I was in my car on the way to work yesterday and turned the radio on, hoping to hear Morning Edition on NPR. Instead I heard people with British accents talking about calamity and bloodshed. Uh oh, sounded like another black day. And indeed it was. If MI5 and Scotland Yard couldn’t see it coming, what hope does our Department of Homeland Security have?

I think that the biggest problem here in the U.S. is that we don’t really know just what the terrorists want. The press and the media say a whole lot about terrorism, but seldom if ever get to the point. Maybe that’s because the terrorists themselves seldom get to the point with us. And perhaps that’s intended.

To be honest, I don’t think that al Qaeda envisions an Islamic revolution in America anytime soon. For now, I think they’re working on the overthrow of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, the other Gulf states, and maybe even Turkey. In order to rally the masses there, they need some big TV coverage. And how to better get such coverage than to cause a major calamity in a western city.

I’m sure that al Qadea would love to scare us away from our commitment to Israel. But that would be icing on the cake. What they need is TV coverage to rally the poor and downtrodden on the Arab street, inspiring them to rise up against secularist and/or pro-American regimes in the Middle East and replace them with puppets who are rightly guided by radical mullahs and imams. They would then push Israel in to the sea, sweep across Africa, pour into the Philippines, and renew the dreams of the 10th century by re-taking Spain, Greece, and eventually even the European heartlands. The poor squatters of Bangladesh and Algeria would finally have access to the wealth and power of the west, and get full benefit from their own resources (e.g., oil).

Just who would benefit from this dream? Just who is it being sold to? In a nutshell, it’s being played to the poor and downtrodden in the Moslem “crescent”. The leaders and activists in al Qaeda (even the suicide bombers) are often intelligent, college-trained people. But the Islamist vision that they are trying to sell is marketed toward the poor. Educated rogues like Bin Laden cannot pull off a revolution themselves. They need the masses to do that for them. So they twist the basic myths of Islam and the strident words of the Quran into a story for today, a story of the masses rising up against the powerful Americans and Israelis who are keeping them locked in poverty. Once the infidels are defeated, Allah will surely reward the Umma with a rich and just kingdom.

I myself don’t believe that the Quran necessarily calls for a return of the 8th and 9th centuries when Islam burst out of Arabia brandishing a sword, ready and willing to conquer the world. Most Moslems today interpret those stories of conquest in terms of personal and spiritual battle; they no more heed the Quran’s call to war against the infidel than most Christians and Jews take literally the stories of vanquishing the Philistines in pursuit of the Holy Land.

Unfortunately, the Quran and Moslem history are fairly easily transmuted into an unfinished story that appeals to the have-nots in modern northern Africa, the Levant and southern Asia. The poor and rural voters in Iran recently elected a fundamentalist president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) despite much opposition to him (and much sentiment for engagement with the west) from educated young people living in the cities. This seems like good evidence of what is going on in the minds of the Islamic underclass, how they are vulnerable to the promise of economic and social salvation through an unfortunate reconstruction of ancient myths. This is what al Qaeda is all about (along with Hamas and Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad).

I’m not at all sure how we here in the USA could help to untangle these specious reinterpretations of fundamental Islamic beliefs occurring in sandy, far-away lands. But a good first step would be for us to come to understand them ourselves; unfortunately, our leaders and our press aren’t able to give us pithy explanations of just what the terrorists (and those who might listen to them) are thinking. Anyone in the USA who might someday face the blinding flash, deafening shock wave and choking black smoke of terrorism needs to gain that understanding on their own. For now, I have one small suggestion: the Mid East Web website. It has a lot of good info, including an incisive history of Islam, Arabia, Israel, and other hot issues. At least this site attempts to walk a line between liberal over-politeness toward Islam, on the one hand, and conservative images of Islam being a crude, war-like race that needs to be treated like the Huns, on the other.