Western analysts often seem at a loss to explain why volunteers are flocking to join the Islamic State (IS). The answer, writes Paul Berman, lies not in sociology but in ideology—an ideology that IS shares with al-Qaeda and Hamas:
Why do people who are not clinically crazy throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide? The sociological answer to this question assumes a pettiness in human nature, such that even the slightest of humiliations and misfortunes may be regarded as sufficiently devastating, under certain conditions, as to sweep aside the gravest of moral considerations. I prefer to invoke the history of ideas. People throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide because they have come under the influence of malign doctrinal systems, which appear to address the most profound and pressing of human problems—and do so by openly rebelling against the gravest of moral considerations. Doctrines of this sort render their adepts mad, not in a clinical sense but in an everyday sense. And the power to drive people mad comes precisely from the profundity, or the seeming profundity—which is what everyone else fails to see.
Berman also notes similarities between jihadism and other violent totalitarian ideologies:
The Islamist mania about diabolical Jewish conspiracies, as defined by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, represents merely one more influence from Europe. It is odd to observe that, in the Islamist literature, the Protocols figure just as prominently as they did among the Nazis, not just in the writings of semi-literates. [Martin] Heidegger took the Protocols seriously as an expression of the diabolical conspiracy, and so did [Muslim Brotherhood theoretician] Sayyid Qutb, who was the Heidegger of the Islamists. Sayyid Qutb’s brother Muhammad was the professor of [Osama] bin-Laden, who himself was the leader in Afghanistan of an Algerian jihadi named Djamel Beghal, who became the guru of Chérif Kouachi, one of the Paris jihadis just now, during Kouachi’s time in a French prison.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188549/islamist-death-cult