While a common idea throughout the Muslim world, Radical Islamists seek to forseable realize, a Caliphate in which political and religious power are fused and whose hypothetical borders are indicated here. One should note that it encompasses the Christian, Confucian, Jewish and Hindu populations of Spain, the Balkans, Greece, central Africa, India and Indonesia.

This Jihadist worldview however, lends itself to global a conspiracy theory today, which provides the dramatic background for the self-appointed role of the global Islamist terrorists.

Thus, Islamists believe that America, Israel, and other "crusader" nations have plotted to destroy Islam, and that they are called upon to defend it. Islamism and Islam exist of course also of other phenomena, not least to say that there are two major groups; shi’ites (example Iran) and Suni (example Saudi-Arabia).

Those with such proclivities seem to lack the ability either to repress or to adequately sublimate such deeper suspicions into more innocent channels, such as artistic or philosophical endeavor. The above paranoid-worldview, literalizes the intuition of a metaphysical conspiracy and the intuition of a cosmic force of evil, imagining that what is at issue is an actual conspiracy involving real people - the Trilateral Commission, the Jews, the Illuminati, or some other group.
Even better than acquiring "understanding" through uncovering conspiracies would be the ability to control events, indeed to create events. Then one' s omnipotence will be put to the service of creating a world that is congruent with one' s image of intelligibility and meaning.

But there are actually two reasons for this. First of all, reification or objectification is the mind's effort to represent this intuition to itself, and thus understand it. The problem is that, in doing so, the mind distorts what it seeks to represent. But this mistake cannot be avoided.

The first reason for the literalization of a conspiracy has to do with the dialectics of coming to know anything; the second reason is not so innocent: taking what is really an inner sense of conspiracy for an actual outer event is a form of projection, which, after all, is a defense mechanism.

Plus those who are under the sway of the paranoid style in politics, may also have delusions of grandeur not simply about themselves, but about the group with which they are affiliated. When groups have delusions of grandeur, it often leads them to an antinomian disdain for rules, laws, and morality in regard to people outside the group, or even outside the group's inner circle. Not surprising, this double morality is endemic to utopian politics.

Group delusions of grandeur are seductive, for they promise those who feel unhappy and unworthy that they can attain the power and prestige of the group, or so they imagine. Furthermore, such groups offer opportunities for ambitious true believers to attain immortality by sacrificing their life for the group. As Schopenhauer has been attributed as saying, “Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability."

Invariably, group grandeur is premised on a lie, for what seems like transcendence is but an extended egotism, and what seems like grandeur is really narcissistic fantasy. In essence, delusional grandeur is founded on a hubris that impotently rebels against the finitude of the human condition. But most important, when finitude is denied, it leads to envy, bitterness, the worship of death, and just plain misery. It might ofcourse be advisable to employ a different word than "grandeur," when considering its transformation to a new key. After all, "grandeur" often connotes an egotism that is intrinsically delusory. There is no ideal word for this new key, but "dignity," "nobility," or "greatness" would be preferable. Sometimes, we shall use those words, but on other occasions we shall stick with "grandeur," so as not to lose the connection that we are trying to establish with the delusions indigenous to the paranoid worldview.

Furthermore, the  disappointment that inevitably arises from utopian expectations is paranoiagenic. It leads to bitterness, hostility, blame, envy, and all the other malevolent feelings associated with the paranoid vision. The utopian vision has clearly left something out of the human equation, namely the fact that human beings are, as Kant said, "twisted timber", from which nothing straight can grow.

How ironic, then, that the utopian vision, with its unconstrained affirmation of humanity's godlike possibilities, leads to bitterness. But those visions of life that recognize the amphibious nature of human beings, and which are constrained in their hopes for humanity, lead to the affirmation of human grandeur, greatness, and nobility. Furthermore, the tragic vision leads to an optimism - not one founded on shallow hopes, but on ennobling endurance of suffering and triumph over adversity. It is paradoxical that the acknowledgement of finitude is a prerequisite for the realization of true grandeur.

The September 11th suicide terrorists were obsessed, as are many fundamentalists, by the dread of impurity. The paranoid's sense that the world needs to be purified, through an apocalypse, is a distortion of a fundamental inner need - the need to attain purity of heart. Martyrdom through suicide is far easier than years of difficult struggle to obtain true purity.

A second inner requirement that is being symbolized by the apocalypse is transcendence. What it would mean to experience the world, apart from the subject/object duality, is unintelligible in the way in which a mystical insight is unintelligible. And a third inner requirement that is also being symbolized by the end of the world, is the need to awaken, conscious of who one is and what life is really all about.

The fate of the awakened person is illustrated by Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He goes back to the cave to awaken the prisoners to their plight. They do not appreciate his claim that they are prisoners of illusion. Indeed, they try to kill him. Plato was, of course, making an allusion to the death of his teacher, Socrates who, as "gadfly of the state," saw awakening people as his mission.

