, most newer academic works on the organization and its founder have tended to be overly apologetic. See, e.g., Raymond

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William Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2006); and Gudrun Krämer, Hasan al-Banna (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009). 48 For a recent illustrative and troubling example, note the 13 June 2013 meeting at the White House organized by representatives of the Obama administration, including Rashad Hussain (about whom see note 53), with Salafist Mauritanian shaykh ‘Abdallah b. Bayyah, a professor of Islamic law at King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz University in Saudi Arabia and a close associate of Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is widely regarded as the most important ideological animator of the Muslim Brotherhood at the present time. See Steven Emerson and John Rossomando, “Exclusive: Banned Cleric’s Outspoken Deputy Visits White House,” Investigative Project on Terrorism website, 26 June 2013, available at www.investigative project.org/4055/exclusive-banned-cleric-outspoken-deputy-visits. Cf. “Qaradawi Associate Meets at White House: Abdullah Bin Bayyah Close to Saudi with Ties to Al Qaeda and Hamas Support,” Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch website, 26 June 2013, available at www.globalmbwatch.com/2013/06/26/qaradawi-associate-meetswhite-house-abdallah-bin-bayyah-close-saudi-figure-ties-al-qaeda-hamas-support/. For two other leading Brotherhood-associated activists with whom the Obama administration met in 2013 (in addition to Ibn Bayyah), in connection with the President’s misguided policy of “fully engaging” with that organization – Salah Sultan and Safwat al-Hijazi – see the three-part series, “The White House’s New Best Friends,” published by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch website, 30 June–15 July 2013, beginning at www.globalmbwatch.com/2013/06/30/part-1-white-houses-friends-fantasticalantisemitic-world-abdallah-bin-bayyah-2/. Al-Qaradawi himself has long been one of the most influential Sunni religious scholars, and he currently has the most popular talk show on the al-Jazira television network. Like all Islamists, al-Qaradawi is an extremist, an anti-Semite, and a promoter of armed jihad against non-dhimmi “infidels” within the dar al-islam (albeit not against Western countries, which he anticipates the future Muslim conquest of via gradual proselytization and infiltration; although he himself normally refers to the West using the traditional formulation dar al-‘ahd [abode of the pact or covenant], he has effectively embraced, however conditionally, the Mawdudist Khurram Murad’s conception of the West as the dar al-da‘wa [abode of proselytization] so as to differentiate it from the dar al-harb [abode of war] that Muslims are mandated to wage war against). He also does not support the concept of Qur’anic “abrogation” (naskh), which is unusual for Islamists. Cf. “Sheik Yousuf al-Qaradhawi: Islam’s ‘Conquest of Rome’ Will Save Europe from Its Subjugation to Materialism and Promiscuity,” MEMRI website, 28 July 2007, available at www.memritv.org/clip/en/1592.htm; Nina Wiedl, “Dawa and the Islamist Revival in the West,” in Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, ed. Hillel Fradkin et al. (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, 2009), vol. 9, especially pp. 128–33; and Lorenzo Vidino, “Aims and Methods of Europe’s Muslim Brotherhood,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, ed. Hillel Fradkin et al. (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, 2006), vol. 4, pp. 22–44. The fact that other Islamists are even more extreme with respect to the means they advocate employing does not mean that al-Qaradawi’s Islamic supremacist goals are “moderate,” as some have argued. See, e.g., Bettina Gräf and Jakob SkovgaardPetersen, eds., Global Muftī: The Phenomenon of Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī (New York: Columbia University, 2009), wherein many of the contributors (including co-editor Gräf, following the example of her academic mentor, Gudrun Krämer) adopt such a misleading, overly apologetic perspective. Note further that, according to John L. Esposito and İbrahim Kalın, eds., The 500 Most Influential Muslims: 2009 (Amman, Jordan and Washington, DC: Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center/Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for MuslimChristian Understanding at Georgetown University, 2009), pp. 19–20, al-Qaradawi is the world’s ninth most influential Muslim, whereas Ibn Bayyah is the 30th most influential. 49 See, e.g., Ian Johnson, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010); Stefan Meining, Eine Moschee in Deutschland: Nazis, Geheimdienste und der Aufstieg des politischen Islam im Westen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011); Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash

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Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2010). For source citations, see Bale, “Islamism and Totalitarianism.” Unfortunately, as Thor E. Ronay (president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington, DC) rightly notes, “[p]olitical correctness is [at this point] too broad and deep institutionally to be overridden. It arises from years of inculcation in the [government] agencies, and more generally in the culture that we all operate within.” Cited in Paul Sperry, Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2005), p. 10. For the U.S., see, in general, Steven Emerson and the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006); Steven Emerson and the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception” video documentary; Sperry, Infiltration; and “The Muslim Brotherhood in America,” a 10-part video documentary produced by Frank Gaffney’s neo-conservative Center for Security Policy, available at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hhtG4k7sQbc. Although the two last-named sources have a rightist political agenda and a rather alarmist tone, and their analyses are at times overly simplistic or distorted and therefore cannot be accepted uncritically, the basic information provided in all four of these sources about Islamist organizations and individuals that have acted to undermine American counterterrorism policies is accurate and well-documented, both during the Bush and Obama administrations. For the activities of the HAMAS-linked organizations out of which CAIR emerged, in particular the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), see the voluminous legal materials produced in connection with the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case: United States District Court, Northern District of Texas, United States of America vs. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, et al., 3:04-CR0240-G, beginning with the 26 July 2004 Indictment, available at www.tamilnet.com/ img/publish/2007/10/Holyland_01.pdf. The exhibits from the HLF trials in Texas can be accessed at www.txnd.uscourts.gov/judges/hlf2.html. Cf. Steven Merley, “Extremism and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) (no place: self-published “confidential” report, [ January] 2007), available at www.globalmbwatch.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/04/20080127_extremism_and_cair.pdf; Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, “CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment,” Middle East Quarterly 13:2 (Spring 2006), pp. 3–20; P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America (Los Angeles, CA: WND Books, 2009), another right-wing, at times histrionic, and perhaps overly conspiratorial but nonetheless factfilled investigative report based largely on confidential CAIR documents surreptitiously (and, according to a judge, “unlawfully”) obtained by infiltrators within the organization (above all Gaubatz’s son Chris); and, for one of the co-founders of CAIR, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Omar Ahmad and The Palestine Committee (Washington, DC: IPT, undated [2008?]), available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/635. pdf. Moreover, CAIR’s underlying undemocratic agenda was illustrated, yet again, by the public statements of several of its officials, who enthusiastically supported Egyptian Brotherhood leader and President Muhammad Mursi and contemptuously dismissed his pro-democracy opponents – in the words of CAIR-Los Angeles’ Executive Director Hussam Ayloush – as “Mubarak supporters, military rulers, anti-Islamists, confused leftists, anarchists, & some well-meaning activists [who were trying to] undo a democratic election.” See John Rossomando, “American Islamists Rally behind MB Amid Egypt Protests,” Investigative Project on Terrorism website, 2 July 2013, available at www.investigative project.org/4068/american-islamists-rally-behind-mb-amid-egypt. For more information about such people and their activities, see “Muslim Brotherhood in America” video documentary, parts 8 and 9. Cf. also “Muslim Brotherhood at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, 23 May 2013, available at www.globalmbwatch.com/2013/05/23/part-2-muslim-brotherhooddepartment-homeland-security/; Stephen Schwartz, “Obama’s Islamic Envoy [Hussain]:

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Obama is America’s ‘Educator-in-Chief on Islam,’” Weekly Standard, 24 June 2010, available at www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-america-educator-chief-islam, where it is pointed out that Hussain is supportive of the OIC’s efforts to institute de facto “blasphemy” laws, even in non-Muslim countries, that are designed to criminalize the ostensible “defamation” of religion (more recently, the wording has been subtly shifted from “defamation” to “incitement to discrimination and violence,” based on the model of less blatantly unconstitutional “hate speech” laws); “Dalia Mogahed: A Muslim George Gallup or Islamist Ideologue?, Investigative Project on Terrorism website, 15 April 2010, available at www.investigativeproject.org/1904/dalia-mogahed-a-muslim-george-gallup-orislamist; and “Obama Muslim Faith Advisor [Mogahed] Appears on U.K. Television with Hizb ut-Tahrir,” Global Muslim Brotherhood website, 5 October 2009, available at http://globalmbreport.org/?p=1644. For the members of the DHS Working Group, which in 2010 contained both Islamist activists like Mogahed and “Islamist apologists” from academia or anti-fascist “watchdog” groups, see Department of Homeland Security, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Working Group, Homeland Security Advisory Council, Recommendations (Washington, DC: GPO, [Spring] 2010), pp. 27–30, available at www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/hsac_cve_working_group_recommendations.pdf. Other Brotherhood-linked Islamists with an entrée into U.S. government and counterterrorism circles include Shaykh Kifah Mustafa of the Chicago Imam Council, Muhammad Majid of the Islamic Center of Washington, and Muhammad Elibiary of the Freedom and Justice Foundation in Texas. Even before Obama’s election, he selected Mazin Asbahi, another Islamist with ties to Brotherhood organizations, as his National Coordinator for Muslim American Affairs. See “Obama Top Muslim Advisor Part of Two More Organizations Linked to Muslim Brotherhood,” Global Muslim Brotherhood website, 1 August 2008, available at http://globalmbreport.com/?p=1017 (although Asbahi later resigned after evidence surfaced concerning his involvement in Islamist fundraising activities). Hence it is hardly surprising that Obama, apart from aggressively targeting al-Qa‘ida and other jihadists, has failed to adopt an appropriately anti-Islamist foreign policy. 54 Some of these ousted individuals were in fact “Islam bashers,” even though Islamists should never be allowed to vet anyone in such a position. For an overview of this problem in the context of the Department of Defense, see David J. Rusin, “Problems in the U.S. Military: Denying Islam’s Role in Terror,” Middle East Quarterly 20:2 (Spring 2013), pp. 19–26. See, as an illustrative example of Islamist pressure and interference, the letter from Farhana Khera, on behalf of various American Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Organizations, to John Brennan, 19 October 2011, at http://aai.3cdn.net/337acb641d 29d2e40a_3nm6bx9ap.pdf, which complained about the government’s use of allegedly “biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam” (p. 1). These groups then urged Brennan (p. 5) to “create an interagency task force, led by the White House,” that would “[r]eview all trainers and training materials at government agencies. . . . . [p]urge all federal government training materials of biased materials. . . . . [i]mplement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state, and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training. . . . . [e]nsure that . . . all trainers and other government employees who promoted biased trainers and training materials are effectively disciplined. . . . . [i]mplement quality control processes to ensure that bigoted trainers and biased materials are not developed or utilized in the future. . . . . [i]ssue guidance clearly stating that religious practice and political advocacy are protected activities under the First Amendment, not indicators of violence, and shall not be the basis for surveillance or investigation.” [Italics not added, JMB]. They then insisted, not surprisingly, that these actions be carried out with “input from Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities ” (i.e., themselves). Yet many of the letter’s signatory organizations had previously been identified, on the basis of internal documents and/or the government’s own investigative materials, as Islamist front groups (pp. 6–7), including CAIR, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), to name only

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the most prominent. For more on MPAC, e.g., see Investigative Project on Terrorism, Behind the Façade: The Muslim Public Affairs Council (Washington, DC: IPT, undated), available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/358.pdf. Moreover, only a few of the illustrative examples that were cited in the letter actually supported their histrionic claims of bias. Indeed, several of the individuals identified therein were falsely smeared as members of “hate groups” (p. 2), such as Robert Spencer (as per “anti-fascist” watchdog groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC], which have sadly adopted the radical Islamist right’s talking points about “Islamophobia” in a wholly uncritical fashion) or were unfairly accused of being “authors who have publicly defiled and maligned Islam and Muslims” (p. 4), such as Daniel Pipes, who has in fact always argued, unlike the “Islam bashers,” that “radical Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.” One might therefore assume that the government would have been strongly resistant to such blatant attempts by Islamist advocacy groups with vested, if not subversive, interests to interfere with its counterterrorist training. On the contrary, Brennan responded with an early November letter on White House stationery, in which he expressed unqualified support for Khera’s complaints, which he said were in line with the administration’s own “countering violent extremism” (CVE) strategy, and thence promised to act upon them. See John Brennan letter to Farhana Khera, 3 November 2011, available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/742.pdf. Apparently, it never occurred to Brennan that slavishly adopting the advice offered by hyper-sensitive Muslim advocacy organizations, including several that were dominated or controlled by Islamist extremists, might not be the best way to “counter” Islamist extremism, violent or otherwise. Unfortunately, the United States (as well as Canada and various European countries) has now adopted the very same misguided approach within the Muslim world itself – partnering with supposedly moderate Islamists to help resist violent Islamists – by collaborating with the Islamist government in Turkey and the pro-Islamist regime in Qatar through the newly-established Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience. See Ryan Mauro, “U.S. Taxpayers to Pay for Spread of Turkish, Qatar[i] Islamism,” Clarion Project website, 3 October 2013, available at www.clarionproject.org/analysis/ us-taxpayers-pay-spread-turkish-qatar-islamism. Cf. Patrick Goodenough, “Kerry: Potential Terror Recruits Need ‘More Economic Opportunities,’” CNSNews website, 30 September 2013, available at http://cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/ kerry-potential-terror-recruits-need-more-economic-opportunities. 55 See “Documents Responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA Request Seeking Records of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Training Material Review,” Judicial Watch website, 20 May 2013, available at www.judicialwatch.org/bulletins/documents-responsive-to-judicial-watchsfoia-request-seeking-records-of-the-fbis-counterterrorism-training-material-review/. These documents, which were released in two batches, can be accessed in groupings by clicking on their URLs at the bottom of that page. See, e.g., the “Agenda” [pp. JW71JW77] of an 8 February 2012 “Office of Public Affairs Community Engagement Meeting” between FBI officials and representatives of several Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and “interfaith dialogue” organizations, among whom were many Islamists and apologists for both Islam and Islamism, along with a brief summary of that “OPA Community Meeting” [pp. JW84–JW85]. See also Judicial Watch, “U.S. Government Purges of Law Enforcement Training Material Deemed ‘Offensive’ to Muslims: Documentation and Analysis of Islamist Active Measures and Influence Operations Targeting Anti-terrorism Training,” Special Report, 1 September 2015, at http://www.judicialwatch.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/11/JWSRGovtPurgeActiveMeasures1SEP2015.pdf. This harmful Islamist input is being facilitated by the Obama administration’s “community-based” approach to “countering violent extremism” (CVE), especially “local [Muslim] communities that may be targeted by violent extremists” like al-Qa‘ida, which was outlined in a series of official documents, including White House, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States (Washington, DC: GPO, [August] 2011), available at www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/empowering_local_partners.pdf; White House,

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Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States (Washington, DC: GPO, [December] 2011), especially pp. 15–18 (section 2.3), which mandates “standardized training” of government personnel for “countering violent extremism” that is culturally sensitive and eliminates supposedly “offensive and inaccurate information,” at www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/sip-final.pdf; and Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Robert Wasserman, Guidance for Building Communities of Trust (Washington, DC: GPO, [ July] 2010), available at http://nsi.ncirc.gov/documents/e071021293_BuildingCommTrust_ v2-August%2016.pdf. The basic premise of this strategy is that Muslim community organizations should not be viewed as a source of radicalization problems, but rather only as a solution to the problems of Islamist radicalization. This ignores the documented reality that influential segments of the Muslim community – in particular Islamist front groups, mostly established by Muslim Brotherhood operatives and, in a number of cases, funded by Saudi Arabian or other Gulf State donors – are in fact a major source of the Muslim radicalization problem. Moreover, since personnel from government agencies are rarely able to distinguish between genuinely moderate Muslims and Islamist extremists posing as moderates, this approach has enabled Islamist activists (and academic “Islamist apologists”) to exert a growing influence on U.S. government efforts to deal with the threat of Islamism and jihadism. 56 See, e.g., Department of Homeland Security, Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, “Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims,” January 2008 memo, available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/126. pdf. Unfortunately, it can be inferred that several of the “influential Muslim Americans” (p. 1) who were providing these problematic recommendations were likely members of Islamist front organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Among their suggestions was to avoid using terms like “jihadist,” “Islamic terrorist,” “Islamist,” “holy warrior,” and “Salafis” – the very terms, other than “terrorist,” that are used as self-designators by our jihadist terrorist enemies – in order, ostensibly, to deny the terrorists the “legitimacy” they seek (p. 3); to use terms like “death cult,” “sectarian cult,” and “violent cultists” instead to characterize al-Qa‘ida, which suggest that the latter embraces a “pseudo-religious ideology that is outside the [Islamic] mainstream” and is thus unlikely to cause offense to Muslims (p. 4) (even though this will surely cause offense to academic “cult apologists”); to use the term “mainstream Muslims” rather than “moderate Muslims,” again so as to avoid offending Muslims (pp. 4–5); and to emphasize the “positive,” including the success of Muslim integration in America (pp. 7–8). The impact of their suggestions can be clearly seen in later government policy documents, e.g., Department of Homeland Security, Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Training: Guidance & Best Practices,” October 2011, available at http://training. fema.gov/EMIWeb/docs/shared/CVE%20Training%20Guidance.pdf; Department of Homeland Security, Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Training: Do’s and Don’ts (sic),” date illegible [2011], available at www. scribd.com/doc/141998997/DHS-CRCL-CVE-Training-Dos-and-Donts. One indication therein of Islamist influence, apart from the actual contents, is that both of these DHS documents recommend a report sponsored by the Islamist organization MPAC: Alejandro J. Beutel, Building Bridges to Strengthen America: Forging an Effective Counterterrorism Enterprise between Muslim Americans and Law Enforcement (Los Angeles: MPAC, undated [2010]). DHS also recommends a misleading academic report published by Duke University: David Schanzer, Charles Kurzman, and Ebrahim Moosa, Anti-Terror Lessons of American Muslims (Durham, NC: Duke University, [6 January] 2010), available at http://fds.duke.edu/db/attachment/1255, which greatly exaggerates the extent to which American Muslim organizations have actively opposed and unequivocably condemned Islamist terrorism. 57 E.g., on p. 2 of DHS’ “CVE Do’s and Don’t’s” document, one of the items in the “Don’t” column reads as follows: “[F]3. Don’t use training that relies on fear or conspiracies to

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motivate law enforcement. Don’t use training premised on theories with little or no evidence to support them.” No one could object to these guidelines in principle, but the problem lies in the examples that are provided therein to illustrate such allegedly conspiratorial, unsubstantiated ideas: “Examples . . . of unsubstantiated theories include: a. Many mainstream Muslim organizations have terrorist ties [, and] b. Mainstream Muslim organizations are fronts for Islamic political organizations whose true desire is to establish Sharia law in America. Muslim Americans are using democratic processes, like litigation and free speech, to subvert democracy and install Sharia law.” In reality, both “a” and “b” are perfectly accurate and easily documentable statements when it comes to certain ostensibly “mainstream” Muslim organizations, which are all too often Islamist front groups that in some cases have documented links to terrorism and in many more instances are simply exploiting democratic processes to further an intrinsically anti-democratic agenda. Yet this DHS brochure pre-emptively dismisses such notions as conspiracy theories, even in cases where they are verifiably applicable, in the context of the agency’s vetting guidelines for counterterrorism training. From where, one might ask, did DHS borrow this dangerously biased and wrongheaded approach? The answer is from a report prepared by an anti-fascist “watchdog” group, Cincotta’s Manufacturing the Muslim Menace, in a section entitled “Islamophobic Frames for Law Enforcement and Homeland Security Professionals,” especially pp. 37–47. And who did Cincotta himself solicit advice from in writing his report about “Islamophobia”? From Alejandro Beutel of MPAC and from “Islam apologists” and/or “Islamist apologists” in academia, including Professor John Esposito from Georgetown University and Professor Ziad Munson of Lehigh University. Esposito is so notorious that he needs no introduction, but examples of Munson’s no less misleading views are that the Brotherhood has “little or no organizational capacity” in the U.S., and that “building front organizations is not in the Muslim Brotherhood’s repertoire.” See ibid., p. 41. These claims are verifiably false. For reliable evidence to the contrary, see Steven Merley, The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, [April] 2009), passim, available at www.currenttrends.org/docLib/20090411_Merley.USBROTHER HOOD.pdf. For more on Beutel’s background and ideas, see “Alejandro Beutel,” Investigative Project on Terrorism report, undated, available at www.investigativeproject.org/ documents/misc/716.pdf. 58 Actually, President Bush waffled on this issue. In a 20 September 2001 address to a joint session of Congress, Bush rightly insisted that the jihadists who sponsored and carried out the 9/11 attacks were “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” and that they were thus comparable to the fascists and other prior totalitarians who were destined to end up “in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.” Cited in White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (Washington, DC: GPO, [February] 2003), p. 5, available at www.cia.gov/news-information/cia-the-war-on-terrorism/Counter_ Terrorism_Strategy.pdf. Even so, according to [Islamist organization] MPAC’s Executive Director Salam al-Marayati, “President Bush told us in a [26 September 2001?] meeting with him that he will make it a point to detach the Islamic label from the word terrorism. . . . . So you will never see President Bush saying ‘Islamic terrorism.’” Transcript of a 9 September 2003 speech given by al-Marayati at the MPAC conference on U.S. counterterrorism policy in Washington, DC, cited in Sperry, Infiltration, p. 6. Indeed, in that same 2003 strategy document, there were only scattered, perfunctory references to ideology and the “war of ideas.” Yet by September 2006, that initial failure to pay sufficient attention to ideological matters seemed to have been rectified, when the Bush administration published an updated version of its earlier strategic policy guidelines. In the very first sentence, it proclaimed that “America is at war with a transnational terrorist movement fueled by a radical ideology of hatred, oppression, and murder.” See White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (Washington, DC: GPO, [September] 2006), p. 1, available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nsct/2006/nsct2006.pdf. Therefore (ibid., p. 7), in “the long run, winning the War on Terror [sic] means winning the battle of ideas.” Bush thus

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seems to have become increasingly aware of the ideological dimensions of the “war on terrorism” and belatedly recognized that something needed to be done to counteract Islamist ideology, even if the initiatives he ended up adopting to win this “war of ideas” proved to be completely ineffective. Unfortunately, it seems as though the Obama administration, in support of its laudable (in principle) but misdirected (in practice) efforts to reorient and improve U.S. relations with the Muslim world, has deliberately “unlearned” those valuable lessons. 59 John Brennan, “A New Approach for Safeguarding Americans,” p. 9, available at http:// csis.org/files/attachments/090806_brennan_transcript.pdf. [Italics added, JMB]. Such a sanitized definition of jihad, a noun deriving from the verb jahada, meaning “to struggle” or “to exert oneself,” conveniently ignores the fact that jihad bi al-sayf (“jihad of the sword”) has always been the most common meaning of the term, both historically and at the present time. See E[mile] Tyan, “Djihād,” in Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition, ed. Bernard Lewis et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983 [1965]), vol. 2, p. 538: “In law, according to general doctrine and in historical tradition, the djihād consists of military action with the object of the expansion of Islam and, if need be, of its defence . . . The notion stems from the fundamental principle of the universality of Islam: this religion, along with the temporal power which it implies, ought to embrace the whole universe, if necessary by force.” Cf. further Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2006); David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2005); Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University, 1999); Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, NJ: Marcus Weiner, 1996); and Alfred Morabia, Le Gihâd dans l’Islam médiéval (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993). 60 See, e.g., Robert A. Pape, Lindsey O’Rourke, and Jenna McDermit, “What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?,” New York Times, 30 March 2010, available at www. nytimes.com/2010/03/31/opinion/31pape.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, wherein the authors argued – reiterating the severely problematic and oft-criticized interpretations of suicide terrorism proffered by Pape in book-length studies, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005), and, subsequently, (with James K. Feldman) Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010) – that Chechen “black widows” were not really “Islamic extremists” motivated in large part by Islamist ideology. For Pape, then, Islamic religious conceptions of “martyrdom” play no role whatsoever in acts of jihadist suicide terrorism, which are instead said to be mainly a response to foreign occupation or a desire to get revenge. For a corrective to this historically uninformed (as well as methodologically problematic) interpretation, see David Cook and Olivia Allison, Understanding and Addressing Suicide Attacks: The Faith and Politics of Martyrdom Operations (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007); and Gordon M. Hahn, “What Makes Russia’s Jihadists So Dangerous?,” Russia: Other Points of View website, 28 April 2010, available at www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2010/04/what-makes-russias-jihadists-so-dangerous.html. Cf. also David Cook, Martyrdom in Islam (New York: Cambridge University, 2007). 61 See, e.g., U.S. Senate, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Special Report by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, Chairman, and Sen. Susan M. Collins, A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (Washington, DC: GPO, [February] 2005), especially Chapters 2–4, available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/377.pdf. Despite all of these indicators of radicalization, after a special investigation undertaken by the FBI to evaluate its own counterterrorism responses before and after the Fort Hood shootings, it was noted that the Bureau’s “WFO” (Washington, DC Field Office) had concluded, after examining the 16 emails Hasan had sent to “radical Islamic cleric” al-Awlaqi and the latter’s two email replies, as well as consulting FBI and DoD databases and Hasan’s personnel records, that it could not conclude that Hasan was then involved in “terrorist activities.”

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Although the San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which had first discovered Hasan’s earliest emails to al-Awlaqi, argued that the WFO’s assessment was “inadequate,” neither entity took any further action. See William H. Webster Commission on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Counterterrorism Intelligence, and the Events at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009, Final Report, undated, p. 1 and, for further details, Chapters 5–7, available at www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/final-report-of-thewilliam-h.-webster-commission. Moreover, the report immediately took pains to emphasize (ibid., p. 6), in the very first chapter on “violent radicalization,” that “[a]lthough highly publicized terrorist plots and acts – and the Fort Hood shootings – have referenced Islam, violent radicalization transcends any one religion – and indeed religion – and can find causes in political, social, environmental, and other contexts.” This is an utterly banal observation that no informed person would disagree with. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that such a sappy and unnecessary disclaimer would have been included in official U.S. reports dealing with any other type of “violent extremist” incident, i.e., those not involving a Muslim perpetrator. This report did, at least, acknowledge the obvious (ibid.): that Hasan was a “religious person.” Note further that since his arrest, especially in various verbal and handwritten statements proffered on the eve of his trial (in which he opted to defend himself ), Hasan has repeatedly highlighted his jihadist ideological worldview and motivations, and has explicitly explained and justified his attack on that very basis, thereby demonstrating the falsity of the ludicrous non-ideological interpretation of his actions being officially promoted by the U.S. government. Cf. “Nidal Hasan Admitted Jihadist Motive, Victims’ Attorneys Say,” ABC News Radio, 6 June 2013, available at www.krna.com/common/more.php ?m=58&ts=1370449411&article=40ABA5EBCE0611E286DEFEFDADE6840A&m ode=2; “Fort Hood Shooting Suspect Maj. Nidal Hasan Renounces Citizenship,” Associated Press, 2 August 2013, available at http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/ state&id=9192877; and Catherine Herridge and Pamela Brown, “Hasan Sends Writings to Fox News Ahead of Fort Hood Shooting Trial,” Fox News, 1 August 2013, available at www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/01/hasan-sends-writings-ahead-fort-hoodshooting-trial/, which contains links to Hasan’s handwritten documents. For an excellent short analysis of the contents of those documents, see Timothy Furnish, “Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s Post-Jihad Islamist Manifesto,” Mahdi Watch website, 2 August 2013, available at www.mahdiwatch.org/2013.08.01_arch.html#1375474673746. Nevertheless, the judge assigned to the case, Colonel Tara Osborne, has refused to allow the prosecution to cite most of the evidence of Hasan’s jihadist motivations for carrying out the attack (e.g., his classroom presentation on “martyrdom” attacks, his emails to and from al-Awlaqi, and his interest in the 2003 murder of fellow soldiers by U.S. Army Sergeant Hasan Karim Akbar) because “motive is not an element of the crime.” [Italics added, JMB]. See Chelsea J. Carter, “Nidal Hasan Challenges Witness Account of Fort Hood Shooting at Court Martial,” CNN, 19 August 2013, available at www.cnn.com/2013/08/19/ justice/nidal-hasan-court-martial-monday/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_ medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_us+%28RSS%3A+U.S.%29. 62 As fully quoted in “Obama Fort Hood Speech: Video, Text of Memorial Remarks,” Huffington Post, 10 November 2009, available at www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/10/ obama-ft-hood-speech-full_n_352633.html. Needless to say, that “twisted logic” is not at all hard to understand if one has even a rudimentary familiarity with Islamist ideological precepts. 63 “Casey: I’m ‘Concerned’ about Backlash against Muslim Soldiers,” CNN, 8 November 2009, available at http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/11/08/casey-imconcerned-about-possible-backlash-against-muslim-soldiers/. What makes this professed “concern” even less justifiable is that Casey himself then stated that he did not believe that there was any evidence of discrimination against the 3,000 Muslims serving in the U.S. military and National Guard. Yet then Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano also hastened to tell reporters in Abu Dhabi that “we object to – and do not believe – that

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anti-Muslim sentiment should emanate from this [incident]” given that Hasan “was an individual who does not, obviously, represent the Muslim faith.” See “Napolitano Warns against Anti-Muslim Backlash,” Fox News, 8 November 2009, available at www.foxnews. com/politics/2009/11/08/napolitano-warns-anti-muslim-backlash/. On the basis of this “politically correct” presumption, it is apparently only angelic behavior that can nowadays be identified as truly “representative” of the Muslim faith. Yet perhaps the greatest irony here is that it was precisely Hasan’s “keen interest in Islamic culture and faith” and supposedly “unique insights into the dimensions of Islam” – including its “belief, culture, and moral reasoning” – that had been highlighted by his superiors in Bethesda, Maryland on his 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 Officer Evaluation Reports, wherein it was also concluded that he had “unlimited potential”. In the end, Hasan’s violent actions did in fact serve to “illuminat[e] the role of culture and islamic (sic) faith within the Global War on Terrorism” – but certainly not in the beneficial way his superiors had naïvely anticipated. See Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Ft. Hood Shooter Received Glowing Evaluations before Attack,” Los Angeles Times, 24 August 2013, available at www.latimes.com/nation/ la-na-0825-nidal-hasan-20130825,0,2071659.story, from which one can access PDFs of the actual Army OERs. 64 Department of Defense, Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood. The Report of the DoD Independent Review, January 2010, p. 16, available at www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/ dod-protectingtheforce-web_security_hr_13jan10.pdf. Instead, the professed concern of the DoD was focused on “policies and procedures at the DoD or Service level that address workplace violence” [Italics added, JMB]. Cf. also the forwarding memo and attached “Department of Defense Implementation of Recommendations from the Independent Review Related to Fort Hood” report, which makes no reference to Islam, including in the section devoted to recommendations concerning the identification of “behavioral indicators of violence,” and also focuses on the dangers of “workplace violence.” See, respectively, p. 1 of the report and p. 1 of the 18 August 2010 memo, at www.defense. gov/news/d20100820FortHoodFollowon.pdf. Apparently, then, Hasan’s attack had nothing to do with his interpretation of Islam, but was simply another case of a disgruntled government employee “going postal.” 65 What makes all of this seem even more tragic was that at an annual U.S. Army counterterrorism conference held in Florida in February 2008, three speakers were said to have explicitly warned attendees (many of whom were responsible for military force protection) that a failure to understand jihadist doctrines was – in the words of one of those advisors, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Myers – “going to get soldiers killed in America, on our own bases.” See Bill Geertz, “Army Warned about Jihadist Threat in ’08,” Washington Times, 9 February 2010, available at www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/9/ army-warned-about-jihadist-threat-in-08/?page=all#pagebreak. Their sound advice was obviously ignored. Moreover, less than three years after Hasan’s shooting spree, another Muslim-American soldier named Naser Jason Abdo who had gone AWOL (after child pornography was found on his computer) was arrested for plotting to carry out bombings and shootings at a restaurant frequented by U.S. soldiers near Fort Hood. This attack was only averted due to the alertness of a local gun shop owner. Yet even though Abdo had already applied for Conscientious Objector status because he did not want to be deployed in Afghanistan where he might have to fight other Muslims, had planned to use two IEDs placed inside pressure cookers of the type that had been described in al-Qa‘ida’s Inspire magazine (and were later used in Boston by the Tsarnaev brothers) in his attack, had vowed to continue “to answer the call of jihad” at his sentencing, and had shouted “Nidal Hasan – Ft. Hood 2009” when leaving the courtroom, U.S. Attorney Robert Pitman did not characterize this as another would-be incident of jihadist terrorism, but instead compared Abdo’s actions to two 2012 spree killings, one carried out by a mentally deranged student in Aurora, Colorado (which was not ideologically motivated), the other carried out by a white supremacist skinhead against a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee (which was ideologically motivated). See Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Jason Abdo, Former AWOL

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Soldier, Sentenced in Ft. Hood Bomb Plot,” Los Angeles Times, 10 August 2012, available at http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/10/nation/la-na-nn-ft-hood-bomb-20120810. Josh Gerstein, “FBI Knew Earlier of Boston Bombing Suspect,” Politico website, 15 June 2013, available at www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/06/fbi-knew-earlierof-boston-bombing-suspect-166313.html?hp=f2. “FBI: No Investigation [of ] Radicalism in Boston Bombers Mosque,” Clarion Project website, 16 June 2013, available at www.clarionproject.org/news/fb-no-investigationradicalism-boston-bombers-mosque?utm_source=feedly. This is all the more extraordinary given that the two Islamic Society of Boston centers in Cambridge and Boston have documented links to Islamist extremists (including some of its founders, imams, and presidents), and that certain worshippers there had previously been prosecuted for their involvement in terrorist plots. See “Mosque That Boston Suspects Attended Has Radical Ties,” USA Today, 25 April 2013, available at www.usatoday.com/story/ news/nation/2013/04/23/boston-mosque-radicals/2101411/; and Jeff Jacoby, “The Boston Mosque’s Saudi Connection,” Boston Globe, 10 January 2007, available at www. boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/01/10/the_boston_ mosques_saudi_connection/?page=full. Alas, this blindness is hardly a new problem at the FBI. As Sperry notes (Infiltration, p. xxii), numerous firebrand Islamist imams and activists had been “preaching anti-American hate to the Muslim community for years, yet they never raised serious red flags at FBI headquarters.” And given that after 9/11 FBI director Mueller had forced FBI agents to attend Enrichment Training Sessions, i.e., “sensitivity training” courses offered by personnel from Islamist organizations like CAIR, and that (according to many FBI insiders) he was always anxious to appease such organizations (ibid., Chapter 1), it is hardly a surprise to learn that so many of the Bureau’s agents are still not only bureaucratically “risk averse,” but also utterly clueless about the nature of Islam and Islamism. Cf. Gaubatz and Sperry, Muslim Mafia, pp. 101–10. Note further the FBI’s likely mischaracterization of what appears to have been yet another act of “individual jihad terrorism,” in this case one committed with firearms on 12 February 2007 – years prior to Major Hasan’s attack and the Boston Marathon bombings – in Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City, Utah, by an 18-year old Bosnian Muslim immigrant named Sulejmen Talović. See further Paul Sperry, “Could the Kenya Attack Happen Here? It Did,” New York Post, 12 October 2013, available at http://nypost.com/2013/10/12/ could-the-kenya-mall-attack-ever-happen-here-it-already-did/. FBI National Press Office, “2011 Request for Information on Tamerlan Tsarnaev from Foreign Government,” Federal Bureau of Investigation website, 19 April 2013, available at www.fbi. gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/2011-request-for-information-on-tamerlan-tsarnaev-fromforeign-government. Many of those indications are conveniently enumerated, year-by-year, in the Wikipedia entry on “Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” which also lists the relevant media citations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_and_Tamerlan_Tsarnaev. Moreover, in late 2011, a few months after the FBI concluded its investigation during the summer of that year without finding anything suspicious, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) added Tamerlan (and his mother) to its huge Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) database. See Mark Hosenball, “Boston Bomb Suspect’s Name Was on Classified Government Watch Lists,” Reuters, 24 April 2013, available at www.reuters.com/ article/2013/04/24/us-usa-explosions-boston-suspect-idUSBRE93N06720130424. He was also placed on the Department of Homeland Security’s unclassified Terrorist Screening Database. See, e.g., Michael Rezendes, “Police Probe Possible Link between Marathon Bomber and Unsolved Triple Homicide in Waltham,” Boston Globe, 22 April 2013, available at http:// boston.com/metrodesk/2013/04/22/police-probe-possible-link-between-marathonbomber-and-unsolved-triple-homicide-waltham/T6MgaX0lur7plZrGj0HsvO/story. html; Peter Hermann, “Authorities Investigating Slain Boston Bombing Suspect in Three

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Earlier Killings,” Washington Post, 22 April 2013, available at www.washingtonpost.com/ world/national-security/authorities-investigating-slain-boston-bombing-suspect-inthree-earlier-killings/2013/04/22/5a5c6874-ab91–11e2-a8b9–2a63d75b5459_story. html; Michelle McPhee, “Boston Bomb Suspect Eyed in Connection to 2011 Triple Murder,” ABC News, 22 April 2013, available at http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/ boston-bomb-suspect-eyed-connection-2011-triple-murder/story?id=19015628#. UXYXeVfhf5n; Michelle McPhee, “‘Mounting Evidence’ Boston Bombers Involved in 2011 Triple Murder,” ABC News, 10 May 2013, available at http://abcnews. go.com/Blotter/mounting-evidence-boston-bombers-involved-2011-triple-murder/ story?id=19151271. There are conflicting reports about whether Brendan Mess, one of the three Waltham victims (the one who had been a very close acquaintance of Tamerlan), was in fact Jewish. Gordon M. Hahn, “The Caucasus Emirate Comes to America: The Boston Marathon Bombing,” unpublished report, September 2013, pp. 4–6. Ibid., pp. 6–8. His brother Dzhokar also posted (ibid., pp. 8–9) many pro-jihadist sentiments and materials online, including those promoting the IK’s jihad. For the possibility that Tamerlan was directly inspired or perhaps even assisted operationally by jihadists in the North Caucasus, see ibid., pp. 11–18. There is now evidence, according to the Russian and Dagestani security forces, of contacts between Tamerlan and three individuals involved in the North Caucasus jihad, an 18-year old, half-Kumyk, half-Palestinian IK recruiter named Mahmud Mansur Nidal, a Canadian-Russian convert to Islam named William Plotnikov, and Gajimurad (“Abu Dujana”) Dolgatov, the ‘amir of the Rabbanikala (Kizlyurt) Sector of the Central Front of the IK’s Dagestan-based network, the Dagestan Vilayet. All three of these individuals were subsequently killed, in separate engagements, by security forces. For another recent illustration of how “political correctness” is continuing to compromise the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts, note that the Bureau cravenly removed its “Faces of Global Terrorism” advertisements depicting the 16 most wanted terrorists, which announced rewards for information leading to their capture, from buses in Seattle after the Islamist group CAIR, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and other “useful infidels” mounted a ridiculous campaign claiming that the ads were “Islamophobic.” Why? Simply because all 16 of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists were jihadists. A rational person might therefore conclude that radicalized Muslims were nowadays more prone to carry out anti-American acts of terrorism than members of other ethno-cultural groups, as indeed they are, but apparently such an obvious conclusion would itself be “Islamophobic.” See Ryan Mauro, “FBI’s Most-Wanted Ads Blocked by Muslim Brotherhood Group,” Clarion Project website, 27 June 2013, available at www.clarionproject.org/ analysis/%E2%80%8Bfbis-most-wanted-ads-blocked-muslim-brotherhood-group/#fm. When speaking about Muslim “moderates,” one has to be clear about exactly what that term means. Many observers have naïvely assumed that all Muslims who are not directly participating in jihadist terrorism, either as perpetrators or as active facilitators, must ipso facto be moderate in terms of their core beliefs and ultimate goals. This is false. First, no Muslim who is also an Islamist, even if he or she eschews or abjures the use of violence and terrorism for essentially pragmatic or tactical reasons, is really a moderate given his or her Islamic supremacist aims. Second, neither other types of Islamic fundamentalists (e.g., of the “quietist” rather than the “activist” variety) nor hardline Islamic traditionalists can be justly characterized as moderate with respect to their doctrinal tenets. Third, even the very large number of semi-observant or non-observant Muslims (i.e., those who do not strictly follow Muslim rituals or regularly attend mosques, or who engage periodically in certain religiously-proscribed activities like gambling and drinking) are not necessarily moderate with respect to their basic theological beliefs, their social and political attitudes toward “infidels,” or their views about armed jihad. After all, conveniently ignoring Islamic injunctions is not the same thing as explicitly repudiating them. Therefore, these personal behavioral lapses do not necessarily signify that such Muslims do not basically

