Amir Taheri:
Where do we go from here? This is the question that Islamist groups are posing these days in the murky space they inhabit on the margins of reality. It is asked in mosques controlled by radicals, touched upon in articles published by fellow-travelers, and debated in the chat-rooms of websites operated by militant groups.
Leaving aside the usual suggestions to hijack a few more passenger jets or to poison the drinking water of big cities in the West or to blow up this or that monument in Western capitals, the movement appears to have run out of ideas. It may even be passing through its deepest crisis of imagination since the 9/11 attacks against the United States.
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For the past year or so Al-Zawahiri has been urging militants from all over the world, including North America and Europe, to converge on the Middle East for a regional “jihad” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Bin Laden, however, has been preaching a totally different strategy. He wants the jihadists, including “sleepers” in America and Europe, to carry out other “spectacular coups” inside the United States.
So far, however, both strategies have failed.
There is no sign of the new fronts that Al-Zawahiri wanted to open in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. At the same time Bin Laden’s desperate pleas for doing “something big” inside the US have produced no results.
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While Bin Laden’s message of hatred and terror still resonates in sections of the Muslim communities and the remnants of the left in the West, the picture is different in the Muslim world. There, people are demonstrating for freedom and, in some cases like Egypt a few weeks ago, even for more trade with Israel. This is a new configuration in which Islamist terrorism, although still deadly dangerous, has only a limited future.
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