Al-Qaida’s wretched utopia and the battle for hearts and minds:
A young, shy jihadi named Fouad took us into an abandoned building, where a meal was spread out on the floor. “Eat, eat, these are good times,” he said, cheerfully shredding chunks of mutton with his thick stubby fingers and throwing them over…
Fouad said that “democracy” – a word that for him covered the autocratic Arab leaders who ran fake elections in their countries – had been shown not to work.
“Democracy has failed in the Arab world,” he said. “It failed in Tunis and in Egypt and Libya. It failed in Yemen. The people agree.
“Democracy only brought injustice and ignorance and backwardness and a desire to follow the west. The first people to revolt against these treacherous regimes were of course the mujahideen. But the people did not respond to them at the beginning because of the strength of the police state. The people feared them. At last, however, they started to revolt. They saw that it was either injustice and slavery or freedom. So they revolted. And we support all the revolutions. Sheikh Osama supported it.
“We also benefited from these revolutions. They gave us freedom. We were able to come out.”
— from The Guardian via journalofajournalist
