| To Know Your Enemy |
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Page 1 of 3 INTRO (OR AFTERWARD)  Norman Spinrad But the invasion of Iraq and the occupation made it possible, in my eyes mandatory, to write something about the consequences in the present at least, because the truth of it seemed to be quite denied in the West, and so I wrote "Know Your Enemy." Too politically-incorrect to be handled by major print publications, the New York Times, the Post, a few other places I tried, even Le Monde Diplomatique, where I had published such stuff before. I sort of forgot about it until I was in Paris in November 2006 during the riots. Then something clicked, and I decided to write it as a short story. Forty pages into it, I realized I had begun a novel, and I was so consumed and obesessed by it that I just kept going, writing it without a contract, not at all my usual practice, and by the time you read this a draft will almost be complete. The novel is called "Osama The Gun" and it is the first person memoir of an Islamic terrorist of the near future, an innocent at first, a Candide, a good man drawn step by step into bad deeds and the ultimate misguided apocalyptic action by sincere, honorable, but blind belief in what I describe in "Know Your Enemy." I know this is a very politically incorrect and possibly even personally dangerous book to write and this is not going to be an easy sell. But I am utterly convinced that this needs to be written because it needs to be read. Because contemporary global civilization needs to understand the true nature of the Islamic alternate civilization it is confronting. And the Islamic world needs to understand itself through not-unsympathetic looking deep into its inside from the outside. The West needs to know its enemy. That enemy needs to better understand itself. --NS |