Even Diamonds are not monolithic - Jihad

[tw]

Islamic Jihad must be anti-American? Or is it anti-Saddam? Or anti-Gaddaffi? Or anti-Iranian cleric? Those guys are not so foolish as to label fundamental Islam as another branch of bin Laden's Al Qaeda. They don't defined all fundamentalists as 'Axis of Evil'. To do so would only empower the extremists. The Economist of 2 Feb also does not see Islamic jihad as monolithic extremists:

... On one side stand the nationalists who have waged local or regional jihads, often with considerable savagery, against third-world regimes. On the other are the globalists, led by Mr bin Laden, who want to take on the world. At issue is not the aim - all jihadis believe that one day the whole world will be Muslim - but the timing. Mr bin Laden's mistake, says one North African who fought along side him, was to declare war when the US was at the peak of its power.

The quarrel dates back at least to 1987, when Mr bin Laden, then a young acolyte of the non-violent Muslim Brotherhood, revealed that he had a "vision" of an Islamic superstate. Muhammad had toppled the two great empires of the day, Persia and Byzantium. Mr bin Laden had helped to topple the Russians in Afghanistan, and now only America remained. He sought to rein in those fighting civil wars in the Arab world, saying that jihad should be waged solely against non-Muslims.

At first, the Egyptian, Algerian and Libyan radicals bitterly resented this. Their struggle, as they saw it, was against corrupt tyrants in the Arab world who were resisting the creation of Islamic states. For them, jihad was a necessary struggle of the weak against the evil and strong. But compromises were arranged. The leader of Egyptian Jihad, Ayman al-Zawahari, a shy Cairo doctor, joined Mr bin Laden's war on the West, and Mr bin Laden accepted the legitimacy of jihad against North Africa's rulers on the ground that they were all western stooges. The ideological partnership was sealed with the marriage of the daughter of Mr Zawahari's deputy, Muhammad Ataf, to Mr bin Laden's son.

As the global movement expanded its operations in Kashmir, Chechnya and Bosnia, dissenters held their tongues, or drifted away. No longer. Now it is the global jihadis who have slipped away - because they are dead, in hiding or muzzled in Cuban cages - and the local radicals are raising their voices again.