Rampage of extremism

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By Arnaud de Borchgrave

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is the proverbial canary in the mine. Gunning down 12 soldiers and one civilian and wounding 31 was not a random act of violence by an army psychiatrist who was slated to deploy to Afghanistan, an evil war in his mind, where American infidels are killing good Muslims.

As the Jordanian-born major told a female neighbor in his apartment complex, "I'm going to do good work for God." Maj. Hasan wanted, in his mind, to die a martyr, killing American soldiers who had been killing Muslim soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan or soon would be doing so.

There are tens of thousands of Hasans all over the Western world - from Brussels to Berlin and from Burgos, Spain, to Birmingham, England. For them, the attacks on America of Sept. 11, 2001, were a conspiracy cooked up by the CIA and Mossad, Israel's external intelligence service. Even though al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, have both taken credit for Sept. 11, countless millions are convinced they had nothing to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

In 2001, before Sept. 11, Maj. Hasan attended Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, where his principal preacher was a U.S.-born Yemeni scholar named Anwar al-Awlaki, who praised the virtues of jihad, or holy war. He is one of 1.3 million Muslims - or 1 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims - who espouse extremist beliefs about the United States and its NATO allies. Led by the United States, the West's Christian nations, as Muslim fundamentalists read the world chessboard, are on a crusade to throttle the Muslim world.

About 10 percent, or 130 million Muslims, are estimated by moderate Arab leaders to be fundamentalists whose sympathies are with the extremists but who do not participate in acts of jihadi violence.

Shouting "God is great" - "Allahu Akbar" - as he opened fire on unarmed American soldiers, Maj. Hasan was merely emulating what Muslims cry out as they charge into battle. He presumably was hoping his last act on Earth would give the powers pause in what he viewed as their crusade to destroy Islam. He had counseled scores of battle-shocked, wounded veterans - in his mind casualties of the Mossad-CIA conspiracy, now an article of faith among most Muslims.

Sept. 11 machination theories have spun a tale of intrigue that has circled the globe and grown from cottage to a global industry replete with best-selling books in scores of languages, videotapes, Web sites and lecture bureaus that offer speakers who claim special knowledge on a variety of inside tracks. The fact that this is twaddle in all its unrationed splendor - e.g., Jews were not ordered to stay away from work in the Twin Towers the day before the attacks - is conveniently ignored.

Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. A conspiracy on the scale of Sept. 11 would have required a lot more than three. Yet two former Egyptian ambassadors in Washington, long since retired, told this reporter in Cairo last month that they were convinced there had been "some U.S. government involvement in Sept. 11." One of them said buildings as solid as the Twin Towers could not possibly collapse like a house of cards unless explosive charges on different floors had been programmed to detonate as the floor above began collapsing.

All Arab newspapers have published detailed stories about an Israeli intelligence service manipulating its friends in high places in the Pentagon and the CIA. The conspiracy theories show no sign of flagging. The peddlers of palpably fraudulent accounts constantly embellish, embroidering accounts of Israeli tourists videotaping and supposedly celebrating the collapse of the Twin Towers. This dovetailed neatly with the biggest Sept. 11 canard that had phone banks calling all the Jews in Long Island and the tristate area who worked in the Twin Towers to stay home next day.

The Sept. 11 conspiracy theory rivals those of Holocaust deniers. Forty-percent of Israel's Arab population say the Holocaust never happened. The phenomenon, understandably, is more prevalent among those born since World War II. For veterans of World War II, dying at the rate of 2,000 a day, the idea that the Holocaust did not take place is too preposterous even to discuss. Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant for three years, admitted at his 1947 trial before an international court in Poland that 1.3 million Jews had been gassed and burned on his watch. He was hanged over the Gestapo's offices at Auschwitz.

Maj. Hasan is one of millions today who believe America and its Israeli ally are working in tandem to suppress Islam. For Maj. Hasan to go off to Afghanistan would be, for him, to participate in America's anti-Islam crusade, made all the worse by the accounts he heard from the soldiers scarred physically and mentally by wounds sustained in a war against Islamic radicalism.

As the FBI's cybersleuths comb through Maj. Hasan's hard drive, they will conclude that this Virginia-born shrink inhabited an electronic global caliphate, the ummah, or universal community of Muslim believers, next to which the nation-state, even one as powerful as the United States, seems irrelevant.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.