LAURENT MURAWIEC:  Pandora’s Boxes

Interviewed by Jamie Glazov

FrontPageMagazine.com | July 24, 2007

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Laurent Murawiec, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of the new book Pandora’s Boxes, The Mind of Jihad, vol. 2, the sequel to The Mind of Jihad, vol I.

FP: Laurent Murawiec, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Murawiec: Hello Jamie, I always enjoy returning to Frontpage.
FP: Let’s first sum up the Mind of Jihad, vol. 1. Can you talk a bit about the bloodlust characteristics of the jihadis?

Murawiec: When you look at a political movement, a terror movement, you look at what is similar, what is different, in order to understand what species, what kind of “animal” it may be. You try to see what it has in common with others, what is uniquely different. There’s one thing that uniquely differentiates the modern jihadi movement from all others: it is the bloodlust. Let me explain: the decapitation “live,” on camera, of Paul Johnson, of Nick Berg, of Daniel Pearl and of countless others is an exaltation of their raw power to kill, to be the masters of life and death.
 
Now, they do that in the name of God – “if God wills it, everything is permitted” – just like for the Russian Nihilists like Nechaev and his Bolshevik progeny, “if God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Nechaev said that the revolutionist was “a man of another nature.” So they are. Some say that the jihadis are “criminals” and should be treated as such. But the type of criminality is very special: it is the permanent and deliberate transgression of “Thou shalt not murder.” There is something extraordinary with the filming and especially the airing of the murders: this is a pornography of crime served as identity fare – “we are Muslims and this is what it means.” Al Jazira and others air snuff movies 24’7, there is a supply – the jihadis – and there is a demand – the viewing public. If it revolted the public, they would zap it off. They don’t, ergo… they like it. They are serving human sacrifice as snuff movies! Think of the famous pictures taken in Ramallah in October 2000, when two young reserve Israeli soldiers were lynched by a Palestinian mob. One of the mob has dipped his hands in their blood and ecstatically displays his bloody hands to the ecstatic mob: they all commune in the bloodlust. But whether jihadis or mob, they are not “criminals” in that sense; they are more like serial killers, but this is not criminality, it is like a disease of the mind.
 
The al-Qaida training manual speaks of killing enemies like of a “slaughter,” an animal sacrifice to Allah: it is human sacrifice. That’s what Mohammad Atta says in his last text. The jihadi practice is a return of human sacrifice in the 21st century. This is the product of more than thirty years of jihadi practice, what I call the bloodtrail. Every single type of jihadi is represented on this bloodtrail: Sunni and Shia, secular so-called and religious, Marxist-Leninist and nationalist.
 
You have the PLO assassin who shoots the Jordanian PM to death and kneels down to lap the blood; the video-cassettes that show the Algerian GIA ambushing draft soldiers are complacently showing the blood spurting from their severed carotid arteries; an Algerian intellectual whose tummy is sliced open in front of his family and his guts slowly pulled out by laughing killers. You have the Baathists of Iraq displaying corpses, cutting various fallen leaders into small pieces; the Syrian Baath giving public displays of hundreds of their victims, pour encourager les autres, a carnival of death. The Turkish Hizbollah torturing a kidnapped feminist, torturing her for 35 hours and filing it all. Why is that? We find an idolization of blood, of savagery, a cult of killing, of death. Gruesome murder is lionized and proffered as model, as pleasing to Allah, as opening the gates of Paradise for the “martyrs.” The highest religious authorities sanction it, governments condone it, approve of it, the media enthusiastically endorse it. Think of the notorious “Waiting Room of Paradise” at the Martyrs’ Cemetery of Tehran where a 14-feet high fountain of blood-like red liquid symbolizes the essence of Islam’s message, the guide says!
 
There is a theory to all that, a theology of carnage. The Saudi clerics proudly speak of Allah and Muhammad bestowing upon the Muslims “our industry of death.” Among the best-known dicta of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is “our art of death.” Death is central to the ethos of the Brothers. The chief ideologues of Iraqi nationalism wax endlessly and proudly on “mastering the manufacture of death.” Killing is the Eros of Baath ideologue Michel Aflaq. The same goes with the Shiites. Ali Shariati, the islamo-marxist ideologue, defines his movement as “Red Shiism,” he advises his disciples to “die before you die.” “Killing is tantamount to saying a prayer,” states a prominent Iranian Islamist. “Islam is a religion of blood for the Infidels,” says Khomeiny himself, who never tires of the subject: he positively wallows in blood. “It is war that purifies the earth.”
 
