bank-robbing is unrelated to economic motivation, since most banks are located in nice buildings.
#terrorism
OBL’s Argument (5): Shapes of Justice
The de-construction of rules for the resolution of serious political disagreements, politics of the end of politics, is the drawing near of danger: War is or occurs for us, and escalates, as that de-construction, in search of a foundation of…
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
OBL’s Argument (4): Retributions
Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah — from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the…
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
OBL’s Argument (3): Leviathan
Freedom from second thought is also provided by the morally supremely convenient notion (or version of the same notion) that government accountability works in one direction only, or, even better, that we can choose which actions of our government or…
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
OBL’s Argument (2): Gomorrah
On my Twitter feed recently, among commemorations of the Austro-Hungarian declarations of July 28, 1914, now recognized as the beginning of World War I, another anniversary was also briefly noted: Of Operation Gomorrah, on July 28, 1943, an aerial bombardment…
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
Osama Bin Laden’s Interesting Argument (1)
Only one thing, apparently, is more natural than to be appalled by violence against someone else’s child: to embrace one’s own child all the more tightly.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
The De-Civilization of Gaza
“Terrorism” is a term not just for a set of tactics that instil fear, but for defiance of “civil”-ized norms. The latter do not deny the moral calculus of an Osama Bin Laden: They seek to limit and move beyond its inexorable and inexorcisable normalcy or naturalness – in wartime at least second nature, if not human nature itself. That the logic of war is a collectivizing, anonymous logic explains why liberalism-individualism seeks to criminalize it, why liberalist-individualist polities have such difficulty orienting themselves morally within it, and why they are, finally, prone to overcompensating in response to it.
Torture as Individualized War, War as Socialized Torture
In an “objective” if not necessarily “morally clear” accounting, the thousands killed and thousands more disfigured and terrified would receive many thousands of times greater concern. The child dismembered by a bomb blast, the soldier buried alive in a bunker, the prisoner merely sent off to some conventional Hell, and on and on, precisely as they become multiplied by thousands or millions and turned into numbers, all seem to command less outrage and concern than the captive in manacles.
Posted in Featured, Philosophy, Politics, The Exception, Torture, War Tagged with: individualism, liberal democracy, Popular Sovereignty, terrorism, The Exception, Torture, War, War on Terror
And many nations shall join themselves to the Eternal in that day
There is no Christian, there is no Muslim, there is no American, there is no atheist, there is no Buddhist, there is no Hindu, there is no Sikh, there is no nihilist, there is no anyone else.
Posted in Featured, History, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, Philosophy, Religion Tagged with: al-Farabi, al-Gahazali, America, Arab Middle East, Buddhist, Christian, Enlightenment, God, Hegel, Heidegger, Hermann Cohen, Hindu, Ibn Rushd, Israel, Jew, Kojève, Moghuls, Mongols, Murder, Muslim, Nietzsche, Nihilism, Palestinianism, Physics, Post-Modernism, prophecy, Rosensweig, Sikh, Strauss, Stupidity, Sufi, terrorism, Theodicy, United Nations, World War, Zechariah, Zionism