MY Trip to Al Qaeda

I saw a film made by Lawrence Wright based on his book "the Looming Tower". This fits right in with the upcoming webinar from Asheville on politics and a Jungian perspective. Wright tried to get to the roots of how the Al Qaeda were formed and what compels it now. The film is actually a version of his one man stage play based on the book. Wright's message to the world is that we are playing into the hands of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda by damaging our own civil rights and continuing a war we cannot win because we don't understand the "enemy". Wright's belief is that many Muslim's in the world share a commmon sense of humiliation and dread of life that can very easily translate into a love of death. It does not take much to convince a young Muslim who is not allowed to find pleasure in this world to give up his life to destroy the "oppressor" who is the one responsibile for his humiliation. But beyond a love of death there is no plan, no political agenda, no vision of the future except destruction. I imagine Freud's two basic principles Eros and Thanatos being the foundation for this battle. Which people could more perfectly reflect the opposite of a love of death than the Americans who have have such a love for life and are ruled by the Eros principle that death is always a surprise and and a cruel intrusion into our love affair with the outer world. It would take a people who hated this world and loved the afterlife to confront a people who only loved this world and had no understanding of the imaginal realm, the symbolic, the archetypal.