Last week, al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a provocative video commenting on the election of Barack Obama. You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, Zawahiri tells the U.S. president-elect. Referring to Obama as abid al-beit, the Arabic term for house slave, the tape condemned Obama as a typical American politician in the pocket of the Zionist lobby.
To decode Zawahiri's words, Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell spoke with French scholar Gilles Kepel, chair of Middle East studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. Kepel has followed Zawahiris statements closely for several years. In his most recent book, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, Kepel identifies two sweeping but opposing narratives -- the neoconservative war on terror and the jihadist myth of martyrdom. According to Kepel, both have failed miserably.
Foreign Policy: Do you think the tape Zawahiri released last week is significant?
Gilles Kepel: The tape is extremely important, because [al Qaeda believed] that 9/11 would be a means to mobilize the Muslim masses against the West and to topple the [Middle Eastern] regimes. But they were totally unable to do it.
I've monitored Zawahiris statements between the fifth and the seventh anniversary of 9/11 to try to decipher his whole system of thought, to understand how it works. The more [strident] Zawahiri's discourse was, the less it was in tune with reality.
Within the ranks of radical Islamism, Zawahiri has been very, very violently criticized. There is a widespread feeling now that al Qaeda's strategy has failed, because [critics] say Zawahiri has spilled Muslim blood. The Jews and Christians he may have killed were OK -- halal -- but the Muslim blood was not halal.
COMMENTS (0)
More...
FP: Do you think Zawahiri hoped that with this tape, he would tap into a kind of Arab anti-black racism?
GK: In a way. But I think he tried not to look like a racist because he quoted Malcolm X, who was a good black man because he [converted to Islam and] became [al-Hajj] Malik al-Shabazz. But you could almost feel in his speech the aristocratic background of Zawahiri, who looks down on niggers with the utmost contempt.
Abid al-beit, [the name by which Zawahiri referred to Obama], is something much more [potent] than house Negro. It is loaded with a very, very strong racist connotation, and I'm not sure that Zawahiri made himself very popular with this sort of discourse. In my view, this is a sign that al Qaeda is in dire straits.
FP: Do you think Obama -- with his ethnic identity and his rhetoric about regaining Americas respect in the world -- is going to help reverse widespread international cynicism toward the United States?
GK: I think even outside the Beltway, everybody still believes that America is necessary. But no one is sure that its sufficient anymore. And America needs allies, [because] what is a foreign-policy agenda for the United States in the Middle East is -- to a large extent -- a domestic policy for us and for people in what we call our Near East.
FP: Over the last eight years, youve been a frequent critic of the Bush administration. What would you say was the biggest analytical error that George W. Bush made?
GK: The administration mistook the Middle East for the former Soviet Empire. They thought that from the Evil Empire to the Axis of Evil there was a continuity, which was not the case.
The war on terror was supposed to mobilize public opinion behind the Bush administration. Everybody was with them after 9/11, but then the agenda was changed and the war on terror was a means to implement another plan -- downing the Saddam regime and creating a U.S.-friendly Iraq.
SUBJECTS:
(0)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE