Hussein Aboubakr Mansour Profile picture
Sep 8, 2021 17 tweets 3 min read Read on X
20 years later, we may, indeed we must ask ourselves; what did Bin Laden achieve? Did he succeed in defeating the United States? Annihilating Israel? Establishing a thousand-year caliphate? The answer to these questions is a decisive no, but we should not indulge ourselves in /1
a delusional sense of victory that hides our true defeat. When the great terrorist entrepreneur sat on his way through the establishment of his organization, “The Global Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders,” the medium was the message. He was seeking to /2
re-wrap our world with the political mysticism of the symbols of the 10th century. Like the good heroes of a good Greek tragedy, the stars were aligned for a perfect tale of the folly of the gods behind which human autonomy recedes into non-being. In Muslim societies in the /3
Middle East, a gradual and systematic social, psychological, and intellectual regression have not just stopped, but entirely reversed the projects of modernization that had started a century earlier forcing entire societies to fall into a deeply neurotic and pathological view /4
of the self, the others, and reality. The bombastic rhetoric of Arab nationalists of the 1950s against “Western imperialism” and the “Zionist entity,” had descended into outright paranoia, conspiratorial existence, pathological antisemitism, and sexual neurosis of the most /5
terrifying kind. “Palestine” became not merely an objective political issue, but an allegory of eternal victimhood, masochistic humiliation, and a pathological symbol of a deeply wounded identity. In mainstream Arab and Muslim discourse, an unprecedented process of time and /6
concept collapse merged Judaism, Israel, the Crusaders, the United States, capitalism, and feminism into perennial cosmic evil, “satan” in the Iranian version. The autocratic Arab republics, themselves founded on the original sin of Arab nationalism, could do nothing but watch /7
their populations descend rapidly into madness. In Western society, different subterranean changes of the cognitive structure were also underway; a systematic and gradual rejection of modernity and all its achievements. From the critical intellectuals of the Frankfurt school /8
to the postmodernist paranoia of Michel Foucault, Western academics and intellectuals collaboratively constructed the greatest polemic against the Western age that dwarfs those of the USSR and early communists. Every corner of modernity, be it medicine, gender relations, /9
democratic practices, and even knowledge itself turned out to be a decorum for aggressive and predatory power. Power was discovered to be, “interwoven” in Foucauldian terms, in everything we do or we say even in these very words. Generations of highly educated Americans and /10
Europeans received critical training to heighten their sense of suspicion of themselves. In the wider populations, the acceleration of the normalization of the individual, the gradual de-conversion from religion, and the predominance of the consumerist aspirations meant that /11
the onset of the new anti-modern, and anti-social, ideologies became either attractive or unimportant. Those are the conditions of the perfect storm that Bin Laden rode to infamy. The CIA uncovered that he, after all, didn’t only read Sayyed Qutub but also Noam Chomsky. The /12
rock which he threw in the pond of our modern world uncovered the boiling waters coming from the deep and brought back the weight of entire human history onto our shoulders, forcing us to assume all old and new dichotomies of our history; Greece vs. Persia, Rome vs. the /13
Barbarians, Islam vs. the infidels, Crusades vs. Jihad, the Ottomans vs. Europe, colonial powers vs. noble savages, and neoliberal economics vs. local development as if we are destined to lead symbolic lives in which every generation reenacts the neverending story. In the /14
Middle East, what seemed like a lunatic fantasy of Bin Laden, a Caliphate built on conquest and sexual slavery, turned out to be a real fantasy of a young generation of Muslims. In Western societies, what was thought to be a temporary academic fad after which modernity will /15
resume its course turned out to be the whole identity perception of young generations of anti-American Americans. In short, Bin Laden won, we lost. The origin of our failure can be found nowhere but in the personal moral failure in the personal life of each of us.
*nomadization of the individual

