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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Andy McCarthy takes on fantasy-based jihad analysis

May 9, 2009 7:09 pm By Robert Spencer

Fantasy-based analysis leads to the fantasy-based policymaking we have seen for so long in the face of the global jihad. In a new review of three books that are sure to be influential among fantasy-based policymakers, Andy McCarthy asks the simple and essential question: is it true?

“The fate of jihad,” by Scott Johnson at PowerLine, May 9:

…The collective story of three new books by Kenneth Pollack, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel is that the war on terror “was horribly implemented by incompetent, moralistic dullards who never really believed in it and who, in their arrogant disregard for the rule of law, came to mirror the terrorists they were fighting.” McCarthy weighs these books in the balance and finds them wanting — among other things, on account of their optimism about Islam and the particulars of their derogation of the Bush administration and the “neocons,” whose Wilsonianism they share. McCarthy ends his review with Kepel’s fantasia on Europe:

He has convinced himself, at any rate, that Islam will go Europe, not the other way around. For Kepel, the combination of human capital drawn from across the Mediterranean and European expertise is driving “an ever changing process of fascination and rejection, where friendship and enmity mingle in the register of intimacy.” His prediction is that this emerging economic dynamo will be the “alternative to the failed narratives of jihad and the war on terror.” It’s a happy ending, but is it true?

Kepel’s fantasia falls under the category of ideas to which the axiom reputedly formulated by George Orwell applies: some ideas are so absurd only an intellectual could believe them.

And some are even more absurd than that, such that no dearth of evidence will ever convince these fantasists that they are false, and no abundance of evidence will ever convince them that the opposite of what they believe is true.

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