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agree with orthodox Muslim or even Islamist clerics who interpret Islam in very dogmatic, intolerant ways, or that they do not sympathize to some extent with the attacks launched by jihadists against non-Muslims. In this context, the results of several public opinion polls conducted in Muslim communities and countries, even those that appear to have been specifically designed to mislead gullible Westerners by exaggerating the degree of Muslim “moderation” (e.g., John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think [New York: Gallup Press, 2007], a propagandistic book that was sent gratis to hundreds of academicians and journalists), are anything but reassuring when one carefully parses the responses (e.g., according to Esposito and Mogahed, 7% of Muslims worldwide – nearly 100 million believers – actually support attacks targeting civilians [even though this is not, in my opinion, an accurate definition of terrorism]). And even if these less observant Muslims – and the overwhelming majority of their co-religionists who are simply devoting their energies to raising families and making ends meet – really are more moderate with respect to their actual interpretations of the Qur’an and the shari‘a (which is by no means certain), as Sam Harris rightly points out, religious moderation alone “offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence.” Why? Because “[m]oderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. . . . This is a problem for ‘moderation’ in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divine law.” See Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 17–18, 20. Finally, even secularists in the Muslim world can be anti-Western ideological extremists rather than moderates, like the nationalist-socialist supporters of Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and the Ba‘thists, or communists from the Hizb-i Tudeh Iran (Party of the Masses of Iran). Who, then, are the genuine Muslim moderates? – a minority of Muslim clerics who have embraced more open, flexible, and rationalist forms of “independent reasoning” (ijtihad) and circles of Westernized Muslim intellectuals, both of whom have been promoting more contextual, metaphorical, modernist, or secularist interpretations of Islamic scriptures and legal tenets. Unfortunately, even if there is in fact a “silent majority” of relatively moderate, apolitical, or unobservant Muslims, these real religious and intellectual moderates do not yet seem to be capable of mobilizing a large, broad-based social movement of supporters whose primary aim is to modernize the Muslim world and liberate it from a host of harmful and regressive religious, tribal, and cultural traditions, something roughly equivalent to the vital “reform(ation)” processes that Judaism and Christianity both underwent after centuries of internal disputation and conflict and/or external struggle. At present, then, hundreds of millions of more or less observant Muslims apparently remain very conflicted about these issues, and are effectively “sitting on the fence.” Hence they could end up going either way, depending upon who wins the battle for ideological influence and hegemony that is currently being waged within the dar al-islam. Sadly, the clerical conservatives and/or the Islamists now seem to be winning this ideological battle, especially in the Arab heartland and in many Muslim communities in the West, notwithstanding the sometimes largescale popular anti-Islamist protests in Egypt (as well as in Iran and Turkey). 76 The essence of this struggle has been well summarized by Salim Mansur: “The struggle within Islam in our time is between Muslims who embrace the values of the modern world in terms of freedom, individual rights, gender equality and democracy on the one side and Muslims who oppose these values and, hence, modernity on the basis of Sharia. . . . This struggle, therefore, goes to the very heart of how Muslims understand Islam either as a faith-tradition, or as a total system of belief and practice that is antithetical to the norms of the modern world. In other words, for Muslims who embrace modernity, as I do, Islam is a matter of personal belief and not a political system; and Muslims opposed to modernity view Islam ideologically, hence Islamism, and accordingly they embrace the views of Maudoodi and Hasan al-Banna, Syed Qutb and Khomeini, about Islam as

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a totalitarian value-system.” See Mansur’s interview by Ryan Mauro, “Salim Mansur: Moderation is Anathema to Islamists,” Clarion Project website, 27 February 2013, available at www.clarionproject.org/analysis/salim-mansur-moderation-anathema-islamists. Similarly, Bassam Tibi promotes a “civil and liberal Islam with a secular perspective” as an alternative to Islamism. See Tibi, Islamism and Islam, p. viii (quote) and Chapter 9. For one apparent example of a successful Muslim anti-Islamist campaign, see Syafii Maarif et al., The Illusion of an Islamic State: How an Alliance of Moderates Launched a Successful Jihad against Radicalization and Terrorism in the World’s Largest Muslim-Majority Country (Jakarta: LibForAll Foundation, 2011), Kindle edition. Their targets were transnational Islamist movements, such as Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as the local Indonesian supporters of such movements. 77 For Arab critiques of the Obama administration’s policies of “partnering” with the Islamists instead of Muslim democrats in the MENA region, which is in part arguably due to the influence exerted by American Islamist front organizations and other “Islamist apologists” on that administration, see Egyptian liberal Essam Abdallah, “Islamist Lobbies’ Washington War on Arab and Muslim Liberals,” The Cutting Edge website, 16 February 2012, available at www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=53331&pageid=44 &pagename=Slices; and “Ahead of June 30 Protests, Egyptian Opposition and Media Attack U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Accusing Her of Taking Sides in Support of Muslim Brotherhood and President Mursi,” MEMRI website, 27 June 2013, at www.memri. org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/7258.htm. Yet despite this unflagging public U.S. government support for Mursi, popular anti-Islamist protests soon after prompted the Egyptian military to force the President to step down from power on 3 July 2013. And what was Obama’s response to the ouster of Mursi? Rather than lauding the collapse of a reprehensible Egyptian Islamist government dominated by enemies of the West (one that was bent on imposing strict shari‘a-compliant laws and destroying its domestic liberal enemies), which would have been the appropriate response, Obama instead said that his administration was “deeply concerned” about this action, called on the Egyptian military to “avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters,” and “directed the relevant departments and agencies [of the U.S. government] to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to Government of Egypt.” See Bill Chappell, “President Obama: U.S. ‘Deeply Concerned’ over Morsi’s Ouster,” National Public Radio website, 3 July 2013, available at www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/07/03/198490883/ president-obama-u-s-deeply-concerned-over-morsis-ouster. (Needless to say, the best time to have cut off U.S. aid to Egypt would have been the moment that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists “won” the elections in 2012.) Even though Obama also claimed in his remarks that the U.S. “does not support particular individuals or political parties” in Egypt, the thrust of his statement was perfectly clear: rather than tangibly and morally supporting the anti-Islamist opposition, which he should have been doing all along, he was instead lending his administration’s de facto support to a powerful, repressive, and intrinsically anti-“infidel” Islamist organization. Indeed, Obama and other Western leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have since unwisely pressured the Egyptian military to release Mursi and his cronies from custody, not to “marginalize” the Brotherhood politically, and not to crack down on “peaceful” Ikhwan demonstrations (even though the latter have been anything but peaceful). Not surprisingly, such counterproductive responses have been encouraged by Brotherhood activists in the West. For example, members of an American Brotherhood front organization (according to the internal Akram memorandum cited in note 47) – the Muslim American Society (MAS) – created a new “pro-democracy” umbrella organization, Egyptian-Americans for Democracy and Human Rights (EADHR), to denounce the Egyptian military and demand the reinstatement of Mursi as Egyptian president. Cf. Abha Shankar, “Rally Organizers Deny Ties with Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,” Investigative Project on Terrorism website, 9 August 2013, available at www.investigativeproject.org/4119/rally-organizers-deny-ties-with-the-egyptian; and John Rossomando,

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“Pro-Morsi Demonstrations Make MB Ties Harder to Hide,” Investigative Project on Terrorism website, 12 August 2013, available at www.investigativeproject.org/4121/pro-morsidemonstrations-make-mb-ties-harder-to. Needless to say, these Islamist self-professed “democrats” had displayed no concerns whatsoever about Mursi’s attempts to subvert democracy and impose an Islamist agenda or about the Brotherhood’s systematic violations of human rights both before and after its ouster. In any case, one is forced to concur with Barry Rubin that the “Obama Doctrine” with respect to the Muslim world, like that of many European governments, effectively often amounts to supporting the West’s Islamist enemies. As Rubin rightly points out, however, “[o]ver and over again history has shown that backing radicals merely gets you more powerful radicals.” See Barry Rubin, “Obama Doctrine: Backing Middle East Radicals after 10 Previous Western Failures,” Rubin Report website, 18 June 2013, available at http:// rubinreports.blogspot.com/2013/06/obama-doctrine-backing-middle-east.html. Note also the disastrous impact of U.S. and NATO military intervention in Libya against al-Qadhdhafi’s regime, which likewise had the practical effect of empowering Libyan Islamists, in this case armed jihadist groups. See John Rosenthal, The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion (New York: Encounter Books, 2013). Cf. Raymond Ibrahim, “Libyan Intelligence: Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi Involved in U.S. Consulate Attack,” Raymond Ibrahim website, 26 June 2013, available at www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/libyan-intelligence-muslim-brotherhood-morsiinvolved-in-u-s-consulate-attack/ (even though the Libyans might well have had a vested interest in blaming “outside agitators” rather than Libyans for the resulting murders of Americans). Alas, the decision of the Obama administration to provide arms to the Syrian resistance, as per the advice of Islamists like Ibn Bayyah and many naïve Western humanitarians, could potentially lead to another political and human rights catastrophe: an armed Sunni Islamist or Syrian Muslim Brotherhood takeover of much, if not all, of Syria. More broadly, see the wise words of Burak Bekdil, “‘Ballotization’ Is Not Democratization,” Hürriyet, 5 July 2013, available at www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ballotizationis-not-democratization.aspx?PageID=238&NID=50041&NewsCatID=398, who points out the obvious fallacies of promoting the introduction of democratic electoral procedures and processes (“ballotization”) without first inculcating genuine democratic values, which in the MENA region has thus far resulted mainly in the election of anti-Western, anti-democratic Islamist candidates who interpret democracy as simple “majoritarianism.” As Bekdil rightly notes, “[f ]or Islamists [who are elected to office], [the] ‘free will of nations’ means a carte blanche given to an Islamist leader by an arithmetic majority to forcibly Islamize the entire society. The free will of nations simply means crude majoritarianism over pluralism. That’s ballotization, not democratization. ” This is an important lesson that the myopic Western proponents of “spreading democracy,” whether they are liberal internationalists or neo-conservatives, and/or of “partnering” with supposedly “moderate” Islamists, should belatedly learn. Cf. also the remarks of David Solway in The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity (Toronto: Lester, Mason & Begg, 2007), p. 65: “A realistic view of history tells us that democracy comes at the end of a long social and political process when the ground has been adequately prepared; it is not a silver bullet. Introduced prematurely, it is the bullet that backfires, the disaster that follows from good intentions and bad judgment. The West seems to be confusing the ritual with the substance, as if the theatre of elections could bring about a democratic reality in regions where there is no freedom of speech, no free or responsible press, no stable civil society, no rule of law, and which are torn apart by rival militant groups and warring religious factions. As Amin Maalouf writes in his In the Name of Identity, ‘what is sacred in a democracy is not mechanisms but values’; universal suffrage can result not in the establishment of a free society, but in the ‘abolition of democracy,’ in ‘tyranny, slavery and discrimination’ if the appropriate cultural framework and political value system are lacking.” 78 For that report, see National Security Council, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (Washington, DC: GPO, [November] 2005), available at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ nation/documents/Iraqnationalstrategy11-30-05.pdf.

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79 See Peter Pace, “Extemporaneous Remarks on Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” keynote speech delivered at the National Defense University, Washington, DC, 1 December 2005, available at www.jcs.mil/chairman/speeches/051201remarks_National StrategyVictoryIraq.html. 80 Ibid. Yet even Pace displayed far too much faith in the potential impact of the spread of democracy in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world, which a proper understanding of the Islamist enemy would have undermined. 81 In addition to the internal Brotherhood documents cited in note 47, see also treatises written by the founders of ostensibly “nonviolent” Islamist organizations, such as Hasan al-Banna and Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi: Hasan al-Banna, “On Jihād,” in Five Tracts of Hasan Al-Bannā’: A Selection from the Majmū‘at rasā’il al-Imām al-shahīd Hasan al-Bannā’, translated from the Arabic and annotated by Charles Wendell (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), Chapter 6; and Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi, “Jihād in Islām,” available at www. muhammadanism.org/Terrorism/jihah_in_islam/jihad_in_islam.pdf. For those who are unable to consult primary sources in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Urdu, and other relevant languages, the MEMRI website (at www.memri.org/) conveniently provides translations of many speeches, sermons, statements, or writings produced by Islamist ideologues who openly promote the wholesale destruction of “infidel” regimes, followed by the armed subjugation or religious conversion of unbelievers and thus, in effect, advocate and anticipate the establishment of strict, puritanical, shari‘a-compliant Islamist rule over the entire world. (Lest anyone assume that this represents a biased selection that is not representative of present-day Islamist thinking, or that it is unfairly designed to portray Muslims in general in a negative light, note that MEMRI also translates many statements made by liberal, moderate, and secularized Muslims.) For translations and analyses of important jihadist statements and documents, see specialist websites such as Jihadica (at www.jihadica.com/) and that of the U.S. Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (at www.ctc. usma.edu/).

8 “NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM”? The terrorism and atrocities of the Islamic State are inspired and justified by its interpretations of Islam

“Which will come first, flying cars and vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgement that beliefs guide behavior and that certain religious ideas – jihad, martyrdom, blasphemy, apostasy – reliably lead to oppression and murder?” Sam Harris1 “Contrary to the mantra repeated by Western politicians that ISIS offers a distorted or warped view of Islam, the debate in the Arab world points exactly in the opposite direction: ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other militant groups draw upon the mainstream texts of Islamic tradition. The sermon by Abu Omar [sic] Al Baghdadi after ISIS captured Mosul this summer could have easily been delivered in any mosque in Cairo or Riyadh or Morocco.” Magdi Abdelhadi2 “From a theological perspective, [the citing of the Qur’an by the Islamic State to justify its activities] is 100% legitimate. Everything the IS is doing and encouraging is theologically correct and appears in all of the basic works of Islam. A Caliph has one military obligation – no peace treaty. He must use force to spread Islam and must make war at least once a year.” Ednan Aslan3 “We are following Allah’s word. We believe that humanity’s only duty is to honor Allah and his prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. We are implementing what is written in the Koran. . . . It is every Muslim’s duty to fight those of a different belief until only Allah is worshipped around the world.” Abu Sattar4

As is invariably the case these days in the wake of the terrorist violence, brutality, and atrocities carried out explicitly in the name of Islam by jihadists, a host

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of dissimulating Islamist activists, other Muslims in a state of psychological denial, and apologetic Western pundits continue to insist that the actions of the terrorist group calling itself al-Dawla al-Islamiyya (IS: the Islamic State) – which was previously known as al-Dawla al-Islamiyya fi al-‘Iraq wa al-Sham (ISIS: the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria) – have little or nothing to do with Islam.5 Not long ago, many such commentators also argued that the horrendous actions committed by other jihadist groups, including the Nigerian Jama‘at Ahl al-Sunna li al-Da‘wa wa al-Jihad (Association of People Following the Teachings [of Muhammad] on Proselytization and Jihad), better known as Boko Haram (Western Influence is Sinful), had nothing to do with its members’ interpretations of Islam.6 In all such cases, however, the perpetrators of these violent actions not only proudly insist that their actions are inspired by the Qur’an and the exemplary words and deeds of Muhammad himself (as recorded in the canonical hadith collections), but explicitly cite relevant Qur’anic passages and the reported actions of their prophet to justify those actions.7 Hence in order to argue that jihadist terrorists are not directly inspired and primarily motivated by their interpretations of Islamic doctrines and by clear precedents from early Islamic history, as they themselves repeatedly and accurately claim, one has to pretend as though the perpetrators themselves have no idea why they are actually carrying out such actions, or assert that they are deliberately mischaracterizing their own motives. In short, one must stubbornly ignore what the actual protagonists keep telling the entire world about their own motives and instead rely on other Islamist activists, who are often peddling outright disinformation, or on Western commentators, most of whom know little or nothing about Islam or Islamism, for explanations of their behavior.8 In both cases, these sorts of pundits minimize the central role played by Islamist ideology and erroneously ascribe the actions of jihadist terrorists to assorted subsidiary causal factors, such as gardenvariety political grievances, poverty, lack of democracy, psychopathology, greed, or simple hunger for power.9 Using similar logic that would be no less faulty than claiming that the actions of jihadist terrorists have “nothing to do with Islam,” one might just as easily argue that self-described Protestant fundamentalists or Catholic ultratraditionalists who bomb abortion clinics or murder abortion providers in the name of their interpretations of Christian doctrines have nothing to do with Christianity, that the actions of theocratic Orthodox haredi or messianic Zionist terrorist groups in Israel have nothing to do with their interpretations of Judaism, that the actions of self-styled Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups have nothing to do with communism, and that the actions of self-described neo-Nazi terrorist groups have nothing to do with Nazism.10 Needless to say, most of the commentators who keep insisting, against all evidence to the contrary, that the actions of jihadist terrorists cannot be attributed to their interpretations of Islam do not also argue that the violent actions of other types of extremists cannot be attributed to their ideological beliefs. On the contrary, whenever other types of terrorists carry out gruesome attacks, many of those same commentators are quick to ascribe their actions primarily to their proclaimed

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theological and ideological beliefs – and justifiably so. One can easily illustrate this glaring contrast with respect to the analytical treatment of Islamist terrorism by asking a simple question: when was the last time that any more or less respected commentator made the case that Nazi ideology had nothing to do with inspiring particular acts of terrorism committed by self-identified neo-Nazis, or that notions of white supremacy had nothing to do with anti-minority violence committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan? Thus it is virtually only in cases of acts of terrorism committed by jihadists, which are nowadays by far the most serious and the most common throughout large portions of the world, that one encounters so much unwillingness to face reality and so much frantic desperation to absolve Islam itself – or even Islamist interpretations of Islam – from shouldering any responsibility for inspiring acts committed in its name. These constant efforts to defend, excuse, absolve, or whitewash Islam (as well as to mischaracterize the nature of Islamism – a right-wing, totalitarian, theocratic, “infidel”-hating, and Islamic supremacist ideology – as “moderate” and “democratic”) have taken a variety of forms. On the one hand, there are many academicians who mistakenly minimize the role of ideology as a key explanatory or causal factor in inspiring the violence and terrorism carried out by non-state extremist groups, not just in the case of jihadist terrorism but also in other such cases. Although these efforts are seriously misleading, since they tend to be based on flawed social science theories (and also, often, on unsuitable or problematic quantitative methodologies) that overemphasize the role of human rationality and “rational choice,” materialistic rather than idealistic motives, personal psychological factors, “really existing” political and economic grievances, or larger impersonal structural forces as causal factors in the etiology of terrorism, they at least have the merit of not employing double standards, i.e., of making an unwarranted and wholly artificial distinction between the causes of Islamist terrorism and other types of ideologically inspired terrorism. Indeed, although some have specifically applied such problematic notions in the context of Islamist terrorism, there is no reason to suppose that they regard ideology as being any more important in other terrorism contexts. See, as examples, the works of Marc Sageman, who exaggerates the role of social connections whilst minimizing that of ideology in the recruitment and actions of jihadists;11 Robert Pape, who (wrongly) argues that foreign occupation rather than modified Islamic notions of martyrdom explain the prevalence of jihadist suicide attacks;12 Scott Atran, who (rightly) notes that along with religious fervor, jihadists are motivated by a spirit of camaraderie, influenced by group dynamics, and affected by “sacred values” of a cultural nature, but arguably underestimates (like many anthropologists who view religions in a more holistic fashion) the impact of core Islamic religious doctrines;13 Eli Berman, who claims that jihadist terrorists are “rational altruists” concerned about their communities rather than fanatics motivated by Islamic religious doctrines, although these two notions are not necessarily mutually exclusive (apart from the exaggeration of their purported rationality);14 and Alan Krueger, who argues that the suppression of civil liberties is the main cause of terrorism, a theory that fails to explain why most non-state terrorist groups, including jihadist

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groups, are animated by extremist ideologies that are intrinsically antithetical to civil liberties.15 Two relatively interesting and insightful examples of efforts to de-emphasize the importance of Islamist ideology, when specifically applied to the Islamic State, are perhaps worth noting by way of illustration. The first is Josh Marshall’s article “The Rage to Oppose,” wherein he rightly points out that some of the Western citizens or residents who leave their countries to join and fight with the IS are individuals who are so hostile to liberal democracy and capitalism that they are looking for any viable ideological opposition movement to embrace. Since the utopian internationalist ideology of “revolutionary socialism” has been largely discredited (as has, though Marshall does not mention it, the utopian radical nationalist ideology of revolutionary fascism) by its own failed predictions and above all by the sordid, brutal nature and behavior of “really existing” communist regimes and movements, the transnational anti-“infidel” ideology of Islamism has become increasingly attractive to some of those “lost souls” (my term) who are desperately seeking a real alternative to, and substitute for, the “bourgeois” materialism and democracy that they despise. Yet although Marshall justly notes that these psychologically alienated individuals have effectively converted to the “most extreme, totalizing variant” of Islam, he downplays the significance of this by arguing that some of them have “little more than a passing knowledge of the basics of Islamic ritual practice,” as if that trivial fact has real relevance.16 The second is an article with an utterly misleading title – “ISIL’s Western Converts are Not Motivated by Islam” – by UK American historian Tim Stanley, who claims, quite rightly, that some of the Islamic State’s Western converts have been induced to embrace Islamic fundamentalism because they suffered from “middle class ennui” and “boredom,” which he later more accurately characterizes as existential “alienation” from grubby capitalist materialism and corrupt, uninspiring democratic politics.17 As many analysts and extremists themselves have long pointed out, mundane daily life in consumerist democratic capitalist societies typically “lacks the romance, the heroism, and the sense of involvement” (as per libertarian Charles Cooke) in a higher transcendental, world-transformative cause that certain individuals find satisfying and inspiring, if not psychologically necessary. These dissatisfied dreamers are thus often prone to embrace utopian ideologies and join extremist movements, which they imagine will satisfy their cravings for adventure and meaning. Although this is an astute but hardly original observation, and the author also rightly dismisses the widespread but unsupportable notion that extremism is mainly a product of social marginalization, the problem with this article is the erroneous assertion that such people, once having enthusiastically embraced Islamism, are not motivated by their interpretations of Islam. Like Marshall, Stanley also suggests, as per a 2008 British Security Service (MI5) report, that many of those involved in jihadist terrorism are not only lacking in religious zealotry, but do “not practise their faith regularly” and “lack religious literacy.”18 Even if this was true before they became radicalized, which it surely is in many cases, it is no longer applicable to most “born again” reverts or converts after they have

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embraced Islamism.19 Such arguments thus completely miss the point, for reasons that will be clarified below. Be that as it may, these analysts are correct to argue that ennui and alienation are important factors that may induce individuals to join insurgent terrorist groups. Indeed, I too have argued for decades that the only demonstrable psychological common denominator of individuals who join insurgent terrorist groups is a profound sense of alienation from the political, social, economic, and/or cultural status quo. After all, people who are satisfied or happy with the status quo are not going to be motivated to formulate revolutionary ideologies, organize insurgent movements, join such movements after they have been created, or carry out dangerous and illegal acts of violence, terrorist or otherwise, against their own governments and fellow citizens. Although boredom may also be a subsidiary factor at the outset, that vague feeling of boredom must be transformed into acute alienation from, and then outright anger toward, the status quo before it will cause someone to embrace an extremist anti-system ideology or join a violent insurgent organization. And, given the decline of intellectual and social support for utopian communist, fascist, and anarchist movements in recent decades, it is also hardly surprising that more and more of these alienated people, especially those who are Muslim, are now turning to Islamism or opting to wage armed jihad. Where, then, have these commentators gone wrong? First, as noted previously in this chapter, they fail to distinguish between the factors, psychological and otherwise, that may initially induce certain individuals to embrace a radical ideology like Islamism, and the factors that motivate them after they have embraced that ideology. Second, they simply ignore the powerful impact that the adherence to such an ideology – and to any organized movement that espouses it – will end up having on those individuals. What they apparently do not recognize is that once such people have become ideologically indoctrinated by or within the Islamist or other extremist ideological milieus, they will thenceforth act in accordance with, and on behalf of, the beliefs associated with those particular theological or ideological doctrines. Indeed, it is precisely that theology or ideology that provides them with the “higher” moral purposes and the “glorious” utopian, world-transformative causes that together serve to inspire them to make sacrifices, risk their lives, and justify their commission of acts of extreme violence against designated enemies. Ideological extremists should therefore not, except in very rare and empirically demonstrable cases, be confused with angry “lone nuts” with clinical psychopathologies who are carrying out acts of violence for idiosyncratic personal reasons, like serial killers or spree killers. Rather, those extremists tend to become dedicated, committed militants who are actively struggling with like-minded comrades or (to use jihadist terminology) “brothers,” whether in person or in the virtual realm, in ongoing collective efforts to forge an ostensible utopia on earth. In the case of Islamist jihadists, their goal is to create an idealized, all-encompassing, shari‘a-compliant world order. Hence it is a serious mistake to argue that the overwhelming majority of the people who are inspired to join jihadist groups do not at some point become religious zealots acting on the basis of Islamist theo-political

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agendas. It is therefore completely irrelevant whether or not those jihadist recruits were previously religiously devout. Nor is it necessary that these jihadist recruits have a sophisticated understanding of Islamic religious doctrines in order to be strongly inspired and motivated by Islamism, as so many commentators have mistakenly or disingenuously argued.20 On the contrary, the last thing that the leaders and ideologues of extremist movements want is for their followers to think too much about complex issues or to understand all of the potential ramifications and contradictions of the doctrines they espouse, either of which could conceivably lead to undermining their ideological convictions or result in their inaction after further reflection. For those leaders, it is actually preferable if most of the people who join extremist movements and/or embrace extremist ideologies have only a simplified, reductionist, and easily comprehensible view of those ideologies, one that is constantly reinforced by inspirational slogans, sound bites, repetitious ritualistic actions, and ceremonial hymns or songs (e.g., jihadist nashids). In that sense, it is irrelevant whether or not most of these “born again” jihadists have, or ever manage to develop, a sophisticated understanding of Islamic or Islamist doctrines, just as it is irrelevant whether the majority of the militants who earlier joined communist and fascist movements fully understood the ideological complexities of those doctrines, since all they needed to understand were the basic concepts that served as guides for revolutionary action. The same is true of various types of non-Islamic religious extremists. For that matter, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims do not have a sophisticated understanding of Islamic doctrines, expertise concerning the interpretation and application of the shari‘a, or a detailed knowledge of Islamic history. Yet no reasonable observer would similarly conclude that over a billion self-identified Muslims with a more or less rudimentary understanding of their faith were “not really Muslims” or that central aspects of their behavior had “nothing to do with Islam.” As I have argued elsewhere in the context of elucidating the characteristics of ideological extremism, all political ideologies, including extremist political and religio-political ideologies, are designed to provide simple answers to the following three basic questions: • • •

first, what is wrong with the world? second, who is responsible for those wrongs? third, what needs to be done to correct those wrongs?

The first two questions are diagnostic in nature, whereas the third provides a basic guide or blueprint for action.21 In short, the only thing that would-be jihadists need to understand about Islamism is its explanation for what is wrong with the world (“unbelief ” [kufr]), who its designated enemies are (“infidels” [kuffar], “pagans” [mushrikun], Muslim “apostates” [murtaddun], and Muslim “hypocrites” [munafiqun]), and what its simplistic, all-encompassing vision for creating a utopian shari’a-dominated world order that is purportedly sanctioned by Allah is (for Sunni Islamists, the idealized image of a global Caliphate). Needless to say, jihadist recruits come to

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believe that Islam’s irremediably “evil” enemies must be fought against relentlessly, defeated decisively, and subjected thoroughly in order for the Islamists to be able to establish their imagined utopian world order, even though such a grandiose, imperialist scheme for global Islamic domination is obviously unachievable in the real world given Muslim military weaknesses. Understanding these basic principles does not require a detailed knowledge of the Qur’an, an awareness of the authenticity and reliability problems concerning the sources for early Islamic history, jurisprudential expertise in the interpretation of the shari‘a, or a full comprehension of the philosophical ideas of brilliant past Islamic thinkers like al-Ghazali (ca. 1058–1111) and Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). Similarly, only a naïve analyst would claim that the average communist militant could not really be inspired by communist ideological doctrines and slogans unless he or she had spent inordinate amounts of time and effort mastering the convoluted arguments presented in the three volumes of Karl Marx’s opus, Das Kapital [Capital]. On the contrary, all communist militants really needed to know was that capitalism was “evil” and exploitive and had to be destroyed, that the “bourgeoisie” were the enemy who must be fought and eliminated, and that the end goal was the creation of a utopian, worldwide “classless” society free of all exploitation and injustice. To understand those core ideas, it would have sufficed for them to listen to exhortatory speeches by charismatic revolutionary militants or read short polemical pamphlets like Marx’s Das Kommunistische Manifest [The Communist Manifesto] or Vladimir Lenin’s Shto delat’? [What Is to Be Done?]. Shifting from relatively serious but nonetheless flawed analyses that minimize the role of Islamist ideology in connection with the activities of the Islamic State to naïve, polemical, or propagandistic claims by Muslims, especially Islamists, that the terrorism of jihadist groups like the IS has “nothing to do with Islam” itself, or even particular interpretations of it, one could cite numerous examples. Indeed, the most egregious nonsense about the Islamic State is currently being peddled, as one would expect, by ideologues, spokesmen, and activists from Islamist organizations, both in the Muslim world and in the West. Leading Saudi clerics, Saudi-sponsored and Saudi-funded international Islamic organizations like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and numerous Islamist groups and networks linked to the Jam‘iyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Society of the Muslim Brothers, better known as the Muslim Brotherhood) or the Mawdudist Jama‘at-i Islami (Islamic Association) party are now belatedly hastening to denounce the IS and to falsely claim that it has “nothing to do with Islam” or that its appalling actions are “un-Islamic” or even “anti-Islamic.”22 They are doing so for two reasons. First, Islamist organizations (like the Muslim Brotherhood) that currently eschew the use of armed “offensive jihad” ( jihad altalab) – whilst simultaneously promoting “defensive jihad” ( jihad al-difa‘ ) against the invading “Crusaders” (salibiyyun) – for opportunistic and pragmatic (as opposed to deep-rooted moral or philosophical) reasons, and instead assiduously employ a gradualist and stealthy “Islamization from below” strategy, are often the bitter rivals of armed jihadist organizations that promote a violent “Islamization from

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above” strategy. Although both types of Islamists share the same long term goals of creating a strict, puritanical “Islamic state” (al-dawla al-islamiyya) or “Islamic order” (al-nizam al-islami), uniting all members of the Muslim “community of believers” (umma) under the aegis of a single political entity, re-establishing the Caliphate (Sunnis) or establishing an Imamate (Shi‘a), resuming the expansion of the dar al-Islam (abode of Islam, i.e., those geographical territories governed by Muslims in accordance with the shari‘a) at the expense of the dar al-harb (abode of war, i.e., those geographical territories not under Muslim control or ruled by the shari‘a), and ultimately Islamizing the entire world, they vehemently disagree with each other about which means are best suited for accomplishing those objectives.23 The former prefer to resort to proselytization (da‘wa), the creation of an elaborate network of sectoral, satellite, and front organizations, systematic ideological indoctrination, the provision of social services, the infiltration of other Muslim organizations in order to attain “hegemony” over Muslim civil society, and the overt or covert penetration of the state apparatus, whereas the latter primarily favor the use of outright violence and the forcible seizure of state power to facilitate their imposition of a strict, puritanical Islamist agenda. This is an ongoing, decadesold dispute over appropriate means that has frequently resulted in bitter polemics between rival Islamist ideologues, organizations, and milieus, including between the IS and its Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated critics at the present time.24 Second, Islamists living in the West who are busily engaged in the aforementioned “gradualist” strategy are anxious to conceal their underlying theocratic, anti-democratic, Islamic supremacist agenda from ignorant and gullible Westerners so that they can pursue that agenda unnoticed and unhindered. As such, they engage in systematic deception and dissimulation to try and convince Westerners, especially elements of Western political, media, and academic milieus that are already prone to delude themselves or engage in wishful thinking, that they are actually “moderate” and “democratic.” For that very reason, one must subject these claims by Islamist activists to particular scrutiny and skepticism. Most of these commentators repeat the same one-sided mantras that have been endlessly repeated since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, e.g., that “Islam is a religion of peace” or that “Islam does not sanction terrorism and beheadings,” usually without providing any actual textual or historical evidence in support of their claims. This is all the more peculiar, since if the jihadists affiliated with the IS were in fact egregiously misinterpreting Islam, it should be very easy indeed for their critics to point this out by referring to Islam’s sacred scriptures and the reported words and deeds of Muhammad that would serve to explicitly repudiate barbarous IS actions such as the wholesale massacre or torture of captives (mainly “apostate” Muslims like Alawis/“Nusayris” and Shi‘a, but also non-Muslims like Assyrian Christians and Yazidis), the confiscation of their land and wealth, the enslavement (sexual and otherwise) of their women, the gruesome public beheadings and stonings of designated enemies and “sinners” in order to terrorize others and perhaps also to precipitate the arrival of the Mahdi and the onset of the “end times,” the wanton destruction of places of worship and historical monuments, and the list goes on and

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on.25 Yet they generally fail to do this, and on those rare occasions when they try to demonstrate that these kinds of activities are “un-Islamic,” usually by citing a handful of Qur’anic passages out of context or by noting a few recorded examples of Muhammad’s compassion, their arguments are weak and unconvincing if not preposterous.26 The jihadists themselves and certain hardline pro-jihadist clerics have thus far seemingly had little trouble, either in attracting the support of would-be mujahidin or in rebutting their Muslim critics’ often specious arguments. An illustrative example of such sophistry is provided by Nihad ‘Awad, National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a key component of the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S.27 In an opinion piece entitled “ISIS is Not Just Un-Islamic, It is Anti-Islamic,” ‘Awad describes ISIS as a “criminal gang” that “falsely . . . claims to uphold the banner of Islam.”28 In support of his claim that the group is actually “anti-Islamic,” he cites three seemingly moderate early Medinan-period Qur’anic passages and, as is common for Islam apologists, attempts to redefine the term jihad in such a way that it cannot be associated with offensive warfare.29 The first of those passages from the Qur’an (2:143) is rather murky and difficult to interpret, given that it seems to promote moderation due to its reference to Muslims as a “community of the middle way” [ummat al-wasatan] but also has the geographic connotation of being in the “center” since it appears in the midst of suras about which direction Muslims should pray toward.30 The second (4:35) concerns arbitration resolution in disputes between the families of the husband and wife and, not coincidentally, appears immediately after an aya that provides theological sanction for patriarchal privilege and an explicit authorization for Muslim husbands to maintain control over their wives (including, after first advising them and then denying them sex, beating them) so as to ensure that they will behave obediently.31 The third (2:190) encourages Muslims to fight those who fight them “in the way of Allah” [fi sabil Allah], but warns them not to transgress any divine proscriptions or boundaries since Allah does not like “transgressors.”32 This is a well-known aya that enjoins proportionality with respect to appropriate levels and types of Muslim violence, and is therefore related to the Islamic just war conceptions to be discussed below. Unfortunately for ‘Awad, none of these passages provides unambiguous support for moderation, or specifically prohibits the use of extreme violence in cases where it might be considered warranted or “proportional” by jihadists. This is all the more true since, as will become clear, so many other Qur’anic passages explicitly sanction warfare and brutal behavior. Hence his argument that the behavior of IS is not only “un-Islamic” but “antiIslamic” should be wholly unpersuasive to anyone familiar with the Qur’an, the ahadith, or early Islamic history. Dawud Walid, another Islamist activist associated with CAIR who was interviewed during a September 2014 protest by “Muslims Against ISIS” in Dearborn, Michigan, cited the Qur’anic passage (5:32) that is invariably referred to by those who are trying to claim that Islam is inherently peaceful, which he then proceeded to summarize as follows: “Whoever kills an innocent soul, it is like they have killed all of mankind.”33 Like so many others have done, Walid conveniently ignored the fact that this particular

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aya refers specifically to the “Children of Israel,” i.e., the Israelites, or members of the twelve tribes of Israel, rather than to Muslims, and that it was presented for didactic purposes in the context of Cain wrongly killing Abel: “Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for (killing) a soul or for corruption [done] in the land – it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one – it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them (i.e., Jews) with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.”34 Whether this message was intended to apply only to Jews or was also intended to provide some moral guidance to Muslims about what was and was not permissable, which remains unclear and indeed debatable, in the Qur’an it explicitly refers to Allah’s supposed warning to transgressing Jews. More tellingly, the following aya (5:33) specifies which categories of people can be legitimately killed, crucified, dismembered, or exiled by Muslim believers for their sins: “those who wage war [yuharibun] against Allah and His Prophet” and those who “strive to spread corruption/mischief [fasadan] in the land.”35 Finally, those who cite 5:32 or other ostensibly peaceful passages from the Qur’an (such as 2: 25636) as authoritative fail to mention that, according to the doctrine of abrogation (naskh), the intolerant and bellicose passages “revealed” during the later Medinan period supposedly abrogate many if not most of the tolerant, compassionate passages from the prior Meccan and earlier Medinan period.37 Hence it is all too easy, and not at all unorthodox or heretical, for jihadists to insist that they are enjoined by the Qur’an itself to kill, subjugate, and enslave the enemies of Islam, irrespective of what genuine Islamic reformers, Islam apologists, or Islamist apologists may claim. For example, another participant at the “Muslims Against ISIS” rally in Michigan, Iraqi-American Alia Almulla, made the bold claim that the Qur’an “doesn’t teach terrorism” and went on to say that “[p]eople need to become more educated about Islam and actually read the Qur’an.”38 She is absolutely right to encourage people to learn more about Islam and to read the Qur’an, but gives little evidence in her quoted comments that she has carefully read the Qur’an herself. If she had, she could hardly have overlooked sura 8:60, which is so often referred to and praised by Islamists precisely because it sanctions the use of terrorism against the enemies of Islam: “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom Allah knows. And whatever you spend in the cause of Allah will be fully repaid to you, and you will not be wronged.”39 That particular passage of the Qur’an has not only been cited favorably by Qa‘idat al-Jihad leader Usama b. Ladin and other jihadist terrorists, but the first two words from it [wa a‘idduwa = “and prepare/make ready/muster”] also appear directly beneath the pair of crossed swords on the bottom of the symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamist organization with numerous branches and offshoots throughout the world that nowadays tends to publicly eschew armed jihad for purely pragmatic or tactical reasons but not infrequently advocated and resorted to violence and terrorism in the past.40 Moreover, there are numerous other Qur’anic passages that explicitly enjoin Muslims to wage war and/or slay, capture, enslave, and subjugate “infidels,” “apostates,”

