Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Jihadist Solution

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 32; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10576100903320696

1521-0731

Simon Cottee,

Islamic Studies and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments The author is extremely grateful to Thomas Cushman and Bruce Hoffman for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Notes 1. Norman Geras, "Marxism, the Holocaust and September 11: An Interview with Norman Geras," Imprints: A Journal of Analytical Socialism 6(3) (2002), available at http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/imprints/normangerasinterview.html (accessed 12 January 2009). 2. Salman Rushdie, "Salman Rushdie: An Interview," The Independent, 10 October 2006, available at http://johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1002 (accessed 12 January 2009). 3. See http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/festival/2007/AmisBuruma (accessed 12 January 2009) 4. Eve Garrard, "Is There Anything Wrong with the Concept of Evil? Part 1," Normblog, 12 January (2004), available at http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/is_there_anythi.html (accessed 12 January 2009). 5. Ibid.; see also Eve Garrard, "Evil as an Explanatory Concept," The Monist 85(2) (2004), pp. 320–336. 6. Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). 7. The author is amazed at how frequently this phrase appears in stories or commentaries about Van Gogh's murder: enter into your Google search engine "Theo van Gogh Murdered in Broad Daylight" and stand to be amazed too. 8. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960). 9. Harold Garfinkel, "Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies," American Journal of Sociology 61 (1956), pp. 420–424. 10. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 49. 11. Garfinkel, "Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies," p. 423. 12. See David Matza, Delinquency and Drift (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), pp. 1–32. 13. Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (London: Knopf Jonathan Cape, 2008). 14. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (London: Duckworth, 2003), p. 82. The quotations that immediately follow are from Part Two of Lévy's book: pp. 77–171. 15. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). 16. Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture," Social Research 38(3) (1971). 17. Quoted in Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 1. 18. Albert Bandura, "Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement," in Walter Reich, ed., Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind (Washington: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1990), p. 182. See also Herbert C. Kelman, "Violence without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers," Journal of Social Issues 29(4) (1973); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 19. Quoted in Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Terrorist Threat (London: John Murray, 2006), p. 1. 20. One of which was an addiction to atrocity porn: p. 4 and p. 212. 21. See Edward P. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight (London: Merlin Press, 1980), pp. 166–167. 22. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. xi. 23. See Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 24. See Ian Loader and Willem de Haan, "On the Emotions of Crime, Punishment and Social Control," Theoretical Criminology 6(3) (2002), pp. 243–244. 25. See Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, p. xi; see also pp. 124–128. 26. Albert K. Cohen, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (New York: The Free Press, 1955), p. 12. 27. Ibid., p. 13. 28. Ibid., p. 18. 29. Ibid., p. 25, emphasis in original. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., pp. 25–26. 33. Ibid., p. 26. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., p. 27. 36. Ibid., pp. 27–28. 37. Ibid., p. 28. 38. Ibid., emphasis in original. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 36. 42. Ibid., p. 52. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., p. 53, emphasis in original. 45. Ibid., p. 53–54. 46. Ibid., p. 54. 47. Ibid., p. 115. 48. Ibid., p. 129. 49. Ibid., p. 168. 50. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "The Radical Loser," signandsight.com, 1 December 2005, available at http://www.signandsight.com/features/493.html (accessed 23 January 2009). 51. Ian Buruma, "Extremism: The Loser's Revenge," The Guardian, 25 February 2006, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/25/terrorism.comment (accessed 20 January 2009). 52. Enzensberger, "The Radical Loser." 53. Ibid. 54. See esp. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (London: The Free Press, 2004), pp. 28–36, 108–152. 55. Like Cohen's delinquents, jihadists express their contempt in the form of various gratuitous inversions, the most notorious of which is, in the words of the current motto of the global jihadi movement, "We love death as much as you [in the west] love life." See Giles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds., Al Qaeda in its Own Words, trans. P. Ghazaleh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 51. 56. Valerie J. Hoffman, "Muslim Fundamentalists: Psychosocial Profiles," in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Comprehended, vol. 5 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 206. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., p. 210. 59. Susan Waltz, "Islamist Appeal in Tunisia," Middle East Journal 40 (1986), pp. 651– 670. 60. Hoffman, "Muslim Fundamentalists: Psychosocial Profiles," p. 225. 61. See, notably, Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 62. Olivier Roy, "Radical Islam Appeals to the Rootless," Financial Times, 12 October 2004. 63. Olivier Roy, "Born again to Kill," signandsight.com, 4 August 2005, available at http://www.signandsight.com/features/296.html (accessed 25 January 2009). 64. Marc Sageman, "The Normality of Global Jihadi Terrorism," The Journal of International Security Affairs 8 (Spring 2005), available at http://www.securityaffairs.org/issues/2005/08/sageman.php (accessed 25 January 2009). 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Seyla Benhabib, "Unholy Wars," Constellations 9(1) (2002), pp. 43–44. 70. The present author has not yet read a profile of Ali Hirsi that does not mention her physical beauty. 71. Timothy Garton Ash, "Islam in Europe: A Review of Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma and The Caged Virgin by Ayaan Hirsi Ali," New York Review of Books, 5 October 2006. 72. For a useful overview of the controversy, see Peter Collier, "Backbone, Berman, and Buruma: A Debate that Actually Matters," World Affairs (Winter 2008), available at http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2008%20-%20Winter/comments/comments-backbone-berman-buruma.html (accessed 30 January 2009). 73. Pascal Bruckner, "Enlightenment Fundamentalism or Racism of the Anti-Racists?" signandsight.com, 24 January 2007, available at http://www.signandsight.com/features/1146.html (accessed 30 January 2009). 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Nick Cohen, "How the Left was Lost," New Statesman, 30 October 2006, available at http://www.newstatesman.com/200610300051 (accessed 30 January 2009). 77. Nick Cohen, "How Condescension Benefits Terrorism," The Observer, 25 November 2007, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/25/comment.terrorism (accessed 30 January 2009). 78. Christopher Hitchens, "She's No Fundamentalist," Slate, 5 March 2007, available at http://www.slate.com/id/2161171/ (accessed 30 January 2009). 79. Paul Berman, "Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?" The New Republic, 4 June 2007, available at http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=fd52e6a4-efc5-42fd-983b-1282a16ac8dd (accessed 30 January 2009). 80. Ibid. 81. Paul Berman, "His Toughness Problem—and Ours: A Rejoinder," The New York Review of Books, 8 November 2007, available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20801 (accessed 30 January 2009).