Al-Guardian Outdoes Itself

Adam Curtis vents in the Guardian warning us: "We dreamed up 'al-Qaida'. Let's not do it again with 'evil ideology":

This is exactly what happened in the reaction to the attacks on America in 2001. For years after 9/11 we were told that we faced a powerful, well-organised enemy, who had established a centrally coordinated command structure that needed to be sought out and crushed. We went storming into Iraq to prevent a rogue state from supplying WMD to this organisation. This would make the world a safer place. But the enemy was not an organised network, and going into Iraq has done the opposite of what we intended. Our actions have inspired resentment throughout the Middle East and Iraq is now the world centre of terrorist activity.

Uh, no. Al-Qaeda has always been known to be a loosely-based organization that would undertake acts of terror that would only be known to the leaders. We are, in fact, not just fighting al-Qaeda, but a group of jihadi's who are inspired by groups such as al-Qaeda.

As for the world center of terror being Iraq, I believe that this was the point.

Last year I made a series of documentaries for the BBC, The Power of Nightmares, which showed how a fantasy image of the "al-Qaida" organisation was created. The films told how the response to the shocking events of September 11 2001 swung out of control, and the threat became exaggerated to a dangerous level. Although there was a serious terrorist threat, the films criticised the apocalyptic vision of what lay behind it - the "nightmare" of a uniquely powerful network, unlike any previous terrorist danger and capable of overwhelming our society and our democracy.

Wrong again. The danger to democracy and our society comes from radical Islam as a whole, not al-Qaeda in particular. Al-Qaeda is a symptom, Islamofascism is the disease.

The Power of Nightmares said bluntly that this was a fantasy. The real threat came not from a network, but from individuals and groups linked only by an idea. Our energies were going into fighting a phantom enemy. We were looking for a network that didn't exist when we should have been dealing with an idea that does.

The guy is of course hawking his movie, which is admirable in the capitalistic world we live in. How did it do in Saudi Arabia? Anyway, we didn't put "our energies" into "fighting a phantom enemy," we took away their base of operations and as a consequence removed the oppressive Taliban regime.

The evidence we have of what lies behind the London bombings confirms that this was the real nature of the threat. It is fascinating to see how suddenly all the terror "experts" have changed their tune. For three years they told us breathlessly about a terrifying global network. Now, suddenly, it has gone away and been replaced by "an evil ideology" that inspires young, angry Muslim males in our own society.

Pay attention, Adam, this gets a wee bit complicated. I do agree with you on the evil ideology (note, no scare quotes). If you had been paying attention for the last four years, quite a few have been screaming at the tops of our lungs that it is angry young Muslims, led by angry old imams that have been the enemy. We know that the only organized global networks of terrorists exist in places such as "Palestine" where murdering bands of thugs such as Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade murder with impunity. Or perhaps Lebanon, where Hezbollah lobs missiles into innocent kibbutzim.

Modern Islamism is a complex political movement with a history that goes back more than 50 years. Its most influential ideologist was an Egyptian school inspector, Sayyid Qutb. In the 50s he wrote a series of books that put forward a powerful critique of modern western culture and democracy, and called for a new type of utopian society in Muslim lands in which Islam would play a central political role.

Emphasis mine. Sayyid Qutb did not espouse radical change in only Muslim lands, he raged that all lands should be Muslim lands and that infidels should be murdered or reduced to dhimmi status. We saw how his teachings played out in Afghanistan, didn't we?

Out of this has come a movement for revolutionary change in the Islamic world that includes an extraordinary range of groupings and variations on Qutb's original arguments. It is only a tiny minority in the Islamist movement who have developed these ideas into a politics that advocates terrorism against the west. Historians of Islamism have shown that this minority, grouped initially around Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri in the late 90s, turned to attacking the west only because of the failure of the wider movement to achieve its revolutionary aims in the Muslim world.

An "extraordinary range of groupings" yet no organizations? It seems as though that tiny minority you speak of must be also the vocal one as well. I've not heard the silent majority speak against what the "minority" is currently doing.

We must be aware of this distinction so as to avoid a witch-hunt against the whole Islamist movement. We may not agree with its reactionary vision of the political use of Islam and the pessimistic, anti-progressive beliefs that lie at the heart of Qutb's teachings, but it is essential to realise that there is no inherent link between these ideas and terrorism. There are worrying signs that journalists are confusing the murderous beliefs of a genuinely destructive minority with the political ideas of a much wider movement. By lumping Islamism into a frightening, violent, anti-western movement led by the "preachers of hate", they risk exaggerating and distorting the threat yet again.

Qutb's teachings speak for themselves, and they do indeed incite terrorism. I'm sure that al-Zawahri and bin-Laden would disagree with your synopsis. As for the "preachers of hate", have you ever heard a sermon from a mosque in Damascus, Jerusalem, Mecca, Cairo or Teheran?