You can remember others who thought likewise. “If you can, give death. If you cannot, die,” Shariati again. Ayatolah Mutahhari has written a treatise on the subject. “Shed the unclean blood!” Al-Manar TV keeps on droning: “Death is happiness.” George Orwell had so well understood the principle of this perversion. Remember, these are people who sent several hundred thousands of kids to their death in the Iraqi minefields! What is in the mind of people who can do that? They want death, they love death. That is why they all say and repeat: “We love death more than you love life.” That’s true. That’s who they are: they love destruction alone. When they say “Death for the Cause of Allah is our most sublime belief,” which they all do, they mean it. They are incapable of – they are uninterested in – constructing anything; they despise life, they say it all the time. They want to establish Allah’s rule? It is the rule of Destruction. It is the Apocalypse. The jihadis want to set off the Apocalypse, they want to unleash it.

FP: What are some similarities of this Jihadi bloodlust with medieval millenarians in Europe, the apocalyptic insurrections and the Gnostic (second reality) ideology?
 
Murawiec: It struck me that the structure of this apocalyptic outlook was very close to a very unexpected way of thinking: the mass-movements which wreaked complete havoc over most of Europe between 1100 and 1550, the millenarian insurrections which mobilized dozens of thousands and more at times: they were eschatological, violent sectarians who knew God’s Plan, whom God had entrusted with the cosmic mission of carrying out the ultimate struggle between Good and Evil. They and they only knew the absolute Truth, and this placed them above everybody else: they were an elite of amoral supermen, as historian Norman Cohn called them. They envisioned a collective salvation that would be terrestrial, imminent, that would sweep the entire world, establish perfection on earth where God’s writ would rule everywhere, with supernatural help.
 
This millenarian fantasy would occur through huge massacres, a final, apocalyptical slaughter which they would lead, and where the enemies of the Elect would be destroyed, while the Elect would triumph to rule over God’s Paradise on earth. The world, dominated by tyranny and iniquity, vice and evil, would turn into the garden of the Saints of God – themselves. This was expressed in a Christian cultural idiom, based on ancient Jewish apocalypses as reprised by the innumerable Christian ones, which are all more or less based in the Book of Revelation. In the atmosphere of general derangement of custom that rapid change was inducing, destabilizing people’s lives, livelihood and their society, angst all too easily fixated itself on sectarian groups that offered meaning.
 
The sectarian groups in turn were led by “prophets,” charismatic leaders who would lead the disoriented into the pathways of “salvation.” Inexorably, it took the path of massacre – of Jews, of the rich, of the clergy. The names who once shook Europe are today vague remembrances – the Pastoureaux, the Flagellants, the Taborites of Bohemia and Thuringia, the Anabaptists of Muenster and Thomas Muentzer… The prophets claimed some measure of supernatural powers, the followers partook in them: they were God’s elects. They felt immensely important and powerful. This gave them fierce energy in their delusional fantasies – the energy was such that they were willing to kill and die for it.
 
“Soon we shall drink blood for wine,” one says. Killing is a duty in God’s service, “kill everyone of them” sinners, and “God has ordered the great massacre, the holocaust is to be an indispensable purification on the eve of the Millenium.” As you can see, they considered themselves free of any constraint. Their every impulse was God’s, God’s command. What this command was: “Accursed be the man who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of God’s enemies. Every believer must wash his hands in this blood… any nation that does not serve them shall be destroyed.”
 
Let’s sum up: boundless aims to take over the entire world, calling forth of a giant cataclysm from which the world will emerge totally transformed and redeemed: this is a revolutionary millenarianism. The collapse of authority around them sent them into the hands of the pseudo-prophets.
 
Now, looking at their way of thinking: the Millenarians did not believe what they saw – they only saw what they believed. They lived inside their own mindscape, not the outside world. They lived in something of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, amid monsters and fiends. In other words, their inner world replaced reality, it refused reality and intended to supersede reality, to reconstruct reality based on their Apocalyptic desires and blueprint. They live in a second reality where cause and effect are distorted. Salvation is at hand, here and now. They are unhappy with the world – they decide to destroy the world. Their fanciful schemes are the only thing that matters. They are unhappy with Man as he is? They destroy man and create a New Man. They are what the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin called the modern Gnostics. The medieval European millenarians share it with the modern jihadis, whatever the difference in cultural idioms. They share a lot with those other Great Destroyers, those ideologues who wanted to reconstruct the world entirely based on the fanciful schemes that made them masters of the universe: Class, Race, Umma – different content, identical principle.

FP: What is Mahdism and how does it stand for the modern political ideology of Islamic revolution?

