I’ve been saying it for two years (see Islam Unveiled and Onward Muslim Soldiers) publicly, and others for much longer, but it is reported at CNN as if it is news: we are not dealing with a single criminal organization — Al-Qaeda — in the war on terror, but with an ideology that is diffused throughout the world and could take generations to defeat. Kudos to CNN for finally catching on, although they wrongly attribute the global nature of jihad to a US-provoked splintering of Al-Qaeda:
“This is not like the Gambino crime family, a Mafia family, where if you just arrest the leaders it goes out of business,” said Peter Bergen, a CNN terrorism expert and author of “Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden.”
“This is more like a mass movement, and you can arrest as many people as you want. But it’s very hard to arrest the movement of ideas.” . . .
But experts such as MJ Gohel, a terrorism specialist at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London-based think tank, suggest the term al Qaeda is just shorthand for a complex global terror network.
“What we are dealing here with is an ideology,” Gohel said. “It is a global jihad movement composed of al Qaeda and many affiliated terrorist groups. All of these groups are autonomous.” . . .
Both government and private experts are bracing for what they say will be a war that could last for generations.
I’m comforted to know that the government is so on top of things.