Repackaging Al Qaeda

Bin Laden appears to be better connected than Bush would have us see. He is wisely responding to his recent well publicized recruiting pool: the anti-Globalization petit bourgeois. These are the young college aged upwardly mobile sons and daughters of the business elite from the Muslim Third World who now pursue their education in Europe and Britain as first or second generation immigrants. Many of them have been recruited via the Internet. With the exception of the geography of their homeland, this is the same class of people who stood with Lenin and who drove the American and French revolution with their bodies in the streets and fields. This is the young intelligencia who have driven every successful revolution in the past several centuries.
Informed Comment Global Affairs

Bin Laden is no longer just seeking to lead Muslims in a jihad against "Crusaders and Zionists"; he is proclaiming to the whole world that the genuine revolutionary alternative to imperialism, capitalism, global warming, genocide, moral decay, confused sex roles, the decline of the family, commercialism, and whatever else ails us is Islam. In this sense Bin Laden is indeed seeking to don the mantle of the last century's false prophets.


One of the clearest indicators is the social origin of new recruits to al-Qa'ida. As Olivier Roy writes in his forthcoming Le Croissant et le Chaos:

The map of the origin of al-Qaida recruits does not match the map of Middle East conflicts. The recruits consist predominantly of second-generation European young Muslims and converts, not Palestinians or Afghans, and very few people coming from the Middle East.

This quote comes from an electronic file dated in July, but it perfectly matches the profile of those arrested in Germany last week: the sons of Turkish guest workers and a German convert.


This quote comes from an electronic file dated in July, but it perfectly matches the profile of those arrested in Germany last week: the sons of Turkish guest workers and a German convert.


Just what are these "converts" converting to? They are not converting to anything that most Muslims would recognize as Islam. They do not integrate into the religion and culture of Islamic civilization and then gradually develop political views that correspond to their new milieu. On the contrary: they are radicalized opponents of the global order who find that al-Qa'ida has become the most genuine anti-globalization revolutionary organization. "Conversion" is just part of the initiation ritual.


In his latest speech he even abandons the usual anti-Semitic claims that "Zionists" control the government and press in the U.S. in favor of the populist trope that the government serves capital, which wants oil. Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust. Bin Laden acknowledges the Holocaust and blames it on Western Civilization. Bin Laden even poses, amazingly, as the heir of the tolerance of classical Islam, the last time that Islam posed a global alternative:

The holocaust of the Jews was carried out by your brethren in the middle of Europe, but had it been closer to our countries, most of the Jews would have been saved by taking refuge with us. And my proof for that is in what your brothers, the Spanish, did when they set up the horrible courts of the Inquisition to try Muslims and Jews, when the Jews only found safe shelter by taking refuge in our countries. And that is why the Jewish community in Morocco today is one of the largest communities in the world. They are alive with us and we have not incinerated them.

It is ironic to say the least that Bin Laden claims credit for the policies of Muslim rulers that his predecessors, the Salafis of the day (the Muwahhidin, known in Spain as Almohade), considered to be apostates.


Bin Laden's message has little or no appeal to Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, or elsewhere engaged in their national struggles for identity, legitimacy, or power. He engages, as Roy writes, "les migrants, les réfugiés, la seconde génération, les nouvelles classes sociales, ou bien . . .les tribus en mutation sociale." (He attracts "migrants, the second generation, new social classes, or tribes undergoing social change.")