Murawiec: the Ancient World’s Gnostics had elaborated extravagant systems where their pseudo-“knowledge” (gnosis in Greek) opened the keys to the universe and to salvation. The Gnostic mass-movements that developed later were equally extravagant, but action-oriented. The old Gnosis was a parasite on Judaism and Christianity; it invaded Islam from the start, making it an unstable compound of mass-based religion which somewhat accommodates itself with the reality of the world, and the Gnostic disease of the mind, which turns its own alienation into a principle for remaking the world. Some of the principles of Islam are perilously close to the Gnostic outlook, like the rejection of the idea that “God’s kingdom is not of this world.” If it is, as Islam insists, if “Allah’s writ must rule everywhere,” if the Revelation contains all possible knowledge, if the Prophet is the last prophet, if the world is divided in two – House of Islam, House of War – then Islam is severely laden by the Gnostic burden.
 
Historically, there has been an endless series of Mahdi-pretenders, who are always revolutionists, radicals ready to change the world, take over in the name of Allah.
 
In the modern era, the religious myth of the Mahdi has become secularized, or better, politicized. One of the most glaring aspects is the Muslim myth of the Mahdi – the Mahdi will emerge at the End of Times, reestablish Justice, after immense, Apocalypse-like massacres and destruction. Since the Mahdi has not shown up, to the disappointment of the jihadis, jihad has the function of replacing him, of creating the apocalypse. That’s what Ahmadjinedi believes, for instance: nuking Israel will bring forward the coming of the Mahdi, the Apocalypse, and therefore salvation. In short, terror is good for the world, it does Allah’s work in more ways than one.
 
FP: Ok, let’s get on with Pandora’s Boxes. Can you talk a bit about  Jihad not being an “event” but an actual institution of Islam?
 
Murawiec: There are all kinds of idiotic “debates” where crooked experts explain to you that there is “Greater” jihad, which is of a spiritual order, and “Lesser” jihad which is, well, fighting. Like there is “mein Grosser Kampf” which is spiritual and “mein kleiner Kampf” which some military undertones? In truth, the entire dynamic of Islam calls for permanent conflict between Islam and the rest: God has entrusted truth and good governance to His community, the Muslims, it is incumbent upon them, “the best community ever created” to spread Allah’s writ to the entire world. Since “my community will never be in error,” the Umma is always right. It must fight “until Allah’s rule is complete” upon the entire earth. Ah! Before the Muslims go to war, they must launch an appeal (dawa) to conversion. It is only if the obstreperous infidels or pagans refuse to submit and convert that war operations begin. Thank you. So in 632, the Religion of Peace has reached the limits of Arabia. By 714 its troops are nibbling at Punjab, by 732 they raid central France: in any Orwellian sense of the term, it is a religion of peace. This does not mean that Islam wants permanent warfare, it means that it is organically, naturally, in permanent conflict with the rest, one major expression of which is war. Jihad, the means used to impose Allah’s writ, is an institution of Islam.
 
There has never been an Islam without jihad. Jihad is not something that happens in Islam: “Jihad is in force until the Day of the Resurrection,” according to one hadith. The Muslims must run the world, this is the natural order of things, willed by Allah. Opposing Allah’s will is a deadly sin. Islam found war in its cradle, and never gave up on it, a childhood intoxication never relinquished, especially as it seemed to work for centuries on end. Jihad is for all places and for all times, only to be suspended at the initiative of the Muslims, for reasons of expedience (e.g., being inferior). Jihad never, ever stopped, though. The chronicle of jihad is endless. I mean, Rome and Lyons and Avignon were sacked by jihadi armies! Millions  of Indian Hindus and Buddhists were slaughtered in the course of centuries of jihad launched from Afghanistan by Muslim conquerors. At the end of the 17th century, the king of Poland Jan Sobiecki intercepted a huge column of Tatars returning to their base on the Black Sea with captured slaves – they were 44,000! The Great Indian Mutiny of 1857-59 was mostly a jihad against the British. It just never ends.
 
The big event was not that the Muslims somehow decided to bring jihad to an end but that the West became stronger. Jihad was contained and rolled back, Pirates of the Barbary Coast or Black Sea Tatars. In the course of the 18th and especially the 19th century, Eurasia stopped being dominated by Muslim empires (Ottoman, Persian, Moghol). The rules of the world game were now European, Western, a frighteningly new situation for Islam which was used to calling the shots. Especially the Sultan in Istanbul had to adapt to the new: he was the first to perceive the need for change. While he tried some reforms at home, he also concocted a new ideology called Pan-Islam or Pan-Islamism, which was Islamic imperialism under conditions of relative inferiority!
 