Many of the manifestations of the paranoid vision - including religious fundamentalism, fanaticism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, witch-hunts, anti intellectualism, anti-secularism, and a fear of "conspiring" secret societies – are reflective of this fear, hatred, and yet secret fascination with people who are thought to possess knowledge. More ultimately, it is a dread and fascination with knowledge itself. Knowledge is indeed dangerous, for it corrodes beliefs, superstitions, and unexamined ideas. Thus it can precipitate the end of one' s world, in a very real way. One is also reminded, in that context, that there was a time when explorers, like Columbus, set out on a journey to what was regarded - as was indicated by ancient maps - as the end of the world. Thus that which lay beyond the limits of (geographical) knowledge was viewed as the "end" of the world.

There are those who argue that suicide terrorists are motivated not by conspirational thinking and fanaticism, but by strategic objectives. The most persuasive argument for this school of thought comes from Robert A. Pape, a political scientist, who wrote a well-circulated article for the American Political Science Review entitled "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism." There would appear to be much truth to Pape's thesis.

Hezbollah, for example, was able, through a series of calculated suicide attacks, to get the United States and Israel to leave Southern Lebanon. Similarly, the Tamil Tigers - the terrorist separatist organization seeking the independence of Tamil Eelam from Sri Lanka - were able to bring Sri Lanka to the bargaining table.

There are, though, certain anomalies that would appear to qualify the validity of Pape's theory. Take, for, example, Pape's well-documented argument to prove that the various Palestinian terrorist organizations were able to get Israel to make concessions, which consisted in letting go of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Here is where the rationality thesis gets strained. Israel finally agreed, in 1993, during the Oslo Accords, to allow the Palestinians to be given the Gaza Strip, ninety-five percent of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem. That would, in essence, have given the Palestinians just about everything that they had demanded. But to the surprise of everyone - including President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack and, no doubt, many of the Palestinians Yasser Arafat, who represented the PLO, rejected the deal. Hamas then launched a fierce infitada of suicide bombings.

In his essay, Pape does not explain how the PLO's rejection of the peace treaty with Israel served their strategic objectives of establishing a Palestinian state. But in The Case for Democracy (2004), Natan Sharansky - who was then serving as a member of the Israeli delegation at the Oslo accords - offers his opinion on what was Arafat's primary, but unstated, objective in turning down Israel's generous deal: "Arafat rejected countless projects Israel proposed that would have served to decrease tension between Israelis and Palestinians and release his hold on Palestinian economic life" (2004, p. 181). Sharansky then explains that it was necessary to keep Israel as an enemy. Infact as we have seen, an enemy has always been the cynical method used by autocrats to maintain control over a group of people. Creating an enemy creates a scapegoat for their nation's social, economic, and political failures, and deflects criticism from their own corrupt regime. The suicide bombings served to keep the tensions with Israel at a feverish pitch. But would the suicide bombers have sacrificed their lives had they deciphered Arafat's real objectives? If Sharansky is correct - that it was all about Arafat maintaining power and control - then does it make sense to talk of the suicide bombings as fulfilling a strategic objective?

For that matter, what was the strategic motivation of Aum Shinrikyo - a cult regarded by the United States government as a terrorist organization - for having released the poisonous gas Saran into the Japanese subways? Their motivation was similarly part of an apocalyptic fantasy.

This is not to deny the obvious fact that terrorists are often strategically motivated. It is just to suggest that non-strategic motives also play crucial role, and it would behoove us to examine some of these motives, for they may help us not only to understand terrorism, but also to more deeply understand Islamism and, more ultimately, the paranoid vision.

In 2002 , Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister of Israel, gave a speech entitled "The Root Cause of Terrorism is Totalitarianism." This is certainly an intriguing hypothesis, but was Netanyahu correct? After all, terrorism, at least as it is being defined here, is not state sponsored. Organizations like Hamas and AI Qaeda act independently. Is it fair, then, to connect terrorism to totalitarianism?

There may, though, be some truth to Netanyahu's statement. After all, Middle Eastern terrorists are radical fundamentalists and, as such, are foes of individual freedom, human rights, and all else that one associates with liberal Western democracy. For example, it is clear that Osama bin Laden has been profoundly influenced by the above mentioned Sayyid Qutb, whose writings clearly espouse authoritarian and totalitarian values. Bearing this in mind, what then might be the connection between totalitarianism and terrorism? As Netanyahu sees it:

[For terrorists], the cause they espouse is so all-encompassing, so total, that it justifies anything. It allows them to break any law, discard any moral code and trample all human rights in the dust. In their eyes, it permits them to indiscriminately murder and maim innocent men and women, and lets them blow up a bus full of children. ( p. 1)

This totalization, or absolutizing, of one's cause may make one a true believer, and perhaps a fanatic, but does it make one a totalitarian? It mayor may not. And it mayor may not make one a terrorist. But we would contend that fanaticism is a cause of terrorism, if "fanatic" means a person acting solely out of an end justifies the means ethics, i.e. a person who has lost all sense of proportion. It became evident, from the three previous case examples, that there is a connection between teleological ethics and antinomianism, nihilism, and the paranoid vision. One can, then, discern a common theme here. Needless to say, fanatics are dangerous, for their all-important cause vindicates any sort of action, including terrorism.

