Submitted by Alex (United States), Jul 19, 2006 at 14:51
Al Qaeda's most important message in recent months--and perhaps its most important one ever--is an internet posting ostensibly authored by a man named Rakan ben Williams, who is said to be a white Christian from the West who has been recruited as a suicide bomber for global jihad. There probably is no real person with this name, as the content of the message indicates (in my amateur opinion) that the author is probably Osama bin Laden or someone very close to him, but the message has been taken as an authentic threat by numerous reputable bodies and analysts, including the SITE Iinstitute, Reuven Paz and Debka.
If the message is indeed true, and if Joel Hinrichs was indeed an Islamist suicide bomber, then the attack last year in Oklahoma was likely a test-run for a brand-new dynamic in world history: the globalization of totalitarianism. In the past, totalitarian terror--defined here along the lines described by Hannah Arendt, as a tool directed randomly against all members of an "objectively" indentified group so as to atomize them and break all bonds of social trust, thus usurping on behalf of some "supreme" leader or principle the sense of belonging and of potency that individuals used to find in their political and other allegiances--was directed either at one group on the global stage, as in Hitler's anti-Semitism, or against the members of a self-contained internal empire, as in the domestic policies of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kim regime in North Korea.
In 1979, however, radical Islam quickly emerged as the new ideology with an exclusive claim to potency in the modern world; because the ethical system and identity politics of Islam are built with globalist pretensions in mind, Islam has now become a vehicle for terror at the global scale as a means of catalyzing loyalty to the Jihad as the supreme principle of sovereignty in Allah's world. The terror is random, all-encompassing, and unpredictable, because, as the message from Rakan ben Williams taunts, how are we in the West supposed to profile and identify jihadists if they have "eaten pigs," gone to Church and had sex with their girlfriends?
It sounds crazy, but I think that's why it's true.
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