Terrorism and Oil

I happened to run into one of the most interesting people I could have hoped to meet at a chili cook-off I attended over the weekend: a university professor whose focus is hosting seminars on terrorism for graduate students. I spoke with him for over 30 minutes, hanging on every word.  Here I bring you the basic ideas he communicated:

Terrorism, of course, is a tactic. It makes no sense to say you’re waging a “war on terrorism” any more that one would say you’re waging a “war on hand-grenades.”  This use of language to pander to the masses represents the depths to which the US has fallen in the integrity with which it thinks and communicates.

One can’t fully address the terrorism that we see from Muslim Fundamentalists with a war of ideas. Yes, we can make the situation worse with the missteps of the warmongerish Bush Administration that has fostered Al Qaeda recruitment by creating intense hatred for the West. The Muslim world itself must iron out its own differences, and history has shown that this is a monumentally difficult thing to do. In any case, the challenge is not amenable to something like an advertising campaign from the West.

The real issue is the fanaticism of certain people who have risen to lofty places, having become highly respected by certain groups of disenfranchised Muslims. Extremist movements that have any chance of success almost always are derived from alienated people from privileged backgrounds. Peasant movements are normally squashed immediately, because they are the product of poor, uneducated people rising up in spontaneous anger with no real planning and foresight, and thus are usually crushed immediately by those in power. The privileged few, by contrast, have the education, as well as the time on their hands, to think through exactly what they are doing, what they feel their ideals ought to be, how they should recruit, raise funds, promote, operate, etc. This is the case with Al Qaeda.

I asked why this extremism isn’t attached to all monotheistic religions – why it doesn’t arise anyplace in which one group of people has the belief that “their God is better than someone else’s God.” He told me that indeed there are extremist Christians, trying to establish a theocratic United States, for example, but they’re generally regarded as the lunatic fringe, and they gain no traction.

When I asked why theocratic Christians fail, where Muslims succeed, he offered two explanations that I found fascinating:

a) Like the Old Testament and the New Testament in the Bible, the Koran has a new and an old part. However, unlike the Bible, where the angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament is replaced by the loving God of the New Testament, the case with the Koran is the reverse. During Mohammed’s life, his early followers were first at Mecca, and, though they were oppressed, things were generally hopeful, and thus the tenor of the religious scripture was one of peace and tolerance. Ten years later, they were forced to fight, and wound up at Medina. They survived the fight, and thus took away a kind of “bring it on” mentality.  As a consequence, the writings that found their way into the Koran were generally bellicose and intolerant of “infidels.” And today, the interpretation of the Koran includes this idea: where there appears to be a contradiction between the old and the new, the new is to take precedence.

b) The Western world had its Age of Enlightenment, its French Revolution, and its US Constitution, all serving to divide church and state. And even our Bible contains passages that serve to tell us to separate religious from public matters, e.g., Matthew 22:21 in which Jesus said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” There are no analogies in the Muslim world. The idea of a theocracy is an intrinsic part of the way Muslims think.  While it’s true that certain Muslim nations tend to be stricter about the way Islam is imposed on all aspect of its citizens’ lives, the idea of a secular government really has no legs on which to stand.

You may be wondering why all this history has made it into a blog on renewable energy. Here’s your answer:

I asked, “Well let me ask you about the money that forms the power to make this all happen in the first place.  I suppose this is really about oil. It would seem to me that, if it weren’t for the unfortunate geologic accident that these countries happen to be sitting on a large portion of the world’s oil reserves, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. They would be even more completely marginalized, and no one would care.” He believes that this is precisely correct. The only force making any of this relevant in today’s world is oil.

He wonders why a US government that is concerned about its own security is not doing everything it can to move away from oil. To him, it’s a complete mystery. I’m out of answers there too.