In "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism." Robert Pape states that, "all suicide terrorist campaigns in the last two decades have been aimed at democracies, which make more suitable targets from the terrorist's point of view" (2003, p. 5). Pape is making an interesting point here, but one must ask: What about nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Sri Lanka? They have experienced terrorist attacks, and they are not democracies. Russia, too, as suffered terrorist attacks, and it is barely a democracy. Each of these cases are different, but it would seem that a recent phenomena are nondemocratic countries that have dealings with democratic counties being attacked by terrorists. The July 26th 2005 terrorist attack in the Egyptian city of Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, where there exists a vacation resort that caters to English tourists, and has been the site of meetings of international conferences, would be an example. All the same, Pape is mostly correct in his assessment. Why, then, do democracies make good targets? According to Pape:

.. .democracies are often thought to be especially vulnerable to coercive punishment. Domestic critics and international rivals, as well as terrorists, often view democracies as "soft," usually on the grounds that their publics have low thresholds of cost tolerance and high ability to affect state policy. Even if there is little evidence that democracies are easier to coerce than other regime types this image of democracy matters. (2003, pp. 7-8)

This seems unconvincing as an explanation of why democracies have been most frequently targets of terrorists. It could be argued, though, that the essential reason is not practical, like Pape contends, but ideological. If democracies are a target for terrorism it is because democracies, quite naturally, stand for democratic freedoms, liberty, individualism, human rights, the separation of church and state, and all else that terrorists, who are invariably totalitarians, reject. Terrorist fear that such liberal values will invade their nation. This fear, and all else that follows from it, is a paranoid reaction to the dread of modernity.

The notion that what is really dreaded is democracy and liberty could explain why democracies are by far the most prevalent targets for terrorism, but how can one explain the act of terrorism itself, now that we have rejected Pape's rational motive thesis? A frequent thesis is that suicide bombing, terrorism in general, and genocide, are part of a cult of death, i.e. a perverse mythicizing, glorification, and worshiping of death. Where as frequently seen in Islam, death is idealized as a desired goal and not a necessary evil in war. At its most extreme, nihilism is not just a doctrine advocating the complete destruction of social and political institutions, which is what some revolutionaries have sought, but the negation of all values. (See Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical Islam, and the Duty of Jihad by Shmuel Bar, 2006.)

But in  radical Islam, suicide plays an absolutely indispensable role, and is not a means to an end but an end in itself, transformed into an act of martyrdom - martyrdom in all of its transcendent glory. Indeed, a third thesis is that apocalypticism. is what motivates the terrorist. In fact terrorists have repeatedly attacked those who seek to find negotiated and non-catastrophic solutions to difficult problems. See for example Anwar Sadat who was  assassinated by the forerunners of Al Qaeda, and Yitzak Rabin by a Jewish fanatic, because these political leaders sought out solutions to conflict by means of diplomacy and compromise, the type of solutions that lie at the core of liberal Western democracy. In the minds of fanatics, such compromises prevent the apocalypse from coming, and ultimately forestall the arrival of utopia. Furthermore, they remove the terrorist's raison d' etre, the logic of terrorism that compromisers are counterrevolutionary and must be killed.

But which view, then, is correct? Is terrorism all about nihilism, or is it about martyrdom, or is it about apocalypse? It would seem that all three views are correct, if one adds a few qualifications. First of all consider the notion that the desire for martyrdom is what is motivating terrorists. If this is martyrdom, Islamists are defining it in a strange new way. After all, the notion that a martyr is a person who, through the act of suicide, kills as many innocent civilians as possible, is outrageously absurd. If anything, martyrs recognize the sanctity of human existence. Furthermore, elsewhere  the Qur' prohibits suicide yet potential suicide murderers are bolstered in their belief that they will be martyrs by belonging to societies, that interpret suicide-murder as a glorious act of selfsacrifice.

It may be that the desire for complete destruction, for a tabula rasa, is itself prompted by a paranoid purity-seeking. The hope is that terror will precipitate the Gotterdammerung, and then the world, having been cleansed through destruction, will be ready for renewal, and for utopia. Underlying nihilism, then, may be apocalyptic fantasies, which would suggest that the nihilist is under the sway of the paranoid vision.

Then, there is for example Osama bin Laden's opinion about who are the real terrorists: "The truth is that the whole Muslim world is the victim of international terrorism, engineered by America at the United Nations"

Putting it all together, the murderous martyrdom that terrorists seek might be called, for want of a simpler term, and a more parsimonious explanation, "apocalyptic, nihilistic, sadistic, envy-inspired, pseudo-martyrdom."It can be concluded, then, that terrorism is not fundamentally strategic, even though, on a surface level, it appears so. It is, on the contrary, the product of a number of un-strategic elements, all of which are under the sway of the paranoid vision, combining together. Ironically, the most world-threatening forms of the malady of tyranny and totalitarianism have coincided with the rise and spread of liberal democracy, giving rise to an opposing ideal that seeks to control every thought and act.

