Some Saudi Arabian jihadi ninjas are in confession mode. A few days back captured Saudi terrorists Khalid al-Farraj and Abdal Rahman al-Rasud gave us snapshots of their way of life on TV1, the official Saudi TV station. The programme itself was titled "Special Facts from within the Cell".

The Cell being the basic, Jihadi building block in their campaigns of annihilation. Not to be confused with the Jennifer Lopez’s film by the same name!

Said Abdal Rahman: "Among the media and intellectual principles of the organization is what I would describe as the practice of taking away freedom of thinking, by which I mean preventing the member of the organization from thinking about or discussing the future steps of the organization. This is done primarily through isolating them from the outside media, be it state media or foreign media, banning the reading of newspapers and replacing them with internal publications."

Added Khalid al-Farraj: "The problem is that there is a total media blackout on the members of the cell. They would not know, for instance, how many people had been killed in the compound (reference to an attack) and what their nationalities were. Often there are no newspapers in the house and watching TV is banned. They (that is the Cell) are the sole source of information. They always accuse the other side of lying."

In these days when sound and pictures are what passes off as knowledge the dread of the enemy’s videology and the written word is understandable. Who knows how a jihadi’s whirlwinds of hatreds might get diluted by an occasional satellite borne byte of truth or fact? Of course, you can only be made to resort to violence when you cannot be bothered to think, are incapable of it or somebody else is doing your thinking for you.

Continues Abdal Rahman: "There is a recruitment of a particular people. This targets young people who do not have a good grounding in the knowledge of Shariah law or reasoning to distinguish right from wrong. They also rely on dashing elements who love adventure and acts of bravery, particularly, the 20-year olds who wish to prove themselves to society and people……They also try to keep those joined using different methods. These include, for instance, telling them that going back was impossible, that the security forces would torture them severely. In addition, they boost their confidence by promising them victory and provide erroneous interpretations to their dreams—which they believed."

Is it not easy to sell a cause that’s holy as being undefeatable, even though it’s far from victory itself? It’s also easier to spin dreams of allurement to the uneducated young. Educated people, even within the Cell itself, would be less accepting of an inferior position and would demand more participation rather than be content to be mere couriers of doom.

In continuation of a media blackout there’s personal censorship as well. Says Khalid al-Farraj: "If someone wants to contact his parents or his wife, he can do so only after making several requests. If he is allowed to get out and make contact, he is accompanied by people to the phone booth or the place of contact, so he cannot escape. If he escapes, he would blow the cover on their place of hiding and reveal some facts about them. Even the letters that are sent by their parents or their wives are not given to them to read privately. They open the letter and read it. If they find any call for going back or surrender, they keep the letter, to avoid any affect."

With a monopoly of information it’s easier to indoctrinate and mould minds to be more toxic. In an area of the world where information itself is scarce it’s easy to substitute a conspiracy theory for truth. An indicator: An Arab Human Development Report of 2002, published under the aegis of the UN observes: "The Arab world (22 countries) translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth of the number that Greece translates. The accumulated total of translated books since the Calpiph Maa’Moun’s time (9the century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year."

Which takes us to the objectives of the terrorists in Saudi Arabia.

The ills have to be understood before the solutions can come. It’s also vital to get a grip on Saudi jihad for it’s the country which has primarily funded the growth of militant Islam around the world through its funding of the Wahabi madarassas that are entrenched in almost every Sunni enclave. And now the chicken has come home to roost. Says Abdal Rahman: "There are two military objectives. First, there are open objectives. These, as I said, consist of hitting places that they try to convince people are Crusaders’ centers in the Arabian peninsula. Thus they convince people that the land of the two holy mosques is colonized by the crusaders.

This is an open objective and they seek to prove it to the people.

Then there are the hidden objectives which they try to deny. These include, for instance, attacking buildings of security services and carrying out surveillance of intelligence officers and attacking them with explosives or weapons."

Nothing new in this. The self-admitted catalyst for Osama Bin Laden, was ostensibly the American presence in Saudi Arabia during the Gulfwar. That’s why a lot of ire of the Jihadi apparatus was directed against the Saudi government itself. Against those whom the Jihadis take to be betraying Islam from the inside.

And while it is often feared that to explain terrorism is to justify it but it is only in this introspection that we can understand that the question is not what Islam has done to muslims but what the muslims are doing to Islam that is becoming important. With public despair and humilation becoming rich grounds for terrorists to exploit the need is also to address the demand side of terrorism and not just the supply side which everybody seems to be concentrating on.

