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Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math ---------- Original Message ---------- From: Louis Proyect via Marxism <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> To: Jim Farmelant <farmela...@juno.com> Subject: [Marxism] al-Qaeda influenced by Marxism? Really? Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 08:07:48 -0400 ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. ***************************************************************** (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. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/farmelantj%40juno.com ____________________________________________________________ Heavy rains mean flooding Anywhere it rains it can flood. Learn your risk. Get flood insurance. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/553105aabcf195aa2e08st03vuc _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
