Louis Rene Beres
The uprisings in Egypt and Libya will only unleash new rounds of jihadist attacks
Revolutionary fervor sweeping the Middle East is plainly ongoing and perilously "contagious." Aside from confirming the longstanding illegitimacy of essentially all Arab regimes, the still-spreading popular discontent reveals that the "Palestinian Problem" has never been more than a cynical contrivance of corrupt Arab monarchies, dictatorships, and "authorities."
Israel, it must now be obvious to all, bears no responsibility for causing the region's core problems. To the contrary, if the Arabs had simply embraced rather than demonized Israel from the start -- a perfectly rational embrace that would have been enthusiastically welcomed by all Israelis -- the Arabs themselves would have benefited enormously. These considerable benefits, moreover, would have been felt politically, intellectually, medically, scientifically, and materially.
What is real in world politics, is not always rational. Because of endless manipulation by the Arab governments, demonization of Israel, not symbiotic embrace, was de rigueur from the very beginning. Nonetheless, in the wake of multiple and more or less interdependent revolutionary eruptions underway across the Arab world, Israel will remain in the cross-hairs of determined regional enemies. More specifically, long-suppressed Islamist forces will soon surface and seek power across the area. These disciplined and capable forces will expand with an utterly renewed dedication to cruelty masked in sanctimony.
There is more. The literally explosive results of this energetic rededication will be felt not only in the Arab world and Israel, but also in
In
Today's headlines from the "revolutionary" Middle East are often misleading, and generally incomplete. At its core, Jihadist terrorism always has little to do with war, politics or resistance to oppression. The essential meanings of these recurrent excursions into barbarism can be found within purely personal feelings of fear, dissatisfaction, cowardice, and loathing.
These feelings include: a consuming, though unrecognized, horror of death (relieved for "martyrs" by a compelling promise of immortality); an unfulfilled wish for ecstasy, or intense pleasure; a satisfying and self-righteous joy, drawn from the mandatory targeting of those who "lack sacredness;" and, even more acutely after Mubarak, an abiding hatred of all "apostates" and "infidels."
In searching for the truest meanings of regional revolutionary fervor in the Middle East, the implications for Jihadist terrorism will never be fully discoverable in official declarations, charters, and covenants. Nor will they be made gainfully understandable in less formal Islamist diatribes. Obliquely, but profoundly, these deeper meanings will remain securely hidden in the incalculable sufferings inflicted by Jihadists upon their past and future victims.
In
Human language can never describe agony. It follows that the defiling horror of Jihadist terror-violence can never really be understood or felt by others. Expert commentaries notwithstanding, this horror can never be reduced to any tangible, measurable, inventory of casualties.
All agony is incommunicable. In matters of Jihadist terror, quantification must always miss the point.
Facing a "new Middle East," the anguish of new terror victims will not only defile language, it will also be language defiling. The sheer inexpressibility of pain, although never determinable by politics, revolution, or society, can still have expressible political, revolutionary and societal outcomes. In the case of still-coming Jihadist terrorism, it may even stand in the way of recognizing new Islamist violence as authentically evil or unacceptable. We may even encounter, in this connection, comfortingly romantic celebrations of Jihadist terrorism as the necessary "revolutionary" expression of "freedom-fighters."
According to certain recent WikiLeaks revelations, the
To adequately understand the "new Middle East," especially the long-term consequences of multinational revolution, we will need to look far beyond the agitated but largely futile cries for "democracy." To begin, we must understand that Jihadist terrorists are spurred on by the distinctly voluptuous and purifying satisfactions of their planned violence. Islamist suicide-bombers, in particular, prepare carefully for their cathartic missions of pain and extinction because of the anticipated ecstasy. Drawn from a presumed religious obligation, this ecstasy, which rewards doubly because it is also "cleansing," represents an almost exact reciprocal of the unendurable suffering that must be borne by the victims.
For Jihadist suicide terrorists, both past and future, the death that is meted out to "profane" others is only an abstraction. These victims, by definition, lack sacredness. Moreover, in the unchanging Quranic concept of war, terrorizing the profane unbeliever who refuses to be dhimmi (to accept Sharia domination) is a desired end unto itself.
Physical pain within the human body can not only destroy ordinary language, it can also bring about a visceral reversion to pre-language human sounds -- that is, to those primal moans, cries and whispers that are anterior to learned speech. While the soon-to-be expanding number of victims of Jihadist terror will writhe agonizingly from the burns and the nails and the screws, neither the "civilized" world publics who bear silent witness, nor the "martyrs" themselves, will ever experience what is actually being suffered.
Physical pain, even in the "new Middle East," can have no consequential "voice." When, at last, it may discover some potentially decipherable sound, the listener will no longer want to listen. This audience, after all, mortal and fragile, will wish strenuously to deny its own existential vulnerabilities. Significantly, such denial, as Freud himself recognized, always lies at the very core of what it means to be human.
Violent upheavals now spreading across the Middle East contain important hidden meanings. For the most part, their principal legacy will have little to do with any sustained popular revolution, democracy, or the overthrow of earthly despotisms. Instead, it will bear upon long-latent and much more primal human hopes of achieving the indisputably greatest power of all, power over death.
Drawing upon these important hidden meanings of current revolutionary fervor in the "new" Middle East and
Once this starkly elusive concept can be understood, we will finally be able to deal intelligently and purposefully with emerging hazards of the region.
Louis René Beres is professor of political science and international law at
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