Submitted by: Conservative 2 Conservative
There are Jihadists from dozens of countries who have joined ISIS. What do they all have in common?
The
official answer is radicalization. Muslims in Europe are “radicalized”
by alienation, racism and unemployment. Neglected by governments, Muslim
youth band together and become terrorists. Muslims in Israel are
responding to the “despair and hopelessness” of the “Occupation”.
Muslims from the rest of the Middle East are angry over their
“dictators”. Muslims from the Ukraine? Who knows.
Radicalization
comes packaged with a set of local grievances and explanations. It
contends that all Muslim terrorism is a response to local conditions and
that we are responsible for those conditions. Even though the
“radicalization” is Islamic, it denies that Islam plays a positive role
as a Jihadist goal. Instead, like Halal liquor or hashish, it’s what
Muslims turn to when they have been disappointed in the West or in their
own governments. Islam is just what happens when a Belgian Muslim can’t
get a job.
And yet Islam is the only positive uniting factor for Islamic terrorism.
Why
otherwise should a Moroccan youth from a French suburb who works at a
nightclub, the son of a rural Saudi farmer who has never been outside
his country and an American teenager who converted to Islam all risk
their lives to form an Islamic State? The Jihadis of ISIS are a truly
multinational and multicultural bunch. They have traveled to two foreign
countries that most of them have never been to.
What else unites them into a common identity that they are willing to kill and die for if it isn’t Islam?
Radicalization
favors local explanations. But those local explanations don’t add up
nationally or globally. Europe spends a fortune on social services and
yet Muslim terrorism has only grown worse. Other immigrant minorities in
Europe have lower unemployment rates and aren’t blowing things up.
Removing
Muslim dictators in the Arab Spring didn’t lower terrorism; it vastly
increased the power and influence of Islamic terror groups. Nor have
changes in American foreign policy and greater outreach lowered Islamic
terrorism. If anything the scale of the problem seems to have only
become more severe.
The
Israeli peace process with the PLO likewise vastly increased the terror
threat and no amount of concessions has brought peace any closer. There
are stateless Muslims throughout the Middle East. Jordan is filled with
the same exact “Palestinians” as Israel, many of whom are stateless and
have few rights, yet terror rates are far lower. Instead Muslim violence
spikes where there are religious differences.
As
we see in Iraq, Syria and Israel, religious differences are more
explosive than political ones. And where religious differences don’t
exist, Jihadists create them by denouncing their Muslim enemies as
un-Islamic. ISIS is the culmination of a process that you can see among
“moderate” Islamists.
The
official explanation is that a multitude of local factors cause Muslim
disappointment leading to some sort of irreligiously religious
radicalism which can be cured by preventing that disappointment.
We
are expected to believe that there are hundreds of explanations for
Islamic terrorism, but not one. And while no doubt individual choices
and emotions play a role in the making of a Muslim terrorist, the same
is true in the making of a soldier. An army exists as part of a positive
national ethos. Reducing an army to a series of personal
dissatisfactions is absurd. So is reducing ISIS to individually
dissatisfied people while ignoring what its members actually believe.
It’s as absurd as believing that Hitler became a monster because he
couldn’t get his painting career off the ground.
Islamic
terrorism is a positive ethos. It is horrifying, evil and brutal, but
it is not some nihilistic void. You can look at unemployment rates in
Brussels or dissatisfaction in Saudi Arabia, but nobody decides to fight
and die for a Jihadist group because they’re having trouble applying
for a job at McDonald’s. They join because they believe in its mission.
Ignoring the organizing principle of Islamic terrorism while focusing on
local conditions that might make Jihadist recruitment easier misses the
forest for the trees.
Radicalization
programs, under euphemisms such as CVE or Countering Violent Extremism,
assume that Islamic terrorism can be countered by forming a partnership
with Muslim groups and social services agencies. While the West will
ease Muslim dissatisfaction by providing jobs and boosting their
self-esteem to make them feel like they belong, the Muslim groups will
tackle the touchy issue of Islam.
These
partnerships achieve nothing because social services don’t prevent
Islamic terrorism; they enable and fund the very no-go zones and
dole-seeker lifestyles that are a gateway to the Jihad. Meanwhile the
Muslim partners are inevitably Islamists looking to pick up potential
recruits for their own terror agendas. Western countries fund terrorism
to fight terrorism and then partner with still more terrorists to train
their homegrown terrorists not to be terrorists, or at least not the
wrong kind of terrorists. This is what happens when the “Islam” part of
Islamic terrorism is ignored and outsourced to any Islamist who can
pretend to be moderate in front of a television camera for 5 minutes at a
time.
None of this actually stops Islamic terrorism. Instead it empowers and encourages it.
The
Islamist alliances suppress any discussion of Islamic terrorism as
“harming” national security. Condemn the Muslim Brotherhood and you’re
interfering with CVE efforts to stop terrorism by “educating” Muslims on
real Islam and helping the Brotherhood take over entire countries to
address the political anger of Muslims. At least the anger of those that
are part of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And yet without discussing Islam, there is nothing to discuss.
There
are plenty of unemployed non-Muslims in Europe. There are lots of bad
governments all over the world. The non-Islamic factors on which Islamic
terrorism is blamed are not unique to Muslims. Only Islam is. Islamic
terrorism is unique and so its causes cannot be reduced to joblessness
or bad governments. A unique outcome suggests a unique cause. And Islam
is a unique cause. Islam is the unique cause of Islamic terrorism. There
is no way to fight Islamic terrorism without acknowledging its
organizing principle, its objective and its worldview.
You
cannot fight “radicalization” without dealing with what Muslim
terrorists are “radicalized” to do. Without Islam, all that’s left is
the political and sociological hunt for individual motives while
completely ignoring what unites these individuals together. And so CVE
plays the seven blind men while ignoring the elephant in the room. And
the terror attacks and the futile efforts to avert them continue.
The issue isn’t radicalization, it’s Islamization.
Islamization
is what happens to individual Muslims and to Muslim communities.
Islamization is also the goal of Islamic movements, overtly violent or
covertly subversive. Islamization is not the answer of some radical
preacher, but of the Islamic religion. This is not about jobs in Europe
or democracy in Egypt.
Islam
is not radicalized. It is radical. Like Communism or Nazism, it offers a
totalitarian answer to everything. To truly believe in Islam is to
possess the conviction that every country in the world must become
Islamic and be ruled by Islamic law. Islamic terrorism is one tactic for
realizing this conviction.
We cannot and will not defeat Islamic terror without honestly and bluntly confronting Islamization.
|
Sultan Knish .
No comments:
Post a Comment