Journalist-author Jason Burke has this to say about the demand side in his book Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror: "The situation is far worse than when Bin Laden began to come to prominence. The legitimising discourse, the critical element that converts an angry young man into a human bomb, is now everywhere. You will hear it in a mosque, on the internet, from friends, in a newspaper. You do not have to travel to Afghanistan to complete the radicalizing process; you can do it in your front room, in an Islamic center, in a park. For an increasing number of people, the Jihadist Salafist-al Qaeda-ist worldview explains everything. It makes sense. There is a battle going on between good and evil, between right and wrong, between justice and injustice. We are all soldiers on the frontline. There are no civilians. This is their worldview."

A lot of this angst and frustration, which makes them embrace fury instead of piety, comes from being marginalized by this prodigal force going by the name of ’global commerce’. The economic situation in the Arab League is nothing to write home about. Says the Arab Human Development Report : "The GDP in all Arab countries stands at US $531.2 billion in 1999—less than that of a single European country, Spain (US $ 595.5 bn)."

Looking at the past and remaining in the past remains one of Jihad’s principal objectives. Even if the fundamentalists arrive at a new idea they seek its origins in the past. They seek to recover the past and buried by obliterating the contemporary. In this battle between modernity as epitomized by ’global commerce’ and jihad the later seek to overthrow all of democracy’s virtues as well as vices. All gobbled together in one lump—freedom, tolerance, multi-culturalism, and inequality, commercial injustice and cultural hegemony---the Jihadis in their act of rebellion seek to overthrow both God and Satan.

A lot of their quarrel with the west seems to be with the belligerent market ideology that the west hoists everywhere in the name of creating a global market brotherhood but which creates gains for just a few as opposed to the Jihadis demand for justice for all. A demand, incidentally, which is quite a universal third world demand.

The word jihad itself, though Islamic in origin and more of a religious mobilizing slogan, has in many ways come to typify the larger friction between the dispossessed in the Islamic world and the forces of cultural hegemony as symbolized by KFC, MTV, the iBook and others of their ilk. And the chafing is not in the Islamic zone alone but spreads in myriad ways to the more hetrogenous parts of the globe. There are few homogenous territories in the world. Less than ten per cent perhaps and in only half of them does a single ethnic group comprise 70 per cent of the population. There are dozens of tribes out there like the Sri Lankan Tamils, Kurds, Quebecois, Inkhata Zulus and East Timorese who live in lands they have to fight for to call their own. And all of whom are looking for something more exhilarating than the wests’s solution for all ills—global commerce..

A kind of capitalism that has few tribulations accepting the tyranny of middle east despots as long as it provides a stability of regime that would help in reaping profits. A force of nature that has never stood against tyranny nor believed in the corporate good of full employment and which by the clever of advertising introduces wants and desires in the common mass that create an obsession with gratification. A capitalism that has yet to realize that it has to invest in political and economic instruments to alter the demand side of terrorism.

Says Benjamin R. Barber in Jihad vs McWorld: "The modern response to terror cannot be exclusively military or tactical, but rather must entail a commitment to democracy and justice even when they are in tension with the commitment to cultural expansionism and global markets."

Barber goes on to argue lucidly how a globalisation of civic and democratic institutions are likely to offer a way out. Continues Barber: "Democracy responds directly to the resentments and spiritual unease of those whom the trivialization of values is an affront to cultural diversity and spiritual seriousness. Democracy also answers the complaints of those mired in poverty and despair as a consequence of unregulated global markets and of a capitalism run wild because it has been uprooted from the humanizing constraints of the democratic nation-state."

In a world where democratic institutions have just peripheral control over predatory MNCs Barber talks about the creation of a new democracy which would address aggressively the need for global capital to provide global justice, provide recognition and a place for faith in an aggressively secular market society (read banning of head scarves in France) and see merit in re-adjudicating north-south responsibilities (read Kyoto protocol).

In a environment where terrorists keep afloat different schools of carnage and try to convince us of the virtues of oblivion, where they develop ideology that is in contradiction of the very religion in whose name they wish to act, and where the interdependence of systems makes it easier for them to paralyse entire networks with fear, the only answer would be the creation of a new , innovative democracy that addresses the facilitative environment in which terrorism functions.

We would be blinding ourselves if we suggest that it does not exist. There is tacit popular support in too many places for the Jihadists. It showers on terrorism an endorsement which is undeserved. But for that facilitating milieu to be co-opted in the fight against terrorism we would need a democracy that doesn’t misunderstand protecting the public good as, in the words of Barber, "heavy-handed regulatory intervention", that doesn’t leave the big multitudes of us as mere viewers in the fight against terror, that recognizes that brigands roam in hotel suites as well as Falluja, that doesn’t absolve itself while demonising others, and which, above all, makes citizens of us as opposed to being just consumers or belonging to some tribes.

Only then will the war on terror turn some corners and there might be the suffusion of the idea in the likes of Abdul Rahman and Khalid al-Farraj that practicing religion doesn’t go with the courtship of death.