By Shireen Qudosi
Thursday, March 24, 2016
On March 18, international counterterror authorities
celebrated the capture of Salah Abdeslam, the ISIS-linked Belgium national
heavily responsible for last year’s Islamic terror attacks in Paris. Belgian
Prime Minister Charles Michel awoke Tuesday morning to find ISIS had rocked
Brussels again. Two explosions at the Brussels airport and a third at the
city’s train station killed 34 people and injured hundreds.
The escalating acts of Islamic terrorism in the last six
months—with multiple attacks on Paris, attacks in Brussels, and even the
far-reaching relatively unprecedented domestic attack in San Bernardino,
California—show the deep-rooted hold of the greatest generational challenge of
our time: radical Islam. ISIS has already devastated a Muslim population in the
Middle East. Now, the most grotesque manifestation of radical Islam to date has
its eyes deadlocked on the West.
In the two and a half years since the Obama
administration began countering ISIS, details on how to counter the
bloodthirsty group are still vague at best, and further complicated by the mass
exodus of Muslim refugees pouring into Europe. In this country, Obama’s foreign
policy has excelled in pressing our government and media elites to deflect a
real conversation about jihadist violence to emphasize a fictional narrative
full of politically correct shibboleths, from non-existent “Islamophobic”
backlashes to a context-less understanding of the Crusades.
Meanwhile, European leaders try their best to ignore the
consequences of decades of apologetic politics, including the backlash from
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent open-door policy that accepted 1
million refugees, no questions asked. In a twenty-first-century world softened
through pseudo-intellectualism, the most devastating enemy since Nazi Germany
has left global leadership confused and overwhelmed.
Yet ours is not an impossible task. We can rely on the
past as a guide through this defining moment in history. Although it was aimed
at domestic policy, when President Franklin Roosevelt outlined his four
freedoms in January 1941, he was making an equally strong case against the
totalitarianisms that were on the march across the world—totalitarian regimes
the United States would be facing before the bloody conclusion of that year. He
outlined freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and
the freedom from fear as symbolic aims that would come to chart America’s
course through World War II.
America knew what it stood for then; the same can’t be
said in today’s muddled “War on Terror.” But rather than caricaturizing
everyone we don’t agree with as a Nazi, the default social stigma of the hour,
we can see how Allied powers worked with language, ideology, alliances, and
geography to counter Axis powers, and we can weaponize these tools to defeat an
enemy more dangerous than Nazi Germany.
Reclaim the Power
of Clear Language
World War II gave us clear definitions that distinguished
Allied forces from the nations that fell under Axis powers. Americans
understood the harsh judgments embedded in shorthand of Vichy France and Norway
under Quisling. Today, we lack clear boundaries. We’re confounded by multiple
extremist groups, Islamist organizations, crumbling nation-states in the Middle
East, Arab lobbies, and a host of other players who are not easily recognized.
America is also grappling with a politically correct environment stemming from
a desire to elevate dialogue in pursuit of higher ideals.
Yet the highest ideal today is no different from the
highest ideal over 70 years ago: freedom. Securing that freedom requires every
man, woman, child, and elected leader once again unite against a common enemy.
To do this, we absolutely must be
comfortable with naming the enemy: radical Islam.
Naming a thing is an incredibly powerful act that grants
dominion. Whether it’s the naming of animals in the biblical book of Genesis,
the power that comes with knowledge of a name in the Old Testament, or even
awareness of a thing through knowing its name, identification is instrumental
to understanding. Naming the problem is the single most important step in
psychological power over radical Islam. It’s also key to driving policy-based
solutions.
Being able to say “Islamic extremism” or “radical Islam”
or “jihad” without fear of backlash is what it’s going to take to get America
on the same page. Being on the same page means recognizing that Islam birthed
this “radical” interpretation of faith more than 1,400 years ago, and stands
today as the ultimate threat to a free world—greater than any threat posed by a
fleeting moment in time that gave rise to Adolf Hitler. We didn’t hesitate to
call a thing by its name 70 years ago, and we cannot hesitate now.
