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(I doubt that Juan Cole got this right, especially after his last gaffe
on how jihadists were emulating "the Bolsheviks" by killing Charlie
Hebdo cartoonists. I forward it as a demonstration of how ignorant Cole
can be on occasion. I might look further into his allegation later on.)
http://www.juancole.com/2015/04/conflicts-sunni-shiite.html
DAVID SPEEDIE: Thank you for clearing this up. [Laughter] It obviously
is a fraught and complex thing.
Let’s move to Europe, if we may, just a couple of questions there. On
Europe, specifically in France, you use a very interesting term, a
phenomenon you called “sharpening the contradictions,” saying that
attacks such as Charlie Hebdo—and presumably, later the incident in
Belgium and then in Copenhagen—are actually contrived by al-Qaeda to
create a backlash that will bring politically unengaged Muslims into the
fold. Explain that a little bit.
JUAN COLE: I see evidence of al-Qaeda thinkers, like Ayman al-Zawahiri,
who was the number-two man for a long time, before bin Laden was killed,
being influenced by Marxist thought, and radical Marxism. This is very
clear in the technical terms that the Muslim far-right uses. They talk
about a vanguard. This was a Leninist term. In some radical forms of
Marxism, activists were impatient with the working class, which seemed
not to want to fulfill its historical duty by rising up against the
business classes, and so it engaged in sabotage—not everywhere all the
time, but there were some groups that did that kind of thing in hopes of
provoking a class war, because they knew the business classes would call
upon their agents, the police, to crack down hard on sabotage and
workers’ activism and so forth.
I think that al-Qaeda picked up this kind of thinking from the Marxist
fringe in places like Egypt and so forth. I think that it is a
deliberate strategy on their part, the sharpening of contradictions, or
the heightening of contradictions, as it’s called. I think it explains
everything that happened in Iraq.
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