You have to love any opinion piece that starts out with a totally incorrect assessment of some historical event, and then goes on to provide you with the answer to some problem today. His assessment of Montezuma and Cortes is like something you hear in the fifth grade-not even remotely realistic or based on the sources.
And hey, when you look through the article, what do you find?
Not one single citation. Not even a single quote from an Al Qaeda ideologue or even an Al Qaeda member, yet he's drawing sweeping conclusions about "the worldview of Al Qaeda".
Please tell me how he managed to sell this as a professional comment. If I can learn that trick and apply it to my work, I'll be a tenured professor at Harvard inside of six months.
There is no political policy we could take that would change the attitude of our enemies short, perhaps, of a massive nationwide conversion to fundamentalist Islam.
Considering that Al Qaeda can and does regularly attack other Muslims for having the wrong policies, I'd have to say the real fantasy is that this guy actually knows something about the subject.
I especially like his expertise in Islamic theology:
But the real world of radical Islam is different its fantasy ideology reflects the same philosophical occasionalism that pervades so much of Islamic theology:
Huh? Oh well-no need to cite anything here.
One continuing irony of all of these articles purporting to explain the ideology of Al Qaeda is the persistence of the word "martyr"-there is no word for "martyr" equivalent to the English in Arabic, just like there's no such word (or equivalent) as "infidel" in Arabic.
But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a good rant on how Arabs generally are irrational. Paying attention to the facts would require us to recognize that they behave like everybody else, and admitting that they're humans who think just like we do would be "justifying terrorism" or "excusing evil".
Unlike refusing to debate whether or not racism is the answer, which is apparently exactly what we will do once we agree with this author:
Pseudo-issues such as debates over the legitimacy of racial profiling would disappear: Does anyone in his right mind object to screening someone entering his country for signs of plague? Or quarantining those who have contracted it? Or closely monitoring precisely those populations within his country that are most at risk?
This article could be reviewed in the Onion under the heading: "Ideologue blasts other Ideologues for ignoring Reality; Not one source cited to prove his case."