Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
Hat tip to another observer Tim Stevens, Kings ICSR, who has pointed to this Dutch report; link:http://english.nctb.nl/current_topics/reports/ where it is the first report

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I've read through it once quickly and am impressed with its grasp of the subject matter but (and it's a big BUT) I am still averse to describing Jihadists as some kind of fringe movement. Furthermore, and this irks me no end, the admonition to study the "ideology" of Jihadism when IMO it's not an "ideology" but a totalisitc worldview (or "religion", a word I have problems with in this respect too); being a Dutch (therefore dependant upon a post-modernist multicultural/relativist paradigm) product it is no wonder they are hard pressed to say the I word (thats Islam to you and I). Furthermore, the presentation and explication of Jihad follows almost to the letter what Muslim "moderates" would have us belive rather than revealing the centrality of Jihad to Islam (reminiscent of Calvin and the calling of the elect in extreme Protestantism). Also, and I think this is something not many have commented upon, is the strange prediliction we have of assuming that we and they inhabit the same "worlds" in which time and space are interpreted through similar paradigms but articulated through difficult languages (hence the priority of diplomacy, communication, radical- translation, et al) when in fact the conflict is not over "interpretation" (although that's a big part of it) but over "constituion" of the world according to different understanding of what the "good life" should be. It's not a question of somehow "getting through" to them (based on the assumption that we all want the same thing, see the world in the same way, and that everything is, at bottom, identitical with only our languages vielling reality) but instead its a question of whose "way of life" in the widest phenomenological sense is going to prevail in our respective AOs. We don't live (or "dwell" as Heideger would have said) in the same "world" and the until we begin grasping that issue (among others) we will always interpret the "jihadists" as we want them to see themselves and not as they actually do see themselves. Unfortunately, I can't copy and paste segments from the article to illustrate my point but I will attempt to do so in greater depth (and one hopes greater cohesion) later in order to more fully adumbrate my concerns.

OTOH here's an article I find better conforms to my own line of thinking although there are still issues I would accentuate and others I would relegate to the sidelines, S.P. Lambert, Y: The Sources of Islamic Revolutionary Conduct http://www.dia.mil/college/pubs/pdf/5674.pdf