When yippies are also yuppies

“London-based Iraqi novelist” Haifaa Zangana claims that “Iraqi women know that the enemy is not Islam…The enemy is the collapse of the state and civil society. And the culprit for that is the foreign military invasion and occupation.” Um…I’m not sure how a set of ideas could be an enemy in any case, but if she has in mind Islamists and not the abstraction “Islam,” why exactly should we think of it as an either/or situation? Doesn’t “the collapse of the state and civil society” (if you could call Saddam’s government that) work in tandem with Islamist aspirations, so that people, in a time of chaos, run to them because their espousing of simple, brainless, exceptionless, absolute rules seems like an appealing bastion of stability and certainty? Of course, one might think that those same Islamists are partly responsible themselves for the “collapse of the state and civil society” through their bombing of police stations, power generators, randomn crowds of people, etc. but no, it’s solely the fault of those American devils and their use of “a modern form of napalm.”

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