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People set fi re to France’s fl ag in Peshawar, Pakistan, during a protest against the publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons and
comments by President Emmanuel Macron. Friday, October 30, 2020. Source: Fayaz Aziz/Reuters
coercion against Muslims (Middle East Eye, 2020).
What Macron failed to understand by giving in to
the “terrorism narrative”, is that the transnational
jihad organizations use these impulsive decisions
to expand their message. As a matter of fact, these
types of irrational choices, which are publicly
challenged by Muslims, create the perfect excuse
for transnational jihadists to portray Western societies
as the enemy, calling for an all-out war to defend
Islamic interests. Victims of jihadi propaganda,
the Western societies then develop an even
more polarized view of Islam, henceforth creating
a vicious cycle of violence and retaliation.
The Legacy of Al-Qaeda
Having taken into consideration the rise of Al-
Qaeda, how the organization reached its plateau
and how it began to deteriorate, it is appropriate
to mention the legacy that it left following the killing
of Bin Laden in 2011, when this book was fi rst
published. First, it is crucial to note that Al-Qaeda
Central created multiple affi liates throughout the
Muslim world, as AQAP (Arab Peninsula), AQIM
(Maghreb) and AQI (Iraq)6. However, it is important
to analyze the reasons which keep these organizations
waving the banner of transnational
jihad, despite facing fi erce opposition from both
the inside and the outside of the jihadi counterculture7.
In his book, Gerges makes a straightforward
assessment:
Tyranny, dismal social conditions, authoritarian
political systems, and the absence of hope provide
fuel that powers radical, absolutist ideologies
in the Muslim world; they are the mother of
all ailments that affl ict the region, including Al-
Qaeda, a parasite that feeds on political and
social turmoil and repression (p. 216)
Even though the appraisal of the situation was
made back in 2014, Gerges managed to hypothesize
the conditions that had to be met to create a
fertile breeding ground for the recruitment of future
transnational jihadists. His evaluation proved to
be correct, considering that the confl icts that unfolded
from 2015 onward, such as Yemen’s brutal
civil war, are directly related to a greater concentration
of terrorist attacks in countries with highly
unstable regimes8 and contribute to the consolidation
of international terrorist organizations such
as Daesh9. A great deal of examples can also be
found through the Middle Eastern and North African
countries, most of which were affected by
the Arab Spring. The pro-democracy protests, in
the best of cases, caused the depositions of dictators,
replaced by new governments that have
not made consistent efforts to address the social
and economic problems; issues that caused the
public outcry in the fi rst place. The paradigm of
this best-case scenario is Tunisia, a trigger country
of the so-called Arab Spring, but that is still the
epicenter of jihadist recruitment. On the other
8 Armas y Cuerpos Nº 147 ISSN 2445-0359