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[At the time of the Oklahoma City bombing] the authorities immediately suspected Jihad. They were right, although mistakenly they thought that Jihad meant foreign. But Jihad had come to America in all its native ferocity. Home-grown, it stalks the homeland. If McWorld is a kind of greed, Jihad is a kind of fear. McWorld is meager fare for hungry moralists and shows only passing interest in the spirit. However outrageous the deeds associated with Jihad, the revolt the deeds manifest is reactive to changes that are themselves outrageous.
This suggests that MacWorld -- the spiritual poverty of markets -- may bear a portion of the blame for the excesses of the holy war against the modern. Jihad tends the soul that McWorld abjures and strives for the moral well-being that McWorld, busy with the consumer choices it mistakes for freedom, disdains. Jihad thus goes to war with McWorld and, because each worries that the other will obstruct and ultimately thwart the realization of its ends, the war between them becomes a holy war. The lines here are drawn not in sand but in stone. There is no room in the mosque for Nintendo, no place on the internet for Jesus -- however rapidly "religious" channels are multiplying. Life cannot be both play and in earnest, cannot stand for the lesser gratification of a needy body and simultaneously for the greater glory of the selfless soul.
-- Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld
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