Madeleine Sorkin

Al-Qaeda's Defining Moment:
The Prominence of the Scapegoat Strategy

Paper

Madeleine's thesis: Osama bin Laden created a myth of U. S. guilt
in order to conceal the deaths of nearly 3000 people as a scapegoat sacrifice.
Madeleine reveals the rhetoric of Al-Qaeda to have its own manipulative purpose:
a "smokescreen," as Salman Rushdie calls it, to obscure the strong mimetic desire
that motivates bin Laden and his supporters.

Madeleine makes a compelling case that bin Laden applied all of Girard's stereotypes of persecution to the U. S.
in order to justify "sacrificing" the center of our economic power that symbolizes our global hegemony.
The attacks of 9-11 were the founding acts of violence for al-Qaeda, making the U. S. into a scapegoat.
In that way his actions, as well as the ideology he has constructed from the work of
Qutb, Maududi, and al-Banna, fit the terms of Girard's analysis.