Lixy, listen up. You are about to be schooled.
The Palestinian cause has traditionally been radical and leftwing, with the majority of its proponents comprising an ugly mix of national socialists and Marxist-Leninists. In Europe, this sordid political current manifested itself in the form of the Red Army Fraction (Baader-Meinhof gang), a group responsible for hijackings and several other acts of terror in the name of Palestine. I mention in passing that Horst Mahler, a founder of this group, is now a member of far-right German think tank, which demonstrates just how short the jump is from far-left to far-right.
This collection of brown and red factions ran under the banner of the PLO and was ultimately controlled by the Egyptian autocracy, the original enemy of the Islamists. Before we go any further, it is crucial to reveal how the jihadists defined their enemies. Here it is useful to turn to ‘The Forgotten Duty’ a booklet by Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj - the man who coordinated the assassination of Sadat.
In the booklet, Faraj divides the enemies of Islam into two categories, the far enemy (the United States and Israel) and the near enemy (the secularist Arab autocracies), and he stresses the importance of overthrowing the latter. “Fighting the near enemy must take priority over that of the far enemy” because a liberation of Jerusalem by the apostate governments would mainly benefit the impious. Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two man, would later echo these sentiments in a 1995 essay titled “The Road to Jerusalem Goes Through Cairo”: “Jerusalem will not be liberated unless the battle for Egypt and Algeria is won and unless Egypt is liberated.” So the real enemy of the Islamist was the local secular dictators, a card that Israel would use against the Marxists in Gaza and that the Americans would use against the Russians in Afghanistan. Both governments would later regret these cynical moves.
So Israel was not the galvanizing force of the Jihadist movement, the U.S. backed secular dictatorships were. But why did the Islamists, or religious nationalists, abandon the struggle against their local government and set their sights on an even bigger target, the US’ First of all, after the assassination of Sadat, the Jihadists were being hammered by the governmental security apparatus. By the late 90’s, they had been brought to their knees and were faced with two choices: surrender and shift strategies or be annihilated.
Recognizing the perilous situation for what it was, the Jihadists adopt a new course of action; a strategy articulated by one Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden claimed that attacking the United States, or “cutting the head off the snake”, as he called it, would cause the apostate governments “to fall like ripened fruit”. This promise satisfied the religious nationalists, but Osama was in possession of a slightly different set of motivations.
Like Majin said in the shortest and sanest post on this thread, Osama was upset by the U.S. presence in the Middle East, in particular, the land of the two Holy cities (Saudi Arabia). Horrified by the prospect of U.S. soldiers treading on holy sand, Bin Laden entered into dialogue with Saudi princes, where he promised that he could muster an army of mujadeen to expel Saddam from Kuwait. With the Ba’athist army at the door, the Saudi leadership had no desire to place their fate in the hands of a madman with an imaginary army and instead petitioned the United States to push back the expansionist Iraqi regime.
Humiliated and bitter, Bin Laden used this experience as a rallying cry for Salafist Saudis who were reluctant to go to war with America. In his diaries Al-Bahri, Osama�??s bodyguard, recounts common fears of the young Salafists in his diary:
Some of the Salafi current asked in surprise: “Jihad against America?!” Some of them even said, “America knows everything about us. It knows even the label of our underwear.”
However, Al-Bahri concludes that Osama’s effort was successful because it revealed to the Salafists the hypocrisy of the Saudi establishment and “all these things opened new horizons for the youths (Saudi Salafists), broadened their mental faculties and changed their position”.
So there you have it. The main motivation for going to war against the United States was its presence in the Gulf and its support of pro-Western secular autocracies, not Israel. Nothing quite like actually reading primary sources and not some hack Marxist tract in a schizoid magazine like Z-Rag. As for the Bin Laden’s mad “Sweden rant”, it deserves its relegation to internet meme status, ranked somewhere between Bush’s “Don’t forget Poland!” and Stevens’s “It’s a series of tubes!”