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and “hypocrites,” such as 8:39, 8.65, 8:67–68, 9:5, 9:13, 9:29, 9:36, 9:41, 9:73, 9:111, 23:1–6, 33:50, 47:35, 48:29, 2:193, 2:216, 3:140–1, 4:24, 4:76, and 5:33. Indeed, several of those very passages, especially in the Surat al-Tawba, are believed by many Islamic scholars to have abrogated and superseded multiple relatively tolerant passages dating from the Meccan or early Medinan eras.41 Hence those who cite certain supposedly “abrogated” (mansukh) suras as evidence that Islam really promotes compassion and toleration rather than intolerance and bellicosity toward unbelievers and “insufficiently Islamic” Muslims, can easily be dismissed as egregious “misinterpreters” of Islam, and indeed demonized and targeted as “apostates,” by pro-jihad Islamists. Even if we limited ourselves herein to discussing particularly gruesome high profile actions such as public beheadings, one can find passages sanctioning this behavior in the Qur’an, such as sura 47:4 and sura 8:12.42 How, then, is it possible to argue – especially if one interprets the Qur’an in a strict, literalist fashion rather than very loosely – that violent actions which are explicitly enjoined in Islamic scriptures are actually “un-Islamic”? Furthermore, it is not only the Qur’an itself, but also the recorded “customary practice” (sunna) of Muhammad himself that provides ample justification and sanction for much of the barbaric behavior of IS jihadists, who may in fact be consciously trying to “reenact” Muhammad’s own successful actions.43 In this context, it must be remembered that Muhammad is regarded by other Muslims both as the last of Allah’s prophets and as the ideal Muslim, and that as such his words and deeds are viewed as both exemplary and worthy of emulation. Unfortunately, Islamic sources that are considered authentic by Muslims, such as the canonical hadith collections, the early biographies of Muhammad, and various historical chronicles of the early phases of the Arab conquests, all provide ample evidence – assuming that those sources can actually be trusted with respect to their reliability, which has long been the subject of scholarly debate amongst historians – of the harshness, brutality, and cruelty that Muhammad, his companions, and the “rightly-guided” Caliphs at times exhibited, especially but not exclusively in the course of their military campaigns, toward their designated enemies: the pagan Quraysh rulers of Mecca, their “hypocritical” Muslim supporters and perfidious Jewish “betrayers” in Medina, recalcitrant Bedouin tribes, the Jews of Khaybar, the Byzantines, the Sasanian Persians, and various rival or rebellious groups of Muslims.44 It should be emphasized, however, that atrocities of the kind described in these sources were hardly atypical in the seventh and eighth centuries CE, much less restricted to Muslims and Muslim armies. But that grim fact provides very little comfort given that these very same gruesome behaviors, however common they may have been in the ancient and early medieval periods (and even, if truth be told, in the later medieval and modern periods), are still clearly regarded as morally permissible, theologically sanctioned, worthy of emulation, and even emotionally inspiring by Islamist jihadists and their active and passive supporters in the early twenty-first century. This remains true despite the extraordinary evolution and transformation of human moral values that has occurred in subsequent centuries, especially in the post-Enlightenment West, and the progress that has been made by the international community since the end

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of World War II in officially delegitimizing and criminalizing, though by no means always successfully ameliorating, such behaviors. On the other hand, there is no doubt that many of the activities of the IS violate the letter and the spirit of traditional Islamic “just war” doctrines, since IS jihadists deliberately and often indiscriminately target, abuse, and slaughter non-combatants from “enemy” groups.45 These just war doctrines, which in theory forbid Muslims from deliberately targeting women, children, the aged, and the physically or mentally infirm and, more broadly, from carrying out disproportionate levels of violence, were developed by medieval Muslim jurists on the basis of certain Qur’anic passages and various compassionate acts and instructions of Muhammad recorded in ostensibly reliable ahadith.46 Even so, it is a sad fact that just war notions in various parts of the world have frequently been devised precisely during historical contexts in which such elevated behavioral standards were being regularly or even systematically violated by armies, and the grim reality in practice was that, during the time of Muhammad and his successors, civilians within all of those protected categories were often killed inadvertently or unreflectively in the normal course of carrying out regular military operations by Muslim troops, especially if doing so was considered necessary in order to defeat their foes.47 The killing of such people in these circumstances was thus regarded as permissible, not only by pragmatic Muslim generals but also by Muhammad himself and by the majority of Muslim jurists, since the survival and ultimate triumph of Islam was their paramount concern and spreading the word of Allah, defeating and subjugating the enemies of Islam, and making the shari‘a supreme throughout the world were the primary goals of waging offensive jihad. Hence if they were so inclined, today’s jihadists could claim, however tendentiously, that such brutal behavior was necessary to ensure their success in fighting “infidels” and “apostates” and to enable them to restore the long-awaited Caliphate. In actuality, most of them – like many other types of ideological extremists – appear to have few if any moral qualms about deliberately targeting, killing, or mistreating their designated enemies, and indeed seemingly display an unwholesome degree of bloodthirsty religious fervor or sadistic glee whilst carrying out those acts, since they believe (not without reason) that the Qur’an teaches them that Allah despises and wants to humiliate, punish, or exterminate the enemies of Islam. As German Marxist and Islam critic Hartmut Krauss has justly noted: “What at first glance appears to be the phenomenology of an irrational, psychopathic bloodlust can on second glance be recognized as an articulate and normative procedure systematically derived from the sources of Islam and the historical matrix of Islamic conquests. That is to say, the barbaric and disgusting actions of IS do indeed have to do with Islam.”48 Even so, perhaps it is better to end on a more positive note by emphasizing the obvious point that Islam can be interpreted, and indeed has been interpreted over the centuries, in many different ways by living, breathing Muslims. Although it is neither unorthodox in most respects nor limited to the extremist fringe, the strict, literalist, puritanical interpretation of Islam that is characteristic of the Islamists, including the jihadists, is far from being the only “legitimate” interpretation of Islam, despite what they themselves assert. Along with secularists in the Muslim world such as Western-style

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liberals, nationalists, fascists, and socialists, who have typically viewed Islam as a vitally important cultural marker rather than as a divinely mandated system of religious beliefs that must be accepted and followed to the letter, Muslim rationalists, modernists, and even some traditionalists have tended to interpret Islam in less restrictive, punitive, or sectarian ways that are at least partially compatible with modernity and democratic pluralism. Although in many ways scriptural literalists have advantages over moderates in religious debates, Muslims can nonetheless adopt various modes of argumentation to challenge theocratic Islamist interpretations of Islam. First, as with Judaism and Christianity, genuinely moderate Muslims can argue that the injunctions in the Qur’an and the commands of Muhammad may well have been relevant and even appropriate during the historical contexts in which they were issued, but that they are not all necessarily applicable in today’s radically different historical context. Second, they can argue that many of those Qur’anic passages and statements of Muhammad were difficult to understand and thus do not provide clear, unambiguous guidelines for Muslim behavior at the present time. Hence Muslims should not interpret them slavishly, dogmatically, or in an invariably literalist fashion, but rather apply human reason and interpret them, especially if the meaning is unclear, in a more contextual (historically grounded), allegorical, or metaphorical way.49 Third, they can make a case, with good reason, that many Qur’anic strictures and ideas of Muhammad were relatively enlightened by seventh-century standards, especially in the context of Arab tribal society, and that they therefore embodied a spirit of innovation, pragmatism, and moderation that Muslims today should be aspire to emulate. Fourth, they can argue that neither the Qur’an nor the ahadith mandate the creation of a theocratic Islamic state or provide a clear blueprint for the organization of such a state, since both the “Constitution of Medina” and the later “Pact of ‘Umar” were not only devised in particular historical contexts that have long been superseded, but also in response to specific and in many ways unique political circumstances.50 Finally, they can simply ignore or reject the doctrine of abrogation on various religio-legal grounds, since that doctrine has frequently been used by some Islamic scholars and militants to justify more extreme interpretations of Islam. Moreover, Islamic jurisprudential experts have for centuries adopted contrasting views toward abrogation, some arguing that it is a mistaken notion, others that it has only a limited application, and still others that it has a very extensive application. Most “regular” Muslims, devout or otherwise, are probably not even aware of abrogation, much less of the complex legal disputes surrounding it. Nevertheless, it is impossible for any knowledgeable, honest person to characterize the beliefs and activities of IS jihadists as “un-Islamic,” much less as “anti-Islamic,” since Islamic supremacism and intolerance of non-Muslims are all too characteristic in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s sunna. As moderate Canadian Muslim Tarek Fatah has justly noted: “Islam is not a religion of peace. It’s not necessarily a religion of war, either, but it would be a lie to deny that its history and literature are seeped [sic] in armed jihad, assassinations and bloodshed that simply cannot be swept under

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a carpet. Only we Muslims can reform Islam for future generations. But first, we must stop lying in the name of Allah. It’s no use denouncing ISIS while refusing to renounce [armed] jihad.”51 Ironically, the official state-supported ‘ulama, genuine Muslim moderates, and disingenuous “non-violent” Islamists who make such arguments about the IS being “un-Islamic” are themselves effectively engaging in takfir, i.e., labeling other Muslims as “infidels,” a sectarian, exclusionary tendency that is so prevalent amongst the jihadists themselves.52 In both cases, it is factually incorrect and legally inappropriate for Muslims to label their co-religionists who have different interpretations of Islam as non-Muslims, whether in order to discredit them or to target them. Although they are mistaken and also arguably misguided, such efforts by Muslims are at least comprehensible, since they are reflective of vitally important doctrinal and political conflicts over the “soul of Islam” that are occurring within the contemporary Muslim world. It remains far less understandable, however, why so many Western leaders and commentators are also peddling the same falsehoods about the IS having “nothing to do with Islam.” If they honestly believe what they are saying, then they are either hopelessly ignorant about Islam, Islamic history, and Islamism, or are wearing impenetrable ideological blinders that prevent them from seeing reality, or are living in an acute state of psychological denial that borders on the pathological and the clinically delusional. And if such Westerners do not actually believe what they are saying, then they are fooling themselves that their embarrassingly facile attempts to divorce Islam from Islamism will somehow end up being the most effective way to counter Islamist ideology or rally support from Muslims for various Western foreign policy and counterterrorist initiatives in the region. Far from having had any beneficial impact on Western-Muslim relations thus far, the incessant repetition of this patent nonsense has instead been paralleled by the ongoing radicalization of young Muslims and increasing support for the IS, including within Western countries. Moreover, making manifestly false claims about Islamism is not going to win over any “hearts and minds,” especially those of genuinely moderate Muslims and secularists who have long been bravely resisting and struggling against better organized Islamists at home and abroad. Perhaps worst of all, it has the debilitating and potentially catastrophic effect of confusing, misleading, and intellectually disarming citizens of Western countries about the nature of the threat that they face from jihadists, whose actions are animated primarily by the Islamist theo-political doctrines that they have fervently embraced.53 As I have argued elsewhere, correctly identifying Islamists – jihadist or otherwise – as enemies of the democratic West is not going to “offend” any actual moderate Muslims who likewise view the Islamists as intractable enemies, any more than identifying Nazis as its enemies during World War II had the effect of offending anti-Nazi Germans.54 (In fact, many German anti-Nazis were encouraged to flee from Germany and then assist the Allied powers precisely because the latter were openly opposing and waging war against Nazi Germany.) Conversely, those Muslims

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who are always so prone to display moral outrage in response to the accurate (and entirely reciprocal) characterization of Islamists, armed or otherwise, as enemies of the West are neither the West’s friends nor its reliable allies: they are either Islamists themselves, Islamist sympathizers, or other Muslims who are so resistant to selfreflection and self-criticism and/or so virulently anti-Western that they are willing to temporarily suspend their own internal disagreements with Islamists on the basis of misplaced tribal, national, or religious solidarity.55 The willingness of too many Muslims to ignore, excuse, or even defend the brutal “anti-infidel” activities of the jihadists (or, alternatively, to blame them on imagined “Zionist” or “Crusader” conspiracies), especially in their interactions with non-Muslim outsiders, only furthers the growth of Islamism at the expense of more moderate interpretations of Islam. Last but certainly not least, one important responsibility of Western leaders, policymakers, and even self-styled security or Islam experts in academia and the media should be to educate the public about the serious national and international security threats emanating from the Islamist and jihadist milieus. Such elites should not be systematically mischaracterizing or minimizing the nature of those threats by promoting revisionist, sanitized, psychologically reassuring fantasies about Islam or Islamism that have little or no basis in reality. These fantasies are not only being promoted in laudable efforts to avoid portraying Islam in general and all Muslims as enemies of the West, but also in misguided attempts to avoid “offending” Muslims who are not Islamists, to convince Muslims that the West is not waging a “war against Islam” (which has obviously never been the case, despite the paranoid delusions of the Islamists), and now also in order to facilitate the forging of an international anti-IS coalition. Ironically, that international coalition now also includes militarily weak Islamist or pro-Islamist Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, which have themselves long been either aggressively disseminating extremist interpretations of Islam (Saudi Arabia) and/or tangibly supporting, either quasi-officially or unofficially, Sunni jihadists in various regions – including IS fighters in Syria.56

Notes 1 Sam Harris, “Sleepwalking toward Armageddon,” Sam Harris website, 10 September 2014, available at www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armageddon. 2 Magdi Abdelhadi, “The Whole Tenor of the Debate Is That Muslim Societies Should Stop Blaming Others for Their Woes,” Your Middle East, 4 October 2014, available at www. yourmiddleeast.com/opinion/is-this-the-beginning-of-a-reform-within-islam_27033. Therein the author confuses Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi, the former head of al-Dawla alIslamiyya fi al-‘Iraq (Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI, a predecessor organization of today’s Islamic State) who died in May 2010, with his successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. 3 See the interview with Ednan Aslan, a Turkish-Austrian specialist on Islamic religious pedagogy at the University of Vienna, in Köksal Baltaci, “Religionspädagoge Aslan: ‘Muslime benötigen Friedenskonzepte,’” Die Presse [Austria], 26 September 2014, available at http://diepresse.com/home/panorama/oesterreich/3875946/Aslan_Muslimebenotigen-Friedenskonzepte. These comments were made in response to the following question: “Do you consider the citing of the Koran by the terrorist group IS to justify its activities legitimate?”

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4 Hasnain Kazim, “Interview with an Islamic State Recruiter: ‘Democracy Is for Infidels,’” Der Spiegel [Germany], 28 October 2014, available at www.spiegel.de/international/world/ islamic-state-interview-with-an-extremist-recruiter-a-999557.html?#ref=rss. Abu Sattar is the nom de guerre of an IS recruiter based in Turkey. His remarks echo those reported to have been uttered by Islam’s prophet Muhammad, as found in the hadith collection of Muhammad al-Bukhari (810–870), which is considered to be one of the most reliable of the six canonical hadith collections. See Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 8, Hadith 387, available at http://web.archive.org/web/20070828110309/www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/ fundamentals/hadithsunnah/bukhari/008.sbt.html#001.008.460: “Narrated Anas bin Malik: Allah’s Apostle [Muhammad] said, ‘I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: “None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.” And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla [prayer direction towards Mecca] and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally and their reckoning will be with Allah.’ Narrated Maymun ibn Siyah that he asked Anas bin Malik, ‘O Abu Hamza! What makes the life and property of a person sacred?’ He replied, ‘Whoever says, “None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,” faces our Qibla during the prayers, prays like us and eats our slaughtered animal, then he is a Muslim, and has got the same rights and obligations as other Muslims have.’” In short, if one interprets such ahadith in a literalist fashion, Muslims are supposedly enjoined by Allah, like their exemplar Muhammad, to fight non-Muslims until the latter convert to Islam. 5 Indeed, problematic, mistaken, or ludicrous claims that the IS has “nothing to with Islam” or is “un-Islamic,” several of which will be analyzed herein, are arguably more common nowadays amongst self-styled “experts” and “respectable” Western pundits than the recognition that its actions are mainly inspired by its interpretations of Islam. For representative examples, see Igor Volsky and Jack Jenkins, “Why ISIS Is Not, In Fact, Islamic,” Think Progress, 17 September 2014, available at http://thinkprogress.org/ world/2014/09/11/3566181/why-isis-is-in-fact-not-islamic/, who argue that “even from the viewpoint of a casual observer, ISIS is an abomination to Islam”; “The 9 Biggest Myths about ISIS,” Vox, [1 October 2014], card 2 of 11: “Myth 2: People Support ISIS because they Like Its Radical Form of Islam,” available at www.vox.com/cards/isis-mythsiraq/isis-islam, which argues that “the foundation of [ISIS’] power comes from politics, not religion. Let’s be clear: virtually all Muslims reject ISIS’ view of their faith”; Stathis N. Kalyvas, “The Logic of Violence in the Islamic State’s War,” Washington Post, 7 July 2014, available at www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/07/ the-logic-of-violence-in-islamic-states-war/, who insists that “there is nothing particularly Islamic or jihadi about the organization’s violence”; Arie W. Kruglanski, “Joining Islamic State Is about ‘Sex and Aggression,’ Not Religion,” Reuters, 16 October 2014, available at http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/10/16/joining-islamic-stateis-about-sex-and-aggression-not-religion/, who adopts a reductionist psychological perspective centering around a personal “quest for significance” by would-be jihadists; “Tariq Ramadan: ‘ISIL’s Acts Are Un-Islamic,’” al-Jazira, 17 October 2014, available at www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2014/10/tariq-ramadan-isil-notislamic-2014101015462542487.html, wherein this high profile, Muslim Brotherhoodassociated Islamist is quoted as saying that the actions of the IS are “against everything that is coming from Islam” and are instead only being carried out by “people playing with politics [whilst] referring to religious sources”; Aditya Divakar Karkera, “ISIS Is Not Muslim,” The Times of Israel, 17 September 2014, available at http://blogs.timesofisrael. com/isil-is-not-muslim/, who completely whitewashes the history of Islam; and Christa Zöchling, “Interview mit Claudia Bandion-Ortner zum Alltag in Saudi Arabien: ‘Nicht jeden Freitag wird geköpft,’” Profil [Austria], 21 October 2014, available at www.profil. at/articles/1443/980/378239/interview-claudia-bandion-ortner-alltag-saudi-arabiennicht-freitag. Therein Bandion-Ortner, the Secretary-General of the Vienna-based, Saudi-funded King ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abdulaziz International Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID), made the following Orwellian remarks (amongst many

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others): “The IS has nothing to do with religion. . . . .I think one could do them some damage by simply changing the name. Why does the entire world say ‘Islamic State’? Yes, they designate themselves as such. In reality it’s a joke. Why does the community of nations not band together and say: ‘We are now labeling them differently’. It is unfair to Islam and Muslims.” (italics added) For much more interesting arguments of this type, Compare Murtaza Hussain, “Why the Islamic State Is Not Really Islamic,” The Intercept, 26 September 2014, available at https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/26/isis-islamic/, who rightly notes that Islamist ideologues have been greatly influenced by Western revolutionary ideas but then concludes, much more controversially, that the behavior of the IS “has more in common with Mao’s Red Guards or the Khmer Rouge than it does with the Muslim Empires of antiquity which they claim to be heirs to”; and Mehdi Hasan, “The Hand Choppers of ISIS Are Deluded: There Is Nothing Islamic about Their Caliphate,” New Statesman, 4 July 2014, available at www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/ hand-choppers-isis-are-deluded-there-nothing-islamic-about-their-caliphate, who justly points to various historical and political problems underlying vague Islamist visions of an Islamic state and insists that “the Islamic faith doesn’t require an Islamic state.” Yet it is even more troubling that false claims about the IS being “un-Islamic” are so often uncritically repeated by Western government officials. For example, then U.S. President Barack Obama made the following misleading statement in his 10 September 2014 address to the American people outlining his strategy for dealing with the Islamic State: “ISIL is not ‘Islamic.’ No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.” See “Transcript: President Obama on How U.S. Will Address Islamic State,” NPR [National Public Radio], 10 September 2014, available at www.npr.org/2014/09/10/347515100/transcript-president-obama-on-how-u-s-willaddress-islamic-state. The very last point about the preponderance of Muslim victims is the only accurate part of this statement, but that is because – as is the case with so many Sunni jihadist groups – the sectarian, puritanical IS jihadists regard their Muslim victims not as real Muslims, much less as “innocents,” but rather as “apostates,” heretical “rejecters of Allah,” or “hypocrites,” and thus as de facto “infidels.” For his part, former American Secretary of State John Kerry made this no less inaccurate statement during his visit to Baghdad a couple of days earlier: “ISIL claims to be fighting on behalf of Islam, but the fact is that its hateful ideology has nothing to do with Islam.” See Jim Bacon and Kim Hjelmgaard, “Kerry Says World Won’t Let Islamic State Win in Iraq,” USA Today , 10 September 2014, available at www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/09/10/kerryiraq-prime-minister-islamic-state-syria/15376123/. Meanwhile, then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, in explaining the adoption of heightened security measures in response to the threat of jihadist terrorism, felt it necessary to opine that “[t]his is about crime and combating crime. This is not about religion.” See Frank Coletta, “Tony Abbott Increases Australia’s Terrorism Threat Level from Medium to High and Warns Australians to Expect Increased Security,” Daily Mail, 11 September 2014, available at www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-2753016/Tony-Abbott-increases-Australia-s-terror-threat-mediumhigh.html. And former British Prime Minister David Cameron, in response to the IS’ beheading of a British aid worker, insisted that “Islam is a religion of peace,” that the IS jihadists are “monsters” rather than Muslims, and that their “claim to do this in the name of Islam” is “nonsense.” See Peter Dominiczak, “David Cameron Vows to Hunt Down ‘Monsters’ Who Beheaded British Hostage David Haines,” The Telegraph, 14 September 2014, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11095247/ David-Cameron-vows-to-hunt-down-monsters-who-beheaded-British-hostage-DavidHaines.html. Apparently, these Western leaders imagine that they have more expertise on Islamic doctrines and history than IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the nom de guerre of Ibrahim ibn ‘Awad ibn Ibrahim ibn ‘Ali ibn Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarra’i, who has a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad. 6 See, e.g., Dean Obeidallah, “The Boko Haram Terrorists Are Not ‘Islamic’,” Daily Beast, 12 May 2014, available at www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/the-boko-haram-

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terrorists-are-not-islamic.html ; “OIC: Boko Haram Has Nothing to Do with Islam,” al-Manar [Lebanon], 6 March 2014, available at www.almanar.com.lb/english/adetails.php?eid=154669&cid=56&fromval=1; and “Boko Haram Has Nothing to Do with Islam: Iran Cleric,” Press TV [Iran], 18 May 2014, available at www.presstv.com/ detail/2014/05/18/363213/boko-haram-has-no-relation-with-islam/. Even some American politicians have made this same erroneous claim. See Michael Warren, “Dem Senator: Boko Haram Is Not Islamist,” Weekly Standard, 16 May 2014, available at www. weeklystandard.com/blogs/dem-senator-boko-haram-not-islamist_792891.html. 7 Compare, e.g., Abu Bakr al-Husayni al-Qura[y]shi al-Baghdadi, “A Message to the Mujahidin and the Muslim Umma in the Month of Ramadan,” al-Hayat Media Center, 1 July 2014, available at www.gatestoneinstitute.org/documents/baghdadi-caliph.pdf, wherein the IS’ leader, the self-styled ‘Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful), announced the establishment of a new Caliphate and enthusiastically promoted offensive jihad, martyrdom, and world domination (along with providing ample citations from relevant Qur’anic passages); Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani al-Shami, “Indeed Your Lord Is Ever Watchful,” 21 September 2014, available at https://ia801400.us.archive.org/34/ items/mir225/English_Translation.pdf, a bloodthirsty IS statement filled with Qur’anic quotes and urging firm Muslim monotheists [muwahiddin] around the world to “kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever. . . . in any manner or way however it may be. . . . .Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over in your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.” (pp. 9,10); numerous IS propaganda and recruitment videos citing the Qur’an and ahadith; and the first several issues of the IS’s magazine Dabiq, which likewise contain references to the Qur’an and hadith, promote actions using explicitly Islamic rationales and justifications, and are inspired by Muslim apocalyptic millenarian themes. See, e.g., “Until It Burns the Crusader Armies in Dabiq,” Dabiq 1, July 2014, pp. 3–5, available at https://ia802500.us.archive.org/24/items/dbq01_desktop_en/dbq01_desktop_en.pdf. Indeed, virtually everything produced by the IS in written or video formats is laced with justificatory references to the Qur’an and hadith, as well as events in Islamic history and Muslim eschatological themes. For more on the apocalyptic themes in the first issue of Dabiq, see Timothy Furnish, “New Islamic State Magazine ‘Dabiq’: Western Forces on the Eve of Destruction,” Mahdi Watch, 14 July 2014, available at www.mahdiwatch. org/2014.07.01_arch.html. Compare William McCants, “ISIS Fantasies of an Apocalyptic Showdown in Northern Syria,” Brookings [Institute], 3 October 2014, available at www. brookings.edu/blogs/iran-at-saban/posts/2014/10/03-isis-apocalyptic-showdownsyria-mccants; and Nour Malas, “Ancient Prophecies Motivate Islamic State Militants,” Wall Street Journal, 19 November 2014, available at http://online.wsj.com/articles/ancientprophecies-motivate-islamic-state-militants-1416357441. 8 Compare Robert Reilly, “Is the Islamic State Islamic?,” Library of Law and Liberty website, 14 October 2014, available at www.libertylawsite.org/2014/10/14/is-the-islamic-stateislamic/, who justly excoriates the widespread ignorance exhibited by so many Western officials and pundits about even the most basic Islamic doctrines and terminology. Indeed, as atheist Sam Harris accurately notes in “Sleepwalking toward Armageddon,” “there is now a large industry of obfuscation designed to protect Muslims [as well as, it should be emphasized, Westerners] from having to grapple with these truths. Our humanities and social science departments are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other diverse fields, who claim that where Muslim intolerance and violence are concerned, nothing is ever what it seems. Above all, these experts claim that one can’t take Islamists and jihadists at their word: Their incessant declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy are nothing more than a mask concealing their real motivations. What are their real motivations? Insert here the most abject hopes and projections of secular liberalism.” For further illustrations of these types of myopic

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approaches, in the context of the Boston Marathon bombings and other acts of jihadist terrorism in the West, see Jeffrey M. Bale, “Denying the Link between Islamist Ideology and Jihadist Terrorism: ‘Political Correctness’ and the Undermining of Counterterrorism,” in the previous chapter in this volume. 9 A perfect encapsulation of this mistaken perspective, which defies both rudimentary logic and masses of evidence to the contrary, can be found in a statement made by U.S. Department of State Undersecretary Richard Stengel, who argued that “there is no battle of ideas with ISIL. ISIL is bereft of ideas – they’re bankrupt of ideas. It’s not an organization that is animated by ideas. It’s a criminal, savage, barbaric organization – I feel like we won that battle already. Their ability to recruit fighters has to do more, I would say, with conditions we don’t control: economic conditions in the Arab world, the ability for individuals to be empowered in the Arab world.” (italics added) See Matthew Wallin, “Under Secretary Stengel: Public Diplomacy Is a Conversation,” American Security Project, 17 September 2014, available at www.americansecurityproject.org/event-review-under-secretary-stengel-american-public-diplomacy-in-2014-and-beyond/. Given the prevalence of views such as this in influential policymaking circles, it is no wonder that the West has been failing so miserably in its efforts to counter the Islamist threat. For an emphasis on sheer (psychopathological?) bloodlust as the source of the IS rank-and-file’s behavior, see Max Fisher, “The Real Ideology Driving ISIS Isn’t Islam or Caliphate Revivalism: It’s Ultraviolence,” Vox, 6 October 2014, available at www.vox.com/2014/10/6/6905363/ isis-truth-ideology-ultraviolence. Therein the author admits that “at the top level, yes, ISIS is guided and driven and organized by complex jihadist ideology, including Salafist Islamism and a revisionist nostalgia for the Caliphate golden age of Islam,” but he then asserts – without providing any evidence – that their followers are instead motivated by “a simple, sadistic desire to commit murder and to do it gruesomely.” There are many problems here, beginning with his implication (in the article’s title) that “ultraviolence” is itself an ideology, as opposed to a method. More importantly, one wonders if Fisher would likewise argue that the tens of thousands of communist and fascist rank-and-file members who committed systematic atrocities were likewise motivated by “ultraviolence” rather than the ideologies espoused by those movements. And if the individuals who are traveling to Iraq and Syria to join the IS were in fact motivated by “ultraviolence” rather than Islamism, then why not simply join, say, violent criminal organizations or street gangs in their countries of origin? Similar types of non-ideological causal explanations of Islamist extremism and jihadist terrorism, especially those derived from social movement theories applied to “Islamic activism,” have also influenced the Obama Administration’s ineffectual and indeed demonstrably counterproductive “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) strategy. Compare the “white paper” by Katharine C. Gorka, The Flawed [Social] Science behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy (Washington, DC: Council on Global Security, [October] 2014), available at http://councilonglobalsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Flawed-Science-Behind-US-CT-Strategy.pdf; and Patrick Poole, “‘Lone Wolf ’ or ‘Known Wolf ’? The Ongoing Counter-Terrorism Failure,” PJ Media, 24 October 2014, available at http://pjmedia.com/blog/lone-wolfor-known-wolf-the-ongoing-counter-terrorism-failure/?singlepage=true. For examples of this “social movement theory” approach, see Quintan Wiktorowicz, The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2001); Quintan Wiktorowicz, ed., Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 2004); and Mohammed M. Hafez, Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003). 10 Compare the broader arguments of Jerry Coyne, “If ISIS Is Not Islamic, Then the Inquisition Is Not Catholic,” New Republic, 13 September 2014, available at www.newrepublic. com/article/119433/if-isis-not-islamic-then-inquisition-was-not-catholic. 11 See Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004); Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century

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(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008). Compare the title of a 28 October 2014 lecture given by Sageman at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia: “Identity, Not Ideology: A New Theory of Radicalization and the Turn to Violence,” which was announced on the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) website, available at www. fpri.org/events/2014/10/identity-not-ideology-new-theory-radicalization-and-turnviolence. No less revealing about Sageman’s dismissive attitudes concerning the importance of ideology are these remarks cited in Christopher Massie, “Is ISIS a Faith-Based Terrorist Group?,” Columbia Journalism Review, 17 September 2014, available at www.cjr. org/behind_the_news/is_isis_a_faith-based_terroris.php?page=all: “When I asked Marc Sageman, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, if he thought it was worthwhile to debate whether the causes of Islamic extremism were ideological, he said,‘I do not. I really do not. And I stress that.’ Sageman argues that political violence, from the French Revolution to modern jihad, is essentially the same: a kind of ‘ritual,’ not dependent on ideology, that people act out to earn ‘a sense of legitimacy within the ‘in’ group.’” (italics added) As a historian, I consider reductionist social psychological perspectives of this type to be seriously misleading and indeed fundamentally mistaken. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2006); and Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012). Compare the sober, historically grounded counter-arguments in David Cook and Olivia Allison, Understanding and Addressing Suicide Attacks: The Faith and Politics of Martyrdom Operations (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), wherein the prominent religious dimensions of Islamist suicide attacks are rightly emphasized. Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Religion, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). Eli Berman, Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011). Alan B. Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton University, 2008). This book does have the merit, however, of demolishing erroneous social science theories that ascribe terrorism to poverty and lack of education. Josh Marshall, “The Rage to Oppose,” TPM, 7 September 2014, available at http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-rage-to-oppose. However, Marshall erroneously claims that the majority of the people from Western countries who have gone off to fight with the IS are Western converts rather than “first or second generation naturalized immigrants from the MENA region or Central or South Asia.” Given that most of these “foreign fighters” from the West are in fact Muslims who fall into the latter category, this tends to greatly undermine his overall argument. Tim Stanley, “ISIL’s Western Converts Are Not Motivated by Islam. They Are Motivated by Boredom,” The Telegraph, 4 September 2014, available at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ news/timstanley/100285161/isils-western-converts-are-not-motivated-by-islam-theyare-motivated-by-boredom/. Compare Kruglanski, “Joining Islamic State is About ‘Sex and Aggression’ . . .”: “Understanding the magnetic appeal of Islamic State’s extremism is a prerequisite to developing a suitable, psychologically sensitive counter narrative. For example, an appeal to moderation and a life of patient struggle seems ill suited to win over the hearts and minds of jihadists. Instead, the glamour of jihad must be countered by an alternative glamour; the charisma of martyrdom pitted against a different kind of charisma, the appeal to primitive drives redirected, jiu jitsu style, against the brutality of the enemy, turning the psychological tables on Islamic State as it were.” See the summary in Alan Travis, “MI5 Challenges Views on Terrorism in Britain,” The Guardian, 20 August 2008, available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/aug/20/uksecurity. terrorism1. The rest of the report’s conclusions seem reasonably accurate. In this context a “revert,” as opposed to a non-Muslim who converts to Islam, is a person raised as a Muslim who for a time does not take his or her religion particularly seriously or carry out his or her prescribed ritualistic obligations regularly, but who then at a certain

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point becomes enthusiastically pious and devoted to Islam (often to its most literalist and puritanical interpretations). 20 See, e.g., Mehdi Hasan, “Islam for Dummies: This Is What Wannabe Jihadists Order Online,” New Republic, 22 August 2014, available at www.newrepublic.com/article/119182/ jihadists-buy-islam-dummies-amazon. This article originally appeared in the New Statesman. Serious scholarly researchers like Ednan Aslan typically come to very different conclusions. See, e.g., “Islam spielt bei Radikalisierung größere Rolle als angenommen,” Die Welt, 2 August 2017, at https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article167326904/ Islam-spielt-bei-Radikalisierung-groessere-Rolle-als-angenommen.html. 21 Jeffrey M. Bale, “Some Problems with the Notion of a ‘Nexus’ between Terrorists and Criminals,” in The Nexus between Traffickers and Terrorists: The New Clear and Present Danger?, ed. Russell Howard (New York: McGraw-Hill e-book, 2014), pp. 52–4; and Jeffrey M. Bale, “Introduction,” in volume 1 of this anthology. 22 Unfortunately, many naïve or agenda-driven Western journalists have cited these deceptive statements by Islamists in an effort to challenge conservative Western media claims that not enough Muslims are speaking out against the IS. Indeed, those journalists tend to highlight such statements in order to give the impression that lots of supposedly moderate Muslims are publicly opposing the IS, either without actually knowing or without bothering to mention that most of the people and organizations that are making such statements are in fact Islamists who are, as per usual, trying to whitewash Islam and their own brands of Islamism, burnish their own tarnished images and thereby protect themselves, and/or mislead gullible “infidels” in the media. For a representative example, see Michelle Leung and Ellie Sandmeyer, “Muslim Leaders Have Roundly Denounced Islamic State, But Conservative Media Won’t Tell You That,” Media Matters, 21 August 2014, available at http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/08/21/muslim-leaders-haveroundly-denounced-islamic-s/200498. These two authors are seemingly unaware that groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) are all either Muslim Brotherhood legacy (or front) organizations or umbrella organizations reportedly dominated by Mawdudists (MCB). For further details, Compare Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Sam Roe, and Laurie Cohen, “A Rare Look at Secretive Brotherhood in America,” Chicago Tribune, 19 September 2004, available at www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/chi-0409190261sep19-story.html#page=1; Steven Merley, The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States (New York: Hudson Institute, [April] 2009), available at www.hudson.org/content/researchattachments/attachment/ 1163/20090411_merley.usbrotherhood.pdf; Tom Quiggin, The Muslim Brotherhood in North America (Ottawa: Terrorism and Security Experts Network of Canada, 2014); Investigative Project on Terrorism, Islamic Society of North America: An IPT Investigative Report (Washington, DC: IPT, undated), available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/275.pdf; Investigative Project on Terrorism, Behind the Façade: The Muslim Public Affairs Council (Washington, DC: IPT, undated), available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/358.pdf; note 27 for CAIR; and Anthony McRoy, From Rushdie to 7/7: The Radicalisation of Islam in Britain (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006), pp. 171–3, for the MCB. For official and unofficial Saudi statements, Compare “ISIS Is Enemy No. 1 of Islam, Says Saudi Grand Mufti,” Al-‘Arabiyya, 19 August 2014, citing comments made by Saudi Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Shaykh (as well as noting the Saudi donation of $100 million to the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Centre [UNCCT]), available at http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/08/19/Saudimufti-ISIS-is-enemy-No-1-of-Islam-.html; and “World’s Top Muslim Leaders Condemn Attacks on Iraqi Christians [by ISIS],” Reuters, 25 July 2014, wherein it is noted that the OIC’s Saudi Secretary General, Iyad ibn Amin Madani, said that actions like the forced deportation and threats to execute Christians by ISIS have “nothing to do with Islam and its principles that call for justice, kindness, fairness, freedom of faith and coexistence.”, available at http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2014/07/25/

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worlds_muslim_leaders_condemn_attacks_on_iraqi_christians/1103410. Given that Saudi Arabia has for decades been – and still is – the primary worldwide disseminator of one of the most influential and sectarian currents of Islamism, Wahhabism, one can only marvel at the hypocrisy displayed in such statements. It is true, of course, that many Muslims who were first radicalized by intolerant Wahhabi doctrines later embraced even more radical currents of Islamism, specifically jihadist Salafism, which identified the Saudi monarchy itself as an “infidel” regime. For radical Islamist opposition to the Saudi regime at home, see Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2010); Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix, The Meccan Rebellion: The Story of Juhayman al-‘Utaybi Revisited (Bristol: Amal, 2011); Stéphane Lacroix, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2011); and Mamoun Fandy, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent (New York: Palgrave, 1999). These developments caused the Saudis to adopt various types of “anti-radicalism” policies at home, ranging from increased repression to newly-instituted “re-education” efforts, which did not however stop them from continuing to indoctrinate Saudi students with “anti-infidel” views, from discriminating against non-Arabs, non-Muslims, and women inside the kingdom, or from aggressively exporting Wahhabism abroad. Moreover, it is not only the IS, but also the regime in Saudi Arabia itself, that is regularly beheading people in accordance with Islamic laws and customs. See Christian Ortner, “Ist der Islamische Staat denn überhaupt ein islamischer Staat?,” Die Presse [Austria], 10 October 2014, available at http://diepresse. com/home/meinung/quergeschrieben/christianortner/3883887/Ist-der-IslamischeStaat-denn-uberhaupt-ein-islamischer-Staat, who makes the following sardonic remarks: “If the IS has nothing to do with Islam, then Saudi Arabia also probably has nothing to do with Islam, and neither does the theocratic state of Iran, and of course the millions in the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Salafists, and numerous other more or less radical currents of this religion. If the IS has nothing to do with Islam, then the major part of Islam has nothing to do with Islam, which just cannot be.” Some examples of Western Islamist claims about the IS being “un-Islamic” will soon be discussed and analyzed. 23 Compare Jeffrey M. Bale, “Islamism and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10:2 (June 2009), pp. 79–81, for the divisions between rival Islamists over the best means to employ. See also the illustrative quotes from assorted Islamist ideologues and activists, concerning their underlying Islamic supremacist goals, cited in Jeffrey M. Bale, “Jihadist Ideology and Strategy and the Possible Employment of WMD,” in Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction, ed. Gary Ackerman and Jeremy Tamsett (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009), pp. 17–21. Both of these articles, with some revisions, also appear in this volume. For the IS’ fantasies of global domination, note the IS-produced images depicting the entire world under the control of the IS, one of which is reprinted as Figure 2 in Aymenn [Ayman] Jawad al-Tamimi’s useful “Comprehensive Reference Guide to Sunni Militant Groups in Iraq,” Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi website, 23 January 2014, available at www.aymennjawad.org/14350/comprehensive-reference-guide-to-sunni-militant. 24 E.g., the IS has criticized both deposed Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Prime Minister Muhammad Mursi and HAMAS leader Isma‘il Haniyya as tawaghit (i.e., rebels against Allah, idolaters, or tyrants) for employing “deviant methodologies,” thereby alluding to their participation (however cynical) in “infidel” institutions like elections, their corrupt behavior in power, and their general abandonment of armed jihad. See “From Hijrah to Khilafah,” Dabiq 1, pp. 38–9. In turn, the IS has been criticized for its supposed “deviance” and “excesses” by Brotherhood-affiliated clerics such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and even by some influential pro-jihadist and pro-Qa‘idat al-Jihad ideologues like the Jordanian-Palestinian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who had also earlier criticized the IS’ original predecessor organization, Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi’s Jama‘at al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad (The Monotheism and Jihad Group), for its excessive sectarianism and brutality. See, respectively, “Qaradawi Says ‘Jihadist Caliphate’ Violates Sharia,” Al-‘Arabiyya, 5 July 2014, available at http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/07/05/