For example how is it that Athens, as the advent of liberal democracy, and Sparta, as the advent of totalitarianism where mutually arising? Could the purpose of totalitarianism be, to combat the 'anxiety' that is aroused by the lure of other, better ideas?

Nevertheless, if ideas cause anxiety, it is not necessarily because they are seen as better. It is because their very existence relativizes the supposed absoluteness of one's own ideas. Furthermore, new ideas suggest the perspectival quality of one's worldview, unmooring one from the solidity of the familiar. Thus is totalitarianism a flight from openness, freedom, and possibility? One might say that in each person there exists an inner Peloponnesian War, a series of battles between freedom and psychological control. Indeed, totalitarianism - of which Islamism is a form - is a desperate effort to quell those anxieties. Anxiety need not result in desperation, reactionary closure, and social and political malevolence. It can spur a people on to new learning, to an expansion of self-awareness, the result of which is a more conscious and more creative relation to the realities of human existence. It can, indeed, lead to a cultural renaissance. But if the "opportunity knocks card" of new learning is rejected, this anxiety will find release in outlets that are pernicious, including conspiracy thinking, the major force that is against us.

Some moderate Muslims, have interpreted the call to Jihad to mean the call to spiritual warfare, i.e. the conquest of one's weaknesses. A spiritual Jihad is, indeed, necessary if the temptation to accept the facile answers proposed by Islamist totalitarianism, and other paranoid phenomena, are to be overcome.
But all of the manifestations of the paranoid vision make sense (and as seen above are in line with standard Psychiatry), and are of a piece. Delusions of grandeur are an obvious enough refusal to acknowledge one's finitude. The sense of evil that is endemic to the paranoid vision has a similar ground. After all, evil represented as defilement, possession, or as a devil (projected onto a vilified group of people) - has the aspect of externality. The implication is that one is inwardly pure and perfect. This arrogation of absoluteness to oneself is a refusal of the task to mediate the finite and the absolute. Conspiracy theories, apart from their vilifying function, fail to acknowledge the limits of the knowable. They derive from a refusal to acknowledge the uncertain, contingent, and chance dimension of spatiotemporal existence. Apocalyptic fantasies are founded on a rejection of the world, with all of its imperfections. Rather than taking up the arduous task of being the crucible, one longs for the day when the imperfect world will be destroyed, and a less demanding mode of existence will appear.

The paranoid vision can be viewed as one modality of the flight from the inner demand to live at the intersection (of time and eternity, of the finite and infinite.) Might all psychopathology, and all immorality, consist in various forms of flight from that difficult task? The evidence would suggest that they are indeed a flight, but a detailed exploration of this phenomenon must be deferred for another time. For now, it will be enough to propose an answer to the question that began this chapter: What does the existence of the paranoid vision tell us about that amphibious creature known as a human being? It bespeaks of the difficulty of living at the intersect. After all, if mediating opposites was not thoroughly problematic, there would be no paranoid vision, nor would there be the ten-thousand other ways in which human beings flee their special calling. It is because the task is arduous that there has always been admiration for such virtues as saintliness, nobility, and heroism, for all things excellent, are as difficult as they are rare.

Of course one could deepen this level of investigation by shifting from a psychological to an epistemological plane of inquiry, one where visions of life are central. A similar advance might also be made in the field of social, political, and organizational psychology. That an organization can become possessed by the paranoid vision should now be clear enough.

As for Islamic terrorist groups, their "fantasy ideology" grows in a manure rich with conspiracy theories and other paranoid narratives, hidden from the light of reason, lacking contact with universal discourse.

Thus insularity is a failure to connect with the larger world. Without that connection, one lives a fragmented, isolated, alienated, and dissolute existence, and one becomes a candidate for possession by the paranoid vision. There is another comparison that one can make: Disagreement in regard to ideology or policy meant losing favor, ostracism, and possibly excommunication. Thus despite the imperfections of democracy, a democratic nation has a better chance of surviving such crises than one that is authoritarian.  
 

Islamic Totalitarianism

Although preoccupied by religion, it will also be evident that Islamists are motivated by, a form of totalitarianism. Whether secular or theocratic, totalitarian societies are, to use Popper's term, "closed societies," meaning that they are ideologically monistic, allowing for only one set of ideas, the so-called party line, to be believed, discussed, and implemented. What is known as "religious fundamentalism" is essentially theocratic totalitarianism, like for example is the case in Iran. It is the wish to have an entire society and polity strictly conform to a certain set of religious rules, which are held to be absolute. As in all forms of totalitarianism, questioning the existing social and political order is not tolerated. Opinions that are contrary to those of the ruling religious authorities draconian punishments are meted out.

