| Vol. 2 | No. 7 |
December 2003 |
| Book Review | |
| Modern Jihad -
Loretta Napoleoni, Ane Books At $ 1.5 trillion, terrorism is the world's largest private business: It is worth several times India's GDP (Extracted from the Review by Yashwant Rai in Sunday Hindustan Times, November 23, 2003) One morning, 21 year-old Abid Ali packed all his meager belongings and reached the local Harkat ul Jihadi-I-Islami office. He wanted to fight the Americans in Afghanistan "And", he said, "you are looking for people". Next day Ali left for Afghanistan with seven other jihadis, all from his hometown in Sialkot, Pakistan. And in a couple of days, the Harket network landed them in Afghanistan, right in the middle of the war. Ali survived the blistering air attacks and was taken prisoner, held in Afghanistan's Shibeghan jail, where I got to speak to him and many other jehadis. They were in Afghanistan without having spent a paisa. It was an all-expenses paid trip. Harkat wasn't short of money. Neither was the war machinery in Afghanistan. In fact, Ali said, life on all the front was better - food was in plenty and they zipped around in Toyota pick-ups. The world of terror, says Loretta Napoleoni in Modern Jihad, is worth a whopping $1.5 trillion, which is five per cent of the world's GDP and several times that of India's. Now do you see what we are up against? It's this financial clout that helps Al Qaeda stay a step, or several steps, ahead of the post 9/11 alliance of intelligence services of the world to continue its terror run: Bali, Morocco, and now a double hit in Istanbul. Napoleoni quotes. US secretary of state Colin Powell: "For money is the oxygen of terrorism." Cut the pipe and it will asphyxiate. But that's easier said than done, she argues. And that's when he became most dangerous, Napoleoni defines this stage of terrorism as "privatization of terror". When groups can fund themselves without any help from sponsor states. They find ways and means to make enough money to finance their shadowy operations. A stage pioneered by PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who figured that self-sufficiency was the way ahead. Napoleoni calls PLO the richest terror outfit in the world, worth, according to the CIA, between $8 billion and $14 billion by 1990. Much richer than some of the West Asian countries like Bahrain, Yemen and Jordan. Arafat also ran a fund, called Chairman's Secret Budget, running into millions. No one else can access this money as no one knows how much it holds. The PLO chairman has exclusive right to it. The evolution of PLO from a terror outfit to a state-like entity is at the crux of Napoleoni's thesis. That Modern Jihad is not being waged by some disgruntled terror outfits, actually and really in the name of religion. It's an organized war being waged by state-like outfits - she calls them state shells - which are financially self-sufficient and use religion, as in the Crusades, only as a tool to mobilize support. Their real fight is economic. The Crusades were fought to break the stranglehold of Arab merchants over trade and commerce. Modern Jihad's aim is to break Western Capitalism's grip over the world economy. Hindustan Times - November 23, 2003. Food For Thought - Budha *** Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it. Sir Winston Churchill. |
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