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Qaradawi-says-jihadist-caliphate-violates-sharia-.html, although the article does not specify what al-Qaradawi’s theological or legal arguments actually are – elsewhere, however, he is reported to have said that it is “religiously invalid” and “does not serve the Islamic project,” cited in “Al-Qaradawi Considers ‘Baghdadi Succession’ in Iraq as Religiously Invalid,” Shafaq News [Iraq], 6 July 2014, available at http://english.shafaaq.com/index. php/politics/10411-al-qaradawi-considers-baghdadi-succession-in-iraq-as-religiouslyinvalid; and Jonathan Miller, “Al Qaeda Spiritual Leader: Islamic State are ‘Deviants,’” Channel 4 News [UK], 1 July 2014, available at www.channel4.com/news/sheikh-abumuhammad-al-maqdis-salafist-islam-islamic-state. Al-Maqdisi’s reasons for criticizing the IS, cited therein, are quite revealing: “The name (caliphate) and its announcement does not alarm me. All of us wish to return to the caliphate and the breaking of boundaries and the raising of the unification banners and lowering the flags of condemnation. No-one hates that but the hypocrite. But the lesson is in matching the names with the facts and implementing these facts on the ground. . . . Whoever rush[es] something prematurely will be punished by being deprived of it. What interests me very much is what will these people (Isis/IS) do based on this announcement and this name – which changed from a group, to the State of Iraq, then to the state of Iraq and the Levant and then to general caliphate. . . . Is this caliphate going to be a safe haven for all the vulnerable people and a shelter for every Muslim? Or will this name become a hanging sword over Muslims who disagree with them? Will this lead to the abolishment of all emirates (Islamic emirates in Afghanistan and elsewhere) that came before their declared state, and will it invalidate all the other groups who are doing jihad for the sake of God in all fields before them?” For al-Maqdisi’s complete statement, see “This is Some of What I Have and Not All of It,” July 2014 (relevant quotes on pp. 3–4 of the English translation), a PDF of which can be accessed at “Minbar al-Tawḥīd wa-l-Jihād presents a new statement from Shaykh Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī, ‘This Is Some of What I Have and Not the Whole of It,’” Jihadology website, 27 July 2014, available at http://jihadology.net/2014/07/01/ minbar-al-taw%E1%B8%A5id-wa-l-jihad-presents-a-new-statement-from-shaykh-abumu%E1%B8%A5ammad-al-maqdisi-this-is-some-of-what-i-have-and-not-the-wholeof-it/. For more on al-Maqdisi, see Joas Wagemakers, A Quietist Jihadi: The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (New York: Cambridge University, 2012); and Nelly Lahoud, “In Search of Philosopher-Jihadis: Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi’s Jihadi Philosophy,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10:2 (June 2009), pp. 205–20. For more on al-Qaradawi, see Bettina Gräf and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, eds., Global Mufti: The Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi (New York: Columbia University, 2009), although several of the entries therein are overly sympathetic. 25 Compare Aaron Y. Zelin, “The Massacre Strategy,” Washington Institute of Near East Policy, 17 June 2014, available at www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/themassacre-strategy, for the attempt to terrorize. For the possible eschatological significance of these beheadings, see Timothy Furnish, “IS[IS]: Still Beheading Like It’s the End of the World,” Mahdi Watch, 21 August 2014, available at www.mahdiwatch.org/2014.08.01_ arch.html. Other analysts have argued that some of the activities of the IS, including its savage behavior, have been influenced by the 2004 jihadist strategic treatise written by Abu Bakr Naji, Idarat al-tawwahush: Akhtar mahala satammuru biha al-umma [The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage through Which the Umma Will Pass], which was first published on a jihadist website but is now available in English translation at http://azelin. files.wordpress.com/2010/08/abu-bakr-naji-the-management-of-savagery-the-mostcritical-stage-through-which-the-umma-will-pass.pdf. One of the aims of this treatise is to show how jihadist territorial conquests could lead to the establishment of a Caliphate. 26 For useful books that effectively rebut these kinds of misleading arguments, see Ibn Warraq, The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology (Nashville, TN and London: New English Review, 2017); and Peter Townsend, Nothing to Do with Islam? Investigating the West’s Most Dangerous Blind Spot (No place: CreateSpace, 2016), especially pp. 101–40. Here is one illustrative example of such weak, unconvincing, apologetic, and

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arguably deceptive arguments. In a late September 2014 “Open Letter” – not, it should be noted, a standard question-and-answer fatwa – to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, available at http://lettertobaghdadi.com/, an international group of Muslim scholars sought to challenge the Islamic legitimacy of the IS by claiming to refute the IS Caliph’s own religious justifications and arguments. Although this document appeared just as this article was being completed, which did not allow me to examine it thoroughly, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has not only correctly noted that several of the signatories listed thereon are in fact Islamists (rather than Muslim moderates) – although Ed Husain, author of The Islamist: Why I Became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left (New York: Penguin, 2009), certainly does not fall into that category, contrary to Spencer’s implication – but has also provided a good preliminary criticism of their arguments. See Robert Spencer, “International Group of Muslim Scholars ‘Refutes’ Islamic State’s Islamic Case: While Endorsing Jihad, Sharia, Caliphate,” Jihad Watch, 24 September 2014, available at www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/international-group-of-muslim-scholarsrefutes-islamic-states-islamic-case-while-endorsing-jihad-sharia-caliphate. Compare also Ayman S. Ibrahim, “Muslim Scholars vs. ISIS: Is the Open Letter to the Islamic State Really Enough?,” First Things, 3 October 2014, available at www.firstthings.com/ web-exclusives/2014/10/is-the-muslim-scholars-open-letter-to-isis-really-enough, who makes the following insightful and on-target remarks: “The ambiguity in this letter reflects the sensitive and critical situation of the Muslim scholars who signed it, and stems probably from at least three reasons: (1) It is obvious that original Muslim texts include statements and stories that could support ISIS’s claims and deeds if interpreted literally, so Muslim scholars try to be both sensitive in choosing their words and selective in their quotations from sacred texts, which results in ambiguity in some cases; (2) Scholars realize that outright denunciation of ISIS’s interpretation is quite difficult, as such interpretations run throughout Muslim history, in addition to the fact that Abu Bakr himself holds a PhD in Islamic Studies; and (3) In the Muslim perception and mindset, the concept of one unified umma (community) obliges Muslims to defend and support their Muslim fellows all the way. . . . Unfortunately, the letter is unclear about crucial beliefs, such as jihad and caliphate, and it does not refute central claims advanced by ISIS. In fact, it raises serious questions about correct Islamic teaching in general. I believe that the leaders of ISIS would most likely find various gaps in this letter, and it would not be too difficult for them to counter its arguments.” For another ostensibly “moderate” attempt to challenge the IS’ interpretations of Islam, see Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS: Destroying Its Religious Foundations and Proving It Has Strayed from Islam and That Fighting It Is an Obligation (Herndon, VA: Sacred Knowledge, 2015). Alas, al-Yaqoubi has a documented history of making rather extreme or conspiratorial statements and has appeared at events sponsored by Islamist organizations. One larger problem, however, is that genuinely moderate Islamic reformers, who endeavor to reinterpret the Qur’an in metaphorical or contextual rather than literalist ways in order to adapt it to the modern era, also use some of the same misleading arguments that dissimulating Muslim and Islamist apologists use to fool gullible “infidels.” The West should obviously support the efforts of honest Islamic reformers whilst exposing and opposing dishonest Muslims who are cynically and deceptively whitewashing various regressive, intolerant, and bellicose elements of the Qur’an and hadith. However, real Muslim reformers should be made aware that the best way to reform and modernize Islam may be to directly challenge and honestly reinterpret those unpleasant aspects of Islamic doctrines, rather than to conveniently ignore the literalist and widely accepted meanings of Qur’anic texts. 27 For a thoroughly documented analysis of the background and agenda of CAIR, which misleadingly claims to be a Muslim civil liberties organization, see Investigative Project on Terrorism, The Council on American-Islamic Relations: CAIR Exposed (Washington, DC: IPT, undated), available at www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/122.pdf. Compare also Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, “CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment,” Middle East Forum 13:2 (Spring 2006), pp. 3–20.

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28 Nihad Awad, “ISIS Is Not Just Un-Islamic, It Is Anti-Islamic,” Time Magazine, 5 September 2014, available at http://time.com/3273873/stop-isis-islam/. 29 The claim that the term jihad does not refer, among other things, to offensive warfare against the enemies of Islam with the goal of expanding the dar al-Islam until the entire world is brought under the aegis of Islam is blatantly false. Such a sanitized definition of jihad, a noun deriving from the verb jahada, meaning “to struggle” or “to exert oneself,” conveniently ignores the fact that jihad bi al-sayf (“jihad of the sword”) has always been the most commonplace meaning of the term, both historically and at the present time. See E[mile] Tyan, “Djihād,” in Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition, ed. Bernard Lewis et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983 [1965]), vol. 2, p. 538: “In law, according to general doctrine and in historical tradition, the djihād consists of military action with the object of the expansion of Islam and, if need be, of its defence. . . The notion stems from the fundamental principle of the universality of Islam: this religion, along with the temporal power which it implies, ought to embrace the whole universe, if necessary by force.” Compare further Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2006); David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2005); Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University, 1999); Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, NJ: Marcus Weiner, 1996); and Alfred Morabia, Le gihâd dans l’Islam médiéval (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993). For a more forthright analysis by Muslims than that of ‘Awad, see “The Reason Why Jihaad is Prescribed,” Islam Question & Answer website, undated, available at http://islamqa.info/en/34647, wherein the following reasons are elucidated (and supported by relevant citations from the Qur’an and hadith): (1) “The main goal of jihad is to make the people worship Allaah alone and to bring them forth from servitude to people to servitude to the Lord of people.”; (2) “Repelling the aggression of those who attack Muslims”; (3) “Removing fitnah (tribulation)” [i.e., internal strife]; (4) “Protecting the Islamic state from the evil of the kuffaar” [infidels]; (5) “Frightening the kuffaar, humiliating them and putting them to shame”; (6) “Exposing the hypocrites” [i.e., those who feign support for Islam]; (7) Purifying the believers of their sins and ridding them thereof ”; (8) “Acquiring booty”; and (9) “Taking martyrs” [i.e., producing martyrs]. This particular website is supervised by Riyadh-born Salafist Muhammad al-Munajjid, but was later banned in 2010 by the Saudi government for issuing independent fatwas. Compare also the analysis of the radical pro-jihad Saudi cleric, Shaykh Yusuf al-‘Uyayri, “The Ruling on Jihad and Its Divisions,” reprinted and translated for al-Tawhid Publications, undated, available at www.eprism.org/images/The_Ruling_on_Jihad_and_its_Divisions_-_Yousef_Uyery.pdf. 30 Surat al-Baqara, 2:143, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/2/143: “And thus we have made you a just community that you will be witnesses over the people and the Messenger will be a witness over you. And We did not make the qiblah which you used to face except that We might make evident who would follow the Messenger from who would turn back on his heels. And indeed, it is difficult except for those whom Allah has guided. And never would Allah have caused you to lose your faith. Indeed Allah is, to the people, Kind and Merciful.” However, it should be pointed out that although this accessible online version of the Qur’an usefully provides the Arabic text together with an English translation, some of the actual translations are poorly rendered, grammatically unsound, or unclear. In this case, e.g., the key phrase is rendered as “just community,” whereas in the online Yusuf ‘Ali translation it is rendered as an “ummat justly balanced”. See ‘Abdallah Yusuf ‘Ali, The Noble Qur’an, 2:143, available at www.sacred-texts.com/isl/ quran/00217.htm. For his part, Islamist ideologue Sayyid Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi notes, in his famous Qur’anic tafsir (the six volume Tafhim al-Qur’an [The Meaning of the Qur’an]), that the expression ummat al-wasatan is “too rich in meaning to find an adequate equivalent in any other language. It signifies that distinguished group of people [i.e., Muslims] which follows the path of path of justice and equity, of balance and moderation, a group which occupies a central position among the nations of the world so that its relationship with all is based on righteousness and justice and none receives its support in wrong and

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injustice.” See Sayyid Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi, Towards Understanding the Qur’ān: Abridged Version of Tafhīm al-Qur’ān (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 2006), p. 40, note 44. The problem, of course, is that the terms “justice,” “equity,” “moderation,” and “balance” are not clearly or explicitly defined, which allows for very different interpretations. Surat al-Nisa’ 4:35, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/4/35: “And if you fear dissension between the two (husband and wife), send an arbitrator from his people and an arbitrator from her people. If they both desire reconciliation, Allah will cause it between them. Indeed, Allah is ever Knowing and Acquainted [with all things].” (Note that I myself have added occasional words within parentheses for clarification in this and other Qur’anic passages, whereas the words in brackets were previously added for clarification by Muslim translators.) Thus, in his article,‘Awad has either mistranslated this aya or cited the wrong aya. For the preceding aya, see Surat al-Nisa’ 4:34, Quran.com, available at http:// quran.com/4/34: “Men are in charge of women by [right of ] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance – [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted and Grand.” This is hardly an illustration of “moderation,” at least by twenty-first century standards. See Surat al-Baqara, 2:190, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/2/190: “Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors.” Natasha Dado, “Muslims Condemn ISIS, Say Terrorist Group Doesn’t Represent Islam,” New America Media, 2 September 2014, available at http://newamericamedia. org/2014/09/muslims-condemn-isis-say-terrorist-group-doesnt-represent-islam.php. Surat al-Ma’ida 5:32, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/5/32. The word “innocent” is found nowhere in this Qur’anic passage, although it is implicit. Moreover, that particular Qur’anic phrase was apparently borrowed from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, Chapter 4, Mishna 3, where it has been translated thusly: “he who destroys one soul of a human being, the Scripture considers him as if he should destroy a whole world, and him who saves one soul of Israel, the Scripture considers him as if he should save a whole world.” See www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/tractate-sanhedrin-chapter-4 . It was thence given an Islamic reinterpretation in the Qur’an, one with arguably anti-Jewish undertones. See Surat al-Ma’ida 5:33, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/5/33, for the entire aya: “Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment.” It goes without saying that “spreading corruption/mischief in the land” is such a vague formulation that it could conceivably apply to virtually anything that particular Muslims do not approve of. For the evolution of the attitudes toward the Israelites and Jews in early Muslim sources, see Uri Rubin, Between Bible and Qur’ān: The Children of Israel and the Islamic Self-Image (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1999). Surat al-Baqara 2:256, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/2/256: “There shall be no compulsion in [acceptance of ] the religion. The right course has become clear from the wrong. So whoever disbelieves in Taghut (false gods) and believes in Allah has grasped the most trustworthy handhold with no break in it. And Allah is Hearing and Knowing.” Lest anyone mistakenly believe that this passage implies Islam’s tolerance for “unbelief ” or “idolatry,” the next aya should disabuse them of that error. See Surat al-Baqara 2:257, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/2/257: “Allah is the ally of those who believe. He brings them out from darkness into the light. And those who disbelieve – their allies are Taghut. They take them out of the light into darkness. Those are the companions of the Fire; they will abide eternally therein.” In short, those who are not Muslims will be forever consigned to Hellfire by Allah for their sins. Perhaps not surprisingly, some

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Qur’anic passages that, extracted from their context, superficially seem to promote unambiguous tolerance for the adherents of other religions (e.g., Surat al-Kafirun 109:6, Quran. com, available at https://quran.com/109/6: “For you is your religion, and for me is my religion.”) are rarely if ever cited by Islamist dissimulators, although genuine Muslim reformers sometimes highlight them. In fact, however, suras 109:1–6 were not paeans to toleration for other, non-Muslim religions at all, but rather constituted a firm declaration by Muhammad to some naïve Meccan pagans that the gulf between their religions was forever unbridgeable. It therefore represented a complete disavowal of “idolatry” and “infidelity.” For scriptural support for the doctrine of abrogation, see 2:106 and 16:101. Three types of abrogation were later identified by Islamic scholars, the most important of which in this context is naskh al-hukm duna al-tilawa, “abrogation of the ruling but not the wording,” essentially the supersession of various earlier passages in the Qur’an or hadith by later passages. The standard Muslim explanation for the apparent contradictions in the Qur’an is not that Allah or Muhammad made any errors in transmitting it, but rather that the former intentionally revealed messages to Muhammad and his followers in stages so that they could completely understand them. For abrogation, see especially John Burton, The Sources of Islamic Law: Islamic Theories of Abrogation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 1990). For a good brief introductory discussion of legal reasoning concerning both the Qur’an and the reported words and deeds (sunna) of Muhammad, see Knut S. Vikør, Between God and the Sultan: A History of Islamic Law (New York: Oxford University, 2005), Chapter 3. For a convenient listing of the chronology of the Qur’anic revelations, which has been the subject of intense analysis and disputation amongst both Muslim scholars and modern historians, see Kevin P. Edgecomb, “Chronological Order of Quranic Suras,” Bombaxo, 2002, available at www.bombaxo. com/chronsurs.html. Cited in Dado, “Muslims Condemn ISIS . . . ” The absurdity of claims that Islam does not sanction terrorism, i.e., intentionally terrorizing the enemies of Islam, has been pointed out by Egyptian liberal and Islam scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943–2010): “If we follow the rules of interpretation developed from the classical ‘science of Koranic interpretation’ [‘ilm tafsir al-Qur’an], it is not possible to condemn terrorism in religious terms. It remains completely true to the classical rules in its evolution of sanctity for its own justification. This is where the secret of its theological strength lies.” Cited by Reilly, “Is the Islamic State Islamic?” Surat al-Anfal, 8:60, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/8/60. See “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration to the West,” in The Al Qaeda Reader, ed. Raymond Ibrahim (New York: Broadway, 2007), p. 54. This text was either written by Bin Ladin himself or written under his direction. On terrorizing the unbelievers, Compare also sura 8:12, cited in note 42. For an attempt to challenge such arguments, see Louay Fatoohi, Abrogation in the Qur’an and Islamic Law (New York: Routledge, 2012), especially Chapter 7, who argues that abrogation is a “myth” and that later violent Qur’anic passages cannot be employed to abrogate earlier peaceful passages. Sadly, many past and present Muslim scholars disagree. Surat Muhammad, 47:4, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/47/4: “So when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens. That [is the command]. And if Allah had willed, He could have taken vengeance upon them [Himself ], but [He ordered armed struggle] to test some of you by means of others. And those who are killed in the cause of Allah – never will He waste their deeds.” Surat al-Anfal, 8:12, Quran.com, available at http://quran.com/8/12: “[Remember] when your Lord inspired to the angels, ‘I am with you, so strengthen those who have believed. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved, so strike [them] upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip.’”

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43 Andrew Salzmann, “ISIS: Public Legitimacy through the Reenactment of Islam’s Early History,”Small Wars Journal,15 August 2014,available at http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/ isis-public-legitimacy-through-the-reenactment-of-islam%E2%80%99s-early-history. 44 For a good introduction to early Islamic sources, see Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writings (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1998). For examples of such sources, see Alfred Guillaume’s translation of Muhammad ibn Ishaq’s Sirat rasul Allah, as The Life of Muhammad (Karachi and New York: Oxford University, 2006), which survives mainly in an edited recension prepared later by ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Hisham; and the translation by Rizwi Faizer et al of Muhammad ibn ‘Umar Waqidi’s Kitab al-maghazi, as The Life of Muhammad: Al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-maghāzī (New York: Routledge, 2011); the six canonical hadith collections, which can be accessed in full or partial translated versions at the USC [University of Southern California] – MSA [Muslim Students Association] Compendium of Muslim Texts website, available at http://web.archive. org/web/20070829052559/www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/; and the Tarikh al-rasul wa al-muluk of Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, translated by various scholars in a multi-volume edition as The History of al-Tabarī = Tārīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk (Albany: SUNY, 1985-), especially vols. 6–14. For a detailed older scholarly biography of Muhammad based upon early Islamic sources, see W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad in Mecca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960); and W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad in Medina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). For scholarly descriptions of the early Muslim conquests, see Fred McGraw Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1981); Walter E. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1992), especially Chapters 4–8; and Parvaneh Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008), especially Chapter 3. For a dense, straightforward narrative of Muhammad’s life based on an uncritical use of those same sources, see Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006 [1983]), which in essence reflects the standard Muslim understanding. For an unduly sympathetic account of early Islamic history, see Asma Afsaruddin, The First Muslims: History and Memory (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007). For a recent, radically revisionist scholarly interpretation (building on skeptical foundations earlier laid by John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, and Michael Cook), which casts considerable doubt on the provenance and reliability of those sources as well as on the standard Muslim account of the origins of Islam, see Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren, Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003). For a moderately revisionist account, see Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2010). The important point, however, is that devout Muslims regard these sources as reliable indicators of the activities of Muhammad, his companions, and his immediate successors (al-salaf al-salih, the “pious ancestors”) during the idealized early history of Islam, and thus as providing an appropriate model for their own behavior. 45 See, e.g., the comments of jihadist researcher Will McCants, cited in Jack Jenkins, “The Book That Really Explains ISIS (Hint: It’s Not the Qur’an”), Think Progress, 10 September 2014, available at http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/09/10/3565635/the-bookthat-really-explains-isis-hint-its-not-the-quran/: “The Islamic State stands apart from other [extremist] organizations . . . They are not bound by the structures of traditional Islamic warfare.” Sadly, both the title of the article and McCants’ own comments are misleading. As has already been noted, many Qur’anic passages serve to justify the atrocities committed by the IS. As for McCants, he draws an overly sharp distinction therein between the IS and other jihadist groups. Although the IS is certainly more brutal than some other jihadist organizations, many of the latter also regularly violate Islamic just war doctrines. Consider, as an example, the appalling atrocities and indiscriminate brutality of al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya al-Musallaha (the Groupe Islamique Armé or GIA: Armed Islamic Group) in Algeria, whose takfiri leaders had labeled all Algerians who did not support them as “infidels” and then systematically proceeded to target them.

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46 For Islamic just war conceptions, compare John Kelsay, Islam and War: A Study of Comparative Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993); and John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2007). See also Fred M. Donner, “The Sources of Islamic Conceptions of War,” in Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in the Western and Islamic Traditions, ed. James T. Johnson and John Kelsay (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 31–70. 47 Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam, especially pp. 104–10, wherein he notes (ibid., p. 106) that classical Islamic treatises on war “exhibit a strong inclination toward a position one might characterize as ‘military realism’,” since once a war is determined to be “just,” i.e., initiated to expand or defend the dar al-Islam, their authors were “willing to grant wide latitude to commanders in the determination of appropriate means” even though such latitude was not “total.” Modern jihadists have consistently expanded the parameters of what is considered permissible in this context, not only with respect to jus ad bellum, the right to go to war, but especially as regards jus in bello, i.e., proper conduct in war. For several relevant examples and citations, see Bale, “Jihadist Ideology and Strategy,” note 132. 48 Hartmut Krauss, “Islam in ‘Reinkultur’: Zur Antriebs- und Legitimationsgrundlage des ‘Islamischen Staates’ und seiner antizivilisatorischen Schreckensherrschaft,” Hintergrund-Verlag website, 29 August 2014, available at www.hintergrund-verlag.de/ texte-islam-hartmut-krauss-islam-in-reinkultur-zur-antriebs-und-legitimationsgrundlagedes-islamischen-staates.html. 49 For an example of the rationalist (but sadly not always non-dogmatic, non-sectarian, or non-authoritarian) tradition in Islam, which was often inspired by the importation and adaptation of Greek philosophical ideas, see D[aniel] Gimaret, “Mu‘tazila,” in Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), vol. 7, pp. 783–93; Albir [Albert] Nasri Nadir, Le système philosophique des Mu‘tazila: Premiers penseurs de l’Islam (Beirut: Lettres Orientales, 1956); Richard MacDonough Frank, Beings and Their Attributes: The Teaching of the Basrian School of the Mu‘tazila in the Classical Period (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1978); and Richard C. Martin, Mark R. Woodward, and Dwi S. Atmaja, Defenders of Reason in Islam: Mu‘tazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). Compare also Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011), especially Chapters 1–2. 50 For those documents and their political contexts, see Michael Lecker, The“Constitution of Medina”: Muhammad’s First Legal Document (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2004); and Mika Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence (New York: Cambridge University, 2011). See, more generally, L. Carl Brown, Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics (New York: Columbia University, 2001). Compare also the harsh criticisms by Muslim moderates of traditionalist, revivalist, or Islamist claims that Muslims are required to create a strict, puritanical Islamic state (whether in the form of a Caliphate or an Imamate), e.g., ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, Al-islam wa usul al-hukm: Bath fi alkhilafa wa al-hukuma fi al-islam [Islam and the Foundations of Political Power: Research on the Caliphate and Governance in Islam] (Beirut: Al-Hayat, 1966 [1925]); Tarek Fatah, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State (Mississauga, Ontario: Wiley & Sons, 2008), especially Chapters 6–8; Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na‘im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2010), Chapter 2; and Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven: Yale University, 2012), especially Chapter 2. 51 Tarek Fatah, “[Canadian PM Stephen] Harper Was Right: Islamism Is a Threat,” Toronto Sun, 9 September 2014, available at www.torontosun.com/2014/09/09/harper-wasright – islamism-is-a-threat. Compare also Amjad Khan, “Why Muslim ‘Not in My Name’ Campaigns Are Part of the Problem,” Left Foot Forward, 3 October 2014, available at http://leftfootforward.org/2014/10/why-muslim-not-in-my-name-campaigns-arepart-of-the-problem/: “Rather than offering . . . shallow condemnations [of the IS], we as Muslims need to stop being solely concerned with the image of Islam and Muslims and recognise that challenging jihadists and associated extremists proactively will do more to

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rehabilitate the image of Islam than shallow ‘not in my name’ statements. . . . The greatest threat to Islam and Muslims today is not the US, Israel or India but jihadism and only we can defeat it. The sooner we recognise that the better!” In contrast to the view of Fatah, Ednan Aslan argues that Islam really is a religion of peace, but that in order to make it so Muslims must challenge core aspects of Islamic theology. See his aforementioned interview in Die Presse with Baltaci, “Religionspädagoge Aslan: ‘Muslime benötigen Friedenskonzepte’”: “Islam is a religion of peace. It just has to seriously question its antiquated theory shaped by revenge, war, and violence and re-interpret it in relation to the reality of our modern life. If not, Muslims will remain slaves to a theology which is shaped by revenge, war, and violence. The consequences are fatal. Muslims risk losing their credibility all over Europe. . . . Muslims must forthrightly and critically confront their theology and/or teachings and develop new concepts of peace in place of the old war-and-revenge concepts. That is also true for the [Muslim] religious community. There is a gap between Islamic theology and the everyday lives of Muslims.” IS recruiter Abu Sattar begs to differ in his interview for Der Spiegel. In response to the question, “Do Muslims not constantly speak of Islam as a religion of peace?”, he retorted that peace “is when people submit to Allah.” See Kazim, “Interview with an Islamic State Recruiter.” Compare James Brandon (an analyst at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence [ICSR]), “By Denouncing ISIS as ‘Not Muslims,’ Moderate Muslims Risk Making Things Worse,” comments reposted on Left Foot Forward, 9 September 2014, available at http://leftfootforward.org/2014/09/by-denouncing-isisas-not-muslims-moderate-muslims-risk-making-things-worse/, who rightly argues that “[w]hen moderate Muslim groups use takfirism to tackle extremism, this dangerous and intrinsically intolerant doctrine is therefore not challenged but is instead reaffirmed. . . . A better approach is to accept that Islamist extremists, however distasteful their view of Islam, remain Muslims, however much other Muslims, and non-Muslims, might dislike their version of Islam.” (However, Brandon himself seems to believe – mistakenly – that certain Islamist groups in the West whose views he cited, such as CAIR, the MCB, and the MAB, are in fact “moderate.”) For an example of such an argument by a high-ranking state-supported ‘alim, see Patrick Goodenaugh, “ISIL, ISIS: Now QSIS?: Top Sunni Cleric Says Stop Calling Terrorists ‘Islamic,’” Cybercast News Service, 25 August 2014, wherein it is reported that Egyptian Grand Mufti and Sufi Shawki Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Karim ‘Allam, current head of the eminent Dar al-Ifta’ al-Misriyya in Cairo, recommends that the IS be referred to as al-Qa‘ida Separatists in Iraq and Syria or QSIS, available at www.cnsnews. com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/isil-isis-now-qsis-top-sunni-cleric-says-stopcalling-terrorists. Although such statements by non-Islamist Muslim religious authorities are certainly to be welcomed, however consistent with the views of Egypt’s current military rulers they may be, ‘Allam’s bizarre suggestion was designed above all to protect the image of Islam from being associated with IS atrocities, and it conveniently ignored the fact that Ayman al-Zawahiri publicly repudiated ISIS and appointed the Jabhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham (Support Front for the People of Greater Syria) as the al-Qa‘ida Central affiliate in the region. See Nelly Lahoud and Muhammad al-‘Ubaydi, “The War of Jihadists against Jihadists in Syria,” CTC [Combating Terrorism Center] Sentinel 7:3 (March 2014), pp. 1–6, available at www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ CTCSentinel-Vol7Iss3.pdf. Compare Enyo [pseudonym for a Greek university professor, diplomat, and intelligence officer who was supposedly stationed in several Muslim countries], Anatomie d’un désastre: L’Occident, l’islam et la guerre au XXIe siècle (Paris: Denoël, 2009), for the negative impact of persistent Western delusions about the motivations and goals of the Islamists. Therein he is particularly critical of the falsehoods promoted by so many self-styled “experts.” See, e.g., ibid., pp. 194, 216, 291–2. Bale, “Denying the Link between Islamist Ideology and Jihadist Terrorism.” On the last point, compare [Sam] Harris, “Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”: “Many believe it unwise to discuss the link between Islam and the intolerance and violence we

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see in the Muslim world, fearing that it will increase the perception that the West is at war with the faith and cause millions of otherwise peaceful Muslims to rally to the jihadist cause. I admit that this concern isn’t obviously crazy – but it merely attests to the seriousness of the underlying problem. Religion produces a perverse solidarity that we must find some way to undercut. It causes in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one’s own group are behaving like psychopaths.” For more on the persistence of an “us-versus-them” religio-tribal mentality throughout much of the Muslim world, see Lee Harris, The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (New York: Basic Books, 2007). 56 See, e.g., Robert Windrem, “Who’s Funding ISIS?: Wealthy Gulf ‘Angel Investors,’ Officials Say,” NBC News, 21 September 2014, available at www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ isis-terror/whos-funding-isis-wealthy-gulf-angel-investors-officials-say-n208006; and Josh Rogin, “America’s Allies Are Funding ISIS,” Daily Beast, 14 June 2014, available at www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/14/america-s-allies-are-funding-isis.html. In the former article, Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif rightly described the Muslim participants in the 15 September 2014 “anti-IS” Paris conference as a “coalition of repenters” who now realize that they helped create a monster. According to Zarif, “Most participants in that – in that meeting in one form or another provided support to ISIS in the course of its creation and upbringing and expansion, actually at the end of the day, creating a Frankenstein that came to haunt its creators. . . So this group has been in existence for a long time. It has been supported, it has been provided for in terms of arms, money, finances by a good number of U.S. allies in the region.” For more on this conference, which included representatives from ten Muslim governments (but not Iran), see John Lichfield, “Islamic State: Countries Meet in Paris to Discuss anti-ISIS Global Strategy,” The Independent [UK], 21 September 2014, available at www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/europe/islamic-state-countries-meet-in-paris-to-discuss-antiisis-globalstrategy-9732540.html.

9 AHMAD RASSAM AND THE DECEMBER 1999 “MILLENNIUM PLOT”

At around 6 pm on Tuesday, 14 December 1999, an Algerian national named Ahmad Rassam drove off of the docked M. V. Coho ferry that had just arrived from Victoria, British Columbia. As he was trying to pass through a United States border checkpoint in Port Angeles, Washington, his rented dark green Chrysler 300M with B.C. plates was stopped by U.S. Customs Inspector Diana Dean. When he grew agitated and began rummaging in the vehicle’s console in response to her simple, straightforward questions concerning his destination and purposes for visiting America, she became suspicious, asked him for his driver’s license, and gave him a customs declaration form to fill out to keep his hands busy. The license identified him as Benni Antoine Noris, a Canadian citizen from Montreal. As the man was slow to comply when she ordered him to turn off the engine, pop open the trunk, and step out of the car, Dean called for the assistance of nearby inspectors. After failing to communicate with Rassam in Spanish and also coming to the conclusion that his behavior was “hinky,” Inspector Mark Johnson took his arm and escorted him from the car over to a table so that he could search the pockets of his trench coat. Meanwhile, inspectors Dan Clem and Mike Chapman removed a suitcase from his trunk and unscrewed the covering over the spare tire. To their surprise, the wheel well was loaded with “ten plastic garbage bags filled with white crystals, two olive jars with amber liquid, black boxes, [and] two pill bottles.”1 Clem assumed these were ingredients for manufacturing illegal drugs and alerted Johnson, who grabbed Rassam by both shoulders and walked him over to the trunk. While Johnson was patting him down, Rassam suddenly slipped out of his oversized trench coat and began running through the streets of Port Angeles. After a four-block, more or less circular chase, the inspectors managed to catch and subdue him. Unbeknownst to any of them at the time, what had begun as a seemingly uneventful day had ended with their nabbing of a terrorist with links to both the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA: Armed Islamic Group) and al-Qa‘ida, a man

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who was planning to detonate an explosive device at Los Angeles airport (LAX). It turned out that the Tylenol bottle contained a powerful, military-grade explosive known as cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine or RDX, whereas the smaller zinc lozenge bottle contained hexamethylentriperoxodiamin or HMTD, an unstable explosive so dangerous that it is not manufactured commercially. The two olive jars each contained 50 ounces of ethylene glycol dinitrate or EGDN, a chemical similar to nitroglycerin that is also highly sensitive. The garbage bags contained 118 pounds of urea fertilizer and 14 pounds of sulfate powder which, when mixed properly with the other chemicals, would result in the manufacture of a very powerful bomb.2 This strange saga had in fact begun years earlier, in Algeria, where Rassam was born into a modest middle class family in 1967. His father, a chauffeur who had fought the French during the Algerian war of independence, had high hopes that his first-born son, a “lively child” and a “decent student,” would pass the tough qualifying examinations which would allow him to obtain a free university education and that would in turn provide him with a good middle class living.3 However, young Ahmad was so afflicted by stomach cramps that he was sent for medical treatment to France, where he was treated for a festering ulcer. His long convalescence forced him to repeat a year of high school, and he ended up failing his final examination in mathematics, which effectively prevented him going on to get a university education. He also failed to get a job as a policeman, further limiting his options. As Algeria’s economy precipitously declined, and radical Islamist movements arose preaching jihad, Rassam instead worked in his father’s café, drank wine, smoked hashish, wore Western clothes, flirted with girls at nightclubs, and dreamed of escaping to France or French-speaking Canada. On 5 September 1992, as violence escalated between the radicals in the Front Islamique de Salut (FIS: Islamic Salvation Front) and the socialist-oriented government and its military forces, Rassam took the bus to Algiers, from where he caught a ferry to Marseilles.4 After his thirty-day visa expired, he became an illegal immigrant, traveled to Corsica, and found work picking grapes and painting houses. Despite having obtained a fraudulent French passport, he was arrested in November 1993 and charged with immigration violations, then released on his own recognizance until his scheduled March 1994 trial date. Unwilling to risk deportation to Algeria, which had by then descended into outright civil war, he obtained another false passport in February and managed to secure an Air Canada flight to Montreal. Although he admitted under questioning by a Canadian immigration official that his passport was not genuine, he appealed for political asylum by falsely claiming to have been mistakenly arrested for selling firearms to a terrorist and then tortured by the Algerian police.5 He was then detained briefly, released on bond, and told to hire a lawyer for the upcoming 28 March hearing, the standard and absurdly lax Canadian policy vis-à-vis asylum seekers. Like hundreds of other cagey illegals whose claims were never confirmed, Rassam was released and allowed to collect monthly welfare checks. He soon found a room at a local YMCA, where he encountered a fellow Algerian. This individual then invited Rassam to move into his small, rather squalid apartment, where several other Algerian expatriates also lived. Meanwhile,

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Rassam failed to attend his scheduled hearing, was rejected for asylum, and was then rearrested, but he was simply given a new hearing date and released again. Rassam soon began regularly attending the Masjid [mosque] al-Salam in Montreal, initially for social reasons, since there he was able to make contact both with “struggling immigrants like himself and successful, confident Muslims who had woven their way into the fabric of French-Canadian culture.”6 During this period Rassam befriended a number of small-time criminals, as well as certain key activists linked to Islamist terrorist groups. Shortly thereafter, having been employed as a distributor of advertising leaflets for only a single week, he embarked on an extended career as a petty thief. In the course of engaging in these illegal activities, which involved around forty incidents of shoplifting, pickpocketing, stealing the luggage of tourists, or taking traveler’s checks, passports, and credit cards and then selling them, he was arrested four times, fined a few times, and even convicted once, but was invariably released instead of being deported.7 Alas, such activities were far from atypical in the Algerian immigrant community within which he found refuge. The key question was whether particular disaffected individuals were engaged in criminal activities of this sort primarily for personal gain, or whether they carried them out consciously in support of radical political agendas. In fact, Rassam’s life was about to change course. In late 1994 and early 1995 he increasingly socialized with certain influential members of jihadist cells linked to al-Qa‘ida. Two of these individuals were particularly important. First, among the persons to whom Rassam sold stolen passport and identity cards in exchange for money was Fatah Kamal, an Algerian veteran of the Afghan and Bosnian jihads who has been described as the “operational chief ” of the al-Qa‘ida network in Europe and North America.8 Kamal was born in Algiers in March 1960, but traveled to Canada in 1987 or 1988, where some friends of his already lived, in order to pursue business opportunities. However, in 1990 he returned to Algeria to join the armed Islamist resistance movement, which was then waging a guerrilla war against the ruling military regime. In the course of fighting in the ranks of this movement Kamal met many “Afghan Arabs,” i.e., Algerians who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and later returned, radicalized and battle hardened, with the aim of overthrowing the government and establishing a puritanical Islamic state in their home country. He himself was then sent to al-Qa‘ida training camps in the Hindu Kush, where his intelligence, courage, and Canadian citizenship attracted the favorable attention of both operations chief Abu Zubayda and military committee head Muhammad ‘Atif al-Masri, who ensured that he was rapidly promoted. In 1993 Kamal was sent to join the international Katiba al-Mujahidin (Mujahidin Brigade) in Zenica, Bosnia, where he operated under the orders of Anwar Sha‘ban, a senior member of the Egyptian terrorist group al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya, and ‘Abd al-Qadir Mukhtari (alias Abu al-Ma’ali), an Algerian “Afghan Arab” and militant in the GIA. Although Kamal was anxious to engage in combat, Mukhtari recognized his talents and appointed him as the logistical officer of the unit, in which capacity he was responsible for organizing an external support apparatus to funnel false documents, money, weapons, and recruits into the group’s ranks.9