Totalitarianism is the antithesis not only of pluralism, but also of individualism, the belief that each person should be free to decide how to live his or her life. In a democracy - one that is founded on the rule of law and that allows for free speech, freedom of worship, and freedom of the press - diverse opinions and individual goals are sanctioned. The state's function (at least under the social contract notion of government of John Locke) is limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. Totalitarianism, by contrast, is the belief that the members of a society or nation have no reality or value in themselves. The source of true reality and value is the state or in the case of theocratic totalitarianism, the church/state. A member of a totalitarian nation has the status not of a citizen, but of a subject - and sometimes merely that of a servant, or of a slave - of the state. In regard to Islamism, Allah is the master and ‚man is the slave.’ The totalitarian vision then becomes a battle cry. One is reminded, in this regard, of Arendt's distinction between tyranny and totalitarianism. The former only demands one's material goods and political allegiance, bat the latter demands all that as well as one's individuality, mind, and soul.

For Islamists, the non-separation of church and state means that there is no secular realm, for the existence of such a realm would limit Allah's (meaning the Koran and Sharia law) sphere of influence, thus fragmenting the overarching totalitarian unity. Some Islamist thinkers, such as Sayyid Qutb, advocated the abolition of free market capitalism altogether.

Qutb regarded contemporary jahiliyya as "rebellion" against God, insisting that Muslims must identify, judge, and overcome unbelievers. Jahiliyya is for Qutb the entire world; current Islamic states are no better than Western ones. Only the Qur'an and the hadith are legitimate sources of social and political guidance; traditional jurists, priests, and men of theory are not to be trusted. But Qutb approved of Jihad, thinking for oneself, since he believed it discredited traditional Islamic authorities and supported militancy. His attention turned from the community-building of al-Bannd to revolution; society must be remade now by direct attack on the state. This was an implicit critique of the Muslim Brotherhood; as the Sudanese Islamist Hassan al-Turabi later put it, "Look at the Brotherhood; they don't change society at all, they never detribalize society, they promote a traditional, sectarian Islam against a progressive Islam" (Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam,  2001: 62).

When Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat lifted the ban on fundamentalism, the children of Qutb emerged from jail with radicalized views. Some called for an internal withdrawal of believers into separatist Islamic communities, given the utter unacceptability of existing majority-Muslim societies. But Muhammed `Abd al-Salam Faraj, a member of the militant group al Jihad, rejected that approach. Like Qutb he insisted that "the Rulers of this age were raised at the tables of imperialism, be it Crusaderism, or Communism, or Zionism. They carry nothing from Islam but their names" (Johannes Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat's Assassins and the Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East. New York: Macmillan, 1986: 169).

Faraj took the logically final step toward holy war in his Al-Faridah al-Ghâ'ibah (The Neglected Duty). For centuries corrupt rulers and traditional scholars have purposely suppressed the Islamic duty of offensive jihad espoused by the Prophet and the early caliphate: "Neglecting jihad is the cause of the lowness, humiliation, division and fragmentation in which Muslims live today" (Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat's Assassins and the Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East. New York: Macmillan, 1986: 205).True Islam is a violent transformation of the real by the ideal, the takeover of all Islamic states by force of arms, an Islam "spread by the sword" (Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat's Assassins and the Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East. New York: Macmillan, 1986: 193).

Qutb would have even abolished the interest on loans, for he considered it usury, and in conflict with Islamist morality. So it is that totalitarianism, with its ideological monism, requires that all domains of human existence - from marriage to morality, from child-rearing to economics - conform to a single uniform theme, i.e. the social and political ideology dictated by the state.

It would be naive to think that, in most cases, totalitarian regimes are simply imposed upon peoples longing to be free. As excellent a thinker as Natan Sharansky is, one derives a sense from his book The Case for Democracy (2004) that people just want to be free. They often do want very much to be free. But, because human beings are creatures of contradiction, they can also wish to jettison the burden of responsibility that comes with being free. As Camus observed, "The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude"

Furthermore, theocratic totalitarianism also goes beyond the desire for material security and spiritual certitude. The command to conquer the world through holy war is an unholy command, predicated upon something akin to a Faustian bargain. Of course, it is not quite the same. One rejects the promise of heaven, but not for the material joys of this world - Helen of Troy, and all the rest - that Faust demanded. Here is a different sort of deal, one whose consequences are not just foolish like the deal that Faust struck, but downright horrifying. Satan realizes that the fatal flaw of theocratic totalitarians is their impatience. They do not seek the heavenly state of being that is a function of a transformation of consciousness. They seek the millennium, and they seek it now, on this earth. If they cannot have the millennium now, then death for themselves and for everyone else is the only other alternative. And so it is a vision of the millennium that Satan offers them. They imagine that the manifestation of God's glory would consist in a world in which everyone unquestionably obeys the laws of Shariah, or the laws of any other totalitarian doctrine, and where there are no infidels to ruin the image of perfect harmony. The impatience of the Islamic ‚terrorist’ is analyzed with great clarity by the Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, who writes, .Politics is a serious business which requires hard work. It needs to find ways of keeping society in harmony while meeting its basic needs and creating conditions for economic, social and cultural development. Writing a poem, erecting a building, composing a symphony, painting a miniature, compiling a theological study, and making a film are not easy. But making a car-bomb is The terrorist has no need of developing policies, building alliances, and mobilizing popular sentiment for his program. All that is hard work, just like winning free elections. The terrorist does not like hard work; he is in a hurry and wants a short-cut, even if that means turning himself into a human bomb. The terrorist has no patience with the lesser mortals who argue, answer back, and refuse to commit to anything unless convinced by rational analysis. All that means politics; something the terrorist is afraid of. He has no time to brew a proper coffee; an instant coffee is all he seeks"

