Charles Cameron and the Strategist of Jihad
My friend and guest-blogger Charles Cameron, a while back, posted a learned essay here at ZP and at Leah Farrall’s All Things Counterterrorism, in response to the unusual dialogue that Farrall, a former Australian counterterrorism official, was having with Abu Walid al-Masri, an Egyptian strategist of jihad, a sometime critic of al Qaida and an adviser to the Taliban. In other words, al-Masri is an influential voice on “the other side” of what COIN theorists like Mackinlay and Kilcullen call the “globalized insurgency”.
After some delay, al-Masri has responded to Charles, as Farrall describes:
Abu Walid al Masri responds to Charles Cameron
Abu Walid has responded a letter from Charles Cameron. Abu Walid’s response to Charles can be found here. You’ll notice when following the link, that he has a new website.
It’s well worth a look. There is also an interesting comment from a reader below Abu Walid’s response to Charles; it’s from “one of the victims of Guantanamo”.
As you’ll see from his website Abu Walid is also engaging in a number of other interesting dialogues at the moment, which I am interested to read as they progress.
Charles wrote his letter in response to the dialogue Abu Walid and I had a little while back. For those of you new to the site, you can find this dialogue to the right in the page links section. The letter from Charles can be found on my blog here.
….These letters may not change anything, but they are important because in mass media sometimes only the most controversial and polarising views tend to make it into the news.
I think person to person contact, especially via mediums like this, can go some way to providing opportunities for all of us to discover or be reminded that there is more than one viewpoint and along with differences there are also similarities. Contact like this humanizes people, and in my book that’s never a bad thing.
Farrall is working up a translation of al-Masri’s post from Arabic ( I used Google which gives a very rough translation). Readers who are fluent are encouraged to read it in full and offer their thoughts. Here is a snippet:
Google translation is fast and dirty but it is not the best source of translation, it garbles many words and phrases that require transliteration, which is how I read al-Masri’s response. With that caveat, my impression was that he did not know quite where to go with Charles’ essay, beyond acknowledging it and then retreating to some talking points. The remarkable aspect was that al-Masri felt the need to respond at all which has sent Charles thoughts bouncing around the radical Islamist online community.
Nice work, Charles!