By trying to rally Muslims around the Sultan in Istanbul, even outside the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan was involving himself in politics, in international politics, i.e., a game that was properly and uniquely Western! Pan-Islam was the Muslims trying to face Western ascendancy in a world now defined by the West. Jihad fared like its source, the Umma: held in check, not disarmed. Jihads were declared and launched, by the Aceh pirates against the Dutch, by Abd al-Qadir against the French in North Africa, by the Senussi Brotherhood in Tripolitania, by the “Mahdi of Sudan,” etc.
 
FP: Share your knowledge with us about how the Bolsheviks “bought” jihad. Did the Muslims actually win the Russian civil war for the Bolsheviks?
 
Murawiec: Now this is pivotal to the whole story. In 1914, the Sultan in Istanbul issued a fatwa that was declaring jihad against England, Russia and France. By and large, the fatwa had been inspired by a man called Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, the head of the Islamic desk of German Imperial Military Intelligence, a favorite of the Kaiser’s. This was part and parcel of the German “politics of destabilization” of their enemies’ colonial hinterlands. The Germans did it in Russia by empowering the leftwing radicals, including Lenin. In the Muslim world, they used Ottoman Defense Minister Enver Pasha, a Pan-Islamist hero. His networks went to work, from India to the Middle East and North Africa, agitating and calling for jihad. Now – this is a pattern – the people playing with jihad, the Germans, did not benefit much from it. It’s jihad that acquired a generation of agitators, cadre, propagandists, organizations, etc. Sounds familiar?
 
Now in 1919, the vanquished Germans went to preparing their revanche. The lst Chief of Staff of the Ottoman Army was the talented General Hans von Seeckt, a close friend of Enver Pasha. He now was the boss of the Reichswehr, which in turn dominated Germany. Enver had taken refuge in Berlin. Seeckt was a partisan of a geostrategic alliance with Soviet Russia against the “Anglo-Saxons.” He sent Enver to Moscow, with high-level introductions, to meet Lenin. Lenin was delighted – be bought into the deal. Enver Pasha settled in Moscow as honored guest of the Soviet government.
 
In September 1920, the Soviet Communists organized a big bash in Baku, the “Congress of the Toilers of the East,” with the aim of gathering and organizing the “third world” against the British and the West, a sort of Ahmadinezhad-Chavez affair. One of the minds behind the strategy was an Indian Revolutionist, former agent of German military intelligence, called M.N. Roy, a fervent pro-Islamic activist. The other one was Enver (they hated each other). So you have the astonishing show of the boss of the Communist International Gregory Zinoviev calling for “Jihad!” thirty times during his conference speeches, and every Communist leader chiming in loudly “Jihad against Britain!” And the couple thousand fanatics, nuts, radicals, kooks, quacks, killers, ideologues, were given Moscow-based institutions to further their mayhem, with M.N. Roy at the top, and Enver Pasha playing the behind-the-scenes role. Baku launched the Bolshevik jihad.
 
Simultaneously, the Russia Civil War (1918-1921) was won in no small part by Muslim troops. The Siberian Front, so crucial to the Bolshevik’s ability to defend their regime, was won essentially by the Muslim troops of the Red Army! There were 250,000 Muslim soldiers, officers and commissars in the Red Army. And the architect of their recruitment was Joseph Stalin, People’s Commissar for Nationalities. The deal was: we Bolsheviks will help you get rid of the infidels, the tsar’s men, the Russians. The Muslims just continued the great jihad to do just that. On the Muslim side, the significant leader was Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev, considered the founder of “national-communism,” but in reality one of the great introducers of the power techniques of Bolshevism – terror as a system of government – into the Muslim world. The Bolsheviks in the end made no friends – but they were not looking for friends, but for obedient corpses. Thousands of Muslim cadre had been trained, and flocked to various parts of the Umma with their new Leninist techniques, the agit-prop, the concepts, the methods…
 
There are other ways I document in which the Leninist and Stalinist techniques of power seeped into the Muslim world: the Communist Parties in the Middle East were singularly unsuccessful as instruments of Soviet power. But if we stop looking at the matter from the Soviet standpoint and look at it from the Muslim standpoint, the CPs were the ideological contaminators, and their techniques played a central role. That’s why Hezbollah is organized as a Leninist Party! That’s why Abu-Ala Maudoodi often sounds Leninist, as well as Osama bin Laden: they are! The worse culprit, by the way, was the Communist Party of Palestine, which co-organized pogroms together with Amin al-Haj al-Huseyni the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, before the latter found more profit on the Nazi side. Arafat was no newcomer to the grand alliance spanning Nazis and Bolsheviks…
 
FP: What does it mean that the mullahs are “Gnostic”?
 
