 | Federal prosecutors filed a civil complaint on Thursday to seize 4 mosques and a Fifth Avenue skyscraper owned by the Alavi Foundation , a Muslim nonprofit long suspected of having ties to the Iranian . . . more |
At the risk of offending the good folks at Web Log Solutions LLC, I felt obliged to post about this report that Scojo recently linked to. It's a paper by a team of geography professors at UCLA and is apparently the first scientific approach to finding Osama bin Laden. It's really a fascinating read. The team relies on biogeographic theories - normally used to predict how plant and animal species distribute themselves over space and time - including distance-decay and island biogeography (explained succinctly in the report). They use spatial scale analyses (global, regional, local) and rely on data like life history characteristics of bin Laden (i.e. requires a power source for his dialysis machine) to develop likely physical attributes of where he might be hiding (i.e. in a structure with an electric grid hookup or generator). Along with high-quality satellite images available to the public, they present a convincing case that narrows bin Laden's likely location down to a small area (they even suggest three structures in Parachinar, Pakistan as excellent candidates).
There are many assumptions made, but they are logical and the theory is testable, refinable and allows for practical, working hypotheses on bin Laden's likely location. Pretty amazing stuff.
A few thoughts upon reading this:
1) I hope the military/intelligence community has a team doing something of this nature already.
2) If not, get this report to Panetta!
3) Scooter already made the knocking-on-the-doors joke, so I won't touch that.
Props to GeoScoot for his initial post.
Raymond Ibrahim has a fascinating article up at the National Review Online, posted here on VDH's Private Papers. Ibrahim, translator and editor of The Al Qaeda Reader, addresses the similarities and differences between Adolf Hitler's polemical Mein Kampf and the Reader, a collection of documents assembled by al Qaeda founders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in order to indoctrinate Muslims to their particular brand of fanatic Islamism.
Ibrahim's article is disturbing, as much for the differences between the two texts as for the similarities. Both texts are expressly anti-democratic, militaristic, expansionist, and pervasively anti-Semitic. The Al Qaeda Reader is even more blatant than Mein Kampf in its unyielding stance on achieving world domination. Negotiation is unacceptable and the "infidel" must submit to Allah or be killed. Both texts appeal to ideals of heroism and self sacrifice while bemoaning the decadence of the West.
It is at first surprising how similar the two texts are according to the excerpts that Ibrahim presents, but it makes sense when one considers that both ideologies - Hitler's eugenic fascism on the one hand and al Qaeda's Islamo-fascism on the other - stem from a perceived victimization at the hands of the world Jewry, allegedly responsible for the moral degradation of the Western democracies.
What is unsettling about the contrast between the two texts is that Hitler's was a secular ideology, and while virulent, destructive, and evil in the extreme, an ideology that was nevertheless soundly defeated by the so-called Arsenal of Democracy in the immediate military sense (with rather a significant part played by the Communists), and that has largely lost credence in the half-century since with the spread of progressive, liberal democratic ideals. Mein Kampf was written by a single man, and from what I understand it is to a large degree a treatise wrapped up in Hitler's personal experience.
The Al Qaeda Reader, however, was not written by one man, nor is it a secular polemic. As Ibrahim says, about half of the Reader comprises quotations, from the Koran, Muhammad himself (hadith), and authoritative Islamic theologians, collected and assembled by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. The anti-Semitic, illiberal, anti-democratic, expansionist, fascistic version of Islam presented in the Reader isn't a hodgepodge of crackpot extremism cooked up by a couple of nutjobs in an Afghani cave, but rather a worldview fundamental to Islam, firmly supported by the ultimate theological authorities. It is easy to discredit and defeat secular extremism with liberal, rational thought. It is far more difficult to defeat an ideology that has theological tenets entirely antithetical to religious pluralism, democracy, diplomacy, and liberalism.
When you argue against a secular ideology you are merely in disagreement with a man; when you argue against an ideology grounded in theology you are, ipso facto, an infidel.
And that's a tough obstacle to overcome.
Raymond Ibrahim has a nice article up at VDH's Private Papers. It's important for us to understand exactly who and what we are facing in this so-called War on Terror, and comprehending the nuances of language as Ibrahim discusses is one step along a very long and difficult path.
For all its legions of moderate practitioners, there is no avoiding the fact that Islam has as its essential tenet - the very name of the religion itself! - worldwide submission to Allah by will or by force.
This poses an intractable problem for any truly effective dialogue between the liberal, religiously plural West and the unyielding, dogmatic "Abode of Islam."
I emailed my Mom this Friedman article that Jeff posted about recently. We got talking about the whole shebang - Iraq, the Mideast, greenery, oil, etc. - and she made an interesting point about how we as a nation, in the immediate wake of 9/11, "would have done anything," such as sustaining a big gas tax or some combination of expansive, energy-saving initiatives intended to reduce our dependency on oil. The more I think about this - and I've thought about this very subject quite a bit over the last year or so - the more I think that the U.S. lost a golden opportunity in the aftermath of 9/11. There are very few events around which we as a nation can rally as one: Pearl Harbors and 9/11s are the exceptions to the norm. Only events such as these, that affect the national consciousness (inasmuch as such a thing exists) on an emotional level, can galvanize an otherwise polarized population to mass, world-changing action.
In the few months after 9/11 there was that smoldering anger, that sense that I felt from everyone that "we" were attacked, that "we" must fight back. I think this sentiment was a big reason why our foray into Afghanistan met with little resistance; if we had coupled our foreign policy with strong domestic action, we might have well been on a better path than the one upon which we struggle at present. I'm not blaming anyone per se - it's not until now that I appreciate to some degree the various factors involved in the situation. However, I'm also not involved in making U.S. policy decisions.
So we messed up, I think. And now we are mired in muck of epic proportions, spending the majority of our time and effort bandying about party ideology rather than making the changes necessary to begin solving this monumental threat to our personal safety and the economic and environmental well-being of future generations.
Anyway. It's a gigantic shackle.
