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and the autonomous individual have no existence. That this authority is theocratic or, in other words, involves the deification and sanctification of human control by humans makes it more tyrannical still.
·   It involves the fetishization of one book as the sole source of legitimacy.
·   It glorifies violence and celebrates death: Not since Franco’s General Quiepo de Llano uttered his slogan of “Death to the intellect: Long live death” has this emphasis been made more overt.
·   It announces that entire groups of people—“unbelievers,” Hindus, Shi’a Muslims, Jews—are essentially disposable and can be murdered more or less at will, or as a sacred duty.
·   It relies on the repression of the sexual instinct, the criminalization of sexual “deviance,” and the utter subordination to chattel status—more extreme than in any fascist doctrine—of women.
·   It has, as a central tenet, the theory of paranoid anti-Semitism and the belief in an occult Jewish world conspiracy. This manifests itself in the frequent recycling of the Russian czarist fabrication The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion — once the property of the Christian anti-Semites—and, in bin Laden’s famous October 2002 “Letter to the Americans,” the published fantasy of a Jewish-controlled America that was first published by the homegrown American Nazi William Pelley in 1934.
    These points in common are by no means exhaustive, but they do represent the most serious and determined and bloodthirsty attempt to revive totalitarian and racist ideology since 1945. For this reason, I always argued that the threat from bin Ladenism was actually greater than was often alleged, since the mass indoctrination of uneducated young men with such ideas is in itself a lethal danger to society and to international order. However, I also wanted to argue that the menace of bin Ladenism was simultaneously being over rated. This was because, in common with fascism, it was also delusional and self-defeating. Like the Nazis, the bin Ladenists dream of the restoration of a lost and glorious past, in their case in the form of the Ottoman Muslim caliphate that held spiritual and temporal sway over the Islamic world (and many non-Muslim subject populations) until 1918. Having gambled and lost everything on its proclamation of a holy war against Britain and France and Russia—in concert with German imperialism—in the First World War, the caliphate was formally dissolved by Kemal Atatürk in 1924. All subsequent attempts to revive it have been, and will continue to be, dismal failures. Not only does this program of reactionary imperial nostalgia make nonsense of the idea that al-Qaeda is in some way anti-imperialist, it also guarantees defeat in the real world. And al-Qaeda seeks not merely the return of the medieval status quo ante , as in the return of Andalusia to Islam, but its extension , as in the conquest of the whole of Spain. (The Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda murdered the United Nations envoy to Baghdad, Sérgio Viera de Melho, for the stated reason that he had earlier overseen the independence of East Timor from Indonesia: a grant of self-determination to a Christian population in a largely Muslim archipelago that was by definition profane and unpardonable.)
    It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the signature method and distinction of bin Ladenism is not so much the act of gratuitous and indiscriminate murder, lurid though that may be, as it is the commitment to suicide and the professed anxiety to make a bloody transition to the hereafter. Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other “races” according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins