The conspiracy of all conspiracies! >From what I've learned, Hizbullah is not like Al-Qaeda in any way, since one, Hizbullah is real, and the other, Al-Qaeda has been largely discredited as existing - at least in the fashion presented by the Bush administration as some sort of umbrella terrorist organization with sleeper cells around the world. In fact, the term, as applied to a terrorist network, was not used before prosecutors used the term in the case against the Yousef bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The creation of Al-Qaeda (as it was then determined) arose out of the need for the prosecution to be able to prosecute terrorists like Yousef under the existing legal framework of the network of organized crime. The prosecution needed to present Yousef and his colleagues as having characteristics similar to those of the Mob.
Most of the characteristics subscribed to Al-Qaeda by the prosecution were predicated on the widely debunked book The Terror Network, by Claire Sterling, who attempted to implicate the Soviet Union as a state sponsor of terrorism during the Cold War. The book was mostly debunked when it was revealed that much of the evidence she used was taken from newspaper articles from around the world - newspaper articles the CIA had itself planted. I also recall that bin Laden himself never employed the term until after 1993 as well. Anyway, my point is that I cringe when I see the term Al-Qaeda being used on the Left, because it indicates, to me, that we have already swallowed one of the neocon/Straussian myths they worked so hard on to promote their world-views. Jayson Funke Graduate School of Geography Clark University 950 Main Street Worcester, MA 01610 -----Original Message----- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jim Devine Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 12:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [PEN-L] what is Hizbullah? [from Juan Cole] What is Hizbullah? Western and Israeli pundits keep comparing Hizbullah to al-Qaeda. It is a huge conceptual error. There is a crucial difference between an international terrorist network like al-Qaeda, which can be disrupted by good old policing techniques (such as inserting an agent in the Western Union office in Karachi), and a sub-nationalist movement.
