Fair enough but being an atheist I tend to feel that this is a distinction without a difference; ultimately it’s all some bollocks someone made up and everyone thinks that the particular bollock in their hand is the one, true, authentic bollock.
Mind you, the force of purity itself as a motivating factor is interesting – it chimes in with the Russian Nihilists and the frenzies of traditional Chinese peasant revolts like the white lotus and the Taipings: annihilation of the self and others in order to establish "purity" in one form or other.
]]>Anyway, the salient question is whether people like Rudolph and his co-thinkers are getting ideas from the example of the jihadis. Think religious open source warfare.
Nah, I don’t think so, at least in Rudolph’s case. Abortion bombings and assassinations began in the 1980’s, well before most Americans had (probably) even heard the word jihad. Who knows now, though? After all, suicide bombing spread from Hezbollah to the Tamil Tigers, whose innovation (the suicide vest) then made its way back to the Arab world.
]]>Mmmm…but the fifth monarchists, who I believe were the first people to come out with the lost tribes of Israel stuff were around at the time of the English Civil War, later morphing into the British Israelites. They’re part of a protestant tradition that rejects centralised orthodoxy, like the Baptists, pentecostalists, primitive methodists and so on. There’s a very strong US tradition of dissident churches, each purer in doctrinal matters than the last and CI does seem to fit into that tradition. H L Mencken’s good on this subject.
Anyway, the salient question is whether people like Rudolph and his co-thinkers are getting ideas from the example of the jihadis. Think religious open source warfare.
]]>Qutb was an Islamic scholar working within a school of orthodox Sunni Islamic thinking with deep roots, and his followers have a copious amount of Islamic thinking to draw on to justify their position. It may not be mainstream, but theologically they are within the broad spectrum of Islamic orthodoxy. Think of them as the Wee Frees with semtex.
CI, on the other hand, is explicitly anti-Orthodoxy, explicitly heretical, and they place themselves purposefully outside the orthodox Protestant tradition (the ‘tribes of Europe’ as the lost tribes of Israel? Weird shit). A better comparison in Islamic terms is probably to strange, not-exactly-halal groups like the Alawites that have grafted mysterious other stuff onto Islamic orthodoxy (except CI is smaller and a lot crazier).
]]>Look, I think that LGF style freakouts over every single Muslim on earth are pointless, hysterical, and stupid, but it’s a bit silly to pretend that, at this particular junction of the space-time continuum, the fringes of Islam don’t have pretty much every other extremist movement on earth beat for sheer nutty violence.
]]>If Eric Rudolph wants to be known as a Christian terrorist then let’s oblige him.
Can we get on with understanding the root causes now?
]]>Suspect me of lying no more, Tim Blair has the evidence here:
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