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In order to accomplish this important mission, Kamal was not based permanently in Bosnia but instead regularly traveled back and forth to places such as Zagreb, Montreal, Paris, Milan, Ancona, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Freiburg, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Istanbul, as well as to locales in Austria, Belgium, Slovenia, and Morocco. Indeed, a French judicial investigation revealed that Kamal had “multiple links” to “diverse Islamic terrorist organizations around the world, and particularly in Bosnia, in Pakistan, in Germany, and in London.”10 Among the many components of Usama b. Ladin’s jihadist international that he was connected to were the Istituto Culturale Islamico (Islamic Cultural Institute) on Viale Jenner in Milan, a hotbed of Islamist activism and subversion, and the violent “Roubaix gang” in France, which was composed primarily of mujahidin who had fought in Bosnia and led by Christopne Caze, a French medical student who had converted there to a radical version of Islam.11 In the mid-1990s, Kamal returned to Montreal. With the help of a Moroccan named Muhammad ‘Umari, he created an elaborate “humanitarian” support network called Save Bosnia Now, bought a small craft shop on St. Laurent Boulevard in the center of Montreal, Artisanat Nord-Sud, and became the co-partner of an export-import firm known as the Société Mandingo. Under the cover of these seemingly innocuous front organizations, Kamal built up an international network of “aid workers” and “business associates” who were actively engaged in the trafficking of arms, documents, and jihadist fighters to Bosnia and other hotspots. Although he frequently left Canada and traveled abroad in order to manage these far-flung organizing activities, Kamal arranged for several jihadist “brothers” who were on the run, such as Labsi Mustafa and La‘ifa Khabu, to take refuge in Canada and stay for a time in an apartment at 6301 Place de la Malicorne, where Rassam, ‘Adl Abu Mazbur, and Kamal’s assistant Sa‘id Atmani (alias Karim) by then all resided. Following Kamal’s arrest by the Jordanian authorities on 8 April 1999, after which he was interrogated and extradited to France, his Canadian cell and its activities were taken over and run by his lieutenants Murad Ikhlaf, who had carried out a deadly bombing at the Algiers airport in 1992, and Mukhtar Hawari, another well-integrated Algerian who subsequently purchased the Artisanat NordSud firm from Kamal’s wife. After doing so, Hawari used the company as a means of obtaining genuine identification card and credit card numbers that he then made use of to forge fraudulent cards.12 Rassam was one of the thieves who sold stolen credit and identification cards such as driver’s licenses to Hawari.13 As for Kamal, after being sentenced to ten years in prison on 6 April 2001 by a Parisian court, he was released early for good behavior and thence made his way back to Canada on 29 January 2005.14 The second key figure who Rassam encountered in Montreal was ‘Abd al-Ra‘uf Hannashi, an al-Qa‘ida recruiter in his mid-forties and “jolly uncle” figure who openly expressed his hatred for the West and frequently regaled select congregants at the al-Sunna al-Nabawiyya mosque about the training he had received in Bin Ladin’s camps in Afghanistan, where he had learned how to fire assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, manufacture explosives, and wage urban

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guerrilla warfare.15 Like Kamal, Hannashi was a man who was well respected in the local Muslim community, which gave him a certain cachet amongst alienated individuals like Rassam. As a result, the latter and his roommates became increasingly obsessed with traveling to Afghanistan for training and waging jihad themselves. Unbeknownst to them, their apartment had by then been placed under surveillance by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), which had received a warning from both French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière and the Italian secret services about the dangers posed by Kamal and his Montreal associates. Even so, the CSIS officers involved were so contemptuous of the group’s potential for mayhem that they referred to its members derisively as the “Bunch of Guys” (or “BOG.”) rather than as jihadist cell members. Of all the members of the group, they considered Rassam to be the least likely to cause serious trouble. During the summer and early fall of 1997, after having been inspired by Hannashi and other friends who had recently returned from Afghanistan, Rassam became increasingly interested in traveling there to receive training. Ostensibly, his original goal in obtaining such training was so that he would become capable of returning home and waging jihad in Algeria itself.16 However that may be, he flew from Toronto via Frankfurt, Germany to Karachi on 17 March 1998, with the assistance of Hannashi, who had arranged the details and functioned as an intermediary between Rassam and Abu Zubayda. The Algerian met next in Islamabad or Peshawar with Abu Zubayda, who was in charge of the training program along with his deputy Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, and it was decided that Rassam should receive training at al-Qa‘ida’s Khaldan camp near Khost. After being provided with a letter, an Afghan guide, and Afghan clothes, Rassam was driven in an automobile to the Afghan frontier. He crossed the Khyber Pass with a group of Afghans to Jalalabad, then traveled on to the Khaldan camp, where he arrived at the end of April 1994. Together with a contingent of thirty other Algerians headed by someone named al-Mu‘taz – who were organized into cells according to their intended regions of operation – he received training in light weapons, handguns, small and large machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs), how to make charges and explosives (specifically TNT, C4, and “black plastic”), sabotage operations, urban guerrilla warfare, assassinations, and security measures. He was also taught covert tradecraft techniques that would enable him to approach and enter prospective targets and carry out bombings without calling attention to himself. Rassam finished his basic training at the Khaldan camp in September 1998, and with the blessings of Ibn Shaykh al-Libi he was then sent first to a Kurdish camp for two weeks to receive pistol training and then on to another camp called Darunta to receive further training in the manufacture of explosives. There, under the direction of Abu Sulayman, he spent about a month and a half learning how to mix chemical substances together and how to build detonators and electronic circuits for bombs.17 The question of critical infrastructure is directly alluded to in this context by Rassam, who defined “sabotage training” as “how to blow up the infrastructure of a country” and included targets such as the enemy’s “installations, special installations and military installations. . . . such as electric plants, gas plants, airports,

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railroads, large corporations, gas, gas installations. . . . [and] hotels where conferences are held.” Urban guerrilla warfare referred to “how to carry out operations in cities, how to block roads, how to assault buildings, and the strategies used in these operations.”18 In another deposition, he added a few more interesting details. For example, he admitted that at the Khaldan camp he had received training “in theory” about where to place explosives in the best manner to destroy tanks, military bases, “a place where there are airplanes,” and possibly automobiles and infrastructural facilities such as “a power facility.”19 Moreover, he indicated that the trainees were taught how to examine and evaluate targets in order to determine whether or not they were suitable for attack. This depended above all on whether they constituted “military bases and sensitive areas that are crucial” to the enemy, specifically “anything that relates to the economy and anything related to the military things.”20 Rassam himself considered airports to be economic targets, but claimed he could not recall whether targeting airports was actually discussed at the camps. He also said he could not remember if businesses owned by Jews were identified as especially valuable targets, or hear anything in the camps about plans to attack the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or the Capitol building in Washington, DC.21 Later, at the Darunta camp where Rassam received advanced training, one of the schemes discussed was the releasing of cyanide gas into the air intake vents of a building, such as a government office, in order to kill large numbers of people inside without endangering themselves or being detected. However, they did not actually practice carrying out such an operation.22 During his sojourn in Afghanistan, Rassam and four other Algerian “brothers” discussed possible future operations, including returning to Canada and carrying out a series of bank robberies to obtain the funding to launch an attack inside America, ideally before the end of 1999. The members of this prospective Canadian jihadist cell were four “Afghan Arabs” – Rassam himself (alias “Nabil”), Mustafa Labsi, Fuda’il, and Abu Ahmad – and Atmani, a former mujahid in Bosnia. Afterward, they hoped to be able to escape from the U.S. and make their way back to Algeria. Among the potential targets they discussed striking were airports and consulates.23 In early November 1998, after completing their training, they arranged to travel individually and then meet up in Canada, but in the end two of the principal cell members were unable to make it through customs in Britain and were therefore not able to reach Canada. Worse still, in October 1998 Atmani was arrested in Niagara Falls in possession of stolen credit cards, and was thereafter deported first to Bosnia and then to France, where he was wanted in connection with the crimes committed by the Roubaix gang. Since the members of this particular cell had originally planned to make their final targeting and operational decisions collectively after they had reconvened in Montreal, in the end Rassam was left to his own devices and forced to plan the North American operation himself.24 In early February 1999 Rassam met one final time in Pakistan with Abu Zubayda, who arranged for his flight home and asked him to acquire Canadian passports for the use of other mujahidin when he got there. Al-Mu‘taz, the ‘amir based in Jalalabad who oversaw training at the Khaldan camp, had previously provided Rassam

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with 12,000 Canadian dollars, two chemical substances to make explosives (hexamine and glycol), and a notebook with instructions on how to manufacture those explosives.25 Rassam then flew back on Asiana Airlines via Seoul, South Korea, and Los Angeles airport to Vancouver, where he stayed with a friend named ‘Abd al-Majid Dahoumane [al-Hawmani?] before returning to Montreal and finding a succession of new apartments, the first on Sherbrooke Avenue and another on Rue du Fort. He claimed that he had not been given any specific instructions about what targets to attack by higher-ups, and at that time had still not developed a concrete plan for a terrorist strike.26 Between February and December 1999, Rassam involved himself in making preparations to carry out a terrorist attack on American soil.27 He endeavored to acquire passable false documents, identify places where he could obtain chemical materials, and procure weapons for the other cell members that he still expected to arrive. However, in the early summer he phoned both Labsi and the cell’s al-Qa‘ida liaison Abu Duha (alias “Dr. Haydar”) in London, at which point he learned that Labsi and Fuda’il had both failed to make it through customs and would therefore be remaining in Britain. Realizing that he was now on his own, in August 1999 he made a decision to attack the Los Angeles airport (LAX), both because he had stopped over there and scouted the premises on his return flight from Pakistan and because he considered it to be “sensitive politically and economically.”28 He thence bought a French-language tourist guide to North America along with a map, on which he circled three separate Los Angeles-area airports as potential targets even though he only intended to attack one of them. His plan was extremely simple: he would do a test run at LAX by placing a normal unattended bag on a luggage cart and then observing how long it took security officials to notice and examine it. If the time lag was sufficient, he would return later and surreptitiously place a bag laden with explosives on a similar cart, walk away, and arrange it so that the bomb would detonate after he had left the terminal. Two other “brothers” provided him with operational advice in connection with his projected future terrorist attack. Samir ‘Ait Muhammad, a close friend who wanted to establish his own training camp in Afghanistan, recommended that Rassam carry out an attack in the affluent Jewish Montreal suburb Outremont, specifically by placing a bomb inside a gasoline truck so as to cause a larger and deadlier explosion. Rassam’s roommate Ikhlaf, the Algiers airport bomber, instead provided him with advice on his planned bombing of LAX. Rassam was considering using a secondary explosion to kill rescue workers as they responded to the initial blast. However, Ikhlaf counseled him to wear a disguise, use one large explosive device instead of two (since the more devices used, the more likely they were to be discovered), place it near a crowded security checkpoint to maximize casualties, and set the timer of the device so that it would detonate thirty minutes after it was positioned there.29 Nevertheless, Rassam later implausibly claimed that had the LAX operation not been interdicted he would have tried to avoid causing unnecessary civilian deaths.30 During that same summer of 1999 Rassam re-established contact with his friend Mukhtar Hawari, in part because, as an illegal subject to deportation, he needed

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to obtain a bogus Canadian visa card. It turned out that Hawari himself was an advocate of jihad in places like Chechnya, praised the terrorist bomb attacks carried out in France and against the U.S. embassies in Africa, expressed a personal desire to travel to Afghan camps for training, and allegedly took an interest in Rassam’s plans to carry out an action in America. Therefore, he not only agreed to let the younger man claim that he was working at the Artisanat Nord-Sud store (so he would have a good pretext to apply for a visa under a phony name), but even filled out the visa application for him. Subsequently, in late October, Hawari, Samir ‘Ait Muhammad, and another “brother” named Sa‘id Harrar asked Rassam to open a new store for them under his fake Benni Noris visa name, so that they would be able to utilize this business to collect credit and ATM card information, a scheme that Rassam agreed to in exchange for payment. He was already aware that Hawari manufactured counterfeit documents in his Sherbrooke home, and had actually seen him mail the completed false documents overseas to the United States and other countries.31 In early November 1999, Rassam told Hawari that he had to carry out some “very important and dangerous business” in America and asked the latter to manufacture both a fake driver’s license and a bogus Algerian passport for him.32 He also asked if he could cash in his interest in their newly opened Marche Benni store so that he could obtain some ready money. Hawari agreed to both requests, and shortly thereafter provided Rassam with a driver’s license in the name of Mario Roig along with 3,000 Canadian dollars. During this same time period, Hawari indicated that he had a friend named ‘Abd al-Ghani Maskini who knew English well, lived in Brooklyn in the United States, loved American beer and Hollywood movies, had been involved in cons and bank fraud, wanted to travel to Afghanistan to train for jihad, and was willing to help Rassam carry out his mission. Rassam agreed to contact the man, took his contact information, and phoned him solely because his friend Hawari had vouched for him, and indicated that if he proved helpful there would be no problem arranging for his travel to Afghanistan. Indeed, soon after Rassam contacted his al-Qa‘ida liaisons Abu Ja‘afar and Abu Duha to inform them of his plans and obtain visas for both Maskini and Dahoumane, with the result that Mustafa sent him two blank visas from London, which he in turn passed on to Hawari so that forged stamps could be prepared for them. Rassam’s tentative plan was to meet up with Maskini after he entered the United States. Even before he flew from Montreal to Vancouver on 17 November 1999, Rassam had purchased electronic components that he used to make circuits and four timing devices. He stayed in Vancouver for two weeks, during which time he and Dahoumane collected chemical materials from garden stores, including two fertilizers used in agriculture known as urea and aluminum sulfate, and both nitric and sulfuric acid, which they stole from companies that manufactured agricultural fertilizers.33 They then rented a room at the Motel 2400, where they began preparing the explosives. Rassam paid for the chemicals, motel, plane tickets, and auto rental with the money that both al-Mu‘taz and Hawari had given him. When he returned to Montreal for the last time, he asked Hawari to send his proceeds from the store to

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his comrades in Britain, and advised him and Samir to lie and deny having known who he was if the police later questioned them. He then left Montreal for good and flew back to Vancouver on 6 or 7 December, after which he and Dahoumane spent the following week completing the manufacture of the explosives before placing them in garbage bags or other containers and stuffing them into the wheel well of the trunk of Rassam’s rental car. On 14 December, the two men drove from Vancouver to Victoria to catch an auto ferry to Port Angeles. In Victoria Rassam bought a ticket for the ferry, reserved a hotel room in Seattle, and bought Dahoumane – for whom he had already rented a motel room back in Vancouver and a plane flight to Montreal – a bus ticket for the return trip to Vancouver.34 As described in the beginning of this chapter, when Rassam arrived in Port Angeles later that day, he panicked at the checkpoint and was arrested. Had he not been arrested, Rassam’s plan was to meet up with Maskini in Seattle, have him help transfer the explosives to some suitcases, return the rental car, and then take the train separately to Los Angeles. It was a long distance from Washington state to southern California, and Rassam was concerned that the explosives-laden trunks might be dangerously sensitive to shock, impact, or sudden motion. When he arrived in LA, he intended to make contact again with Maskini, get a hotel room, go with his new friend to get a rental car (using his fake name), and then head to the airport to follow through on his simple but potentially devastating plan. After carrying out the bombing, he hoped to make his way back to Montreal, say goodbye to his friends, pick up the Algerian passport that Hawari had made for him, and then fly on to Europe and Algeria.35 In the end, however, Rassam was arrested as he tried to enter the United States. In April 2001, he was convicted in a Los Angeles courtroom on nine criminal counts, including conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism. Facing a sentence of between fifty-seven and 130 years in prison, he was ready to listen when Department of Justice officials offered him a deal to reduce his sentence: in exchange for testifying against his friend Hawari and revealing everything he knew about al-Qa‘ida’s plots, training, and tactics, they offered to cut his minimum sentence in half, to twenty-seven years. On 10 May 2001, the first of dozens of interviews with Rassam was conducted, in the course of which most of the details enumerated in this article emerged.36 In the end, even though he endeavored to conceal the identities and activities of some of his associates despite his agreement to reveal everything, and from 2003 on became increasingly uncooperative, on 27 July 2005 Rassam was given only a twenty-two-year sentence by a Seattle judge instead of the thirty-five-year sentence that the prosecutors asked for. Since the judge’s leniency meant that Rassam might be released after spending only fourteen years in jail (for time already served and good behavior), on 26 August 2005, the U.S. government decided to appeal that sentence.37 The reasons why this particular case is relevant to any evaluation of al-Qa‘ida’s possible interests in targeting critical infrastructure are twofold. First, elements within the Algerian expatriate circles with which Rassam was associated were undoubtedly linked to al-Qa‘ida. Not only had several of them received training in Bin Ladin’s

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Afghan camps, but their recruiters or handlers were key al-Qa‘ida operations and logistics officers, such as Hannashi and Kamal. Rassam himself met personally in Pakistan with Abu Zubayda, a very senior operational leader of al-Qa‘ida, and was thereafter in semi-regular contact with two key al-Qa‘ida liaison officers, Abu Ja‘afar in Pakistan and Abu Duha in London, from whom he periodically received assistance. Indeed, according to a formerly classified and now infamous intelligence memo concerning al-Qa‘ida’s intentions, entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” which was made available to President George W. Bush and his national security team on 6 August 2001, Rassam admitted both that Abu Zubayda had “encouraged him” to carry out an attack on American soil and “helped facilitate” it, and that Bin Ladin himself was “aware of the Los Angeles operation.”38 Second, as Rassam himself also acknowledged, he had received advanced training in manufacturing explosives at certain Afghan camps, training which was specifically designed to help him attack targets that fall into the infrastructural category. Indeed, Rassam’s statement that he was trained “how to blow up the infrastructure of a country” suggests that at least some portions of that training were specifically geared toward attacking infrastructure qua infrastructure. However, that particular statement should probably not be interpreted too literally. As has been argued elsewhere, assaults on certain types of infrastructural targets enabled al-Qa‘ida to achieve a multiplicity of operational objectives, including killing large numbers of people, exerting a profound psychological impact on hostile and friendly target audiences, striking famous symbolic targets, and physically damaging important buildings and facilities. Yet ironically, disrupting infrastructure in the narrow sense of that term seems not to have loomed particularly high in their considerations. That was seemingly true in this case as well. Among the indications of this were that Rassam and his “brothers” debated attacking a number of targets that did not fall into the category of critical infrastructure, e.g., Jewish neighborhoods in Montreal. Moreover, even when they considered attacking targets that could technically be construed as critical infrastructure, such as the Bureau of Exchange in Montreal, LAX, and government buildings such as an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, their main objectives were not in fact to disrupt the functioning of those facilities.39 For example, in the case of the Bureau of Exchange, the scheme was hatched as a possible means of stealing money that could thence be used to finance other jihadist operations, and both the planned bomb attack on LAX and the hypothetical plans to attack government buildings, including with cyanide, were viewed as good ways to kill large numbers of “infidel” enemies.40

Notes 1 The details in the first two paragraphs are drawn from Paula Bock, “An Otherwise Ordinary Day,” Pacific Northwest, a magazine inserted into the Seattle Times, 25 November 2001, available at www.seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2001/1125/html; supplemented by Hal Bernton et al., “The Terrorist Within,” Chapter 12, Seattle Times, July 2002, available at www.seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/nation-world/terroristwithin/chapter12.html.

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2 For more on these materials, compare Rassam’s own testimony in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, United States v. Mokhtar Haouari [Mukhtar Hawari], S4 00 Cr. 15 (JFK) [hereafter U.S. v. Haouari], 29 June 2001, pp. 575–7. 3 See Bernton et al., “Terrorist Within,” Seattle Times, Chapter 2, June 2002, for the details in this paragraph. 4 For the details in this paragraph, see ibid., Chapters 3–4, 6; Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, pp. 536–8. For political developments in Algeria during this and subsequent periods, see Martin Stone, The Agony of Algeria (New York: Columbia University, 1997); Michael Willis, The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (New York: New York University, 1996); and Hugh Roberts, The Battlefield Algeria, 1988–2002: Studies of a Broken Polity (London and New York: Verso, 2003). 5 Note, however, that both the French internal security agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST: Directorate of Territorial Surveillance), and a French investigative journalist reported that Rassam really was involved in selling arms to Islamist guerrillas in 1992, and the latter added that he was then imprisoned for thirteen months at a prison in Blida before being released. Compare Cour d’Appel de Paris, Tribunal de Grand Instance de Paris, Requisitoire definitif contre Salah Achour + 27, P96 263 390LZ, undated [hereafter Requisitoire], p. 142; and Ali Laïdi, Le jihad en Europe: Les filières du terrorisme islamiste (Paris: Seuil, 2002), pp. 231–2. However, Laïdi also claims that Rassam later traveled to Barcelona, where he was put up by jihadist “brothers,” before moving on to Paris, an itinerary that has not been confirmed by other sources. 6 Bernton et al., “Terrorist Within,” Chapter 6. 7 Ibid.; Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, p. 538, 631–6, 639. 8 Laïdi, Jihad en Europe, p. 225. 9 Ibid., pp. 225–8. 10 Requisitoire, p. 126. 11 For the Milan cultural center, see Lorenzo Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005), pp. 217–33; Guido Olimpio, La rete del terrore: Come nascono e agiscono i militanti delle Guerre Sante (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2002), pp. 87–97; and Magdi Allam, Bin Ladin in Italia:Viaggio nell’islam radicale (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), pp. 62–72. For the Roubaix gang, see Hassane Zerrouky, La nébuleuse islamiste en France et en Algérie: Enquête (Paris: Editions 1, 2002), pp. 218–20; and Evan F. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), pp. 188–97. 12 Laïdi, Jihad en Europe, pp. 231–2. For the case against Hawari, see U.S. v. Haouari, passim. 13 Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, pp. 539–41. 14 Stewart Bell, Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism around the World (Mississauga, ON: Wiley & Sons Canada, 2005), p. 159. 15 For the information in this paragraph, see Bernton et al., “Terrorist Within,” Chapter 7. 16 Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, pp. 545–55. Compare also his 17 December 2002 testimony in United States District Court, Western District of Washington at Seattle, In Re: Letter Rogatory from Germany to the United States Dated October 2, 2002, pp. 17–19, 113. The latter deposition is focused primarily on the training that Rassam received in Afghanistan and his operational objectives following his return. 17 Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, pp. 554–5. It was also there that he witnessed the release of a chemical agent, which he identified as cyanide, which resulted in the death of a dog. See ibid., pp. 620–6. 18 Ibid., pp. 549–51. 19 Rassam testimony, 2 October 2002, Letter Rogatory, pp. 39–40. 20 Ibid., pp. 45–6. 21 Ibid., pp. 47, 111–2. 22 Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, p. 624. 23 Ibid., pp. 555–61. 24 For these details, see Rassam testimony, Letter Rogatory, pp. 87–90, 92–4.

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25 For the materials provided to Rassam by al-Mu‘taz, see ibid., pp. 73–4, 114–5; and Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, pp. 559–60. 26 Rassam testimony, Letter Rogatory, pp. 81–2. Note that these claims have been contested by the U.S. government, which charges Abu Duha, a senior al-Qa‘ida operative who handled networks of Algerian jihadists, with having discussed an attack on an American “airport or other large facility” with Rassam in mid-1998, at the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan, as well as with having conspired to provide logistical and material support for the Canadian cell. See United States District Court, Southern District of New York, United States v. Abu Doha, Indictment, 01 Cr., undated, p. 3. For more on Abu Duha, see Laïdi, Jihad en Europe, p. 234, where he is identified as a key logistical operative in al-Qa‘ida’s Europe network, one of whose tasks was facilitating the transfer of Algerian mujahidin to and from Afghan training camps and battle zones such as Chechnya. 27 See Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, pp. 570–4; and Bernton et al., “Terrorist Within,” Chapter 10, for his preparations and planning. 28 Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, p. 572. 29 Ibid., pp. 647–54; Bernton et al., “Terrorist Within,” Chapter 10. In his testimony, Rassam also revealed that Ikhlaf – who he did not actually name – had provided him with other logistical assistance and operational advice. 30 Ibid., pp. 626–9. 31 Ibid., pp. 561–6, 589–91, 636–42. 32 For the information in this paragraph, see ibid., pp. 577–84, 591, 594–7. 33 Ibid., pp. 574–7, 591–3, 658; Bernton et al., “Terrorist Within,” Chapter 11. 34 Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, pp. 593–4, 600–6. 35 Ibid., pp. 606–8. 36 Bernton et al., “Terrorist Within,” Chapter 16. 37 Gene Johnson, “Would-Be Millenium Bomber Gets 22 Years,” Associated Press, July 27, 2005; and Mike Carter, “US Seeks Longer Sentence for Ahmed Ressam Millennium Bomb Plot Terrorist,” Seattle Times, 26 August 2005. 38 “Transcript: Bin Ladin determined to strike in US,” CNN, 10 April 2004. This memo later became a subject of political controversy, since it revealed that the Bush team’s post9/11 claims not to have received any warnings about al-Qa‘ida’s intentions of carrying out attacks on American soil were not, strictly speaking, true. Apparently, the reason why Bin Ladin knew about the North American Algerian cell’s plans was because in the summer of 1998 Abu Duha visited the al-Qa‘ida leader in Qandahar and personally informed him. See Bernton et al., “Terrorist Within,” Chapter 8. 39 Schemes to attack an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, are mentioned in Bernton et al, “Terrorist Within,” Chapter 16. 40 Rassam testimony, U.S. v. Haouari, pp. 624, 648–50. Note that the cyanide attack scheme directly conflicts with Rassam’s claims to have intended to avoid causing unnecessary casualties by, e.g., attacking a government building at night. See ibid., pp. 626–7.

10 SOME PROBLEMS WITH THE NOTION OF A “NEXUS” BETWEEN TERRORISTS AND CRIMINALS1

“On the whole, it would appear that it is not prudent to lump organized crime groups and terrorist groups together. There are linkages, yes, but there are also important motivational and operational differences between terrorist groups and organized crime groups.”2 Alex P. Schmid “Most transnational criminal or trafficking organizations and terrorist networks have little or no contact with one another, do not share common interests, and are not part of a process of threat convergence.”3 Phil Williams “There are no known examples of a terrorist group integrating into a criminal entity. . . . ”4 Tamara Makarenko “Contrary to what is commonly said, money is not the oxygen or lifeblood of terror[ism]. Such slogans suggest that once money is ‘taken away’ from terrorists, terrorism will stop. ‘Money warriors’ have the causality wrong: terror[ism] does not exist because there is money; rather, money appears where there is support for terror[ism].”5 Ibrahim Warde

In recent years there has been a growing amount of concern about the often alarming allegations of collaboration between terrorist groups, on the one hand, and criminal organizations, on the other. Indeed, two of the new buzzwords that are now being embraced, if not insistently hyped, by certain government officials and analysts, as well as by some academicians, are those of a “nexus” or “threat convergence,” in particular that between terrorists and criminals.6 The fear is that by

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collaborating symbiotically with one another, terrorists and criminals may both be able to facilitate their ability to operate clandestinely, avoid detection, and finance themselves, mutually augment their skill sets by learning from one another, and possibly even combine their forces in order to carry out joint operational activities, perhaps including increasingly dangerous and destructive acts of violence.7 Many observers are concerned that this type of symbiotic collaboration could end up functioning as a kind of “force multiplier” for both types of organizations, one that could qualitatively increase their danger to the security of the United States and its allies. Indeed, some have argued that this is already occurring. The purpose of this short chapter is neither to argue that terrorists and criminals never interact or collaborate – quite the contrary – nor that such collaboration does not pose potential or actual dangers when it does occur, but rather to highlight various problems with the more exaggerated and alarmist theories concerning this so-called “nexus” between terrorists and criminals. As will soon become clear, these problems are multidimensional inasmuch as they are simultaneously definitional and conceptual, marked by ahistoricism, and evidentiary in nature, as well as often being reflective of self-serving state propaganda, vested bureaucratic interests, and other types of partisan biases. Unfortunately, to the extent that claims about terroristcriminal nexuses are distorted and overwrought, they only serve to obfuscate the complex, fluid, dynamic, and manipulative nature of the real-world interactions between these two types of milieus, and in the process to mislead military and law enforcement personnel whose job is to confront and cope with the threats emanating from those milieus.

Definitional and conceptual problems: confused terminology The first problem stems from the imprecise or inaccurate use of the term “nexus” itself. Properly speaking, according to the online Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, that term refers to “a complicated series of connections between different things.”8 In this particular context, it refers to the multifaceted interactions and connections, real or imagined, between two disparate types of actors: “terrorist groups,” on the one hand, and criminal organizations, on the other. Yet even though one might agree that “the nexus is not only about cooperation between two independent groups. . . . [but] simultaneously about cooperation, organizational learning (i.e., the adoption of the tactics of the ‘other’) and [any] motivational transformation” resulting from their interaction,9 the term cannot be used to refer to other important and interesting phenomena involving only one type of group that have at times been mistakenly associated with the notion of a terrorist-criminal “nexus,” such as the all too common reliance of terrorist groups on various types of criminal activities (usually in order to help finance themselves), the frequent use by mercenary criminal organizations of terrorist operational techniques, the alleged transformation of self-righteous political or

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religious extremist groups into purely materialistic criminal groups (which almost never occurs in the real world, contrary to the claims of some analysts), or the occasional adoption by originally criminal organizations of extremist political or religious ideologies.10 Nor is the term applicable to “the integration of one group into the other,” as Tamara Makarenko argues, which would constitute a complete convergence, a merger, or a fusion between the two previously disparate groups, not a nexus, symbiotic or otherwise (even if the process had begun as a nexus in the form of collaboration which thence led to an alliance and eventual merger between those groups).11 This confusion in turn gives rise to a second major conceptual problem – the framing of the nexus in question as one involving “terrorists” and “criminals.” The reason why this is so problematic has to do with the nature of terrorism itself, a phenomenon that is all too often misunderstood and mischaracterized. Hence the first desideratum must be to draw a clear analytical distinction between “terrorism” in the strict sense of the term and other types of violence, a distinction that unfortunately needs to be made at the outset precisely because most definitions of terrorism are problematic if not entirely misleading.12 Without spending too much time on contentious definitional questions, it can be said that the best way to distinguish between terrorism and other forms of violence is to recognize that most acts of violence are dyadic, i.e., they involve only two parties or protagonists – the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s): Perpetrator(s) → Victim(s) In marked contrast, bona fide acts of terrorism are necessarily triadic, i.e., they involve three parties or protagonists – the perpetrator(s), the victim(s), and a wider target audience (or audiences): Perpetrator(s) → Victim(s) → Wider Target Audience(s) In short, terrorism is violence that is consciously carried out by the perpetrator(s) in order to influence the attitudes and behaviors of a wider target audience (or multiple target audiences). It is, as Brian Jenkins and others have aptly pointed out, violence for psychological effect.13 Indeed, one of the many perverse ironies of terrorism is that, although the actual victims suffer its effects disproportionately and in the most direct and brutal manner, their importance is strictly secondary and derives principally from the fact that they have been specifically selected because they are viewed as symbolizing something larger or representing a broader category of persons. To put it another way, the most important nexus in any genuine act of terrorism is between the perpetrators and the target audience(s) they are trying to influence. It follows from this that targeted assassinations of particular individuals for purely instrumental reasons (e.g., murders of particularly effective or brutal policemen)

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or attacks that are solely designed to kill large numbers of people (e.g., massacres) are not, strictly speaking, acts of terrorism. They would only constitute acts of terrorism if their primary purpose was to traumatize and influence the behavior of wider target audiences, not just of the surviving victims. In many real-world cases, of course, attacks are carried out for both instrumental and psychological reasons, but the latter would have to predominate in the eyes of the perpetrators if such attacks are to be regarded, strictly speaking, as terrorism. Hence violent acts that inadvertently end up traumatizing people other than the actual victim(s), e.g., a series of rapes in a particular neighborhood, should not be characterized as acts of terrorism. Thus terrorism is nothing more than a violent technique of psychological manipulation, and like other techniques it can be used by anyone, whatever their ideological orientation or relationship to the state. It can be – and indeed often has been – employed by the state or on behalf of state power as well as in opposition to state power; by left-wingers, right-wingers, or centrists; by the irreligious or the religious; by the law-abiding or avaricious criminals; by non-ideological individuals motivated by idiosyncratic personal considerations; and for an infinite variety of potential causes. One man’s terrorist is therefore not another man’s freedom fighter, as many foolishly claim, a phrase which not only confuses means with ends but also falsely suggests that terrorism is not an objectively recognizable phenomenon, but rather one that is entirely subjective or purely in the eyes of the beholder, like beauty. On the contrary, one man’s terrorist should invariably also be another man’s terrorist, since regardless of the underlying cause involved – or whether one sympathizes with or deplores that cause – a terrorist can be identified purely by the methods he or she chooses to employ. It follows that terrorism, as an operational technique, is no more intrinsically immoral than other forms of violence or violent techniques (e.g., outflanking maneuvers), since it can be employed on behalf of causes that could be variously characterized, depending upon one’s perspective, as “moral,” “amoral,” or “immoral.”14 Indeed, in the real world terrorist methods are often used by counterterrorist forces against their terrorist opponents, just as counterinsurgency forces often emulate the operational techniques used by the insurgents they are fighting.15 In any case, only those organized groups that rely primarily on terrorist techniques can legitimately be described as terrorist groups. Given this clarification, the reason why it is so problematic to speak of a nexus between terrorists and criminals should be immediately apparent – because criminal organizations, i.e., organizations that engage regularly in illicit and criminal activities in pursuit of essentially mercenary motives, often employ terrorist techniques, meaning that they carry out acts of violence against symbolic or representative victims that are specifically intended to traumatize or manipulate the behavior of wider audiences. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to point to the potentially contrasting behavior of criminal thugs who decide to beat up an individual storekeeper who refuses to pay them “protection” money. If the beating is mainly administered to compel that

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particular storekeeper to pay the thugs a share of his weekly profits, then it would be nothing more than a case of extortion through violent intimidation. But if the thugs’ purpose in beating up that one storekeeper is to make an example out of him and thereby send a message to other storekeepers whom they are seeking to extort, then such an action would fall into the category of terrorism because it involves three parties, not merely two. As this all-important distinction between the victim and the wider target audience that our hypothetical thugs intended to terrorize and manipulate the behavior of makes clear, many acts of horrendous, blood-curdling violence carried out by, say, the henchmen of powerful drug trafficking cartels in Mexico, would fall into the category of terrorism, since they clearly seem designed to terrorize rivals or opponents beyond the actual victims.16 Who, then, are the so-called “terrorists” that criminals are supposedly seeking to collaborate with, according to the nexus thesis? The answer is groups of sectarian political and religious extremists that rely primarily on terrorist techniques to achieve their ideological goals. Hence the actual nexus that we are concerned about in this context is that between ideological extremists and criminals, two disparate types of (usually) non-state actors with radically different and indeed often antithetical objectives. Yet both might conceivably – and indeed frequently do – resort to the use of terrorist techniques. In order to differentiate ideological extremists from criminals, it is necessary to shed a bit more light on the nature of ideological extremism. In order to do so, one must begin with the term “ideology” itself, which refers to systematic, relatively coherent, well-articulated, and often all-encompassing sets of ideas about the nature of social reality, whether or not those ideas have a solid factual basis.17 Amongst the most important types of ideologies are political ideologies, all of which claim to provide the answers to three interrelated questions: • • •

first, what is wrong with the world? second, who is responsible for those wrongs? third, what needs to be done to correct those wrongs?

This means, effectively, that political ideologies (and, nota bene, politicized religious ideologies) all contain both diagnostic elements – the answers they provide to the first and second questions – and prescriptive elements that are intended to serve as a guide for action – the answer they provide to the third question. Obviously, however, not all political ideologies (e.g., liberalism and moderate conservatism) can be characterized as extremist ideologies, which are what concern us in this context. On the other hand, all forms of ideological extremism, irrespective of their specific, variable, and unique doctrinal contents, share certain common characteristics or features that are both identifiable and easily recognizable. Some of those specific features are of course applicable, in varying degrees, to many other kinds of beliefs and attitudes. However, it is the combination, interaction, and mutually reinforcing nature of all of these problematic individual characteristics

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that together serve to mark ideological extremism. These characteristics include the following: • • •

• •

•

• •

Manicheanism – the simplistic, black-and-white division of the world into absolute “good” and absolute “evil,” devoid of shades of gray; monism – the opposite of pluralism, the belief that there is only one correct interpretation or course of action that is acceptable; utopianism – the promotion of political or religio-political goals that are not only impractical but unachievable, since they typically involve ill-conceived if not delusional efforts to transform human nature and/or establish an idealized, perfectly harmonious society free of strife, conflict, and exploitation; collectivism – the rigorous subordination of the rights of the individual to the interests of the group, as well as to the pursuit of the group’s “higher cause”; hyper-moralism – the adoption of an excessively self-righteous, puritanical, and moralistic vision, agenda, or code of behavior, usually involving an emphasis on self-sacrifice and self-abnegation, that virtually no one, including its exponents, can possibly live up to; authoritarianism or totalitarianism – the effort to exert high levels of control, either only over the external behavior of people (authoritarianism) or, in addition, over their innermost thoughts by means of indoctrination, so as to transform their very consciousness (totalitarianism); the systematic dehumanization or, in the case of religious extremists, the literal demonization, of designated enemies; conspiratorial paranoia (usually of a non-clinical variety) – the conviction that there are sinister enemy plotters operating everywhere, including even within the ranks of the group itself, who have to be continually fought against and ultimately eradicated in order for the group to achieve its supposedly “noble” goals.