The idolization of earthly images of totality absorbs-the energies that might have been devoted to an encounter with God. Of course, one could object that the Islamist is truly religious, for Islamism is very much concerned with having its votaries devote themselves to sacred law, and would abolish the secular realm altogether, if it could. But human beings are infinitely clever in their self-deceptions, and an adherence to law and rituals - and Islam is a thoroughly legalistic religion - can be a way of protecting one from an encounter with the sacred. Some might say that radical Islam is a religion characterized by an absence of love and true piety that have been replaced by the strict observation of religious rituals and the hunt for infidels (the reward for martyrdom is said, to be the gift in heaven of seventy-two black-eyed virgins).

What is the essential reason why totalitarianism ends up creating so much misery, if not a downright hell on earth? Human reason, operating uncritically, creates a gap, or a disproportion, between what the mind believes the world should be - i.e. a utopian dream of everyone and everything joyfully organized -into a harmonious totality - and the way that the world actually is, i.e. forever recalcitrant to any effort to bring it all together into any sort of overarching totality. For example, it is absurd to think that most human beings are going to work extra hard and be entrepreneurial, without the chance of individual gain. Maybe some monks will, but few people are willing to live like monks. Is it any surprise, therefore, that totalitarian societies - particularly those that are communistic or theocratic - often end up impoverishing the lives of their citizens?

The gap between the ideal and the actual grew to immense proportions in the first part of the Twentieth Century, for that was a time in which dictators sought to make their societies conform to their utopian visions of goodness, beauty, truth, and reality. Despite the power of these dictators and their hordes of true believers, they could not bridge the gap between their utopian ideals and the actuality of lived life in the totalitarian state. This same gap is created by Islamism.

If the effort to bridge the gap between the ideal and the actual is undertaken with a fanatical zeal, it invariably proves socially, economically and politically disastrous, as would be any effort to place life upon the procrustean bed of a totalitarian theory. It also creates a great deal of cognitive dissonance. This is where the paranoid vision enters the stage. It is an effort to explain why the gap between the ideal and the real exists. It always comes down to assigning blame; a certain group of nefarious individuals has conspired to subvert what could have been utopia. Islamists blame "the infidels." Consequently, if absurdly convoluted conspiracy theories abound in the Middle East  - it is because these theories are attempting to bridge the impossibly wide gap between visions of Islamist glory and the actual state of Islamist societies today. Furthermore, those under the sway of the paranoid vision concoct apocalyptic fantasies, mad dreams of a time when there will no longer be a gap between the ideal (totality realized) and the real. Islamism is highly apocalyptic.

Rising expectations, by their very nature, widen the gap between what people believe is possible and the present state of affairs. If that disproportion becomes too extreme, it leads to a dangerous state of social and political dissatisfaction. That is what happened in Iran during the time of the Shah of Iran. Those on the side of greater democracy and freedom - and who were impatient with its gradual evolution in Iranian society and politics - sought the Shah's overthrow. But the result was, as in many revolutions, the emergence of a far more repressive regime, namely that of Ayatollah Khomeini. Something similar happened in Algeria.

It would seem that political leaders who have blatantly unrealistic objectives add fuel to the flames of social and political paranoia by increasing the width of the gap. The career of Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser is a case in point. Nasser made grand promises to his people about the Aswan Dam, so much so that he felt that he could not reverse course when it became clearly necessary to do so without feeling disgraced.

From the moment that Nasser had staked his prestige on the dam, practical considerations became irrelevant because the shame of abandoning the scheme would have made his position untenable. Nothing less than the nation's foreign policy was swung by a shame-honor response. Sure enough, the Aswan Dam has spread bilharzia in exact accordance with the 1944 warning. Other consequences of this planned and forcible freeing of the peasants from age-old living patterns were more incalculable. The failure of the dam project was attributed, as were all other failures in the Middle East, then and now, to Zionist conspirators (D. Pipes, The Hidden Hand, 1998, p. 104).

In 1967, Nasser made the same type of grand claims, followed by the same humiliation when he promised to destroy Israel, but was defeated in six days. Naturally, when there are no grand expectations the size of the gap shrinks, and there is then no need to bridge it with paranoid explanations. As Winston Churchill said, "There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away." That is why Churchill, during some very dark times, told the British people, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."

