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al-Nuaimi had sent US$2 million per month to AQ for one year ( Al-Arabiya 2017b ). Other connections include Abd al-Latif al-Kawari, who worked for Qatar’s Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning, and according to the US Department of the Treasury also ‘worked … to coordinate the delivery of funding from Qatari financiers intended to support Al Qaeda and to deliver receipts confirming that al-Qaeda received foreign donor funding from Qatar-based extremists’ ( US Department of the Treasury 2008a ; Al-Arabiya 2017a ). There is also Salim Hasan Khalifa Rashid al
AQ’s targeting of the New York World Trade Center and Washington Pentagon on 9/11 marked a watershed moment in public and political understandings of the phenomenon of neo-jihadism. While Al Qaeda and the ideological movement with which it was associated were in many contexts perceived as a civilisational threat ( Ali 2003 ; Dreyfuss 2006 ), the symbolic nature of 9/11 and its propagandised after-effects also drew attention to neo-jihadism’s political-economic dimensions. Some explored how the relative meaning of image-based propaganda is integral to the
This book retraces the human and intellectual development that has led the author to one very firm conviction: that the tensions that afflict the Western world’s relationship with the Muslim world are at their root political, far more than they are ideological. It aims to limit itself to a precise scholarly arena: recounting, as meticulously as possible, the most striking interactions between a personal life history and professional and research trajectories. This path has consistently centered on how the rise of political Islam has been expressed: first in the Arab world, then in its interactions with French and Western societies, and finally in its interactions with other European and Western societies. It brings up-to-date theses formulated in the 2000s, in particular in the author’s previous book Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda (2005, 2nd ed. 2010, English ed. 2010), by measuring them up against the lessons of the powerful revolutionary dynamics set off by the “Arab Spring” of 2011, followed by the counter-revolutionary ones.
Few social and political phenomena have been debated as frequently or fervidly as neoliberalism and neo-jihadism. Yet, while discourse on these phenomena has been wide-ranging, they are rarely examined in relation to one another. In response, Neoliberalism and neo-jihadism examines political-economic characteristics of twentieth and early twenty-first-century neo-jihadism. Drawing on Bourdieusian and neo-Marxist ideas, it investigates how the neo-jihadist organisations, Al Qaeda and Islamic State, engage with the late modern capitalist paradigm of neoliberalism in their anti-capitalist propaganda and quasi-capitalist financial practices. An investigation of documents and discourses reveals interactions between neoliberalism and neo-jihadism characterised by surface-level contradiction, and structural connections that are dialectical and mutually reinforcing. Neoliberalism here is argued to constitute an underlying ‘status quo’, while neo-jihadism, as an evolving form of political organisation, is perpetuated as part of this situation.
Representing differentiated, unique, and exclusive examples of the (r)evolutionary phenomenon of neo-jihadism, AQ and IS are demonstrated in Neoliberalism and neo-jihadism to be characteristic of the mutually constitutive nature of ‘power and resistance’. Just as resistance movements throughout modern history have ended up resembling the forms of power they sought to overthrow, so too have AQ and IS ended up resembling and reconstituting the dominant political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism they mobilised in response to.
Quesnay , A. ( 2016 ), Syrie. Anatomie d’une guerre civile ( Paris : CNRS Éditions ). Bradol , J-H. ( 2015 ), ‘ How Humanitarians Work When Faced with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State ’, CRASH , 20 February. www.msf-crash.org/en/publications/war-and-humanitarianism/how-humanitarians-work-when-faced-al-qaeda
understand why the masses can elect oppression as though it were liberation. Violence can be seductive, and it can also be psychologically purifying, especially for those who have long been subjugated by it. But more often, those who justify violence do not put themselves on the side of death. However deluded and deceptive, only the most bizarre suicidal cults can be explained in the terms Freud explained. From fascism to liberalism (the two never so distant), al-Qaeda to Assad, ISIS to Israel, what marks out claims to violence is precisely the idea that a better world
the purpose of revealing the mutually constitutive nature of the entities in question. For the analysis in Chapters 3 and 4, neo-jihadist propaganda documents were obtained using a Boolean technique to search Google, Yahoo!, and Bing for various combinations of the keywords ‘Islamic State’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘speech’, ‘video’, ‘English-language’, ‘English translation’, from 1979 to 2014 for AQ and from 2014 to 2017 for IS. The credibility of the search results was assessed by the research method of triangulation ( Rothbauer 2008 ) and with consideration of the political
attractive target for extremist Islamist groups, who see attacks on Uganda as also hitting the US. The fear post-9/11 is that Islamist groups will attack vulnerable US targets in weaker countries, such as Uganda, if they do not have the strength to attack the US directly. This had already happened in the 1998 al Qaeda embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. An attack against a US target in Uganda would serve the dual purpose of attacking the US and potentially persuading the Ugandan Government that the price of such a close relationship with the US is too high to
there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11; second, about Iraq’s nuclear weapons capacity; and third; about Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons and his ability to deliver them. The possibility that the intelligence process was politicized is also examined. Although the record at this early date is far from complete, the chapter concludes that from publicly
The contemporary type of political violence sometimes referred to as ‘neo-jihadism’ developed in a dialectical, political-economic relationship with its US-directed military and counterterrorist opposition. While the neo-jihadist organisations, Al Qaeda (AQ) and Islamic State (IS), have since their inception propagandised on the basis of widespread anti-capitalist sentiments, at the same time they exploit and contribute to the mechanisms of neoliberal and late modern capitalist finance they condemn. The nature of the dialectic between AQ, IS, and their US