Ever wonder why so many top-level diplomats seem to have no idea of what is really going on, particularly when it comes to the global jihad? Maybe it’s because they read analyses like this one, from Le Monde Diplomatique, with thanks to Ali Dashti:
The bomb attacks in Casablanca on 16 May 2003 revealed the existence of a new form of fundamentalism – takfir (1). Takfirists are no longer content to fight the United States or the “Zionist entity”; they brand Muslim leaders, and all their direct or indirect supporters, as infidels (kafir) and condemn them as apostates. They preach political violence as a means of forcing states to return “to the laws of God and the society of the Prophet of original Islam”. Their aim is not only to overturn unpopular and corrupt regimes but to cleanse the existing political order.
The idea that Takfir wal-Hijra originated the idea of viewing Muslim leaders as apostates is absurd. In fact, the all-purpose bogeymen, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the Wahhabis, did the same thing — particularly when they made war on the Ottomans.
Then there’s this:
In the greater Casablanca area, Douar Sekouila and the shanty towns of Thomas and Lahraouyine, home to 16 May bombers, were constructed illegally. Hovels of planks and cardboard boxes found in the streets are heaped in anonymous blocks without formal roads that congregate into districts with no official identity. Inhabitants survive on petty theft and trafficking. These miserable slums, less than half an hour from the centre of Casablanca, have no running water, sewers or electricity. Foul water stagnates in alleyways of packed earth that attract clouds of mosquitoes carrying diseases. The inhabitants call the districts Chechnyas, which says much about the extent of urban, social and cultural disintegration.
These extraterritorial zones breed Takfirists as well as mosquitoes.
Maybe they do, but time and time again we have seen that jihadists are not always desperately poor and uneducated “” quite the contrary.