The main types of extremist ideologies that have historically served to motivate nonstate actors that rely heavily or primarily on the use of terrorism as a technique are a) ethno-nationalism, a generally illiberal form of micro-nationalism; b) left-wing ideologies like Marxism-Leninism and anarchism; c) secular right-wing ideologies like ultranationalism, nativism, racism, and fascism (even though fascism actually seeks to conjoin diverse ideas from both the right and the left); and d) strict, puritanical interpretations of theological doctrines from many different religious traditions (Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist [especially amongst the Sinhalese elite in Sri Lanka and within certain Nichiren-inspired Hokkeshū Mahāyāna Lotus Sutra cults in Japan], etc.). Once one understands that ideological extremists are primarily if not singlemindedly motivated by a supposedly “higher cause” that they regard as both “righteous” and “noble,” a behavioral driver that is radically different than the materialistic motivations of criminals, it becomes impossible to accept certain absurd premises that seemingly underlie the “nexus” thesis. Among these premises are that “the ideological basis for traditional conflict had largely dissipated” in the post-Cold War era, that violent conflicts in the “developing world” were now “primarily

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driven and maintained for economic reasons” rather than to further ideological agendas, and that extremists commonly espoused self-justificatory ideologies simply in order to conceal their baser power-seeking and avaricious motives rather than being actual “true believers” in the causes they advocated.18 All of these notions, which are fundamentally wrong-headed, were developed by Western academicians who had grown up in and been strongly affected by the values of a materialistic society in which acquiring social status and being economically successful were lionized, and who thence ended up projecting their own cultural frames of reference and biases onto others, a flawed but often unconscious analytical process which is referred to as “mirror imaging” within the intelligence community. Alas, there are so many conceptual and factual problems with all three of the aforementioned premises that it might require several book-length studies to demolish them thoroughly. So herein it must suffice to say, firstly, that ideologies most certainly did not lose their resonance or importance after the Cold War ended. Although the image of communism had been severely tarnished over the decades and therefore lost some – but by no means all – of its appeal following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, at least temporarily, other extremist political and religious ideologies have not only persisted but flourished: all types of illiberal nationalism (including ethno-nationalism), anarchism, neo-fascism, eco-radicalism, pan-Islam, neo-Ottomanism, and religious puritanism, ultra-traditionalism, or fundamentalism of all varieties (most notably in its totalitarian Islamist variant), to name only a few. Second, political and religious extremists had never been purely and exclusively ideological in terms of their motivations, either before or during the Cold War, – they were, after all, human, with all of the sordid subliminal and arguably animalistic impulses that this entails – nor did they suddenly become purely mercenary when bipolarity once again gave way to chaotic multi-polarity. Finally, anyone who has ever had sustained interactions with genuine ideological fanatics is painfully aware that they are not generally feigning their beliefs or cynically peddling them to disguise their underlying venality or hunger for power. That may well be true of some uncommitted or blatantly hypocritical self-professed radicals, but it is most emphatically not the norm within extremist milieus. Of course, even the most fanatical ideologues can end up losing some of their fervor, either gradually over time or even suddenly in response to changing personal, historical, or political circumstances, and some can be – and all too often have been – corrupted by either power or access to wealth. But all that signifies is that extremists are human beings with personal flaws who can never completely live up to or fully maintain their own typically strict moral codes, however warped these may seem to outsiders – it does not mean, however, that they are not very different in terms of their motivations than people without similarly strong beliefs who are primarily motivated by material gain, including criminals. That is why the traditional law enforcement focus on “methods, not motives” is fundamentally misguided, and why the “methods and motives” formula of Louise Shelley and John Picarelli is vastly preferable.19 In my opinion, however, the focus should be much more on motives than on methods, since the latter are simply means to an end. It is the ends of the groups using certain

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methods that must be properly understood in order to neutralize the long-term threats that they pose. Yet another common premise in the “nexus” literature, which is overly simplistic but not entirely mistaken, is that when the Cold War ended, terrorist groups were forced by necessity to look for other sources of revenue because of a “decline in state sponsorship of terrorism.”20 This notion too is problematic for many reasons: it fails to acknowledge the imprecise nature, overuse, and frequent abuse of the term “state sponsorship,” exaggerates the levels of state support for most terrorist groups during the Cold War, and conveniently ignores the fact that several terrorist groups are nowadays the beneficiaries of “state sponsorship,” especially in South Asia. Indeed, like today’s “nexus” thesis, the earlier “state sponsorship of terrorism” thesis was a politically convenient buzzword that was often infused with biases and analytical distortions, most notably in its built-in assumption that ideologically motivated terrorist groups were simply the docile “proxies” or “agents” of adversarial regimes during the Cold War.21 Moreover, as was highlighted in the discussion of the term “nexus,” there are serious problems with the actual concepts formulated by proponents of the nexus theory. These are best examined by referring to select analysts whose conceptual schemes have been fully elaborated and have thus become particularly influential, such as Makarenko and Shelley. For example, according to Makarenko’s framework, the nexus between “terrorists” and criminals takes a variety of forms that can be arrayed along a spectrum beginning with “alliance” and passing through a process of “appropriation of tactics” and “convergence” (in either a “hybrid” or “integrated” form), sometimes to the extent that this results in a “transformation” of their very nature.22 Alas, every aspect of this scheme is problematic. For example, an “appropriation of tactics” may not involve any sort of nexus at all: if these two types of groups borrow from one another from afar in an effort to keep up with operational “best practices,” without having any actual interactions whereby they can share techniques directly, then there is no nexus. It would only be in cases where group A interacted with group B, either by observing what the latter did firsthand or by receiving some hands-on training from its members, where one could speak of an actual nexus. Nor would the latter case necessarily occur only after the two groups had “allied,” contrary to Makarenko’s evolutionary scheme. Indeed, the first phase in any developing nexus between extremist and criminal groups that was not entirely “parasitic” would be some sort of symbiotic interaction, short-term or longer-term, which may or may not lead to an actual “alliance,” whether formal or informal.23 As for “convergence,” according to Makarenko, it can either signify complete “integration,” which as previously noted would constitute a fusion and no longer a nexus, or a “hybrid,” the “convergence of criminal and political motivations within one group,” which would therefore also not involve any nexus between disparate groups.24 Finally, she uses the term “transformation,” as per Chris Dishman, to refer to cases in which “the ultimate aims and motivations of the organization have actually changed.”25 Unfortunately for her argument, all of the examples she cites are in fact cases of hybridization, not complete transformation,

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which would signify that a group had shifted entirely from being one type of group to being another type.26 I can think of no real-world examples that fall into her “transformation” category, i.e., of extremist or criminal groups that completely altered their original nature. Somewhat comparable problems beset the schemes developed by Shelley. She and her academic collaborators likewise create a “terrorist”-criminal interaction spectrum, one which wisely adds “symbiotic relationships” to Makarenko’s formulation, but then parallels the latter’s by including activity appropriation, the emergence of hybrid entities engaged in terrorist and criminal activities, and transformation.27 Hence many of the same criticisms of Makarenko’s scheme are also applicable to those of Shelley, as well as to many other academicians who have adopted variations of these schemes. And when one adds even more egregiously flawed analytical approaches derived from “rational choice” theories to the problematic theoretical contructs that so often beset the nexus literature, still more unfounded conclusions are bound to be forthcoming.

Factual historical problems: the “nexus” is nothing new To hear certain “nexus” proponents talk, one might be led to believe that interaction and periodic collaboration between violent extremists and criminals was an entirely novel phenomenon. As the historical record demonstrates, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the so-called nexus between violent political or religious extremists and criminals has existed on and off for many decades, if not for centuries. The primary reason is that all of the variegated denizens who find it necessary to operate clandestinely or covertly within the vast illicit underground milieu in order to achieve their respective goals – including violent revolutionary or counter-revolutionary ideological extremists, well-organized or petty criminals, members of certain secret societies or occult groups, and elements within the secret services or secret police of virtually every country – simply cannot avoid rubbing shoulders and periodically interacting with one another, whether or not they wish to.28 This is in fact the normal pattern, historically speaking. Moreover, there has always been far more political and economic interpenetration between the supposedly sordid “underworld” and the ostensibly respectable political and economic “overworld” than most people recognize or wish to acknowledge.29 Nevertheless, even though it is almost inevitable that individuals and organizations operating regularly within this underground milieu will at least periodically encounter and at times interact with other denizens of that milieu, it should not be assumed that they will invariably decide to establish sustained relationships or actively collaborate with others whom they encounter. That is because the disparate forces operating within this clandestine world do not, and indeed realistically cannot, fully trust each other. Nor can any of the parties involved afford to establish overly intimate, completely transparent, or fully fraternal symbiotic relationships, since in such a situation their “partners” could easily exploit their vulnerabilities

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or even betray them. On the contrary, far from genuinely collaborating, these diverse actors normally endeavor to infiltrate, penetrate, manipulate, and instrumentally exploit one another in pursuit of their respective and largely incompatible goals, which necessarily makes their de facto patterns of interaction unstable, fluid, dynamic, constantly evolving, often temporary, fraught with mutual risk, and at times hostile and openly violent. This is precisely due to the fact that their goals are so fundamentally different and in various crucial respects antithetical. Thus the aim of insurgent ideological extremists, virtually by definition, is to overthrow the incumbent regime if not to overturn what they regard as a corrupt, unjust existing world order, seize political power, and then remake the nation or the entire world in accordance with their characteristically utopian visions. Conversely, the goal of criminals, sophisticated or not, is simply to maximize profits over the long and/or short term, which is usually best achieved not by seizing political power themselves, but rather by corrupting or weakening incumbent regimes so that they are able to continue to operate and engage in their illicit activities unmolested.30 And when criminals do endeavor to seize control over more territory, it usually amounts to little more than an extension of their usual “turf ” wars with rivals. Alternatively, the goal of most secret services, except perhaps for some corrupt or subversive “rogue” factions within them, is to penetrate, gather intelligence from and about, and thence manipulate these other two types of groups, either so as to neutralize and destroy them or to utilize them covertly and instrumentally in the service of what they regard as the state’s “higher” national interests. Finally, elements of certain influential secret societies may develop collusive relationships with all or some of the other three types of organizations in order to achieve a diverse array of presumed beneficial objectives. At this point it is necessary to cite some well-documented examples, in roughly chronological order, which serve to illustrate both of the aforementioned points: that interactions between these various types of underworld denizens is quite common, if not effectively the norm, but that the nature of their interactions, even if they collude with one another, is highly convoluted, usually risky, and all too often duplicitous or even fractious rather than truly fraternal. •

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The complex and growing interactions between underground revolutionary organizations, secret societies, and the secret police agencies of more or less autocratic regimes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Not surprisingly, revolutionaries and secret police agents frequently sought to infiltrate each other’s organizations, and both periodically used secret societies as covers or fronts for their activities – and vice versa.31 The close collaboration between Chinese nationalist leaders of the Zhongguo Guomindang (GMD: Chinese Nationalist Party) and powerful triad secret societies, in particular the Shanghai-based Qing Bang (Green Gang). Indeed, GMD leader Sun Zhongshan had apparently been a member of several secret societies, and his successor Jiang Jieshi had joined the Qing Bang, whose thugs he later often relied upon to help establish GMD authority, break up

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labor strikes, or even eradicate his opponents, especially the communists, in Shanghai.32 (Later, despite cracking down on secret societies and launching a ruthless and unusually effective anti-opium crusade between 1949 and 1952, more pragmatic leaders of the new Chinese communist regime likewise opted to establish a modus vivendi with certain powerful triads. For example, Deng Xiaoping made an agreement with various Hong Kong triads after China assumed control over the former British colony, essentially allowing them to continue functioning and profiting from both licit and illict economic activities in exchange for not creating problems for the Chinese authorities, and even in various interior mainland Chinese provinces local communist party officials often colluded with influential triads in a multitude of ways.33) The collusive covert relationships developed by both the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and certain Department of Defense (DOD) components, in the context of facilitating Cold War anti-communist military and counterinsurgency operations, with opium growers and traffickers in Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle” (e.g., GMD military remnants from the Nationalist Fifth Army which had taken refuge in northern Thailand, warlords from the Shan National Army in Burma, Meo tribal leaders like Vang Pao in Laos who had previously fought alongside the French, certain high-ranking officials in South Vietnam, etc.), as well as with drug-trafficking right-wingers, state and nonstate, throughout Latin America (e.g., Cuban exile terrorist organizations like Alpha 66 and Omega 7, factions of the Nicaraguan contras, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, “death squad” leaders in El Salvador, high-ranking Argentine military officers involved in the “dirty war,” etc.).34 The systematic, decades-long pattern of post-World War II collaboration between certain elements of the Sicilian Mafia (and perhaps also of the Neapolitan Camorra and Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta), factions of the Italian political establishment (in particular the Democrazia Cristiana [DC: Christian Democracy] party), key components within the Italian secret services (in particular the Interior Ministry’s Ufficio Affari Riservati [UAR: Office of Secret Affairs] and the military intelligence service Servizio Informazioni Difesa [SID: Defense Intelligence Service] and its successor, the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare [SISMI: Military Intelligence and Security Service], neo-fascist terrorist groups (in particular Avanguardia Nazionale [AN: National Vanguard], Ordine Nuovo (New Order), and the Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo [MPON: New Order Political Movement]), and later the “covered” Loggia Massonica Propaganda Due (P2 Masonic Lodge). All of these intersecting networks were undeniably active in sponsoring or carrying out covert political and paramilitary activities, including the systematic campaigns of terrorism and succession of coup plots, which have come to be referred to as the “strategy of tension,” that were designed to prevent the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI: Italian Communist Party) from joining the ruling government coalition together with the DC (in a “historic compromise” being advocated by

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factions within both parties) as well as to repress militant elements of the extraparliamentary left.35 The frequent post-World War II cooperation between elements of the French security services, especially the Service de Documentation Extérieure et du Contre-Espionnage (SDECE: Foreign Intelligence and Counterespionage Service) – the forerunner of today’s Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE: General Directorate for External Security) – and barbouzes (“bearded ones,” i.e., covert operatives) from Gaullist parallel police apparatuses such as the Service d’Action Civique (SAC: Civic Action Service) and Lucien Bitterlin’s innocuously named Mouvement pour la Coopération (MPC), with Corsican and French mafiosi, who those agencies recruited and used to carry out various kinds of “dirty tricks” actions, including breaking up strikes or demonstrations and opérations ponctuelles (assassinations). Among these mobsters were Joseph Attia, Christian David, Andre Labay, Ange Simonpieri, Roger Delouette, and Achille Cecchini. These same secret agencies, above all the SAC, also later recruited French neo-fascists from organizations like Ordre Nouveau (ON: New Order) and the Groupe Union Défense (GUD: United Defense Group) to carry out violent actions against radical leftist groups. In addition, other notorious mobsters, including Jacques Mesrine and Albert Spaggiari, at times collaborated with the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS: Secret Army Organization), a dangerous right-wing terrorist group established in French Algeria by battle-hardened anti-Gaullist French military officers and civilians. Many other gangsters of Corsican or Italian origin likewise operated in southern French strongholds of the so-called Milieu like Marseille, such as the Guerini brothers (Barthélémy and Antoine) and Gaetano Zampa, who sold arms to terrorist groups as well as large quantities of heroin.36 A similar decades-long nexus in Turkey between Turkish security agencies associated with the so-called “deep state” (derin devlet), in particular the Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı (MİT: National Intelligence Organization) and the Turkish military’s Özel Harp Dairesi (ÖHD: Special Warfare Department), above all its Kontr-Gerilla (Counter-Guerrilla) organization (all of which were closely linked to the security apparatus of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]), the paramilitary Bozkurtlar (Grey Wolves) groups affiliated with the neo-fascist Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP: Nationalist Action Party), and powerful Turkish mafiosi. These groups all collaborated in carrying out a vast array of covert and often violent actions against the Turkish far left, the separatist Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane (PKK: Kurdistan Workers’ Party), the terrorist Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), and, more recently, Islamist terrorist groups such as Hizbullahi Kurdi (Kurdish Hizballah) – an organization that the security forces themselves had allegedly helped to organize as a counterweight to the PKK! It was also this same covert nexus with which Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Grey Wolves terrorist who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1979, was associated. Ironically, this deep state nexus was graphically illustrated in the wake of a 1996 car accident on the Susurluk

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highway, which resulted in the death of three of its passengers, deputy Istanbul police chief Hüseyin Kocadağ, Grey Wolves leader and Kontr-Gerilla contract killer Abdullah Çatlı (who was also linked to the papal assassination plot), and female model Gonca Us; the only surviving passenger was Sedat Edip Bucak, a Kurdish MP from the center-right Doğru Yol Partisi (DYU: True Path Party) who was reportedly linked closely to the Turkish mafya. Unfortunately, the delineation of the components of this important nexus has recently been compromised by the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP: Justice and Development Party)-instigated prosecution of members of the secret Ergenekon organization, real or imagined, a prosecution which has been cynically manipulated and exploited by the Islamist regime in an effort to eliminate its last remaining Kemalist adversaries within the Turkish officer corps.37 The collaborative relationship between certain powerful Japanese political fixers known as kuromaku or “black curtain[s]” (above all former ultranationalist “Class A” war criminals Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ryōichi), the ruling center-right Jiyū-Minshutō (Liberal Democratic Party), leading industrialfinancial conglomerates (known as zaibatsus), members of various postwar paramilitary ultra-rightist (uyoku) organizations, several major yakuza crime syndicates (especially the Yamaguchi-gumi under its boss Taoka Kazuo), and the Japanese branch of Moon Sun Myung’s cultic Unification Church, the Genri Undo ([Divine] Principle Movement). (Note also that Moon’s original church branch in South Korea had early on established very close operational links to high-ranking officers within the Korean Central Intelligence Agency [KCIA], including the agency’s founder Kim Jong-pil, a future Prime Minister, with whom it tangibly collaborated in numerous ways.) Elements from all of these groupings in Japan subsequently joined together – besides having previously engaged for decades, individually or jointly, in many other sordid covert political and economic activities, including the violent suppression of left-wing strikes and demonstrations, coup plots, electoral manipulation, blackmail and extortion, secret funding, and innumerable financial scandals – to form the Japanese section of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a transnational anti-communist network originally established in 1954 (as the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League [APACL]) by the secret services of Taiwan and South Korea which later was renamed, expanded its geographic range, and incorporated several violent European and Latin American neo-fascist groups.38 Kodama was also a major player in the 1970s Lockheed bribery scandal, and Sasakawa later sought to burnish his unsavory reputation by becoming, with the aid of the United Nations, a major global philanthropist. The collusion between the Bulgarian secret service, the [Komitet za] Darzhavna Sigurnost (DS: [Committee for] State Security), the state-owned export-import firm KINTEX (which was heavily involved in international arms trading, the sale of cigarettes and other goods, and apparently also in drug trafficking), and organized crime groups from Eastern Europe and Turkey. It was precisely these documented linkages, which were developed by the DS primarily for

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the purposes of generating both licit and illicit profits for the regime, collecting useful intelligence, and facilitating the sale of weapons to certain insurgent and terrorist groups – including both left-wing and right-wing terrorists in Turkey – that enabled “hawkish” Western analysts to try to link right-wing Turkish would-be papal assassin Ağca to the DS and, through that organization, to the Soviet Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopaznosti (KGB: Committee for State Security). This so-called “Bulgarian Connection” thesis, which remains problematic, highly controversial, and unproven to this day, was based primarily on the documented links between Ağca and certain key Turkish mafiosi who periodically resided in Sofia, in particular Abuzer Uğurlu and Bekir Çelenk, both of whom aided Ağca in various ways. However, the intimate long-standing links between the MHP, its Bozkurtlar paramilitaries, and the Turkish mafia suggest that there was no good reason to jump to the strained, albeit politically convenient conclusion that the DS or the KGB were necessarily involved in the papal assassination plot, all the more so since the evidence cited in support of this thesis was unreliable and contradicted by better documented facts.39 The intimate ongoing collaboration – despite angry official denials to the contrary – between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) and other state special operations organizations, jihadist groups such as Lashkar-i Tayyiba (The Army of the Pure), Jaysh-i Muhammad (The Army of Muhammad), Hizb-ul Mujahidin (Party of Mujahidin), the [ Jalaluddin] Haqqani network, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party) in Afghanistan, and several Afghan Taliban factions, and various criminal organizations involved in the illicit smuggling of weapons, drugs, and other materials, including the proIslamist D-Company organization headed by Dawud Ibrahim.40 However, the most blatant example of this widespread pattern of covert collaboration between extremists, criminals, and secretive state agencies may have been the July 1980 “Cocaine Coup” in Bolivia. Following a left-wing electoral victory, right-wing officers within a number of Bolivian military and security agencies (with help from Argentine military advisors who were veterans of the “dirty war”), wealthy Bolivian cocaine barons (who provided financing), and multi-national paramilitary groups composed of neo-fascists and mercenaries such as the Novios de la Muerte (Bridegrooms of Death, which engaged in ruthless acts of repression), responded by carrying out a successful coup d’etat against the incumbent government.41 After General Luis García Meza took power and established a new dictatorial regime, he gave the powerful drug barons who had supported the coup free rein to produce and sell their products and also allowed them to systematically eliminate rival drug trafficking networks (in exchange for a share of the profits).

These important historical and contemporary examples, which could easily be multiplied, should leave no doubt that the much ballyhooed “nexus” between violent ideological extremists, criminals, and other types of secret organizations, above all elements of state security services, is hardly new. Quite the contrary. However, in

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most of the cases in this chapter, it was secret service personnel who were apparently the primary instigators, brokers, and sustainers of the resulting collaborative interactions and ventures between extremists and criminals, a fact that may have vital analytical significance in terms of assessing the potential for future extremistcriminal collaborations. Consequently, it is important to emphasize yet again that the relations between extremist groups and criminal organizations are normally likely to be guarded and somewhat distant, if not tense and strained, even when they opt to collaborate with one another, however temporarily, for their perceived mutual benefit. Indeed, sustained collaboration, as opposed to “episodic and “impermanent” collaboration, is still much rarer than many analysts assume, since both types of groups generally prefer to develop necessary “in-house” capabilities rather than to run the risk of interacting with each other.42 That is because such alliances can be viewed as “unnatural” in certain important respects due to the distinctive and intrinsically incompatible characteristics of both types of groups. As noted, ideological extremists tend – virtually by definition – to be fanatical “true believers” in their respective causes, and none of the previously enumerated characteristics of extremism are really conducive to fraternal cooperation and coexistence with persons or organizations that do not share their own perceptions and goals. Therefore, the individuals who embrace such radical doctrines tend to be deeply suspicious of anyone outside of (and often even within) their own organizations and ideological milieus, which inevitably makes sustained collaboration with other types of non-state actors problematic and fraught with potential friction. Moreover, the often egomaniacal, narcissistic, and/or paranoid leaders of extremist groups tend to be hostile to perceived rivals and obsessed with preserving their own autonomy and influence, which likewise causes them to distrust and resent outsiders, even those with whom they may be temporarily cooperating. These factors all militate against them forming stable, long-term alliances with organizations that do not fully share their own extremist agendas. For their part, criminal organizations also tend to be very insular and suspicious of outsiders. Being essentially predatory, mercenary, and avaricious themselves – also virtually by definition – they are acutely aware that strangers or outsiders who learn too much about their operations might be easily induced, perhaps by bribes or offers of judicial immunity or clemency, to “rat them out” to the authorities, thereby compromising their ongoing ability to profit from engaging in illegal activities. That is precisely why most criminal organizations are composed of close-to-distant kinsmen and/or friends who grew up together within the same local communities, tribes, ethno-cultural groups, nationalities, or religious denominations, which in theory provide their members with a heightened feeling of intra-group solidarity. In order to strengthen those bonds of solidarity and loyalty further, however, such organizations also feel it necessary to devise elaborate oaths of allegiance or stringent internal codes of honor and, if required, to employ the most brutal sanctions against any insider or outsider who they suspect has betrayed them. Not surprisingly, being more narrowly materialistic and pragmatic, criminals are naturally prone to regard

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ideological extremists, who are frequently willing to engage in extreme acts of violence or even self-sacrifice in pursuit of their utopian goals, as a potential source of volatility or trouble for themselves. And, like their counterparts from extremist groups, leading criminal bosses also strive to retain their autonomy and influence, as well as their wealth and power, which means that they too tend to be suspicious of outsiders and resent potential rivals. Finally, the decision by criminals to collaborate with high-profile terrorist groups may well result in heightened levels of state repression, both locally and internationally, directed against their own organizations. Criminal bosses may well be reluctant to take such a risk, which could conceivably lead to the destruction of their own organizations, unless the potential economic rewards are extraordinary. In short, whatever patterns of “collaboration” develop between these disparate types of actors are generally attributable to shared or otherwise symbiotic but usually temporary mutual interests, if not to cynical ongoing attempts at mutual instrumental manipulation. This does not mean, of course, that violent extremists never collaborate with other types of non-state actors (or states) who do not share their own ideologies, since they have often done so, albeit usually on the realist if transitory grounds that “the enemy of my (principal) enemy is my (temporary) friend.” Indeed, resourcepoor extremists are arguably more likely to work with criminal groups, and to accept tangible support from different quarters, in order to further their objectives or resist common enemies. Nevertheless, they are prone to be very suspicious and wary of any criminal networks with which they are interacting and cooperating, since such cooperation invariably comes with certain strings attached and might well have the effect of limiting their own freedom of action. They will also assiduously strive to maintain their own autonomy, all the more so if their mercenary “partners” do not share their particular worldviews or long-term goals. After all, criminals might be willing to betray their trust at any time for mere financial gain or immunity from prosecution. On the other hand, extremists not infrequently have adversarial relationships with, and sometimes even take up arms against, criminal groups operating within their own areas, sometimes for ideological reasons (since criminals are widely regarded as moral reprobates and “evil” influences), but also for a variety of pragmatic reasons (e.g., to extort them, seize their weapons, displace their access to sources of income, or defend themselves from attack). Thus, as John Picarelli has justly emphasized, the relationships between ideological “terrorists” and criminals are likely to be “turbulent,” to say the least.43

Bias problems: the prior political exploitation of the “nexus” and related themes Yet another issue that must be kept in mind when evaluating current claims about the terrorist-criminal nexus is the long history of the dissemination both of a) inadvertent misinformation, and b) state-sponsored, or at least state-centric, disinformation and propaganda concerning terrorism, organized crime, and the alleged links between the two. This has normally manifested itself in exaggerated, one-sided

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claims, specifically in alarmism about the nature and extent of the threat, and/or in naïve or dishonest attempts to attribute that threat solely to one’s own government’s designated enemies du jour. Elsewhere I have already highlighted serious problems of this sort in relation to Cold War and post-Cold War allegations about “state sponsorship” of terrorism,44 but they are also all too prevalent in the context of claims about the organized crime threat and about terrorist-criminal collaboration. A couple of examples should suffice to illustrate this. One clear example of this type of politically motivated distortion can be seen in the persistent efforts by Western officials and “hawkish” national security analysts, during much of the Cold War, to attribute drug trafficking primarily or exclusively to hostile communist regimes. Thus this theme was cynically elaborated and stubbornly promoted for years by U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), who sought to discredit if not vilify the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by falsely accusing that regime of being the most important player in the international heroin trade.45 One might have thought that an accurate, unvarnished portrayal of the totalitarian nature of Mao Zedong’s regime and of the horrific crimes it was systematically committing against the Chinese people would have been sufficient to delegitimize that regime and justify its diplomatic isolation, if not its ongoing exclusion from the United Nations (given all of the other reprehensible authoritarian and totalitarian regimes which are allowed to represent their countries in that “august” body), but simply recounting the grim facts was apparently not enough for Anslinger and other purveyors of propagandistic Cold War-era stereotypes about the nature of “really existing” communism. So it was that in the early 1950s Anslinger, who had long since adopted a modus operandi based on demonizing other alleged criminals and drug traffickers, began to characterize the PRC as the “greatest purveyor in history of habit forming drugs.”46 He continued peddling this theme for many years to come, despite the fact that the “evidence” he relied upon to substantiate these claims was unreliable and unconfirmed, if not manufactured out of whole cloth by anti-communist hardliners.47 What makes this case even more illustrative of bias is that it was not the PRC, but rather high-ranking Taiwanese officials, GMD remnants that had taken refuge in northern Thailand after the communist takeover of the mainland, and Hong Kong triads that became the primary growers of opium or traffickers of heroin from the “Golden Triangle,” sometimes aided and abetted by the CIA and other anti-communist security agencies like the Thai National Police.48 However that may be, allegations of PRC sponsorship of the heroin trade continued to be promoted by U.S. officials and private advocacy organizations until President Richard Nixon decided to embark on his “opening up to China” strategy in the early 1970s, at which point they were largely debunked by U.S. government officials entrusted with investigating those claims. However, new accusations that communist regimes and guerrillas were major players in the international drug trade soon reappeared following the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980, in certain cases with some justification.49

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A second theme that illustrates the problem of bias is that of “narco-terrorism,” yet another imprecise buzzword that has been used in contradictory and often partisan ways, e.g., to refer to the involvement of authoritarian, terrorist-sponsoring states in drug trafficking, to criminal drug trafficking organizations which resort to terrorism, and/or to situations in which a “terrorist group” – i.e., an extremist group relying on terrorist techniques – either collaborates with criminal drug trafficking organizations for mutual benefit, or itself becomes increasingly involved in the production, distribution, and sale of drugs, so as to help finance its activities.50 Apart from the issue of definitional imprecision and confusion, however, the term “narco-terrorism” has also generally been applied in a biased, wholly one-sided fashion. To be more specific, it has typically been used to characterize the U.S. government’s current designated enemies, such as communist insurgent groups (whether Leninist, Maoist, or Castroist) during the 1980s and 1990s, and Islamist insurgent or jihadist groups since 9/11, that rely heavily on terrorism. For example, the “narco-terrorist” label has frequently been used, with justification, in reference to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army) and other Colombian extreme left guerrilla organizations like the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN: National Liberation Army) and the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19: 19th of April Movement),51 as well as to the Partido Comunista del Perú – Sendero Luminoso (PCP-SL: Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path) in Peru.52 Conversely, it has rarely if ever been applied to groups that the U.S. and its allies have openly or secretly collaborated with, even when those groups were no less involved in using terrorist techniques and in dealing drugs. For example, it has infrequently been applied to right-wing paramilitary groups in various Latin American countries, except for the [Fuerzas] Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC: United Self-Defense [Forces] of Colombia),53 or to components of the Northern Alliance or other regional warlords in Afghanistan with whom the U.S. formed an alliance against the Taliban regime, even in cases where these tribal “allies” clearly resorted to employing terrorist techniques and engaging in large-scale drug production and sales.54 Similarly, as with the accusations of communist drug trafficking illustrated in the previous paragraph, the term “narco-terrorism” – like the official Department of State designation “state sponsor of terrorism” – has mainly been applied to hostile “rogue” regimes, such as Cuba and Venezuela, but never to supposedly “friendly” regimes whose high-ranking officials have often been heavily implicated in the drug trade, such as Pakistan. In American usage, then, “narcoterrorism is carried out by others; what the United States did in South-East Asia in the 1960s and 1970s is not included.”55 The same, alas, is true with respect to the partisan way in which such loaded terms tend to be used by all nation-states.56 Hence one is forced to conclude, as Johan Hartelius has, that “[i]n practice, narcoterrorism becomes more of a politically constructed concept than a strict legal or criminalistic definition.”57 It is understandable, of course, that governments would prefer to avoid delegitimizing or demonizing their own official or de facto allies, state or non-state, by not openly using such labels to describe or

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characterize them. However, the pursuit of the state’s geopolitical interests cannot justify the similarly one-sided or propagandistic use of such terms by academicians, journalists, analysts, and scholars, who are in theory expected to be as independent, fair-minded, balanced, and objective as possible. Hence it is crucially important for analysts, including those within the intelligence community whose job it is to apprise national security decision-makers of “real and present” dangers, to avoid uncritically adopting the partisan rhetoric and biased interpretations that might be promoted by a given incumbent administration or by other government agencies, including with respect to the alleged “nexus” between violent extremists and criminals. Adopting distorted frames of reference to determine policies has generally proven to be a recipe for disaster, not for success, in the national security context.

Evidentiary problems: the lack of reliable sources of information Last, but certainly not least, some of the most oft-repeated allegations about the present-day dangers stemming from the “nexus” between terrorists and criminals rest on absurdly scanty and unreliable sources of information. A quintessential example of this is the endlessly recycled but as yet unsubstantiated notion that the vicious Salvadoran/Central American street gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) could soon be – or, worse still, already is – collaborating with al-Qa‘ida. Some analysts have only speculated about this as a possibility, citing certain local sheriffs and border control officers who claim that numerous Special Interest Aliens (SIA) from Middle Eastern and Muslim countries have been brought across the Mexican-American border by coyotes (human smugglers), whereas others have instead insisted that some sort of informal alliance between MS-13 and al-Qa‘ida has already been brokered. Indeed, according to certain overly alarmist authors, members of the transnational jihadist terrorist group allegedly made a secret deal with elements of MS-13 shortly after 9/11: in exchange for providing false documents (including a counterfeit Mexican government matricula consular, which would allow wanted terrorist “sleeper agents” to avoid triggering name-based watch lists) and helping them get across the border into the U.S., al-Qa‘ida would pay MS-13 $30,000 to $50,000 apiece.58 Although such a hypothesized scenario is certainly not outside the realm of possibility, so far these claims have been based on nothing more than unconfirmed allegations made by often unreliable sources, and have not yet been substantiated by any actual, verifiable evidence (at least not any that is presently in the public domain). In fact, according to U.S. officials in a position to know, there is no evidence that al-Qa‘ida is collaborating with MS-13 or other street gangs in the Americas.59 However that may be, the absence of sufficiently reliable or compelling evidence is all too common in connection with claims about so-called “nexuses” between terrorists and criminal organizations. Yet there are, as previously emphasized, many other contexts in which terrorists and criminals operating within the same geographical regions do end up interacting and sometimes collaborating, as in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where warlords

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and tribal groups have been engaged in smuggling weapons, drugs, and a multitude of other black market goods for centuries. In those same areas, as well as in Kashmir and India, extremist groups are also frequently engaged in the same types of criminal activities, which sometimes leads to collusion with, and at other times precipitates conflicts with, local criminal networks. Moreover, there is a good deal of reliable evidence indicating that operatives from Hizballah, as well as the group’s sympathizers within the Lebanese diaspora and other Shi‘i communities overseas, have likewise been engaged in a broad array of illicit economic activities, both in the Western hemisphere and elsewhere. They have clearly been active in the “lawless” sections of the Tri-Border Area of South America, as well as in North America itself, as the recent break-up of an extensive cigarette mark-up operation demonstrates.60 There are also worrisome indications that both Hizballah and Iranian intelligence operatives have been setting up front organizations and businesses in Venezuela, with the connivance of recently deceased President Hugo Chávez and other high-ranking officials associated with his regime.61 Although up until now these Lebanese and Iranians seem to have been focused primarily on money-raising activities, whether licit or illicit, the entities they have created could conceivably become involved in facilitating future covert and terrorist actions directed against the U.S. and its allies, as their counterparts based in Argentina are alleged to have done in connection with two terrorist bombings against Israeli targets in Buenos Aires in the mid-1990s.62 Finally, there is evidence that certain commanders (‘umara) associated with the Tanzim al-Qa‘ida fi Bilad al-Maghrib al-Islami (AQIM: Al-Qa‘ida Organization in the Countries of the Islamic Maghreb) are increasingly engaging in criminal activities themselves, as well as collaborating with criminal organizations and smuggling networks in North and West Africa, and reportedly also with drug traffickers in South America.63 In Albania, Chechnya, and Central Asia as well, there are long-standing links between various Islamist fighters and criminals. Only time will tell whether these particular nexuses pose serious security threats to the U.S., but in the meantime these regions all need to be monitored carefully by Western and local intelligence, military, and police agencies.

Concluding remarks In sum, regarding the alleged nexus between “terrorists” (i.e., ideological extremists using terrorist techniques) and criminals, the key question that must be answered is this: is the nature of the threat posed by such nexuses – where they actually exist – greater today, either qualitatively or quantitatively, than the threats posed by similar nexuses in past decades? Many proponents of the nexus thesis argue vehemently that the threat is both relatively new, which is false, and that it is much greater today than before. For example, Bob Mandel indicated during the “Nexus” conference at MIIS that he has found empirical data demonstrating that such nexuses constitute a growing threat today. Perhaps, then, this worrisome conclusion is – or at least will eventually turn out to be – correct. However, apart from a handful of select cases that all need to be qualified in certain important respects, most of the

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proponents of the nexus thesis have thus far not presented much convincing evidence that their sometimes histrionic claims are warranted. Nor do certain of their fears seem justified. For example, some observers have been especially concerned about the supposed degeneration or transformation of ideologically motivated terrorists into criminal thugs.64 In fact, if this were to occur, that would be the best thing that could possibly happen, since ideological radicals and fanatics are generally much more uncompromising, intransigent, obsessively single-minded, willing to sacrifice themselves, and difficult to deter than criminals, because they are typically fighting stubbornly, often against impossible odds, to achieve utopian, unachievable goals. Conversely, criminals, being more narrowly materialistic and in theory pragmatic, can be influenced and pressured to make deals more easily when faced with superior force (provided that one does not grievously insult their honor or kill their closest gang and family members, which is bound to generate vengeful and savage reprisals). Hence a much greater problem would be posed by organized criminals embracing extremist ideologies, which is fortunately a relatively rare occurrence. The main danger in that area is the radicalization of Muslim petty criminals by Islamists within or outside of prison, either individually or in small, close-knit groups.65 In the final analysis, whatever developments may be occurring in the context of “terrorist”-criminal nexuses, if the U.S. and its allies wish to cope effectively with a multitude of very real security threats, they must comprehend the actual nature, complexity, and extent of those threats rather than creating and maintaining distorted, overly simplistic images of sometimes phantom menaces.66

Notes 1 Reprinted with permission from “Some Problems with the Notion of a ‘Nexus’ between Ideological Terrorists and Criminals” [from Russell D. Howard, ed., The Nexus between Traffickers and Terrorists: The New Clear and Present Danger? (New York: McGraw-Hill e-book, 2014), pp. 50–73] 2 Alex P. Schmid, “Drug Trafficking, Transnational Crime, and International Terrorist Groups,” in Organized Crime: From Trafficking to Terrorism, ed. Frank G. Shanty and Patit Paban Mishra (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008), vol. 1, p. 344. Compare also Schmid’s much earlier article, “The Links between Transnational Organized Crime and Terrorist Crimes,” Transnational Organized Crime 2:4 (Winter 1996), pp. 40–82. 3 See Phil Williams, “Beyond the Nexus: Relationships, Hybrids, Methods, and Transformation,” in The Nexus between Traffickers and Terrorists: The New Clear and Present Danger?, ed. Russell D. Howard (New York: McGraw Hill, 2014), p. 74. 4 Tamara Makarenko, “Foundations and Evolution of the Crime-Terror Nexus,” in Routledge Handbook of Transnational Organized Crime, ed. Felia Allum and Stan Gilmour (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 242. Nor, one might add, is there likely to be. 5 Ibrahim Warde, The Price of Fear: The Truth behind the Financial War on Terror (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2007), p. xix. 6 Compare Makarenko, “Foundations and Evolution of the Crime-Terror Nexus,” pp. 234–49; Tamara Makarenko, “A Model of Terrorist-Criminal Relations,” Jane’s Intelligence Review 15:8 (2003), pp. 6–10; Tamara Makarenko, “The Crime-Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay between Transnational Organized Crime and Terrorism,” Global Crime 6:1 (2004), pp. 129–45; Louse I. Shelley, “The Unholy Trinity: Transnational Crime, Corruption and Terrorism,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 11:2 (2005), pp. 101–1; Louse I. Shelley et al., Methods and Motives: Exploring Links between Transnational Organized

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Crime and International Terrorism (Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, [ June] 2005); John T. Picarelli, “The Turbulent Nexus of Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism: A Theory of Malevolent International Relations,” Global Crime 7:1 (February 2006), pp. 1–24; Phil Williams, “Terrorism and Organised Crime: Convergence, Nexus or Transformation?,” in FOA Report on Terrorism, ed. Gunnar Jervas (Stockholm: Swedish Defence Research Establishment, 1998); Chris Dishman, “The Leaderless Nexus: When Crime and Terror Converge,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 28 (2005), pp. 237–52; Steven Hutchinson and Pat O’Malley, “A Crime-Terror Nexus?: Thinking on Some of the Links between Terrorism and Criminality,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30 (2007), pp. 1095–107; Jennifer L. Hestermann, The Terrorist-Criminal Nexus: An Alliance of International Drug Cartels, Organized Crime, and Terror Groups (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013); Ryan Clarke, Crime-Terror Nexus in South Asia: States, Security and Non-State Actors (New York: Routledge, 2011); Frank G. Shanty, The Nexus: International Terrorism and Drug Trafficking from Afghanistan (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security, 2011); Lyubov Grigorova Mincheva and Ted Robert Gurr, Crime-Terror Alliances and the State: Ethnonationalist and Islamist Challenges to Regional Security (New York: Routledge, 2012); John Rollins, Liana Sun Wyler, and Seth Rosen, International Terrorism and Transnational Crime: Security Threats, U.S. Policy, and Considerations for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, [ January] 2010); and James J. F. Forest, “Crime-Terror Interactions and Threat Convergence,” comments prepared for Trans-Atlantic Dialogue on Combating Crime-Terror Pipelines conference, National Defense University, 25 June 2012, available at www.jamesforest.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/JForest-CrimeTerror_ Dialogue_June2012.pdf. See, e.g., in the context of terrorists, criminals, and “WMD” proliferation, Threat Convergence: New Pathways to Proliferation? Report on the NATO EAPC/PFP Workshop within the Partnership Action Plan against Terrorism, 4–6 March 2007 (Zürich: Fund for Peace, 2007). As per http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/nexus (emphasis added). Makarenko, “Foundations and Evolution of the Crime-Terror Nexus,” p. 234. For the long-standing involvement of diverse terrorist groups in criminal (as well as, in some cases, legal) financial activities, see James Adams, The Financing of Terror: How the Groups That Are Terrorizing the World Get the Money to Do It (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). For a broad historical overview, see Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks (New York: Seven Stories, 2005). Compare further Michael Freeman, ed., Financing Terrorism: Case Studies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); Jeanne K. Giraldo and Harold Trinkunas, eds., Terrorist Financing and State Responses: A Comparative Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2007); Jodi Vittori, Terrorist Financing and Resourcing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Timothy Wittig, Understanding Terrorist Finance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), for a range of interpretations about this complicated subject. Much less well-studied is the ideological radicalization of criminal groups, which, while relatively rare, is of particular interest and potential concern. Two recent examples are La Familia Michoacana (The Michoacan Family) and its offshoot, Los Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar), both of which are violent criminal organizations in Mexico that espouse idiosyncratic Christian worldviews: the former an evangelical Protestant doctrine inspired by a conservative Colorado-based Christian writer named John Eldredge, who promotes a “muscular Christianity” which enjoins Christian men to be fierce, wild, and passionate rather than wimpy nice guys, the latter a seemingly more Catholicized religious orientation, at least with respect to its preferred symbolism. See, e.g., George W. Grayson, La Familia Drug Cartel: Implications for U.S.-Mexican Security (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Army War College/ Strategic Studies Institute, 2010); Luis Jorge Garay Salamanca and Eduardo SalcedoAlbarán, eds., Narcotráfico, corrupción y estados: Cómo las redes ilícitas han reconfigurado las instituciones en Colombia, Guatemala y México (Mexico City: Debate, 2012), pp. 221–65; and “Descubren códigos de adoctrinamiento de ‘Los Caballeros Templarios,’” Excelsior