Murawiec: Start from this: there is no conceivable way within Islam to articulate a concept of “Islamic Revolution.” It’s a conceptual impossibility. But Khomeini had no qualms appropriating the most powerful myth of modern times, that of revolution. He merged it all into his own brand of Mahdism: the Gnostic Mahdi with Lenin’s terror. In the mix, Shariati added his delirious Manichean pseudo-history: the a-historical struggle of “the oppressed” against “the oppressors,” which is the old Iranian notion of the eternal struggle between the principles of Good and Evil. He presented “Ali’s Shiism” as a permanent “No!” to the world: in short, a revolt against Creation, against the Order of things, and demanded a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the world along the principles of his fantastical delusion. The mullahs fully integrated this into their theology. Khomeini was hinting broadly that he was the Mahdi, which incidentally comes close to blasphemy.
 
By the way, in the second Iranian (Islamic Republic) “election” for president, 400,000 ballots were cast for “the Imam-Mahdi.” The “Followers of the Line of the Imam” chanted their slogan “Oh God! Oh! God! Keep Khomeini until the revolution of the Mahdi.” By 1988, Khomeini had estabslished himself as the God-appointed ruler whose writ was quasi-divine, or quasi-equivalent to that of Ali and the Imams. He and his disciples were purging Iran of undesired elements, by slaughtering dozens of thousands; they were building their New Man; they were replacing reality by their delusional worldview. Ahmadinezhad’s endless pronouncements that border on insanity stem directly from that: he lives in a “second reality,” not in our common reality. Why is it important to label them “Gnostic”? Because this is the system that lurks behind their insanity – this is the disease that owns their mind.
 
FP: How does Algeria represent the “how-to” of modern jihad?

Murawiec: The Algerian War (1954-1962) was “sold” to the world as a “movement of national liberation.” Internally, it was presented as a jihad. The daily newspaper of the FLN (National Liberation Front) was called al-Mujaheed. The premier target of FLN terror was not the French, but the Algerian Muslims. In order to become “sole representatives of the Algerian people,” the FLN went into the villages, the douars and the mechtas, and killed with abandon, dozens, hundreds, thousands. In the cities, in the countryside, in order to enforce their ban on alcohol and tobacco, they cut off noses, lips, ears. They slaughtered the other Algerian factions. Terror as a system of government. Their terror against the French of course was no less disgusting, indiscriminate, targeting civilians, kids, with relish and priority. They desired that torrents of blood alienate the two communities, they enjoyed it. That was their jihad. Slicing open some poor guy’s skull and depositing the brain on the road; nailing a petty Muslim civil servant to a tree, eyes gouged out, appalling mutilations, killing the babies in pregnant women’s wombs, French soldiers with their cut-off genitals in their mouths - these were finesses and delights.
 
This is the jihad Yasser Arafat reported he and his team of thugs so much admired that they made it their model. At the same time, the three-piece suit FLN diplomats were parading at the U.N. on behalf of “the people’s right to self-determination,” and various feckless Western politicians, from de Gaulle who wanted to become the anti-American leader of the third world, to John Kennedy who wanted a “progressive” profile, were helping the jihadis! The Algerian war showed that the right combination of diplomatic lies on Western media and savage ruthlessness on the ground, paid off. A lesson not lost!
 
FP: Before we go, some final thoughts?
 
Murawiec: Six years after 9/11, we still hear sickening nonsense accusing us of having brought it all down upon ourselves, the “why-do-they-hate-us” style. We hear moronic academics pontificating about “occupation” being the “cause” of terrorism, when it is not “poverty,” “frustration,” and a bevy of other mechanical pseudo-causes. You hear some idiotic colonel explaining that “Islam has nothing to do with it,” some senior FBI ignoramus or CIA bureaucrat-cum-politician proudly bragging that nobody needs to know anything about Islam to fight “terrorism.” We continue to have the misnomer “war on terror” used to define what we’re doing, and euphemisms like “the Long War.” We have fools like Gordon Brown banning the word “Muslim” in connection with the bombings, and a president who does not know which label he should use on which day. What confusion, what intellectual poverty! What waste of our forces’ energy and lives!
 
What I’ve tried to do in both volumes of The Mind of Jihad is to identify the etiology of the spirit of destruction and the savage love of destruction of the jihadis that characterizes them. When people tell you “We love death more than you love life,” you’d better believe them. It’s a precondition to fight them and destroy them. So I’ve believed them and tried to reconstruct the various aspects of the perversion, based on their own sayings and writings. Much remains to be done – we have only begun to fight.
 
FP: Laurent Murawiec, thank you for joining us sir.

Murawiec: Thank you for giving me this forum. I like the venue.