What Comes After Jihad?

In a volatile world, only change is a constant. One day, the world may well view the notion of holy war, or jihad, as outdated as the duel or trial by ordeal.

What then? Look for another rally point for expression of violence. Look for xenophobia as trigger.

Xenophobia is the next incubator for nascent terrorist organizations, once the world tires of jihad. A recent article on how this just expressed itself in South Africa presents a grim view of how hackers – the machete-wielding kind – exact revenge for real or perceived injustices suffered at the hands of immigrants who, to the rest of the world, hardly appear to be cavorting in luxury.

The interesting but faint signal to detect here is a phenomenon stretching at least as far back as the sans culottes of France who warmed to the guillotine as instrument of social justice during the French Revolution. There are a number of commentators of the world scene out there who are making their living editorializing about why the world hates America and Americans.

Type in "why they hate us" in Amazon.com's search box and 463 entries materialize. We represent the modern world to people who want to cling to tradition. We are the only remaining super power, hence easy to blame for everything that goes wrong. We are prosperous, so we must be doing something at someone else's expense. We are ostentatious, shifting between the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen popularized a couple of centuries ago to just making more films and entertainment products that sell throughout the world, inevitably putting an American face into the world's face.

Evidently, the world resents that. But we are not the only bad guys.

What a recent Reuters article on the South African violence brings to mind is another idea. Maybe old-fashioned xenophobia never goes away.

My own theory is that people are tribal, even in America. We all have a certain number of people we can accommodate comfortably into our lives. Say, for example, my upper limit is 30, while yours may be 50. [The exception may be for those of you with giant Rolodexes whom author Malcolm Gladwell defines as mavens in his Tipping Point.]

When we move, change jobs, or just start our own families, the personal total stays about the same, but many of the players change. We lose touch with people who no longer affect our lives, making room this way for others who are now take center stage.

And this takes place in a modern world and country, where the nuclear family has made us much less hidebound with clan, tradition, and feudal patterns or castes that distinguished other societies. But the rest of the world may well be much more clannish.

Recall that, in Saddam Hussein's ascendancy, his clan and tribal relationships meant that preferment went to kinfolk or tribesmen from Tikrit, Saddam's birthplace.

Add this tribal preoccupation, for which Africa is famous, to a natural tendency to find fault with outsiders, and what do you get? The kinds of mob attacks South Africa is seeing.

What do we watch for in all this? The victims.

How long will it be before some enterprising, organized, and martially proficient "defenders" emerge to offer protection to the victimized expatriates or tribal minorities in exchange for money or the kind of unwavering loyalty that is very easy to promise when one's back is to the wall and the only alternative is death or torture by mob violence?

– Nick Catrantzos