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[Mexico City], 13 July 2011, available at www.excelsior.com.mx/2011/07/13/nacional/752740. Along with these two specific examples, there has been an ever-increasing amount of veneration by criminal Latin American gang leaders and members for La Santa Muerte (Saint Death), the skeletal female symbol of a syncretistic and largely underground folk religion combining indigenous Mesoamerican and Catholic elements, since she is especially believed to protect and look after the poor, the dispossessed, and outlaws. See R. Andrew Chestnut, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (New York: Oxford University, 2012). Unfortunately, these religious or quasi-religious beliefs are perfectly compatible with the employment of extreme, grisly violence. See, e.g., Pamela L. Bunker, Lisa J. Campbell, and Robert J. Bunker, “Torture, Beheadings, and Narcocultos,” Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels, Mercenaries and the Invasion of America, a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies 21:1 (2010), pp. 145–78. More generally, a number of analysts have sought to distinguish between traditional political insurgencies, new-style “commercial insurgencies” that large-scale criminal organizations are alleged to be increasingly engaged in, and what some refer to as “spiritual” (a search for meaning by people afflicted with anomie) or “religious” insurgencies, even though the last-named actually fall into the category of religio-political insurgencies. For a brief introduction, see John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker, “Rethinking Insurgency: Criminality, Spirituality, and Societal Warfare in the Americas,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 22:5 (December 2011), pp. 742–63. Makarenko, “Foundations and Evolution of the Crime-Terror Nexus,” p. 236. Note, e.g., the definition from Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Section 2656f(d): “Terrorism means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” See www.cia.gov/terrorism/faqs.html. Here there is one unnecessary restriction (e.g., terrorism can be “religiously motivated” or even “economically motivated,” as well as “politically motivated”) and two outright errors (terrorism is not always perpetrated against “noncombatant targets,” and it is not only carried out by “subnational groups” or “clandestine agents” – the worst perpetrators of terrorism, historically speaking, have been states, which often openly employ their own security forces instead of “clandestine agents”), and the quintessential feature of terrorism – the carrying out of violence in order to influence a wider target audience – is wrongly qualified with “usually.” The best collection and analysis of definitions of terrorism can be found in Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories and Literature (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988), especially pp. 1–38. Many of the better definitions highlighted therein emphasize the centrality of carrying out violent actions with the conscious intention of exerting a psychological impact on a wider target audience. This work has recently been updated by Schmid as The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (New York: Routledge, 2011), wherein the discussion of terrorism definitions appears in Chapter 2. The formal definition that I have been using in my own classes on terrorism for three decades is as follows: “Terrorism is the use or threatened use of violence, directed against victims selected for their symbolic or representative value, as a means of instilling anxiety in, transmitting one or more messages to, and thereby manipulating the attitudes and behavior of a wider target audience or audiences.” Note also, in the interests of terminological precision, that the term “terror” refers to a psychological state marked by fear and anxiety, and must therefore be distinguished from terrorism, a violent technique of psychological manipulation. “Terror” is therefore not a synonym for “terrorism” or “terrorist,” even though it is often mistakenly used as such, especially in the wake of 9/11, when non-specialists began writing more about terrorism. Thus there is no such thing as a “terror network,” only a “terrorist network.” Even so, usually terrorism is in fact morally problematic if not morally reprehensible because the actors that rely most heavily on that technique are either non-state extremist groups or authoritarian and totalitarian states, both of which tend to promote agendas

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that are inimical to individual freedom, and because such actors very often – though not always – deliberately target civilians and noncombatants. For example, post-World War II French guerre révolutionnaire counterinsurgency doctrine was explicitly based on using the very same methods and techniques employed by their guerrilla opponents against the latter, first in Indo-China against the communists and later in Algeria against the nationalists. Compare Roger Trinquier, La guerre modern (Paris: Table Ronde, 1961); Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The Analysis of a Political and Military Doctrine (New York: Praeger, 1964); Claude Delmas, La guerre révolutionnaire (Paris: PUF, 1965); Pierre-Cyril Pahlavi, La guerre révolutionnaire de l’armée Française en Algérie, 1954–1961: Entre esprit de conquête et conquête des esprits (Paris: Harmattan, 2004); and George Gabriel Peries, “De l’action militaire à l’action politique: Impulsion, codification et application de la doctrine de la ‘guerre révolutionnaire’ au sein de l’armée française, 1944–1960” (Unpublished PhD dissertation: Université PanthéonSorbonne, 1999). Similarly, the “dirty war” waged by the British in Northern Ireland specifically involved employing Protestant paramilitaries and various special operations units to wage a campaign of terrorism against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its supporters. See Martin Dillon, The Dirty War: Covert Strategies and Tactics Used in Political Conflicts (London: Routledge, 1999); Nicholas Davies, Dead Men Talking: Collusion, CoverUp and Murder in Northern Ireland’s Dirty War (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2004); Steve Bruce, The Red Hand: Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University, 1992); Greg Harkin and Martin Ingram, Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004); Paul Foot, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1989); and Fred Holroyd and Nick Burbridge, War without Honour: A True Story of Military Intelligence in Northern Ireland (Hull: Medium, 1989). Compare José Francisco Gómez, “Los cárteles mexicanos,” in Narcotráfico, corrupción y estados, ed. Garay and Salcedo-Albarán (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 2012), p. 161; Sylvia M. Longmire and Lt. John P. Longmire, “Redefining Terrorism: Why Mexican Drug Trafficking Is More Than Just Organized Crime,” Journal of Strategic Security 1:1 (2008), pp. 35–52. Unfortunately, however, the latter authors use flawed U.S. government definitions of terrorism that seriously undermine their efforts to portray Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) as terrorists. Be that as it may, the systematic use of beheadings and dismemberment by paramilitary drug enforcer groups like Los Zetas is likely designed not solely to brutally eliminate individual enemies, but also to psychologically terrorize other potential opponents and society at large. That means that many such acts fall into the category of terrorism. For more on the Zetas, see Diego Enrique Osorno, La guerra de los Zetas: Viaje por la frontera de la necropolítica (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2013); George W. Grayson and Samuel Logan, The Executioner’s Men: Los Zetas, Rogue Soldiers, Criminal Entrepreneurs, and the Shadow State They Created (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2012); Robert J. Bunker, ed., Criminal Insurgencies in Mexico and the Americas: The Gangs and Cartels Wage War (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Jorge Fernández Menéndez and Víctor Ronquillo, De Los Maras a Los Zetas: Los secretos de narcotráfico de Colombia a Chicago (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2006). For a much more extensive discussion of ideologies, political ideologies, and extremist ideologies, see further Chapter 1 in volume 1 of this collection. For more on extremism, see John George and Laird Wilcox, American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, and Others (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), pp. 54–62; Gian Mario Bravo, L’estremismo in Italia (Rome: Riuniti, 1982), pp. 7–18; Neil J. Smelser, The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially pp. 58–80; and Gérald Bronner, La pensée extrème: Comment des hommes ordinaires deviennent des fanatiques (Paris: Denoël, 2009). Compare also Maxwell Taylor, The Fanatics: A Behavioural Approach to Political Violence (London and Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1991), especially Chapter 2, wherein “ten features of fanaticism” are listed that are analogous to several of the characteristics associated with “extremism.” Compare Makarenko, “Foundations and Evolution of the Crime-Terror Nexus,” pp. 235–6; Makarenko, “Crime-Terror Continuum,” p. 138, where she claims that civil

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wars have “evolved from wars fought for ideological and religious motivations to wars hijacked by criminal interests and secured by terror tactics”; David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars (New York: Oxford University/International Institute of Strategic Studies, 1998), wherein he opines (p. 11) that “[i]ncreasingly, civil wars that appear to have begun with political aims have mutated into conflicts in which short-term economic benefits are paramount”; and Justine A. Rosenthal, “For-Profit Terrorism: The Rise of Armed Entrepreneurs,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31 (2008), pp. 481–98. Note that Rosenthal tries to differentiate (p. 481) between “‘traditional’ terrorist groups that engage in criminal activities to secure funding but remain primarily concerned with political goals,” and those that engage “in criminal acts under the guise of an ideology” but whose ideologies have supposedly become “nothing more than attractive facades.” The problem, however, is that four of the five groups she cites as examples of the latter phenomenon, the one exception being the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone (whose so-called ideology was hopelessly vague, confined to rhetorical slogans, and never really functioned as a behavioral driver), exhibited a much more complex and shifting mixture of ideological and mercenary motives than she seems to realize. Shelley et al., Methods and Motives. Makarenko, “Crime-Terror Continuum,” p. 136. For a critique of the “terrorists as proxies” thesis, as well as an attempt to provide a more nuanced categorization of different levels of state involvement in terrorism, see Jeffrey M. Bale, “Terrorists as State ‘Proxies’: Separating Fact from Fiction,” in Chapter 1 of this volume. Makarenko, “Foundations and Evolution of the Crime-Terror Nexus,” pp. 239–46, and Figure 15.1 on p. 247. The notion of “parasitic” cooperation between extremist groups and criminal organizations, as opposed to genuine symbiotic relationships, has been rightly emphasized by Hutchinson and O’Malley, “A Crime-Terror Nexus?,” p. 1104. Ibid., p. 242, and the discussion up through p. 244. Ibid., p. 245. For the quote, see Chris Dishman, “Terrorism, Crime, and Transformation,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 24:1 (2001), p. 48. Makarenko, “Foundations and Evolution of the Crime-Terror Nexus,” pp. 245–6. Shelley et al., Methods and Motives, pp. 34–9. That is clearly the implication of the remarks by FBI analyst Daniel Boyce, in “NarcoTerrorism,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin [#107701–107706] 56:11 (October 1987), p. 25: “Contacts between terrorist groups and narcotics traffickers appear to be the result of the clandestine nature and criminal activities of both types of groups.” Therein, however, he is contrasting that basic situation, which he claims exists in the U.S., with what he calls the “affiliation” between the two that exists in places like Colombia. Yet as will become clearer, the fact that they both operate in clandestinity within the criminal underworld is the essential reason why these two types of disparate groups initially tend to end up interacting, when in fact they do. See, e.g., James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace (New York: Doubleday, 1986); Jean-Louis Briquet and Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, eds., Organized Crime and States: The Hidden Face of Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); James S. Henry, The Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Thurston Clarke and John J. Tigue, Jr., Dirty Money: Swiss Banks, the Mafia, Money Laundering, and White Collar Crime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); and Roy Godson, ed., Menace to Society: Political-Criminal Collaboration around the World (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing, 2003). An extraordinary example is that of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was established in 1972 by Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abadi and eventually became the world’s seventh largest bank. However, the BCCI, whose founder appears to have had some sort of Third Worldist or Islamist political agenda, was later involved in a rash of international financial and political scandals, and investigations carried out in numerous countries revealed that it was implicated in numerous financial crimes, including fraud, laundering money from

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criminal activities (including drug trafficking), managing portfolios for several dictators (Saddam Husayn, Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi, Manuel Noriega, Samuel Doe of Liberia), criminal organizations (the Medellín Cartel), and terrorists (Abu Nidal), and funnelling money to terrorist groups (including the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahidin), which resulted in its liquidation in the early 1990s (even though some components apparently continued functioning thereafter). See U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, 2nd Session, 102nd Congress, The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations (Washington, DC: GPO, 1993); U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, 1st Session, 102nd Congress, The BCCI Affair: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, International Narcotics, and International Operations (Washington, DC: GPO, 1992); Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1992); James Ring Adams and Douglas Frantz, A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole Billions around the World (New York: Pocket Books, 1992); Mark Potts, Nick Kochan, and Robert Whittington, Dirty Money: BCCI, the Inside Story of the World’s Sleaziest Bank (Washington, DC: National Press Books, 1992); and Jonathan Beatty and S. C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993). Needless to say, the term “nexus” clearly applies in this case. 30 Compare R. T. Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2002), p. 45: “A world of difference exists between the motives of insurgent versus criminal groups. Criminals commit crimes to make money. The buck, so to speak, stops there. But to an insurgent group, money is merely a tool – one that is necessary but not sufficient to achieve the group’s goals.” Compare also the remarks of Raphael Perl, an analyst for the Congressional Research Service: “it is important to recognize that we are dealing with two distinct and separate phenomena, linked mainly for convenience.” See the testimony of Perl before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary, 20 May 2003, available at www.judiciary.senate. gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=4f1e0899533f7680e78d03281febe8d1&wit_id=4f1e 0899533f7680e78d03281febe8d1-2-1. Other analysts have noted a similar distinction between the motives and goals of ideological extremists and criminals, if only to criticize or qualify that distinction. See, e.g., Clarke, Crime-Terror Nexus in South Asia, pp. 2–3: “In the West, despite often having the use of violence at their core, organized crime and terrorism are viewed as fundamentally different phenomena that are driven by their own distinct motivations and therefore must be viewed as being on opposite ends of the spectrum. When it comes to crime, especially organized crime, the profit motive is viewed as the key motivation and a preference for the status quo and a stable, predictable operating environment is witnessed. However, terrorism is believed to the by-product of an extremist ideology that can be motivated by religion, ethno-nationalism, socio-political considerations, or opposition to a particular action or policy (otherwise known as ‘single-issue terrorism’) and seeks to violently overthrow the existing order with which they have an issue.” (Note, however, the false claim in this summary that only extremists employ terrorism as a technique.) Clarke thence immediately challenges this common distinction, but since the focus of his book is on D-Company, a South Asian criminal organization with a pro-Islamist ideology, his conclusions about this unusual case are definitely not generalizable to most other criminal groups, which do in fact normally lack ideological agendas and motives. 31 Compare Robert J. Stove, The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2003); Jean-Paul Brunet, La police de l’ombre: Indicateurs et provocateurs dans le France contemporaine (Paris: Seuil, 1990); Nurit Schleifman, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The SR Party, 1902–14 (Basingstoke: Macmillan/St. Antony’s College, 1988); Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); and Steve Hewitt, Snitch! A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer (New York: Continuum, 2010). One of the few historical overviews of revolutionary ideas and movements in modern times that has devoted

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sufficient attention to the important role played by secret societies, above all as a model for clandestine and revolutionary organizations, is that of James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), especially pp. 86–123. For examples of serious scholarly studies of actual secret societies, some of which became involved in revolutionary activities, see Karl R. H. Frick, Die Erleuchteten: Gnostische-theosophische and alchemistische-rosenkruezerische Geheimgesellschaften bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der Neuzeit (Graz: Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt, 1973); Karl R. H. Frick, Licht und Finsternis: Gnostische-theosophische und freimaurerisch-okkulte Geheimgesellschaften bis an die Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1975); Helmuth Reinalter, ed., Aufklärung und Geheimgesellschaften: Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogen im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1989); René Le Forestier, La franc-maçonnerie templière et occultiste aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1970 [1928]); Jan Rachold, ed., Die Illuminaten: Quellen und Texte zur Aufklärungsideologie des Illuminatenordens, 1776–1785 (Berlin: Akademie, 1984); René Le Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande (Paris: Hachette, 1914); Armando Saitta, Ricerche storiografiche su Buonarotti e Babeuf (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, 1986); and Mark Raeff, The Decembrist Movement (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966). 32 Compare Jean Chesneaux, Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1971); David Ownby and Mary Summers Heidhues, eds., “Secret Societies” Reconsidered: Perspectives of the Social History of Modern South China and Southeast Asia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993); Fenton S. Bresler, The Trail of the Triads: An Investigation into International Crime (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980); Martin Booth, The Triads: The Growing Global Threat from the Chinese Criminal Societies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); Teng Ssu-yu, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Chinese Secret Societies,” in Studies on Asia, ed. Robert Sakai (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1963), pp. 81–99; Brian G. Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1996) , especially Chapters 4–7; and Frederick Wakeman, Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1996), passim. 33 See, e.g., Fredric Dannen, “Triads and China: Partners in Crime,” The New Republic, 14, 21 July 1997, parts I–III, available at www.copi.com/articles/triads1.html; and “Events Suggest Communists, Triad Criminal Gangs Intertwined,” Vancouver Sun, 2 September 2009, available at www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story. html?id=4bf21cac-4ab4-4ac9-ae34-0b1a787249d9. 34 Compare Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2003), Chapters 4–7; Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948 (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1999); Jonathan Marshall, “Cooking the Books: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Cold War Propaganda, 1950– 1962” (Unpublished paper), pp. 12–20; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1998); Jonathan Marshall, Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency, and Covert Operations in the Third World (Forestville, CA: Cohen & Cohen, 1991); Allan Nairn, “Behind the Death Squads,” The Progressive (May 1984), pp. 1, 20–9; Craig Pyes and Laurie Becklund, “Dope and Death Squads: How American Drug Traffic Serves the Salvadoran Right,” New Republic, 15 April 1985; R. Bruce McColm and Francis X. Maier, “Fighting Castro from Exile,” New York Times Review of Books, 4 January 1981, pp. 28–34; Jeff Stein, “Inside Omega 7,” Village Voice, 10 March 1980; Martin Edwin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993); and William C. Marcy, The Politics of Cocaine: How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2010), Chapters 1, 3–6. See also the more controversial investigative findings of former San Jose Mercury News journalist Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories, 1999), which generated a storm of outrage and retaliation that ultimately resulted in the suicide of the author, for which see Nick

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Schou, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (New York: Nation Books, 2006). 35 Compare Parlamento italiano, XII Legislatura, Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul terrorismo in Italia e sulle cause della mancata individuazione dei responsabili delle stragi, Relazione[Sen. Giovanni] Pellegrino: Il terrorismo, le stragi ed il contesto storico-politico (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1999), as well as the testimony and documentation; Parlamento, IX Legislatura, Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sulla Loggia Massonica P2, Relazione di maggioranza [Dep. Tina Anselmi] (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1984), and also the dissenting minority reports, testimony, and documentation; Giuseppe De Lutiis, I servizi segreti in Italia: Dal fascismo all’intelligence del XXI secolo (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2010); Gianni Flamini, Il partito del golpe: Le strategie della tensione e del terrore dal primo centrosinistra organico al sequestro Moro (Ferrara: Bovolenta, 1981–5), especially vols, 1–3; Franco Ferraresi, Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), Chapters 4–6; Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991); Vittorio Borraccetti, ed., Eversione di destra, terrorismo, stragi: I fatti e l’intervento giudiziario (Milan: Angeli, 1986); neo-fascist insider Vincenzo Vinciguerra, Ergastolo per la libertà:Verso la verità sulla strategia della tensione (Florence: Arnaud, 1989); and Andrea Barberi et al., L’Italia della P2 (Milan: Mondadori, 1981). See also volume 1 in this collection. 36 Compare Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop, La Piscine: Les services secrets français, 1944–1984 (Paris: Seuil, 1985); Douglas Porch, The French Secret Services: A History of French Intelligence from the Dreyfus Affair to Gulf War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), Chapters 11–18, especially pp. 400–3; Charles Cogan, “Stay behind in France: Much Ado about Nothing?,” Journal of Strategic Studies 30:6 (2007), pp. 937–54; Pierre Péan, L’homme de l’ombre: Eléments d’enquête autour Jacques Foccart, l’homme le plus mystérieux et le plus puissant de la Ve Republique (Paris: Fayard, 1990); Patrice Chairoff [pseudonym for DominiqueIvan Calzi], Dossier B. . . . comme barbouzes: Une France parallèle, celle des basses-oeuvres du pouvoir (Paris: A. Moreau, 1975); Lucien Bitterlin, Nous étions tous les terroristes: L’histoire des “barbouzes” contre le O.A.S. en Algérie (Paris: Témoignage Chrétien, 1983); Mathilde von Bulow, “Myth or Reality?: The Red Hand and French Covert Action in Federal Germany during the Algerian War, 1956–61,” Intelligence and National Security 22:6 (2007), pp. 787–820; Assemblée Nationale, Rapport de la Commission d’enquête sur le activités du Service d’action civique (Paris: A. Moreau, 1982); Serge Ferrand and Gilbert Lecavelier, Aux ordres du S.A.C. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1982); François Audigier, Histoire du SAC: La part d’ombre du gaullisme (Paris: Stock, 2003); Rémi Kauffer, O.A.S.: Histoire d’une organisation secrète (Paris: Fayard, 1986); James Sarazin, Dossier M. . . . comme milieu (Paris: A. Moreau, 1978); Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1980); and Newsday Staff, The Heroin Trail: The First Journalistic Investigation into the Heroin Traffic from Turkey to France to Its Ultimate Consumer: The Young American Addict (New York: Signet, 1973–4), pp. 109–21. 37 Compare Uğur Mumcu, Silah kaçakçılığı ve terör (Istanbul: Tekin, 1981); Uğur Mumcu, Papa – Mafya – Ağca (Istanbul: Tekin, 1984); Jeffrey M. Bale, “The Ultranationalist Right in Turkey and the Attempted Assassination of Pope John Paul II,” in volume 1 of this collection; Kemal Yücel, Kontr-Gerilla (Ankara: Yar, 1973); M. Emin Değer, CIA, Kontr-Gerilla ve Türkiye (Ankara: Değer, 1977); Süleyman Genç, Biçağın sırtındaki Türkiye: CIA-MIT-KontrGerilla (Ankara: Der, 1979); Cemal Anadol, Alparslan Türkeş: Olaylar belgeler hâtıralar: MHP ve Bozkurtlar (Istanbul: Burak, 1995); Talat Turhan, Çeteleşme: Kontrgerilla, Gladio, Susurluk (Istanbul: Akyüz, 1999); Semih Hiçyılmaz, Susurluk ve Kontrgerilla gerçeği (Istanbul: Evrensel Basım, 1997); Michael Gunter, “Susurluk: The Connection between Turkey’s Intelligence Community and Organized Crime,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 11:2 (1998), pp. 119–41; Soner Yalçın and Doğan Yurdakul, Reis: Gladio’nun Türk tetikçisi (Istanbul: Doğan, 2005); Emin Demirel, Hizbullah (Istanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat, 2001); Hikmet Çetinkaya, JITEM ve faili meçhuller dosyası: Hizbullah vahşeti (Istanbul: Cumhuriyet, 2011); Rusen Cakir, The Reemergence of Hizballah in Turkey (Washington, DC: Washington

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Institute for Near East Policy, [September] 2007); Gareth Jenkins, Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey’s Ergenekon Investigation (Washington, DC: Central Asia-Caucasus Institute/Silk Road Studies Program, 2009); and H. Akin Ünver, Turkey’s “Deep State” and the Ergenekon Conundrum (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, [April] 2009), Policy Brief 23; and Doğu Perinçek, Gladyo ve Ergenekon (Istanbul: Kaynak, 2008). 38 Compare Richard Halloran, “Little-Known Japanese Wield Vast Power,” New York Times, 2 July 1974; Hiroshi Hanzawa, “Two Right-Wing Bosses: A Comparison of Sugiyama and Kodama,” Japan Quarterly 23:3 (July–September 1976); John G. Roberts, “Ryoichi Sasakawa: Nippon’s Right-Wing Muscleman,” Insight [Hong Kong], April 1978; John G. Roberts, “Rightwingers: Men Who Brood and Wait,” Far Eastern Economic Review 80:24 (18 June 1973); John G. Roberts, “The ‘Japan Crowd’ and the Zaibatsu Restoration,” Japan Interpreter 12:3–4 (Summer 1979), pp. 384–415; Koji Nakamura, “The Japanese ‘Godfathers’: A Strange Alliance of Gangsters, Businessmen, and Right-Wing Politicians,” Atlas World Press Review 21:11 (December 1974); Ivan I. Morris, Nationalism and the Right Wing in Japan: A Study of Post-War Trends (London: Oxford University, 1960); Karl Hale Dixon, “The Extreme Right Wing in Contemporary Japan” (Unpublished PhD dissertation: Tallahassee, Florida State University, 1975); Wolfgang Seifert, Nationalismus im Nachkriegs-Japan: Ein Beitrag zur Ideologie der völkischen Nationalisten (Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde, 1977); David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2012), especially part 2; U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Committee on International Relations, Investigation of Korean-American Relations, Report, 95th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: GPO, 1978); U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Committee on International Relations, Activities of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, 94th Congress (Washington, DC: GPO, 1976), parts 1 and 2; U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Committee on International Relations, Investigation of Korean-American Relations, Hearings (Washington, DC: GPO, 1978), part 4, Supplement; Robert Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1980); Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., Science, Sin, and Scholarship: The Politics of Reverend Moon and the Unification Church (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1978); Jean-François Boyer, L’empire Moon (Paris: Découverte, 1986); Paul Valentine, “The Fascist Specter behind the World Anti-Red League,” Washington Post, 28 May 1978; Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986); and Jeffrey M. Bale, “‘Privatising’ Covert Action: The Case of the Unification Church,” elsewhere in this volume. 39 Compare Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA], “The Involvement of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in International Narcotics Trafficking,” in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Drugs and Terrorism: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, 98th Congress, 2nd Session, 2 August 1984 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1984); and “Prepared Statement of John C. Lawn, Acting Deputy Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency,” in U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Relations, Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection: United States-Bulgarian Relations and International Drug Trafficking. Hearings and Markup before the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Its Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, 98th Congress, 2nd Session, 7 and 24 June, and 26 September 1984 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1984); Newsday Staff, Heroin Trail, pp. 50–8; Mumcu, Silah kaçakçılığı, pp. 114–18; Edward S. Herman and Frank Broadhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square, 1986); and Bale, “Ultranationalist Right in Turkey,” pp. 37–45. 40 Compare Christina Lamb, “Taliban Leader Killed by SAS Was Pakistan Officer,” [London] Times, 12 October 2008; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Ladin, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 67–8, 113, 119–20, 128–9, 131, 157, 165–6, passim; Bruce Reidel, “Pakistan and Terror: The Eye of the Storm,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social

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Science 618 (July 2008), pp. 31–45; and Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism (New York: Cambridge University, 2005), Chapters 6–7. Of course, in response to U.S. pressure and provision of aid in the wake of 9/11, the Pakistani government adopted a more circumspect and ambiguous but no less deceptive policy toward jihadist terrorists, one that combined helping the Americans capture or kill certain highprofile al-Qa‘ida figures while doing little or nothing to interfere with the activities of the Afghan Taliban or Kashmiri jihadists. See, e.g., Shaun Gregory, “The ISI and the War on Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30 (2002), pp. 1013–31; Ashley J. Tellis, “Pakistan’s Record on Terrorism: Conflicted Goals, Compromised Performance,” Washington Quarterly 11:2 (Spring 2008), pp. 7–32. On the other hand, there are increasing indications that the ISI was complicit in sheltering Usama b. Ladin in his Abbottabad compound. Compare Bill Roggio, “Pakistani Complicity in Sheltering Osama bin Ladin Is Evident,” Long War Journal, 2 May 2011, available at www.longwarjournal.org/ threat-matrix/archives/2011/05/pakistani_complicity_in_shelte.php; and Bruce Reidel, “Pakistan’s Musharraf Has Been Accused of Knowing Osama bin Ladin’s Hideout,” The Daily Beast, 14 February 2012, available at www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/13/ pakistan-s-musharraf-has-been-accused-of-knowing-osama-bin-laden-s-hideout.html. On Dawud Ibrahim, see Gilbert King, The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Dawood Ibrahim (New York: Chamberlain Brothers, 2004); and Clarke, Crime-Terror Nexus in South Asia, passim. 41 Compare Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton, and Neal Ascherson, The Fourth Reich: Klaus Barbie and the Neo-Fascist Connection (London: Coronet, 1985), pp. 362–77; Latin America Bureau, ed., Narcotráfico y politica: Militarismo y mafia en Bolivia (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos para América Latina y Africa, 1982), pp. 100–44; Federico Aguiló, “Nunca Mas” para Bolivia (Cochabamba: Asamblea Permanente de los Derechos Humanos de Bolivia, 1993), pp. 245–91, 326–52; Gerardo Irusta Medrano, Espionaje y servicios secretos en Bolivia, 1930–1980: “Operación Condor” en acción (La Paz: self-published, 1995), pp. 261–384; Asociación de Familiares de Detenidos, Desaparecidos y Martires por la Liberación Nacional (ASOFAMD), Acusación a la dictadura del narcotráfico (La Paz: Gráficas, 1993), pp. 66–173; Carlo Rossella, “Un uomo in vendita,” Panorama [Milan] 20:857, 27 September 1982, pp. 82–91; Jürgen Roth and Berndt Ender, Geschäfte und Verbrechen der Politmafia: Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme des internationalen Dunkelmännerwesen (Berlin: IBDK, 1987), pp. 222–5; and Kai Hermann, “Eine Killer-Karriere [part 5],” Der Stern 37:24 (6 June 1984); ex-DEA operative Michael Levine, with Laura KavanauLevine, The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War (New York: self-published, 2012), pp. 55–60; Ariel C. Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984 (Miami: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1996), pp. 29–30; and the account by one of the key Novios, Italian neo-fascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie, in Stefano Delle Chiaie and Adriano Tilgher, Un meccanismo diabolico: Stragi, servizi segreti, magistrati (Rome: Publicondor, 1994), pp. 193–5. It is very difficult to determine the precise organizational structure, not to mention the exact chain of command, of the various paramilitary groups involved in the 1980 Bolivian coup. Apparently, there were several different paramilitary bands operating under the aegis of the Interior Ministry and/or Department 2. The most important of these was the Servicio Especial de Seguridad (SES: Special Security Service), headed by Colonel Fernando (“Freddy”) Quiroga, which seems to have been a parallel “special operations” unit staffed (at least in part) by active-duty Bolivian military officers. It was officially under the command of the Interior Ministry’s Comando de Operaciones Conjuntas (COC: Combined Operations Command) – or, according to others, Department 2 – and collaborated closely on an operational level with the same ministry’s Departamento de Orden Social (DOS: Department of Social Order). Under the loose supervision of Department 2 were several exclusively civilian paramilitary groups, including the Grupos Operacionales Especiales (GOES: Special Operational Groups) and the Novios de la Muerte. The first of these was probably composed entirely of Bolivian

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nationals, whereas the latter was the aforementioned mixed international band of Latin American and European neo-fascists and mercenaries. Dishman, “Terrorism, Crime, and Transformation,” pp. 43–7, 52–4 (quote from p. 44), referring to Phil Williams, “Transnational Criminal Organizations: Strategic Alliances,” Washington Quarterly 18:1 (1995), pp. 57–72. As examples of groups that have apparently refused to collaborate with the other type, Dishman cites the Russian mafiya and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN: Zapatista Army of National Liberation) in Mexico. For the barriers to such collaboration, see further Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, Actual and Potential Links between Terrorism and Criminality (Carleton: ITAC/CIEM, 2006), pp. 8–9, available at www3.carleton.ca/cciss/res_docs/ itac/omalley_e.pdf. Picarelli, “Turbulent Nexus of Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism,” pp. 5–17. Bale, “Terrorists as State ‘Proxies.’” For the claims made by Anslinger and related matters reported in this paragraph, see Marshall, “Cooking the Books.” Marshall gave a presentation based on this paper at the “Nexus” conference at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS) from which this volume emanated, but his paper (though based in large part on archival and other primary source materials) was unfortunately not included in the published volume. Ibid., p. 5. This theme was also endlessly promoted by the Nationalist government in Taiwan, as well as by components of the influential pro-Taiwan “China Lobby” in the U.S. Yet many historians have since concluded that the new communist leaders of China, driven both by ideology and a sense of national shame, embarked upon a serious and at times ruthless campaign to suppress poppy cultivation and opium production, especially between 1949 and 1952. See, e.g., Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 272–5; Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600–1950 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012), pp. 700–1; and Zhou Yongming, Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China: Nationalism, History, and State Building (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), Chapter 6. In reality, however, the situation was much more complicated and variegated, since both the GMD and the Communist regimes – like later Qing Dynasty rulers and various regional warlords – vacillated between adopting harsh anti-opium rhetoric and periodic eradication campaigns, on the one hand, and secretly regulating and taxing the domestic production and sale of opium, which provided them with an important source of revenue in lean times, on the other. For the history of modern Chinese anti-drug campaigns, which were also usually used as a pretext for fomenting nationalism, if not outright xenophobia, as well as for consolidating state power, see Zhou, Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China. Marshall, “Cooking the Books,” pp. 5–12. Ibid., pp. 12–20. See also the sources cited in note 32. See, e.g., Joseph D. Douglass, Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America (Atlanta, GA: Clarion House, 1990), for a particularly alarmist and histrionic example. The original meaning of the term “narco-terrorism” was in fact much more limited, since it was coined in 1983 by Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde (1963–1968, 1980– 1985) to refer to terrorist-style attacks by criminal drug trafficking organizations, such as that of Pablo Escobar, on the predecessors of the Dirección Antidrogas (DIRANDRO) units of the Policía Nacional de Perú (PNP: National Police of Peru). Compare Jonas Hartelius, Narcoterrorism (New York and Stockholm: East West Institute/Swedish Carnegie Institute, 2008), p. 1. It still sometimes retains that original meaning today, as in the U.S. DOD’s definition: “terrorism conducted to further the aims of drug traffickers.” Cited by Douglas J. Davids, Narco-Terrorism: A Unified Strategy to Fight a Growing Terrorist Menace (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2002), p. 4. However, the meaning of the term was subsequently expanded in different ways. Thus during the Reagan Administration, National Security Council members and other hawkish Cold Warriors began using the term, in the same biased way that they were then defining “state sponsorship

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of terrorism,” almost exclusively to refer to the Soviet Bloc’s alleged involvement in the drug trade. See Bruce M. Bagley, ed., Drug Trafficking Research in the Americas: An Annotated Bibliography (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami North-South Center, 1997), p. 1. These claims about the Soviet Union and its satellites were then extended to many other corrupt regimes by Rachel Ehrenfeld in her potboiler Narco-Terrorism: How Governments around the World Have Used the Drug Trade to Finance and Further Terrorist Activities (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Other definitions are broader still, e.g., that of the Oxford dictionary: “Terrorism associated with the trade in illicit drugs.” For its part, the DEA defines the term as the “participation of groups or associated individuals in taxing, providing security for, [or] otherwise aiding and abetting drug trafficking endeavors in an effort to further, or fund, terrorist activities.” Cited by Kimberly Thachuk, Transnational Threats: Smuggling and Trafficking in Arms, Drugs, and Human Life (London: Praeger Security, 2007), p. 26. Later, as previously noted, the term came to refer increasingly to extremist groups known for terrorism that were likewise involved in drug trafficking. See, e.g., the definition of Boyce (“Narco-Terrorism,” p. 24), who defines it as “the involvement of terrorist organizations and insurgent movements in the trafficking of narcotics.” However, Davids (Narco-Terrorism, pp. 4–5) combines that notion with the original meaning: “On the one hand. . . . terrorism that aims to protect and support the activities of illegal drug traffickers; and on the other, terrorism by organizations that use the financial profits of narcotrafficking to support their political, religious, or other goals.” See, e.g., Luis Alberto Villamarín, El cartel de las FARC (no place: Faraón, 1996); Victoria Bruce, Karen Hayes, and Jorge Enrique Botero, Hostage Nation: Colombia’s Guerrilla Army and the Failed War on Drugs (New York: Knopf, 2010); “Narcotráfico sí financió toma del Palacio de Justicia: Comisión de la Verdad,” El Espectador, 17 December 2009, available at www.elespectador.com/node/177849 (regarding M-19’s attack on the Palace of Justice in Bogota being funded by the Medellín Cartel following an amnesty between the group’s leader, Iván Marino Ospina, and Pablo Escobar). Gabriela Tarazona-Sevillano and John B. Reuter, Sendero Luminero and the Threat of Narcoterrorism (New York: Praeger, 1990). The involvement of the AUC and other right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia in drug trafficking has been well documented by Colombian investigators. See, e.g., Carlos Medina Gallego, Autodefensas, paramilitares y narcotráfico en Colombia: El caso “Puerto Boyarcá” (Bogota: Documentos Periodisticos, 1990). Since the AUC has also resisted American-backed anti-drug efforts associated with “Plan Colombia,” it too has been labeled as a narco-terrorist group. There are, of course, notable exceptions. Thus Boyce (“Narco-Terrorism,” pp. 25, 27) highlights the involvement of Cuban exile terrorists from Omega 7 in drug trafficking. For the involvement of the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban warlords in the drug trade, see McCoy, Politics of Heroin, Chapter 9; John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 2002), Chapter 7; Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), Chapter 9; Syed Saleem Shahzad, “US Turns to Drug Baron to Rally Support,” Asia Times, 4 December 2001; Paul Harris, “Victorious Warlords Set to Open the Opium Floodgates,” The Observer, 24 November 2001; and especially Julien Mercille, Cruel Harvest: US Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade (London: Pluto Press, 2013), Chapters 3–6. Therein (p. 1), Mercille ably sums up the general situation: “Counternarcotics missions abroad mostly target individuals and groups that are considered enemies or who have outlived their usefulness, while allies are rarely prosecuted.” Concerning the drug situation in Afghanistan, after a dramatic increase of Afghan opium production and trafficking during the 1980s, which was conveniently ignored by the U.S. since it helped to fund the anti-Soviet mujahidin, it appears that Northern Alliance components and regional anti-Taliban warlords became the biggest culprits in the late 1990s. In 2000 and 2001 the ruling Taliban government made efforts to suppress opium growing (but not to eliminate existing stocks or the laboratories used to refine it), but since 2005 an ever-increasing

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majority of the opium production in that country has occurred in Taliban-controlled or – dominated regions. See Shanty, The Nexus, Chapter 2. Hartelius, Narcoterrorism, p. 2. This problem of applying blatant double standards raises much larger issues, such as the wisdom of continuing to wage a decades-old, militarized “war on drugs,” which has not only been a catastrophic failure with respect to eradicating or even interdicting illegal drugs but has also resulted in serious abuses of individual freedoms at home and abroad; the disastrous impact of drug eradication policies and actions on U.S. counterinsurgency and counterterrorist efforts in South America and in the “Golden Crescent,” given that destroying the livelihood of peasants who depend upon coca or opium production will inevitably turn many of them into recruits for the insurgents; and the extent to which the odious legacy of religio-moral puritanism in America, which has manifested itself concretely in the form of both anti-alcohol and anti-drug prohibition (as well as anti-obscenity and anti-prostitution) campaigns, has primarily benefitted organized criminal groups by providing them with an easy means of making vast profits by producing, trafficking, and selling illegal substances. For the counterproductive impact of the “war on drugs” in the foreign policy realm, compare Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block, eds., War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Coletta A. Youngers and Eileen Rosin, eds., Drugs and Democracy in Latin America: The Impact of U.S. Policy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005); Jurg Gerber and Eric L. Jensen, eds., Drug War American Style: The Internationalization of Failed Policy and Its Alternatives (New York: Garland, 2001); and Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2009). For an illustrative Spanish example, see Luis Alberto Villamarín Pulido, Narcoterrorismo, la guerra del nuevo siglo. ETA, FARC, Al Qaeda, IRA: La cadena del terror al descubierto (Madrid: Nowtilus, 2005). Hartelius, Narcoterrorism, p. 2. Compare Schmid, “Drug Trafficking, Transnational Crime, and International Terrorist Groups,” p. 342, who rightly notes that “[w]hile the propaganda value of the term is high, its analytical value is dubious due to the multiple meanings attached to the term.” See especially Paul L. Williams, The Al Qaeda Connection: International Terrorism, Organized Crime, and the Coming Apocalypse (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), pp. 160–9, where he also discusses MS-13’s supposed smuggling of al-Qa‘ida operative ‘Adnan Shukri Juma‘a across the southern U.S. border. However, Williams has written a series of books filled with increasingly extravagant and histrionic, but ultimately unsupported, claims about al-Qa‘ida’s technical and operational capabilities and planned terrorist plots, e.g., arguing that the group’s “sleepers” will soon be detonating multiple suitcase nuclear devices within the U.S. See Paul L. Williams, The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), wherein he repeats that same unsubstantiated information about jihadists and MS-13 cooperating on pp. 152–7, 168–9. Compare also Hitha Prabhakar, Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crime Funds Global Terrorists (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2012), pp. 21–5; “Honduran Official: ‘Al Qaida Recruits Central American Gang,” Associated Press, 21 October 2004; ex-NYPD sergeant Lou Savelli, “Gangs and Terrorists in Our Midst as Partners in Crime: The Newest Threat Exposed as the Tenth Anniversary of September 11th Arrives,” GTI [Government Training Institute] website, 7 September 2011, available at www.gtitraining. org/news_090711A.htm; and Eyewitness News 4, “Terrorist Alley: Illegals from Terrorist Nations Are Crossing the Border into Arizona,” KVOA-TV, Tucson, Arizona, aired 13 August 2004. See Celinda Franco, The MS-13 and 18th Street Gangs: Emerging Transnational Gang Threats? (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, [ January] 2008), p. 1, citing a personal communication in June 2007 with John Truchon, Director of the FBI’s MS-13 Task Force; and Danna Harman, “U.S. Steps Up Battle against Salvadoran Gang MS-13,” USA

