An Almost Word-for-Word Endorsement of al Qaeda's Worldview

Earlier today Glenn Greenwald wrote about the French intervention in Mali. This made Joshua Foust, a writer for the Atlantic and fellow at the American Security Project, very angry:

This quickly devolves into an almost word-for-word endorsement of al Qaeda's worldview. m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/…

— joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) January 15, 2013

Back in 2007, an Egyptian Islamist named Sayid Imam Sharif wrote "Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World," which strongly criticized al Qaeda. Al Qaeda's second-in-command and chief propagandist Ayman al-Zawahiri then wrote a long screed in response. It turned out "Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World" was an almost word-for-word endorsement of the worldview of the crusaders and Jews (and their puppets the Egyptian Interior Ministry and security services):

A document called "Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World" became public and was accompanied by much attention and furor. When I carefully examined it, I found--regrettably as I had expected--that it served, in the best possible way, the interests of the alliance that the crusaders and Jews have with our rulers, who act in contradiction of Shari'ah. This document is an attempt to sedate their mujahidin enemies, make them doubt their methods, and drive them from the battlefield...It sounds like a [Egyptian] security services' pamphlet...This document was written in the spirit of the Interior Ministry…

Meanwhile back in America, there's something else wrong with Greenwald:

@bpsycho1 @ck_macleod @eliasisquith worst of all he tries to downplay the horrific behavior of Malian rebels as the west being anti-Muslim

— joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) January 15, 2013

@billbindc Notable, perhaps, but not surprising. Because in his universe, all descriptions of atrocity are meaningless unless directed at us

— joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) January 15, 2013

According to Zawahiri, this was very similar to what was wrong with Sayid Imam Sharif and "Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World":

[Sharif] neglected the crimes of the crusaders and their agents, abandoned the need to exhort the nation to fight and resist them, and occupied itself with what it alleged were the mujahidin's errors…

This is a question that we address to the brothers who use the term "terrorism" to describe what happened in America...

When the United States fired missiles on the medicine factory in Sudan, destroying it over the heads of the employees and workers who were inside, what do you call this?...Why did they condemn what happened in America but we heard no one condemn what America did to the Sudanese factory?...

What about starving the Libyan people? What about the almost daily starving of the Iraqi people and the attacks on them? What about the sieges and attacks on the Muslim state of Afghanistan?

I don't want to say Foust is exactly like Zawahiri; for instance, Zawahiri jabbers on for 268 pages, while Foust is thankfully using twitter. But there are a limited number of ways to be a hateful, tribalistic knob, so all the knobs all over the world eventually end up sounding pretty much the same. Everything they say is a kind of violent moron mad libs.

BONUS: This entire phenomenon is available in diagram form here.

—Jon Schwarz

Posted at January 15, 2013 04:58 PM