Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology
| "Know your enemy" is a well-known maxim, but one that is difficult to observe in practice. Nor is the reason for this hard to fathom: If you are my enemy, it is unlikely that I will go very much out of my way to learn to see things from your point of view. And if this is true even in those cases in which the conflict is between groups that share a common culture, how much more true will it be when there is a profound cultural and psychological chasm between the antagonists? Yet, paradoxically, this failure to understand the enemy can arise not only from a lack of sympathy with his position, but also from a kind of misplaced sympathy: When confronted by a culturally exotic enemy, our first instinct is to understand such conduct in terms that are familiar to us--terms that make sense to us in light of our own fund of experience. We assume that if our enemy is doing X, it must be for reasons that are comprehensible in terms of our universe. |
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