AspenValley wrote: I heard something interesting on the radio the other day about Osama Bin Laden's "worldview" and how it was gradually being rejected in the ME, especially among the young. The person interviewed had written a book about it and how the new generation of those wanting change in the ME rejected the idea, propounded by Bin Laden of a return to what he was as an Islamic "Golden Age", circa the sixth century. Younger people were responsible for the uprisings demanding change and democratic government in the middle east, and they reject this notion, wanting instead to move more into the modern world.
I wonder if now that he is dead if his dangerous vision of a forceful return to a fundamentalist Islamic world will fade even faster. According to the author, the winds of change were already blowing against him and his radical views. although we've been so busy "fighting terror" as though it was going to be a permanent condition that we may not have noticed that support for his views was on the wane.
Young people moving towards a more democratic representation seems like a positive departure from the past. It is not necessarily an indication of their perspectives toward the west. Dismay fueling a promise for vengeance and continuation of 'Jihad' was expressed by a number of young Saudi's following OBL's death. Reactions were not only mixed in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, but in some other Muslim countries. Carefully chosen word were the order of the day in many other places in the ME too.
An article (linked by SC in Scientific America) cites sociologist Charles Kurzman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kurzman is an expert on the Middle East saying that we are over reacting to the threat of terror. Al Qaeda Central has not been too active in recent years. It's been chased to the ends of the world, and it really is not the center of action for global terrorism any more. That center has shifted to local affiliate groups in Yemen, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, Northwest Africa, which are only loosely linked to the center. They don't rely on the center for funding and training. Fortunately for the world, they are less competent, less well-trained. They manage to kill people each year, but not too many. Indeed he thinks we need to
turn down the volume of fear and paranoia and have a reasonable discussion about the costs and benefit of these security measures, given what we know about the level of threat.