The effect of Churchill's honesty was to maintain public morale. The effect of Nasser's braggadocio was demoralizing, creating a culture still imbued today with bitterness, resentment, and hatred, and a fertile ground for terrorism. We can also say that just as nature abhors a vacuum, so it is that the conspirational vision seeks to fill the gap between the totalitarian ideal and the less than glorious reality. Because totalitarianism, whether secular or theocratic, creates a large gap between utopian desires and actual realities.

Democracies, too, can create a gap, but the gaps that they create are, generally, far less extreme than those created by totalitarian political regimes. This is because democracies are generally not energized by millenarian images of Heaven on earth. It is enough for most people to find some modicum of happiness through owning a home, having a relatively satisfying marriage, and sending one's children to college. Those sorts of goals do not create heaven on earth, but they are realizable. Consequently, democracies are far less paranoiagenic or conspirationalist.

Fascism and communism are often regarded as the two types of totalitarianism and theocratic totalitarianism - of which Islamism would be an example - is a third type. Walter Laqueur in The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism (2006), contends, that theocratic totalitarianism is essentially a form of fascism something we have, investigated in our last years case study about the subject as a whole, including in the introduction to this particular series yesterday. That there are distinctions between Fascism as it existed in Italy, and then in Spain, and Nazism in Germany are not essential to this argument. These affinities were not coincidental, for, as we already observed elsewhere, Hitler himself apparently drew inspiration from Islam including the Armenian ‚Holocoast’ initiated by the Young Turks.

The connection between Islamism and fascism has also been observed by historians such as Francis Fukuyama in 2002, when used the neologism "Islamofascism." Indeed, with greater justification, it could be argued that the strengthening of fascism then and now, was the result of the failure of democratic systems to resolve the problems facing them. The breakdown of democratic institutions the failure of the democratic spirit - opened the doors to fascism. This generalization should not, however, be pushed too far, for even though it may apply to much of Europe, it is not valid in countries that never knew democracy.

Iran, during the time of the last shah, was a dictatorship whereby discontent, led to what some have termed, the Islamofascism of Khomeini. But there is at least one objection that comes to mind in regard to the notion that Islamism is a species of fascism. Fascism has historically been associated with nation states, often those that have transformed civilian life into a giant paramilitary organization. Examples include Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, as well as Iraq under Sad dam Hussein. An Islamist terrorist organization like Al Qaeda, on the other hand, is not a nation state, but is in some ways akin to a holding company for other terrorist organizations, and in other ways it is akin to a large gang. But the Nazis too were very much like a gang before they became a political party, and then a government. And all along they were thoroughly fascistic in their viewpoint.

Islamism furthermore shares with other fascist movements the desire to resurrect an ancient empire. Mussolini, for example, wanted to restore Italy to the glory of the ancient Roman empire. Furthermore the sense of decadence, in regard to present-day Islam, is attributed to various historical events. For example, in one of the videotapes that bin Laden had sent to news stations, he alluded to the abolition of the caliphate as devastating to Islam.

Thus revivalism is often allied with delusions of persecution - which is a key aspect of the conspirational vision. A similar example where history was to be made up and distorted - the First World War was not caused by an aggressive Germany, but surely lost by a 'stab in the back' by Jews at home.

Nationalism, as Mussolini indicated by his words and his actions, is a key component of fascism.

And apparently, bin Laden views all of Islam as a single nation. In fact as we have seen, the notion that there is an Islamic nation is very much part of Islamism's "ideology," that is endemic to fascism. The aggressive nationalism of fascism does not, though, appear to be, for example, the self-confident nationalism of Napoleonic France or America under Theodore Roosevelt. Fascism, on the contrary, always blends nationalism with the perception of victimhood, which derive from conspirational ideas of persecution, hence an undertone of vengeance.

Not surprisingly, militancy is endemic to fascism, but again, while fascism is invariably militant, not all military dictatorships are fascist, neither are popular acclaim and expansionism sufficient to make a regime fascistic. Soviet communism rested on popular acclaim plus it was expansionistic. Al Qaeda and other extreme forms of Islamism, is not, of course, a dictatorship, but it could be argued that it is fascistic in its way of seeing. Their power has rested on popular acclaim, certainly by those within their organization, and by many people outside their organization as well. Indeed.

The militancy of Islamist organizations and bin Laden is both popular in the Muslim world, it contains fascism's voluntaristic and romantic roots, its rejection of intellect and thinking in favor of the life of instinct, feeling, and action unmediated by consideration of thought and conscience. From this militancy emerges the mystique of the warrior. If one reads transcripts of the speeches of Osama bin Laden, one hears about the virtues of being a holy warrior, of sacrifice and martyrdom. Bourgeois life is rejected in favor of that creed. Civilian life disappears as everyone becomes the equivalent of a soldier. This is not viewed as a temporary state of affairs, but one founded on the belief that war is good in itself. Islamists find scriptural support for warfare in the Qur'an, which commands that true believers go on a Jihad, or holy war.

The cult of the supreme leader is also endemic to fascism.

Mussolini wrote in 1932, "If the nineteenth was the century of the individual it may be expected that this one may be the century of 'collectivism' and therefore the century of the State". Of course, Islamists have no interest in worshipping the state unless, like bin Laden, they view the Islamic world as one big state, to be ruled by the Caliphate. For theocratic totalitarians, the church/state separation is viewed as artificial.

Qutb had made that separation the gravamen of his critique of the West. Qutb described this experience - of having to lead a double life, as a religious person and a secular person - as "the hideous schizophrenia of modem life."  The fact that the source of the problem according to Qutb is "specific and identifiable" in the form of „Christianity“ makes it an example of what one could call call ‚the localization of evil’, which is the basis of conspiracy theories. For blaming the problem on in this case Christianity, is a way of drawing attention away from the internal conflicts and contradictions that exist within all human beings, including those who are Islamist. In contrast, for example Buber's theory of the twofold manner of knowing the world, namely I-Thou and I-It. The latter mode of knowing would be responsible for the existence of the secular realm. In a non-conpiratist explanation, for it sees the dialectical inevitability of the division of existence into the realms of the sacred and the secular, as due to the development of human consciousness. Also some Sufi mysticism as an effort to overcome one's fallen condition through a change in consciousness (of the fall of spirit into objectification) can be said to be equally non-conspiratist. But the claim that one's culture or society possesses wholeness and organicity - or had possessed these attributes, before it became corrupted - coupled with a disdain for the supposed cause (fragmentation), is a futile effort to put Humpty Dumpty (i.e. a symbolic image of an original, unbroken, cosmic, totalitarianist unity) back together again, while blaming another group of people - Americans, Jews, etc. - for Humpty Dumpty's fall. We could also say, that  the preoccupation with one's culture, society, or world being natural, organic, and whole, is the outer expression of the longing to annul the divisions and dualities, and the consequent feeling of isolation and alienation, that is a function of emerging self awareness. The totalitarian solution to the burden of individuality is to jettison one's own will and conscience, in an effort to live in accordance with the will of the leader, the nation, and the movement. The totalitarian longing for group identity as an inauthentic flight from the responsibilities of being a person.

Related is the accusation that ‚Westerners’ (Americans and Jews in particular) are rootless and, consequently, abstract, mechanical, excessively rational, artificial, and superficial. Or as the Nazis early on claimed; that membership in a Volk was 'organic' and by definition exclusive, while citizenship in the French republic, the United States, or Britain was, like their cities, theoretically open to all.

The example of Islamist feeling that the existence of American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia was defiling the land can also be perceived as the paranoid vision of purity seeking. And then, there are the effort to return to a supposedly purer state of being by means of terror and violence. A purifying violence would purge the people of egotism and hedonism, and draw them back into a primitive collective of self-sacrifice.

But the assumptions, on the part of the Islamists, that makes for their bitterness, is that hegemony is an indication of moral superiority. After all, Mohamed was a hugely victorious general and leader, in contradistinction, for example, to the Jews at the time. And so, not surprisingly, Mohamed becomes the paradigm for the right life. Consequently, if they do not see themselves as having been betrayed by fate, history, or conspirators, they are in danger of falling into doubt about their alleged moral superiority. It is possible, though, to challenge the equation of might with right, as did Socrates in Plato's Republic. To challenge that equation would be to challenge the very worldview that Mohamed bequeathed to them, but that is a risky business.

The dehumanizing caricatures of the West that are the product of the dualities that we mentioned above, set the stage for the growth of apocalyptic fantasies. In this scenario, one sees the final battle. It is between the forces of good (the traditionalists) and the forcers of evil (the modernists). Like other apocalypticists, whether secular or theocratic, Islamists believe that their attack on the enemy could precipitate the apocalypse.

Of course, Islam was strongly apocalyptic right from the beginning, as were Judaism (in the book of Daniel, for example) and Christianity, long before the advent of modernity. The Qur'an is filled with predictions about the end of the world. The prophet Mohammed envisioned the end as being very close, within a few years after receiving his revelation.

Not surprising, in Arab lands as well as in Iran, The Protocols of Elders of Zion ranks number six on the best seller list, along with the Qur' an and Mein Kampf.  Furthermore, one is surprised to learn that Muslims would be drawn to a notion that belongs to Christian theology, namely the Antichrist, demonstrating that they can be eclectic in their theological references. Sometimes the Anti-Christ is identified as a U.S. president, other times it is western civilization in general. This literature freely uses predictions about End of World or Israel's demise to recruit followers and prove they need to be working for God, instead of their own purposes.

And Islamists will often quote the Hadith, saying ascribed to the Prophet Mohamed, "The Hour [of Judgment] will not arrive until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill them until the Jew will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rock and the tree will say: O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me-come and kill him."

In fact also Richard Landes, a scholar of millennialism, confirms that bin Laden sees himself, and many Muslims also see him, as "...a central player in a cosmic battle that pits warriors of truth against the agents of Satan and evil in this world" (Landes; Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History, 2005, p. 1).

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