by Waller R. Newell

About the author: Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Much has been written about Osama bin Laden’s Islamic fundamentalism; less about the contribution of European Marxist postmodernism to bin Laden’s thinking. In fact, the ideology by which al Qaeda justifies its acts of terror owes as much to baleful trends in Western thought as it does to a perversion of Muslim beliefs. Osama’s doctrine of terror is partly a Western export.

To see this, it is necessary to revisit the intellectual brew that produced the ideology of Third World socialism in the 1960s. A key figure here is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who not only helped shape several generations of European leftists...