332 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Then there was the Muslim Brotherhood. When Nasser lost face in
the Six Day War, the Egyptian masses simply abandoned him. They
turned instead to the vast anti-Nasserite movement permeating their
country. And now, the Muslim Brotherhood metastasized. The organiza-
tion itself thrust beyond the borders of Egypt, into Syria, into Jordan,
into the Arab emirates and the rest of Arab heartland. What's more, the
original movement began sprouting offshoots, each one more radical than
the last. One such branch was Egypt's Islamic Jihad, founded by a man
named al-Zawaheri, who in turn mentored the now-infamous Saudi ji-
hadist Osama bin Laden.
Some ideologues inspired by Qutb began to teach that jihad was not
only "an obligation" for devout Muslims but the "sixth pillar" oflslam, on
a par with prayer, pilgrimage, fasting, charity, and the creed of monothe-
ism. A few extremists, such as Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who fought
the Soviets in Afghanistan, went even further and declared that participa-
tion in jihad was the only way to distinguish a Muslim from a non-Muslim:
according to his doctrine, anyone who held back from armed struggle was
fair game.^2 These hardcore revolutionaries should properly be called "ji-
hadists" rather than simply "Islamists." Their ideology was plainly off the
charts for the vast majority of Muslims, hardly even recognizable as Islam
to most: it was a sliver of Islamism, itself a sliver of political Islam, itself
one branch of Islam as a whole.
Overall then, what did the Six Day War accomplish? Israel gained the
Occupied Territories. They were supposed to buffer the country against
further attacks. Instead, within those same territories, Israeli authorities
have faced ever-mounting insurgencies called intifadas, to which they have
responded with ever more brutal measures. Year after year and decade after
decade, this strike-and-counterstrike syndrome has drained the nation's
energies and compromised its moral arguments in the world.
On the other side of the ledger, the war radicalized and "Palestinian-
ized" the PLO, empowered the Ba'ath party, and energized the Muslim
Brotherhood, which spawned Jihadist splinters as the years went by, ever
more extremist zealots who mounted increasingly horrific attacks not just
at innocent bystanders who got in the way-a tragic byproduct of virtually
all wars-but against anyone who could be gotten and the more innocent
the better, the distinctive genre of violence known today as terrorism. In