Global Jihad: temi, piste di diffusione e il fenomeno del reducismo ...

is a real threat that the impact of these violent ideologies and activities on the one
hand, and of the global counterterrorism campaign led by the United States on the
other, will speed up two major developments, whose signs have been visible
throughout the past decade: namely the radicalization of Muslim communities in the
West, and the increasing hostility and alienation that many younger Muslims feel
toward the West, often based on socio-political secular grievances.
Following the September 11 attacks, and mainly after the campaign against global
Jihadi terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, al-Qa’ida and Jihadi groups affiliated
with its ideology, adopted the doctrine that jihad is not just a means to fight, but first
of all a means to consolidate a global Islamist solidarity and brotherhood, on the way
to create a new kind of society, based upon jihad as a way of life. Jihad is supposed to
be not just a religious duty, a means of war or struggle, but a global comprehensive
culture in the process of a nation-building.
Since the emergence of al-Qa’ida, and only throughout ten years, there has been the
emergence of a global Jihadi culture, which turned al-Qa’ida from a Jihadi terrorist
organization into an ideological, doctrinal, and strategic umbrella for a variety of
movements, groups, and self-radicalized youth, a phenomenon that has several
characteristics. Above all, this is a development of the “culture of the oppressed,”
whether oppression is taking place or is just part of the feeling of large segments in
the Arab and Muslim world. Furthermore, this umbrella is targeting the Arab and
Muslim youth through the Internet as kind of an “open university for jihad studies,”
and thus its main activity is the indoctrinating of a generation, not only terrorist
operations.
Four major elements are taking place in motivating, feeding, and hotwiring this
phenomenon:
• Sense of global conspiracy against the Islamic world.
• Sense of the apocalypse in the “clash of cultures.”
• The search for symmetry with the enemy in every field of the clash, while the
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