[...] ComingAnarchy has a fascinating post up analyzing how first the Palestinians and now Al-Qaeda have bungled their respective wars after initial successes.  Read! [...]

And might not their current message be one stressing recruitment of more “holy warriors” [“we are the ones waging war on the infidels”] rather than drumming up international support? Just a thought.

You don’t seem to have trackbacks, so ping!

I agree about the loss of the message, but don’t you think that saying that “’Palestinian is now synonymous with ‘suicide bomber’” is going too far? Synonymity implies actual overlap in meaning, not in use of words. And it’s not true: even Zionists would not report that “a suicide bomber attacked a bar in Jerusalem today, killing one Israeli and three (other) suicide bombers.” Or imagine: “It is believed that this fundamentalist Islamic group has been training children to become Palestinians in the West Bank…”

Chirol: I know that you don’t think that Palestianians are all suicide bombers (statistically, for every suicide bomber, there must be hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are not suicide bombers). I simply think that synonymous is too strong a word. To say that Palestinians are strongly associated with suicide bombers is nothing close to being synonymous, and it’s generalizations like this that infuriate the Palestinians to the point of hopelessness. Yeah, I know, it’s not nearly as infuriating as, say, having your kid blown up, but anyway, there’s no point in fanning the flames.

As for your survey, it depends on where you’re doing it. I can imagine a lot of different reactions: “Palestinian” in Israel would probably elicit “maid”, “poor”, or “Muslim”, not “suicide bomber”. In France, “oppressed”, “poor”, “intifada” would be more likely. In Tajikistan, most people would say, “Arab”, “brother”, or “Muslim”. I’d love to hear what the Chinese have to say. It’s only those who get most of their information about Palestine from CNN that would have this opinion: and that is not a huge part of the world population.

Pursuant to Dan’s comment…I’m not sure that al Qaeda, itself, has enough legs on the ground, per square mile, to be a 4GW entity; thus, relies on proxies.

I’d like to defend the Victorians here by saying that indeed most Americans would equate Palestinians and in fact Muslims with terrorism. With each attack this becomes more and more apparent. I think many of you associate with people who are either not the norm or you simply do not have a feel for the general populations’ attitudes. All I have to do is have a conversation about Islam with my father or any relative or associate here in my mid sized Texas town to get a negative response. This is not bigoted hatred. And yes, perhaps these people are for the most part misinformed but they are perceptive people who see the state of the Middle East and see nothing but violence, hatred and anarchy.

I agree with the principle Chirol is putting forward, but with regard to al-Qaeda I’m not sure about some aspects of application. Two factual observations regarding Muslim opinion, esp. the Arab world:

1) It is true that the Palestinians have blown much sympathy in the West, but support for Palestinian terrorists – not just regular Palestinians mistakenly associated with terrorists – is quite strong. This is clear, for example, from the fact that they are referred to as shuhada – martyrs – in the mainstream Arab media. Reliable survey data doesn’t exist in the Arab world, but there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence. Example: When Israel kills an Islamic Jihad operative, there are protests in the streets, while these Iranian-sponsored terrorists openly operate in PA-administered areas. I see the same thing in the Isreali English media and the Arabic language media. I use this example because the PIJ has no welfare services like Hamas, so there is no other way to explain way sympathy for them.

We need to be realistic: most Palestinians are pro-terrorist. It isn’t simply that they voted for Hamas, but one of Fatah’s lists was headed by convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti, and that party maintains its own terrorist militia, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The PFLP also got about 4% of the vote, more than Salam Fayad’s Third Way Party, the one party of prominence with no terrorist taint. I would put pro-terrorist support at around 60-65% among the general population.

2) Support for al-Qaeda is clearly less than Hamas and Hizballah, but is substantial nevertheless, ranging from minimal in countries like Turkey and Indonesia to fairly strong in Pakistan and Jordan. Al-Jazeera is the best barometer of Arab opinion there is, not only from its coverage but because of the diversity of its commentators, and while Hamas gets positive coverage and America gets very negative coverage, al-Qaeda gets fairly neutral coveage. After Bin Laden’s recent message the reaction from Arab commentators was mixed (see my post, Bin Laden’s New Message – The Culture War), but safe to say that it was not controversial, or surprising, that some, including the editor of the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, supported Bin Laden’s argument. And I thought it notable that those who supported OBL’s culture war argument didn’t feel the need to separate themselves from him by condemning his killing of civilians. That says a lot.

I agree with the argument that attacks on fellow Muslims makes Islamists unpopular, and I think that Zawahiri and Bin Laden learned this in the 1990s. This is why they condemned the GIA and supported the formation of the GSPC in Algeria, and this is why they have tried to tone down Zarqawi in Iraq. I don’t think that 9/11 was a strategic miscalculation for them in this regard, however, since my observation is that it energized support in most areas. I don’t see any indication that it hurt them much. I think that association with Zarqawi’s murder of so many Iraqis and Jordanians has hurt them. I think that the main thing to hurt them has been the loss of so many key operatives and bases of operation. Were it not for the Taliban’s continued vitality in the Pakistani borderlands, they would be just about done.