Overused as the term “fascism” may be, bin Ladenism has the following salient characteristics in common with it:
• It explicitly calls for the establishment of a totalitarian system, in which an absolutist code of primitive laws—most of them prohibitions—is enforced by a cruel and immutable authority, and by medieval methods of punishment. In this system, the private life and the autonomous individual have no existence. That this authority is theocratic or, in other words, involves the deification and sanctification of human control by humans makes it more tyrannical still.• It involves the fetishization of one book as the sole source of legitimacy.• It glorifies violence and celebrates death: Not since Franco’s General Quiepo de Llano uttered his slogan of “Death to the intellect: Long live death” has this emphasis been made more overt.• It announces that entire groups of people—“unbelievers,” Hindus, Shi’a Muslims, Jews—are essentially disposable and can be murdered more or less at will, or as a sacred duty.•