To: JohnM who wrote (44923 ) 9/18/2002 10:37:39 AM From: carranza2 Read Replies (1) | Respond to So, first point--Kepel and Lacquer [sic] disagree on the decline argument. We'll have to see how this one goes in the future. Though Lacquer needs to make his argument that it is not in decline. He does not do so in this review. bu.edu Kepel may well be right in the long run. Having underrated the importance of political Islam for many years, some Western observers have belatedly accepted its important role and are again lagging behind events; they now attribute to Islamism an exaggerated importance even while it is in decline. might be wrong on the decline issue because there are serious conditions in the Islamic world that are tantamount to "social dynamite", a point I don't think even Kepel would question. Laqueur said the following:But there are social trends pointing in the opposite direction. Islamism is, broadly speaking, a movement of the urban and rural poor and of the lower middle class. These segments of the population in the Islamic world are suffering not only spiritually but materially as a result of economic stagnation; and there is a considerable amount of social dynamite. Foreign Affairs in 1996.foreignpolicy2000.org All that leads well beyond terrorism as we have known it. New definitions and new terms may have to be developed for new realities, and intelligence services and policymakers must learn to discern the significant differences among terrorists' motivations, approaches, and aims. The Bible says that when the Old Testament hero Samson brought down the temple, burying himself along with the Philistines in the ruins, "the dead which he slew at his death were more than he slew in his life." The Samsons of a society have been relatively few in all ages. But with the new technologies and the changed nature of the world in which they operate, a handful of angry Samsons and disciples of apocalypse would suffice to cause havoc. Chances are that of 100 attempts at terrorist superviolence, 99 would fail. But the single successful one could claim many more victims, do more material damage, and unleash far greater panic than anything the world has yet experienced.’
