From "Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology"

A fantasizing individual is normally surrounded by other individuals who are not fantasizing in the same way, and this fact puts some limit on how far most of us allow our fantasy world to intrude on the precinct of reality. But what happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group—a sect, or a people, or even a nation? That such a thing can happen is obvious from a glance at history.

The various chiliastic movements, such as those studied in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, are splendid examples of collective fantasy; and there is no doubt that for most of history such large-scale collective fantasies appear on the world stage under the guise of religion.

But this changed with the French Revolution. From this event onward, there would be eruptions of a new kind of collective fantasy, one in which political ideology replaced religious mythology as the source of fantasy’s symbols and rituals. In this way it provided a new, and quite dangerous, outlet for the fantasy needs of large groups of men and women—a full-fledged fantasy ideology.

The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation—in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street.

They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?

But in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into that of martyrdom—martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has always assigned to martyrdom.

But such Clausewitzian terror is quite remote from the symbolic drama enacted by al Qaeda on 9-11—a great ritual demonstrating the power of Allah, a pageant designed to convey a message not to the American people, but to the Arab world. A campaign of smaller-scale acts of terror would have no glamour in it, and it was glamour—and grandiosity—that al Qaeda was seeking in its targets. The pure Islamic David required a Goliath. After all, if David had merely killed someone his own size, where would be the evidence of God’s favor toward him?

The demands of the fantasy ideology are such that it transforms all parties into mere symbols. The victims of the fantasy ideology inevitably end by including both those who are enacting the fantasy and those upon whom the fantasy is enacted—both those who perished in the World Trade Center and those who caused them to perish; and, afterwards, both those who wept for the dead and those who rejoiced over the martyrs.

THE PASSAGES ABOVE ARE FROM A PAPER LOCATED HERE.