378

60

61 62

63

“Nexus” between terrorists and criminals

Today, 23 February 2005, citing Robert Clifford, yet another Director of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Task Force created to fight MS-13: “The FBI, in concert with the U.S. intelligence community and governments of several Central American republics, have determined that there is no basis in fact to support this allegation of al-Qaeda or even radical Islamic ties to MS-13.” This is not to say, of course, that the FBI and DOJ might not be mistaken. For more on MS-13, see Thomas Bruneau, Lucía Dammert, and Elizabeth Skinner, eds., Maras: Gang Violence and Security in Central America (Austin: University of Texas, 2011); T. W. Ward, Gangsters without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang (New York: Oxford University, 2012); Tom Diaz, No Boundaries: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2009); and Samuel Logan, This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang (New York: Hyperion, 2009). See, e.g., U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, 1st Session, 7 July 2011, 112th Congress, Hezbollah in Latin America: Implications for U.S. Homeland Security (Washington, DC: GPO, 2012); Barbara Newman and Tom Diaz, Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), which is based largely on trial materials; and Steven Emerson, Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), Chapter 6. Chris Kraul and Sebastian Rotella, “Fears of a Hezbollah Presence in Venezuela,” Los Angeles Times, 27 August 2008, available at http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/27/ world/fg-venezterror27. For a somewhat alarmist interpretation, see Vanessa Neumann, “The New Nexus of Narcoterrorism: Hezbollah and Venezuela,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, E-Notes, December 2011, available at www.fpri.org/enotes/2011/201112.neumann.narcoterrorism.pdf. Concerning possible Hizballah and Iranian involvement in the Buenos Aires bombings, compare Walter Goobar, El tercer atentado: Argentina en la mira del terrorismo internacional (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1996); Juan Salinas, AMIA: El atentado. Quiénes son los autores y por qué no estan presos (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1997), especially pp. 101–16, 74–100, 150–78, 321–400; and Jorge Lanata and Joe Goldman, Cortinas de humo: Una investigación independiente sobre los atentados contra la embajada de Israel y la AMIA (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1994), pp. 83–105, 173–217. For the Israeli embassy bombing, see Carlos S. Fayt, Criminalidad del terrorismo sagrado: El atentado a la Embajada de Israel en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Universitaria de La Plata, 2001). Former members of the Iranian secret service have since provided detailed testimony concerning the specifics of the operation, testimony that explicitly implicates high-ranking Iranian “diplomats” stationed in the Argentine capital. Compare “Iranian Arrested in AMIA Bombing,” Weekly News Update on the Americas, 24 August 2003; and “Iran Rejects Accusations of Its Bombing of AMIA,” Iran Press Service, 7 November 2003. Predictably, the Iranian government was quick to attribute these “baseless” accusations to a “Zionist plot.” More recently, the Argentines dropped charges against the Iranian personnel implicated in the attack, to the chagrin of many observers who suspected this action was politically motivated. However, for scepticism concerning the evidence of Hizballah and Iranian involvement in these attacks, see Gareth Porter, “Bush’s Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up,” The Nation, 4 February 2008, available at www.thenation.com/article/bushs-iranargentina-terror-frame#. Compare Mohamed Mokaddem, Al-Qaïda au maghreb islamique: Contreband au nom de l’Islam (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010); Serge Daniel, AQMI: L’industrie de l’enlèvement (Paris: Fayard, 2012); and Robin Yapp, “South America Drug Gangs Funding al-Qaeda Terrorists,” The Telegraph, 29 December 2010, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/southamerica/colombia/8230134/South-American-drug-gangs-fundingal-Qaeda-terrorists.html. For more on AQIM, see Atmane Tazaghart, AQMI: Enquête sur les héritiers de Ben Ladin au Maghreb et en Europe (Paris: Picollec, 2011); Gwendal Durand, Organisation d’Al Qaïda au maghreb islamique: Réalité ou manipulations? (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011); Mohamed Sifaoui, Al-Qaïda maghreb islamique: Le groupe terroriste qui menace la France

“Nexus” between terrorists and criminals

379

(Paris: Encre d’Orient, 2010); and Camille Tawil, The Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb: Expansion in the Sahel and Challenges from within Jihadist Circles (Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation, [April] 2010). 64 Dishman, “Terrorism, Crime, and Transformation,” pp. 44, 47–8, 51–2. 65 Radicalized Muslim petty criminals have been involved in many jihadist terrorist plots and attacks, both within the West and elsewhere. For prison radicalization, see, e.g., Mark S. Hamm, The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat (New York: New York University, 2013); Patrick T. Dunleavy, The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism’s Prison Connection (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011); Greg Hannah, Lindsay Clutterbuck, and Jennifer Rubin, Radicalization or Rehabilitation? Understanding the Challenge of Extremist and Radicalized Prisoners (Santa Barbara: RAND Europe, 2008); Martin Evans and Duncan Gardham, “Radical Muslims ‘Target Young Inmates in Prison,’” The Telegraph, 6 February 2012, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/9062960/Radical-Muslims-target-young-inmates-in-prison.html; Craig S. Smith, “Islam in Jail: Europe’s Neglect Breeds Angry Radicals,” New York Times, 8 December 2004, available at www.nytimes.com/2004/12/08/international/ europe/08prisons.html; Renwick MacLean, “Common Criminals in Spain Transformed into Islamic Militants: Terrorists Recruiting in Prison,” New York Times, 1 November 2004, available at www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/news/01iht-spain_ed3__0.html?_r=0; and Jennifer Carlile, “Islamic Radicalization Feared in Europe’s Jails,” NBC News, 8 July 2006, available at www.nbcnews.com/id/13733782/ns/world_news-islam_in_europe/t/islamicradicalization-feared-europes-jails/. 66 See, e.g., Michael Barkun, Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security since 9/11 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011).

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

The Darkest Sides of Politics, I: Postwar Fascism, Covert Operations, and Terrorism Jeffrey M. Bale 1 Introduction: ideologies, extremist ideologies, and terrorist violence 2 Political paranoia versus political realism: on distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics 3 Postwar neo-fascist internationals, part 1: Nazi escape networks, the Mouvement Social Européenne, Europäische Neu- Ordnung, and Jeune Europe 4 Postwar “neo-fascist” internationals, part 2: Aginter Presse and the “strategy of tension” in Italy 5 The December 1970 “Borghese coup” in Rome 6 The May 1973 terrorist attack at Milan police HQ: anarchist ‘propaganda of the deed’ or ‘false-flag’ provocation? 7 Concluding thoughts on the terrorist “strategy of tension” in Italy 8 The ultranationalist right in Turkey and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II 9 ‘National revolutionary’ groupuscules and the resurgence of ‘left-wing’ fascism: the case of France’s Nouvelle Résistance

INDEX

9/11 attacks 15, 30n77, 247, 362; al-Qaida 164, 178–9, 184, 188, 190–1, 202n47, 208n106, 209n109, 266n5; American invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq after 192; attacking infidels 183; Clausewitzian frameworks explaining 162; conspiracy theories 8, 271n19, 272n22; hijackers 247; ideological justification 176–7; Islam apologism 269n12; Islamic threat 222; jihadist terrorism 279n39, 281n41, 282n43; martyrs on 200n18; memorializing 262; official 9/11 Report 245; one-sided mantras repeated since 309; planes operation 181; reaction after 217; Saudi Arabia in wake of 169; terrorism 367n13; “war against terrorism” 257, 259 Abbott, Tony 318n5 Abdelhadi, Magdi 302, 316n2 al-Ablaj, Abu Muhammad 190–1, 195, 214n160 abrogation: concept of 233n13, 287n48; doctrine of 219, 311, 314, 328n37 Abu Ghayth, Sulayman 177, 184–5, 208n103 Abu Nidal Organization 18 Afghan Arabs 167, 187, 202n44, 213n149, 335, 338 African Explosives and Chemical Industries (AECI) 35 Ağca, Mehmet Ali 6, 356, 358 AKP (Justice and Development Party) 235–6n26, 357

al-A’la Mawdudi, Sayyid Abu 172, 216, 225, 227, 240n50, 301n81, 326n30 Alexander, Yonah 5 Allum, Peter 38 Almulla, Alia 311 Alpha 66 7, 79, 102n167, 355 al-Qa‘ida 14; bin Laden and 155; “fantasy ideology” 159–60, 162, 195, 200n25; ideological factors of 157–82; organizational factors of 156–7; see also jihadist ideology American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 66, 297n74 American Muslim Political Action Committee (AMPAC) 272n22 AN (National Vanguard) 80, 355 ANC (African National Congress) 39, 48 Anderson, Jon Lee 24n17, 87, 98n133, 144n55, 373n38 Anderson, Scott 24n17, 87, 98n133, 144n55, 373n38 al-Ansari, Sayf al-Din 173, 176, 206n90 Anslinger, Harry J.361, 375n45 Anti-Christ 139n17 anti-cult movement (ACM) 120, 136, 142n47 apocalypse, term 110 apocalyptic millenarian groups 108–9, 136–7; behavioral indicators of 135–6; “closed source” vs “open source” groups 131; controversies over cults 119–26; demographic indicators of 133–5; difficulties in identifying bioterrorist threats 111–13; financial

382

Index

indicators of 133; groups by hierarchical organization 128–9; groups by traditional secret societies 129–31; groups headed by charismatic leaders 126–8; organizational indicators of 118–31; rhetorical indicators of 131–3; scientific or technological fetishism of 117–18; terminology of 109–11; types of millenarianism 113–17 AQIM (Al-Qa‘ida Organization in the Countries of the Islamic Maghreb) 364, 378n63 Aquino, Michael 130, 152n92 Arab League 13 Arab Liberation Front 16 Arab Spring 251, 255 Arafat, Yasir 13, 29n66 ARENA (National Republican Alliance) 80 Armageddon 159, 170, 211n129, 316n1, 319n8, 331n55 Armed Islamic Group (GIA) 17, 33n97, 329n45, 333, 335 ARMSCOR (Armaments Corporation of South Africa) 35–6, 42–3, 45 Army of Communist Combat 5 Army of Muhammad 15 Army of the Pure 15 Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League (APACL) 77–8, 80, 85–8, 97n107, 97n111, 98n135–7, 99n138, 100n150, 357 Aslan, Ednan 302, 316n3, 331n51 Atif, Muhammad 181 Aum Supreme Truth (Oumu Shinrikyo) 9, 21, 109, 117 authoritarianism 10, 124, 131, 143n52, 144n54, 148n67, 227, 233n20, 350 autonomous terrorists: agents of nationstates 4–8; instruments of secret services of nation-states 9–16 AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) 56 Azev, Evno 17 ‘Azzam, Usama 170, 205n72 Bacillus anthracis 38, 48 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 318n5, 319n7, 324n26 al-Baghdadi, Abu Omar 302, 316n2 al-Baghdadi, Ahmad Husayni 154, 197n4 Balaguer, José María Eschivá de 148–9n68 al-Banna, Hasan 172, 225, 227, 239n44, 240n50, 298n76, 301n81 Basson, Wouter 34, 36, 40–4, 45–8, 50–5, 57n2, 59n30, 60n44–7, 61n57, 62n68 Beck, Glenn 274n30, 279n39 Becker, Jillian 12

Bergen, Peter 186 Berman, Eli 304 BfV (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) 5 bin Laden, Osama 14–15, 31n84, 201n31, 202n47, 311; 9/11 attack 176–7, 266n5; apostasy of Saudi regime 199n14; critique against 197n2, 202n44; intention 164; jihadist ideology 155, 161–3, 167–71, 175, 178–80; jihadist theology 182–4, 186–7, 189, 191, 200n18; organization 156–7, 160–1, 172, 181, 195–6, 336, 341–2; waging war 201n28 biological agents: expressions of interest 132–3; rhetorical indicators 131–3 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) 52, 62n74 Blair, Tony 184 Blanchard, Christopher 164, 202n46 Blücher, Hubert 54 Boko Haram 303, 318–19n6 Book of Revelation 109, 112–13 Borman, Riana 46, 60n47 Botes, Pieter 48 Botha, P. W. 36, 43, 51 Botha, R. F. 50 Botha, R. J. 48 Bothma, Kobus 51 Boyer, Paul 114, 116 brainwashing: image of 147n65; term 122, 123, 146–7n58; Unification Church 66 Branch Davidians 109, 127–8, 132 Brand Russell 249 Breivik, Anders Behring 250, 268n8, 275n31 Brennan, John 258–9, 289–90n54, 293n59 Brickhill, Jeremy 39 Bromley, David G. 112 Brucella maletensis 48 Bruguière, Jean-Louis 337 Bruwer, Hennie 47, 62n75 Buddhism 68, 246 Buffham, Roger 53 al-Bukhari, Muhammad 317n4 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) 109 Bush administration 27n36, 178, 184, 256–7, 264, 282n43, 288n52, 292n58, 342 Butler, Eric D. 80, 102n167 Byman, Daniel 15 Caliphate: al-Qa‘ida and 160–2; establishing new 319n7; global dominance 201n36, 307; name 324n24; nostalgia for 320n9; return of 167, 175, 177, 181, 309, 313

Index

Call of Jesus Christ 17 Cameron, David 248, 272n24, 318n5 Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) 108, 137n3, 337 Carbonari (Charcoal Burners) 129 Carlos the Jackal 12, 18 Casey, George W. Jr. 260, 294n63 catastrophic millenarianism 114, 115 Caze, Christopne 336 CBW see South African chemical and biological weapons (CBW) program Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 99n138, 258, 293n59 CESNUR (Center for the Study of New Religions) 137n3, 146n57 Chang, Myon 70–1, 97n99 Chapman, Mike 333 charismatic leaders, groups by 126–8 Charlie Hebdo (magazine) 265n2, 285n44 Chavez, Hugo 364 chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons (CBRN) 132–3, 135; jihadist ideology and potential for 182–95; terrorist choice of 158 Chiang, Kai-shek 77, 80 Choi, Sang-Ik 74, 81–2 Choudary, Anjem 175, 274n29 Christianity 68, 81, 139n18, 217–18, 220, 237n33, 283–4n44, 298n75, 303, 314 Christian Reconstructionism 217, 220, 232n8, 283n44 Church of Scientology (COS) 90n5, 118, 127, 141n41, 142n47, 143n53, 149n69, 150n82 Civiletti, Benjamin 65 Clapper, James 269–70n14 Clem, Dan 333 Cline, Ray S. 5 Clostridium botulinum 48 Clostridium perfringens 46, 54 Coetzee, Jan 36 Cohn, Norman 111 Cole, Juan 246 collectivism 10, 144n54, 227, 350 Combat Organization 17 Concutelli, Pierluigi 80 Confucianism 68 conspiracy theories 10, 28n50 conspiratorial paranoia 350 Cooke, Charles 305 Copeland David 250 Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) 35 Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) 256, 288n52, 289n54, 296n67, 297n74, 310, 322n22, 325n27, 331n52

383

counter-cult movement (CCM) 120, 142n46 counter-jihad movement 283n44 counterterrorism, impact of political correctness on 254–63 covert action see Unification Church Cowan, Douglas E. 131, 149n69 cults, controversies over 119–26 Daniels, José 48 Das Kapital (Marx) 308 Davey, Brian 40, 59n31 Dean, Diana 333 de Bruyn, J. G. 52, 62n67 Dederich, Chuck 127 deep state 234n22, 356 dehumanization 350 de Jonge, Klaas 39 de Klerk, Frederik 51 Deng Xiaoping 355 De Villiers, J. P. 35–6, 40 Devine, Diana 75 Dishman, Chris 352 Doctrine of National Security 26n30, 145 Doe, Samuel 370n29 Doran, Michael 164, 202n47 drug trafficking 349, 355, 357–8, 361–2, 364, 368n16 DS (Committee for State Security) Bulgaria 357–8 Du Toit, Danie 40, 59n31 Eisenhower, Dwight 84 Eldredge, John 366n10 Enlightenment 224, 226, 235n24, 239n43, 279n39, 283n44; counter- 238n36, 239n41, 242n54; post- 114, 225, 312 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 275–6n31 eschatology 116; biblical 114; notions of salvation 110; term 138n8 Escheria coli 46 Esposito, John 222, 236–7n29, 287n48, 292n57, 298n75 al-Fahd, Nasir ibn Hamid 177, 185, 212n142 “fantasy ideology” 159–60, 162, 195, 200n25 FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) 362 fascism 221, 225–8, 235n25, 238n36, 239n41; anti- 252, 254, 264, 265n2, 274n30, 274n31, 276n32, 280n41, 285n44, 289–90n54, 292n57; communism and 220, 257; enemies of 276n32, 284–5n44; notion of Islamo-fascism 242n56; revolutionary 305; term 225

384

Index

Fatah, Tarek 284n44, 314, 330–1n50–1 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 55–6, 108–9, 256, 261–3, 342 Feith, Douglas 27n36 al-Filastini, Abu Qatada 170, 173, 206n89, 227 FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) 334 Folb, Peter 41, 42, 52, 57n3, 58n18, 60n44 Ford, Larry 55, 56 Fort Hood shooting 260–1, 293–4n61, 295–6n64–5 Franco, Francisco 16, 148n68 Fraser, Donald 66, 67, 70, 72, 75–6, 90n8 freedom fighters 7, 80, 348 Freemasons 129 Freemen compound (Justus Township) Montana 109, 138n5 FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) 48, 51 Friedman, George 160–1 Fromm, Erich 125, 149n71 Gaarder, Jostein 275n31 Gadahn, Adam 183–4, 212n136 gangs: Chechan mafia 213n147; ISIS as criminal gang 310, 320n9; Mau “counter-gangs” 17, 57n12; MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) 363, 377n58, 377–8n59; Roubaix gang 336, 338; Yoshio Kodama and 84–5 Geller, Pamela 274n31 Genri Undo (Divine Principle Movement) 81–2, 86, 357 Genyo Sha (Dark Ocean Society) 82 GIA (Armed Islamic Group) 17, 33n97, 329n45, 333, 335 GICM (Moroccan Islamic Combat Group) 156, 199n17 GMD (Chinese Nationalist Party) 78, 98n137, 99n138, 354, 355, 361, 375n46 Golan, Galia 13 Golden Triangle 78, 355, 361 Goosen, Daan 36, 46, 54, 57n9, 59n30, 59n35, 60n47, 63n77 Goren, Roberta 5 Gould, Chandré 41, 42, 52, 57n3, 58n18, 60n44 Grey Wolves 356–7 GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Fighting) 156 Haddad, Wadi‘ 13–14, 30n69 Haddad, Yvonne 205n71

HAMAS: Islamic Resistance Movement 174, 207n93, 223, 234n22, 255, 272n22, 286n47, 288n52, 323n24 Han, Sang-Kil 72–3 Hannashi, ‘Abd al-Ra‘uf 336–7, 342 Harris, Lee 159, 162, 163, 177 Harris, Sam 281n41, 284–5n44, 298n75, 302, 319n8, 331–2n55 Hartelius, Johan 362, 377n55, 377n57 Hasan, Nidal Malik 260, 293–4n61 Hatfill, Stephen J. 56 Hatoyama, Ichiro 84 Hauth, Rüdiger 68 Headley, David 31n84 Heaven’s Gate 109, 135 Hegghammer, Thomas 179, 201n33, 277n36, 323n22 Hideo, Murai 117 al-Hijazi, Faruq 14, 287n48 Hitler, Adolf 127, 168, 177, 239n45, 247, 248 Hizballah 14, 134, 202n47, 223, 234n22, 241n53, 356, 364, 378n62 Hoffman, Bruce 1, 154 Holder, Eric 259 Horchem, Hans Josef 5 HRB (Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood) 80, 103n173 Hubbard, L. Ron 118, 127–8, 141n41, 143n53, 150n82 Husayn, Fu‘ad 180, 201n43 Hussein, Saddam 8, 14–15, 22n3, 30n71–2, 30n77, 53, 370n29 hyper-moralism 144n54, 350 ideological extremism: characteristics of 349–50; true believers 351, 359 ideology, extremism term 349 Illuminati (Enlightened Ones) 129 Immelman, André 46, 48, 50, 54, 60n47, 61n51, 61n58, 62n62 infidelphobia 280n39 International Raélian Movement (UFO religion) 118, 127–8 International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) 128, 132, 134, 136, 150n79, 153n95 Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Pakistan 8, 15, 358 Introvigne, Massimo 146n57 Iranian Revolution (1979) 216 Iron Curtain 1, 6 ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) 305, 317–18n5, 320n9, 322n17, 323–4n24, 331n52

Index

ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria) 303, 310–11, 315, 317–18n5, 320n9, 321n11, 322n22, 325n26, 332n56 Islam apologism 216, 218, 220, 220–2, 230n4, 269n12 Islam bashing 216, 217, 220, 231n5, 285n44; term 230n4 Islamic activism 320n9 Islamic Cultural Institute 336 Islamic Party 15, 30n71, 358 Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) 286n47, 322n22 Islamic State (IS) 302–3, 305, 308–9, 314 Islamic Union for the Freedom of Afghanistan 15 Islamism: ideology of 227; totalitarianism and 216–30 Islamist ideology, denying role in jihadist terrorism 249–63 Islamist terrorism 2 Islamophobes 252–4; anti- 283–5n44 Islamophobia 230n4, 265n2, 270n15, 276n32, 280n39, 290n54, 292n57 Jacomet, Jürgen 54 jahiliyya, concept of 173, 237n33 Jainism 218 Jama‘at Ahl al-Sunna li al-Da‘wa wa al-Jihad see Boko Haram Japan, Unification Church 81–2 Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) 156, 181 Jenkins, Brian 347 jihadi groups, anti-Western 15 jihadist ideology, employment of CBRN weapons 182–95 jihadi terrorist attacks 244–5, 282n43; Boston (2013) 245–8; de-emphasizing Islamist ideology 305–9; denying Islamic involvement 302–16; inspiration for 302–5; one-sided mantras following 309–10; political correctness 252–4; reasons for denying role of Islamist ideology in 249–63; Woolwich (2013) 248–9 Jihad Watch 268n8, 283–4n44, 325n26 John Paul II (Pope) 6, 356 Johnson, Boris 249 Johnson, Daryl 274n30 Jones, Alex 274n30 Jones, Jim (Peoples Temple) 120, 127, 132, 134, 136, 143n52 Jones, Terry 279n39 Jordaan, Hennie 45, 60n46 Jouret, Luc 130 Judaism 217, 218, 298n75, 303, 314

385

Kamal, Fatah 335–7, 342 Kartashov, Magomed 262 KCIA (South Korean Central Intelligence Agency) 67, 144n55; background of 71–2; connection to Unification Church 67–8; see also Unification Church Kerry, John 246, 318 KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 25n25, 29n66, 358 Khalil, Mahmud 190 Khmer Rouge 18, 132, 134, 138n11, 318n5 Kim, Sang-In 72 Kim Jong-Pil 67, 70, 72–3, 76, 357 Kishi, Nobusuke 84–8 KKK (Ku Klux Klan) 80, 304 Knobel, Niel 44, 51, 52, 55, 59n30, 60n36, 60n44 “known wolf ” 320n9 Kodama, Yoshio: Lockheed bribery scandal 357; Unification Church 82–8 Koortzen, Johnny 50, 60n38 Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF) 75–6, 80, 97n104, 97n110, 97n112 Korean War 122 Koresh, David 109, 127 Krause, Charlie 48 Krauss, Hartmut 313, 330n48 Krueger, Alan 304 al-Kuwayti, Abu ‘Abdullah 189 LaRouche, Lyndon 148n67, 248 Lawrence, Bruce B. 222, 236–7n29, 238–9n39 Ledeen, Michael A. 1, 8 Lenin, Vladimir 308 Lia, Brynjar 193, 208n106, 214n163 Liebenberg, A. J. “Kat” 44 “lone nuts” 306 “lone wolf ” 260, 268, 320n9 Loots, Fritz 39, 49, 62n60 Los Angeles airport (LAX), plot to detonate explosive 137n4, 334, 339, 341–2 Lourens, Gert 45, 60n46–7 Lourens, Jan 40, 50, 57n6, 59n32, 59–60n35, 60n38, 60n46–7, 61n53–4, 62n62 McChrystal, Stanley A. 267n6 McGuinness, Michael J. 37–8, 56, 58n18 McVeigh, Timothy 248, 250 Mad Killers of Brabant Wallonia affair 17 magical thinking: al-Qa‘ida 155; Islamism 265; term 198n11 Makarenko, Tamara 345, 347, 352–3

386

Index

Makkawi, Muhammad Ibrahim 180, 201n43, 206n81 Malan, Magnus 36, 42, 44, 45, 59n33, 62n60 Manchurian Candidate, The (film) 147n59 Mandel, Bob 364 Mandela, Nelson 50, 51, 62n74 Manicheanism 10, 144n54, 227, 350 Manson Family 120, 132 Mansur, Salim 244, 284n44, 298–9n76 Mao Zedong 318n5, 361 Marcos, Ferdinand 16 Marshall, Josh 305, 321n16 martyrdom 159, 208n106, 294n61, 302; charisma of 321n17; conceptions of 293n60; Islamic notions of 304, 319n7, 319n8; operations 211n132, 259, 278n37 Marx, Karl 308 Marxism-Leninism 221, 226, 228, 229, 350 al-Masri, Abu al-Walid 187, 197n2, 202n44 al-Masri, Abu Khabab 210–11n128, 213n147 al-Masri, Muhammad ‘Atif 335 Mau 17, 57n12 al-Mawritani, Abu Hafs 14, 188 Mayes, Donald G. 54 Mechem 35 MfS (Ministry for State Security) 11–12, 29n56–9 MIIS (Monterey Institute of International Studies) 364, 375n45 Mijburgh, Philip 45, 51, 60n38, 60n46 millenarian groups: passive and active 140–1n32; see also apocalyptic millenarian groups millenarianism, term 109 millennium, term 109 millennium plot (December 1999) 137n4, 333–42 Mir, Hamid 186, 212–13n146 MLN (National Liberation Movement) 80 Mollicone, Nazareno 80 monism 10, 144n54, 227, 350 Moon, Sun-Myung: theology 69–71; Unification Church 65–7, 357 Moonies see Unification Church Morgan, Philip 39, 56, 57n6 Mormonism 132, 246, 274n30, 279n39 Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God 127, 132, 136 MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) 40 MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) 363, 377n58, 377–8n59 Mueller, Robert S. III 261, 296n67

Mugabe, Robert 38 Muhammad cartoon, Charlie Hebdo 265n2, 284–5n44 Mujahidin Movement 15 Mumbai attacks 15, 31n84, 248, 282n43 Murghām, Yūsuf 54 Mursi, Muhammad 288n52, 299–30n77, 323n24 Musavi, Husayn 196 Muslim American Society (MAS) 289n54, 299n77 Muslim Brotherhood 8, 172, 174, 207n93, 221, 223, 228, 233n19, 233n21, 240n50, 241–2n53, 242n55, 255–6, 269n14, 276n32, 277n34, 284n44, 285–6n47, 290–1n55–6, 298–9n76–7, 308–10 Muslim moderates 263, 297–8n75, 315, 325n26, 330n50 Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) 283n44, 289–90n54, 291–2n56–7, 292–3n58, 322n22 Mussolini, Benito 83, 162, 225 mythology, terrorists as agents of nation-states 4–8 Naji, Abu Bakr 180, 210n120, 324n25 narco-terrorism 362, 375–6n50, 377n55 al-Nasir, Jamal ‘Abd 221, 298n75 Nass, Meryl 38 National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) 57n7 nation-states: autonomous terrorists as instruments of secret services of 9–16; autonomous terrorists as simple agents of 4–8 Nazism 93n38, 138n11, 226–7, 256, 279n39, 303 Neethling, Lothar 39, 60n44 Netanyahu, Benjamin 24n17, 25n20 New Religious Movements (NRM) 108, 111, 119–26, 143n52–4, 144n55 nexus: confusion in terminology 346–53; evidentiary problems 363–4; examples 354–8; factual historical problems 353–60; prior political exploitation 360–3; terrorist-criminal 346, 360–1; threat convergence 345 Nihon Kokumin (Japan People’s Party) 82 Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army) 18 Nilsson, Jerry 55 Nixon, Richard 66, 361 Nkomo, Joshua 38 Noriega, Manuel 355, 370n29 Noris, Benni Antoine 333, 340

Index

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 7, 86, 98n136, 300n77, 356 Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) Defence School 35 Obama administration 256–60, 264, 269n11, 287n48, 288n52, 290n55, 292–3n58, 299–300n77, 320n9 Odendaal, Michael 46, 59n35, 60n47, 61n54, 62n62, 62n68 Oklahoma City bombing (1995) 15, 247 Omega 7, 7, 102n165, 355, 376n54 ON (New Order) 80, 355, 356 Ono, Bamboku 84, 86–7 Operación Cóndor 7, 80 Operation Alcora 39 Operation Dual 49 Operation Modular 40 Operation Winter 39 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 308, 319n6, 322n22 OTS (Order of the Solar Temple) 109, 130 Otsuka, Eisuke 87, 104n195 Oumu Shinrikyo (Aum Supreme Truth) 9, 21, 109 Pace, Peter 264 Pak, Bo-Hi 67, 72–7, 80, 92n27, 94n43, 96n75 Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) 8, 15, 358 Pape, Robert 304, 321n12 Park, Chong-Kyu 77, 97n112 Park, Chung-Hee 67, 69 PCP-SL (Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path) 362 Pearson, Roger 79 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 361 Peoples Temple (Jim Jones) 120, 127, 132, 134, 136, 143n52 persecution complex 168 Peters, Ralph 162–3, 171, 201n42, 244, 276n33 PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) 13, 30n69 Phares, Walid 167, 172, 206n81, 233n20, 284n44 Picarelli, John 351, 360 Piñar, Blas 80 Pithy, Barry 45, 60n46 PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) 234n22, 356 “planes operation” 164, 181, 188 plausible deniability 4, 18 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) 12–14, 207n93, 234n22

387

“Poison Assassination” program 49–50 political correctness 297n74; impact on counterterrorism policies and actions 254–63; unwillingness to identify Islamist ideology 252–4 Posey, Tom 80 Possony, Stefan 79 Post, Jerrold 154 progressive millenarianism 114, 116 Project Coast see South African chemical and biological weapons (CBW) project Project Megiddo 108, 137n3 Psotta, Klaus 51 al-Qaddafi, Muammar 8, 370n29 Qa‘idat al-Jihad (Base of Foundation of the Jihad) 157, 216, 224, 247, 311, 323n24 al-Qandahari, Abu Shihab 189–91 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 287n48, 323–4n24 Qing Bang 354 Qur’an 302–3, 308, 310–14, 319n7, 325n26 Quran.com 326n30, 327n31–2, 327n34–6, 328n39, 328n42 Qutub, Sayyid 173, 224–7, 237n33, 239n44, 280n39 Radio of Free Asia (RFA) 76 RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion, Red Army Faction) 11–12, 29n56, 29n58–9 Raich, Johann Michael 129 Rajneesh Movement 117, 127–8, 132–4, 141n40, 150n82, 152n93 Rall, Gerrie 45 Rassam, Ahmad 137n4, 333–42, 342n5, 344n26 Reagan, Ronald 5, 32n86, 65, 221, 361, 375n50 Regli, Peter 54 Reid-Daly, Ron 38 Rhee, Syng-Man 69–70, 77, 80, 86, 97n99, 98n135 Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) 37–8 Rhodesian chemical and biological weapons (CBW) program 37–9 Rhodesian Special Air Service (SAS) 38, 39 Richardson, James T. 113 Riley, James Patrick 55 Rissho Kosei-Kai (Establishment of Righteousness Rebirth Association) 81–2, 87, 103n185 Roland, Robert 76 Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL) 36, 42–3, 46–50, 52 Rowe, David 79 Roy, Olivier 177

388

Index

Sánchez, Ilich Ramírez 12 sabotage training 337–8 Sageman, Marc 199n16–17, 220, 304, 320–1n11 Said, Edward 252 salaf al-salih 165, 169, 176, 223, 237n33 Sandoval Alarcon, Mario 80 Sasagawa, Ryoichi 357; Unification Church 82–8; war criminal 357 Sato, Eisaku 84–5, 88 Sattar, Abu 302, 317n4, 331n51 Savage, Michael 279n39 Scheuer, Michael 160–1, 163, 167–8, 170–1, 175, 177, 195, 200–1n28, 210n125 Schmid, Alex P. 345 Seiichi, Endō 117 Selous Scouts 37–9, 49, 56, 58n12, 58n18, 64n86 Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) 9, 134, 362 Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) 109 Shelley, Louise 351–3 Singlaub, John L. 80, 103n177 SISMI (Military Intelligence and Security Service) 355 Socialist-Revolutionary Party 17 Society of the Muslim Brothers 8, 172, 207, 233n19; see also Muslim Brotherhood Solway, David 244, 284n44, 300n77 South African chemical and biological weapons (CBW) program: biological warfare activities before Project Coast 36; biological warfare facilities 46–7; chemical warfare activities before Project Coast 34–6; chemical warfare facilities 44–5; classical biological weapons use 48; classical chemical weapons use 47–8; covert “Poison Assassination” program 49–50; current status of 53–6; dismantling of 50–3; financing and expenses 47; foreign intelligence agencies and rogue regimes 53–5; history of 34–53; international right-wing 55–6; organization and command structure of 42–4; origins and purposes of Project Coast 40–2; Rhodesian CBW program and influence on 37–9 South African Defence Force (SADF) 35–6, 39–49, 51, 54–5, 57n11, 60n44 South African Medical Services (SAMS) 42 Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) 289n54 Southwest Africa Peoples Organisation (SWAPO) 48 Sparmer, David 46

Spencer, Robert 231n5, 268n8, 283n44, 290n54, 325n26 Stanley, Tim 305, 321n17 state involvement, levels in terrorism 18–19 state sponsorship: engagement 19; term 18 Steenkamp, Lucia 45, 60n46 Steenkamp, Willem 40, 59n31 Stengel, Richard 320n9 Steyn, Ben 51, 60n38 Steyn, Mark 266n6, 275n31, 284n44 Steyn, Pierre 51 Stiff, Peter 38 strategy, term 198n8 al-Suri, Abu Mus‘ab 154, 171, 179, 185, 191, 193, 208n106, 212n144, 213n147, 214n161, 249, 260 Symington, Robert 37, 39, 58n15, 58n22 Synanon 90n5, 127, 132, 136, 148n67 Synarchy of the Temple 130 Talhami, Ghada Hashem 1 Taliban 15, 164, 170, 178, 190, 227, 358, 362 Taoism 68, 218 Taylor, Kathleen 123 Tenet, George 15 terrorism 22n6; conspiracy theories 10, 28n50; covert penetration 16–18; definitions of 23n10, 214n168, 367n12, 367n13; factors promoting state-centric perspectives 2–4; “Guns for Hire” 16–18; levels of state involvement in 18–19; mythology about 4–8; nation-states and extremist groups 20–1; official line on 24n14; root causes of 33n100; secret service creations 16–18; state-sponsored 27n35, 32n87 Terrorism as State-Sponsored Covert Warfare (Cline and Alexander) 5 terrorism experts 22n9 terrorism industry 3; financial activities 366–7n10 terrorist-criminal nexuses 346, 360–1; see also nexus TFP (Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition) 128, 144–5n55, 146n57 Theory of Social and Economic Organization, The (Weber) 126 Theron, Johan 49, 57n6, 62n60 Thomsen, Hendrik 54 threat convergence 345 Todashev, Ibragim 262 T’ong-il Kyo (Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity) 69; see also Unification Church

Index

totalitarianism 10, 78, 144n54, 147n62, 147n66, 350; Islamism and 216–30; Islamist 283n44, 283–4n44; term 224 TREWITS (Counter-Revolutionary Intelligence Task Force) 49 transformation, term 352 “true believers” 10, 28n52, 112, 124, 139n17, 241n51, 247, 280n40, 351, 359 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 41, 49, 52–3, 57n9, 59n30, 60n44 Tsarnaev, Dzhokar 245–6, 262, 296n69 Tsarnaev, Tamerlan 245–8, 261–2, 270–1n17, 296n69 Tsuji, Karoku 84 al-Turabi, Hasan 14, 228, 241n53 Unification Church 65–7, 127, 128; beginning of 68–9; Japanese UC 81–2; KCIA (Korean Central Intelligence Agency) 71–2; KCIA and 72–4; Kim Jong-pil 357; Kodama 82–8; Korean CIA connection 67–8; Moonies 66–7, 75–6, 87–8, 134, 144n55; Moon’s theology 69–71; Sasagawa 82–8; UC in 1960s 74–7; WACL (World Anti-Communist League) linkage to 77–8, 144n55, 357; WACL development 78–80 UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) 40 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 6–7, 22n2 U.S.S. Cole 181 utopianism 144n54, 208n106, 227, 350 van Creveld, Martin 1 van den Bergh, H. J. 49 van Rensburg, Schalk 46, 59n35, 60n42, 60n47, 61n57 Verster, Joe 48 Vibrio cholerae 38 Viljoen, Constand 41–2 von Clausewitz, Carl 155, 198n9 Vorilhon, Claude 118, 127

389

Walid, Dawud 310 Wandrag, Stiaan 47, 61n51 Warde, Ibrahim 345 weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 197n7; expressions of interest 132–3; fatwa approving use of 177; rhetorical indicators 131–3 Weber, Max 126 Wessinger, Catherine 110, 114 Williams, Phil 345 Willoughby, Charles A. 83, 105n204–5, 105n207 Wolf, Markus 24n18 Wood, Allan Tate 77 Woolsey, R. James 1, 22n2 World Anti-Communist League (WACL) 65, 67, 144n55; development of 78–80; Unification Church linkage 77–8, 357 World Trade Center bombing (1993) 15, 30n77 World War II 68, 80–1, 99n144, 256, 313, 315; post-355–6, 368n15 Wurmser, David 8, 27n36 Yersinia enterocolitica 48 Yersinia pestis 48 Yoshida, Shigeru 84 Yu, Hyo-Won 74 Zablocki, Benjamin 90n4, 122–3, 141n44 Zamin, Bakht 15 al-Zarqawi, Abu Mus‘ab 14, 176, 180, 197n4, 201n43, 211n132, 323n24 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 156–7, 175, 179, 199n14, 202n48, 204n65, 209n115, 278n37, 331n52 Zilinskas, Raymond 133, 135 Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) 38 Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) 38 Zionism 254 Zlokie, Robert A. 54