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More from @HusseinAboubak

Jun 30
The old left often came from children of working class families who were learned but not worldly. The New Left however came from the most affluent strata of both Western and Third World elites and this in great part explains why they cares more about psychosexual liberation, which they had the means to afford and enjoy while being a disastrous development for working class people who no longer have a family to mediate between them and the market forces.
Needless to say that the rise of such affluent New Left naturally negated any role of the working class and thus had to be replaced with identity politics, narcisstic personal narrative and brands of trauma assortments, in which these affluent kids can fit.
Even Third Worldism changed. We can in effect say there was an old Third Worldism, the Leninist fantasies of Nasser, Sukarno, Castro, etc. and a new Third Worldism of the new class of Third World elites who realized their decolonization was a catastrophe and migrated Westward.
Read 8 tweets
Jun 1
I recently realized that Darryl Cooper is not only the most popular writer on Substack but also a widely influential figure online. Curious about his appeal, I decided to listen to him, and accidentally I fell right into his account of Jewish history and Christianity (I don't know if that's all he does). Despite approaching it with good faith, particularly when he opened with the phrase “as a Christian,” I found the experience painful and couldn't go on past 20 mins or so. Within 20 minutes, he arrived at the astonishing claim that “the central conflict in all the Gospels” was about the Jews finally accepting the Gentiles. This is simply false. I have no idea where Cooper derives his theology from, but it bears little resemblance to any serious reading of the texts. The Gospels are not structured around this all. Their central conflict concerns the identity of Jesus himself—his claim to messiahship and divine sonship—and that is what culminated in his crucifixion. If this is his approach to all topics, then the man is creating a whole alternative reality that is parasitic on this one. That's not at all different than what leftist scholars have been doing for decades.
It was only 20 mins but the whole thing was bizarre. His understanding of Christian theology is that god basically designed for himself a pedagogical journey so he might experience those little dramas of those little humans. So God basically is Faust, in it for the experience!! It's so stupid you feel its some stupid Hollywood kitsch.
What I find heartbreaking is that the man had the heart to call himself a Christian as he was quite blatantly sacrificing the very heart of Christian theology (who is Jesus?), unequivocally throwing it out, in order to replace it with what is clearly obsessive antisemitism.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 1
This is happening in most museums I visited in the UK, Spain, and Germany. The informational plaques are often just exercises in narcissistic resentment talking about the white gaze, constructing whiteness, orientalizing, and all the cacophomisms that are clearly American in origin.
This was from the Thyssen museum in Madrid. Just read the bolded words Image
Currently, the Kurpfälzisches museum in Heidelberg has a special exhibition on Orientalism and the construction of whiteness. As a historical corrective, they staged portraits of a bunch of black people in European 16th-century attire to de-orientalize them. If I were black, I would have been very insulted.Image
Read 4 tweets
Oct 20, 2024
There is a beautiful conflict that has been playing out between bourgeois Arabs whose path to white liberal status goes through the trauma of Western colonialism and others whose path to the same status goes through guilt over Islamic imperialism and terrorism.
Both paths ultimately involve achieving the same goal: elite liberal status, which is the contemporary form of whiteness. One strategy hinges on victimhood, the other on guilt. Still, both end up reinforcing the same liberal orthodoxy—essentially playing into the larger framework that privileges these narratives in the first place. They’re both trying to prove their worth to the same ideological gatekeepers but from different sides of the historical ledger.
Some less sophisticated ones are confused and alternate between both strategies. They don't quite get it.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 2, 2024
I have a lot of reservations about the New Atheists, especially with their atheism as a socio-cultural and political project, but their atheism remains a thousand times more preferable and acceptable than the radical Feuerbachean atheism of Žižek and Marxist thinkers. 🧵
The former, while locked in a truly cartoonish understanding of religion and of the self, remains infinitely more honest and safer. It is very cartoonishness is indeed a testimony to its sincerity.
Its superficiality makes it much safer, like a child who thinks he built his treehouse all on his own and doesn't know that the work was actually done by his father. What the child thinks is of secondary importance to the fact that the treehouse is sturdy and safe for the child.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 27, 2024
Israel should never concede real advantages in exchange for mere promises which their fulfillment is left to circumstance and good-will. The world of states is not determined by legal commitments or moral principles but by interest.
What determines the policy of the United States in the Middle East is not any moral or ideological considerations but how American interests in the region are conceived by Washington.
The only other considerations that historically qualified these considerations have always been the Jewish and later the Evangelical votes for the D and R respectively.
Read 15 tweets

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