The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,218

pretty depressing, because it suggests we are fighting a multiheaded hydra that cannot be decapitated by killing its leadership or invading its home base. Remember, though, that all terrorist organizations follow an arc toward failure. Are there any signs that Islamist terrorism is beginning to burn out?

The answer is a clear yes. In Israel, sustained attacks on civilians have accomplished what they accomplish everywhere else in the world: erase all sympathy for the group, together with any willingness to compromise with it.223 After the Second Intifada began, shortly after Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the Camp David accords in 2000, the Palestinians’ economic and political prospects steadily deteriorated. In the long run, Cronin adds, suicide terrorism is a supremely idiotic tactic because it makes the target nation unwilling to tolerate members of the minority community in their midst, never knowing which among them may be a walking bomb. Though Israel has faced international condemnation for building a security barrier, other countries faced with suicide terrorism, Cronin notes, have taken similar measures.224 The Palestinian leadership on the West Bank has, more recently, disavowed violence and turned its energies toward competent governance, while Palestinian activist groups have turned to boycotts, civil disobedience, peaceful protests, and other forms of nonviolent resistance.225 They have even enlisted Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of Mohandas) and Martin Luther King III for symbolic support. It’s too soon to know whether this is a turning point in Palestinian tactics, but a retreat from terrorism would not be historically unprecedented.

The bigger story, though, is the fate of Al Qaeda. Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer who has been keeping tabs on the movement, counted ten serious plots on Western targets in 2004 (many inspired by the invasion of Iraq) but just three in 2008.226 Not only has Al Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan been routed and its leadership decimated (including bin Laden himself in 2011), but in the world of Muslim opinion its favorables have long been sinking, and its negatives have been rising.227 In the past six years Muslims have become repulsed by what they increasingly see as nihilistic savagery, consistent with Cronin’s remark that decency, not just violence, has an international language. The movement’s strategic goals—a pan-Islamic caliphate, the replacement of repressive and theocratic regimes by even more repressive and theocratic regimes, the genocidal killing of infidels—begin to lose their appeal once people start thinking about what they really mean. And Al Qaeda has succumbed to the fatal temptation of all terrorist groups: to stay in the limelight by mounting ever bloodier attacks on ever more sympathetic victims, which in Al Qaeda’s case includes tens of thousands of fellow Muslims. Attacks in the mid-2000s on a Bali nightclub, a Jordanian wedding party, an Egyptian resort, the London underground, and cafés in Istanbul and Casablanca massacred Muslims and non-Muslims alike for no discernible purpose. The franchise of the movement known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) proved to be even more depraved, bombing mosques, marketplaces, hospitals, volleyball games, and funerals, and brutalizing resisters with amputations and beheadings.

The jihad against the jihadis is being fought at many levels. Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia and Indonesia that once indulged Islamist extremists have decided that enough is enough and have begun to crack down. The movement’s own gurus have also turned on it. In 2007 one of bin Laden’s mentors, the Saudi cleric Salman al-Odah, wrote an open letter accusing him of “fostering a culture of suicide bombings that has caused bloodshed and suffering, and brought ruin to entire Muslim communities and families.”228 He was not afraid to get personal: “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed . . . in the name of Al Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions on your back?”229 His indictment struck a chord: two-thirds of the postings on Web sites of Islamist organizations and television networks were favorable, and he has spoken to enthusiastic crowds of young British Muslims.230 The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz al Ash-Sheikh, made it official, issuing a fatwa in 2007 forbidding Saudis to join foreign jihads and condemning bin Laden and his cronies for “transforming our youth into walking bombs to accomplish their own political and military aims.”231 That same year another sage of Al Qaeda, the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Imam Al Sharif (also known as Dr. Fadl), published a book called Rationalization of Jihad because,