from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 30 Aug 2009 07:36 PM PDT

In the conventional political narrative the root causes of
Islamic terrorism usually run the class warfare gamut from the generic
oppression to outrage at Western foreign policy or more esoteric issues of
globalism. And naturally like most people who look into a mirror to find
the cause of someone else's anger, their reflection only repeats back to
their own agenda.

Surprisingly enough the root cause of Islamic terrorism has
very little to do with any of these things, though they are moderately
handy talking points when it comes to recruiting future terrorists or
touching base with idiot leftist reporters. To understand the root cause,
requires understanding the function which terrorism serves in the
Arab-Muslim world.

While Western liberals insist on viewing
terrorism as a form of political or social activism, within the Muslim
world terrorism is a two-sided tool, a way to create friction with an
enemy without going to war while promoting the political standing of its
leaders and backers. This two-sided concept of terrorism goes back to the
nomadic days of bandit raiders that would carry out hit and run attacks
that would bring in loot while raising the status of the tribal sheikh and
the head of the raiding parties. Given enough time probing the enemy's
weakness and raising the stature of the sheikh, such attacks might
escalate into all out wars. And while such tactics may seem primitive,
Mohammed was able to leverage them to turn his newly created Islamic cult
into a major player in the region.

In modern times, the driving
ideological force behind Arab-Muslim terrorism has been to recreate a
single great state to replace the splintered colonial entities left behind
by the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. It was an ancient tribal goal,
and one that Mohammed's followers had come closest to achieving in the
Arab version of the Thousand Year Reich. Modern versions of this might
vary from the Islamic Caliphate to the secular Arab Nationalist version
that would be a Socialist dictatorship run by someone like Nasser or
Saddam. So while the ideology might vary, the underlying idea was always
the same. One great state under one great ruler, who would demonstrate his
fitness to rule by subjugating the enemy and thereby bring all of the
region under his rule.

Under the ancient raiding codes, showing the
most boldness and inflicting the most damage by striking at the enemy
demonstrates that fitness to rule. This form of Arab-Muslim internal
rivalry routinely spills over into external wars and terrorism, as both
sides seek to prove their superiority by killing as many infidels as
possible.

So Osama bin Laden's tribal religious conflict with the
Saudi rulers was fought with the Soviets and then with America and Europe,
more than with the House of Saud itself. Using the pretext of the US
troops that the House of Saud had brought in to protect themselves from
Saddam, Bin Laden was able to gain religious imprimatur for a war on
America to build status for his claim to rule over the holiest place in
Islam. The Saudis in turn had been funding a covert war on America for the
same reason, as well as to divert wannabe Bin Ladens from trying to seize
power.

In the same way Hamas and Fatah addressed their
rivalry for nearly two decades by competing to see who could kill more
Israelis. Hamas' greater viciousness and murderousness won it the support
of Palestinian Arabs, allowing them to triumph in elections and seize
Gaza. While Western liberal observers have struggled to frame the conflict
in terms of Hamas' social services or Fatah's corruption, these were only
side issues. The main event was to demonstrate who could inflict more harm
on the enemy. An indirect conflict the Arab Nationalist Fatah and the
Islamist Hamas for power over the Palestinian Authority cost the lives of
numerous Israelis and foreign tourists, and it had next to nothing to do
with any of the usual propaganda complaints about checkpoints or the wall
of separation or even the desire for a Palestinian State, which the
terrorism repeatedly sidelined. It had to do with an internal conflict
expressed indirectly, a problem that is the root cause of much of Islamic
terrorism.

That problem is also why there are fairly few actual
moderate Muslims. When showing strength or inflicting harm against the
enemy is key to leadership, moderation is an express train to nowhere. As
terrorists have repeatedly demonstrated, every single Islamic religious
law and practice can be set aside in the interest of killing infidels.
That is because in practice no Islamic virtue is greater than that of
defeating infidels and heretics. That singleminded approach allowed Islam
to expand from an obscure cult to an empire. If Judaism embraces study and
Christianity embraces evangelism as their key attributes, Islam embraces
conquest. There would be no Islam without conquest. There can be no
Islamic expansion today without it.

Within this framework,
terrorism allows different groups to jockey for power by demonstrating
that their way is best, when it comes to that fundamental virtue of
killing infidels and forcing them to submit to their authority. All the
while avoiding an open and outright war, which they are certain to lose.
Terrorism allows Arab and Muslim nations to carry on covert wars, and
allows for the rise of local chiefs who conduct those wars, from the late
and unlamented Yasir Arafat to Osama bin Laden, Nasrallah or Muqata al
Sadr. Virtually every part of the world today has such chiefs or wannabe
chiefs whose followers carry out bombings and murders in their
name.

While the local pretexts may vary, Western observers err by
confusing the propaganda with reality. Hitler did not invade Poland for
any of the reasons he claimed he did, no more than Japan invaded China to
protect the region from Europe. Like the mythical raped Belgian nuns of
WW1, propaganda is not motive, and it is startling to note the great
eagerness with which supposed regional analysts treat propaganda as
motive, rather than pretext at best.

It really does not matter what Israel does, or what America
does, or what England and France or Denmark do. Being provocative or not,
only affects short term reactions, not the long term reality of the
ideological causes of the conflict itself. And that ideological cause
remains the dream of a great Islamic state with limitless boundaries,
bringing all of the world into the Dar Al Islam. That is the great dream
for which Mohammed's warriors rode out with blood red swords, and in
succeeding centuries rampaged across the Middle East, Asia and even
Europe. It is the post-Ottoman dream as well, and it is behind the diverse
Islamic terrorist and guerrilla uprisings across the world
today.

But that dream requires leadership, and that struggle for
leadership has also indirectly led to much of the terrorism in the 20th
century and the 21st, as Arab leaders and Islamic militias have all
struggled to define the cause around individuals. Osama bin Laden's
videos, like Arafat's infamous speech at the UN, are part of that larger
narrative, a story of "personal greatness" weighed by the value of the
only coin acceptable in the Middle East and demonstrated through the
corpses of innocent men and women who belong to the "tribes of the
enemy".