As a society, this is going to require a hard
psychological reset that wipes out political correctness. A crippling PC
culture devastates a civilization’s ability to move forward. If we’re going to
move forward in this war on terror, then we also need to fall into ranks and
recognize we’re dealing with more than just terror.
Combat the
Ideology Head-On
While the Third Reich was a politically driven machine
that relied on belief in National Socialism, it’s well known that Adolf Hitler
was also heavily influenced by the occult. Whether the war is seen through
Hitler’s occultist motivations or in the more common thread of a totalitarian
ideology, the fact is that Allied forces fully accepted they were battling an
ideology that believed in a greater force.
Yet very few people today can engage in a conversation
about the ideological motivations of jihadis, choosing instead to pin the blame
on “extreme interpretations of scripture,” economic devastation, or retaliation
against Western foreign policy. While any of these three are factors, the
driver today is no different than it was over two generations ago. As before,
it comes down to belief systems.
But twenty-first-century societies have a hard time
accepting religious ideology as a driver in a larger war due to a growing
displacement from faith and religion. In the West, there’s a sense of
estrangement that lingers in the air; purpose and meaning are lost when
everything is secured through the push of a button. Our relationships are
transactional, and the only god most of us worship is at the other end of a
selfie stick. So it becomes difficult to understand how jihadis and Islamists
could have enough belief in an ideology to the point of self-sacrifice.
Meanwhile, the label “Nazi” is freely pressed upon
conservative viewpoints, while failing to see how real extremism in the form of
radical Islam desires to completely obliterate any oppositional view. So while
we’re squabbling over who is the most unfair, radical Islam is looking to
destroy us all equally.
This is still a stretch of the imagination for those who
cannot see how modern history’s most notorious villain, Adolf Hitler, is
anything like the self-appointed caliphate of ISIS. William L. Shirer in “Rise
and Fall of the Third Reich” shows us how: “[Hitler] was twenty-four and to
everyone except himself he must have seemed a total failure. He had not become
a painter, nor an architect. He had become nothing, so far as anyone could see,
but a vagabond – an eccentric, bookish one, to be sure. He had no friends, no
family, no job, no home. He had, however, one thing: an unquenchable confidence
in himself and a deep, burning sense of mission.”
This is the same conviction found in the innumerable
thousands of Muslim extremists who hold the same deep, burning sense of
mission, and among Islamists who are aligned in radical philosophy with their
jihadi counterparts. At the center of our generational struggle, we have a
faith-driven ideology surfacing from the darkest hour in Islam, one that has
branded its followers with a sense of infallible destiny. The only real and
permanent solution is rising to meet an ideology with an even more powerful
ideology, within and outside of Islam.
Make Alliances
with Moderate Islam
In recent months, France and Belgium were united in their
common cause to apprehend terrorists behind the Paris attacks. Belgium is also
part of an international coalition against the Islamic State. In fact, in
response to every attack against a Western state, the whole free world comes
together in a show of empathy.
Leaders promise action, national monuments light up,
Facebook default pictures change to flags and peace signs, and hashtags and
drawings fill social media. And nothing changes beyond having pacified a
momentary sense of duty. Nothing changes because we haven’t named the problem;
we still deny an ideological war; and we haven’t formed strategic and necessary
alliances.
In WWII, a collection of nations came together committed
to thwarting the spread of Nazism. Today, we have countries that are banding
together, even working together to thwart terrorism—but there is no central
alliance created to tackling the root cause of this ideological problem. Quite
ironically, some of us are sitting across the table from the enemy.
The War on Terror launched on October 7, 2001, directing
its first strike against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nearly 16 years later, the
United States is now negotiating with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is the lesser
evil compared to the new strain of religious extremism in ISIS. Alliances are clearly
blurred, but we’re losing the war because we’re engaged in the wrong kind of
alliances.
The right kind of alliances look to history first.
Islamic fanaticism was kept at bay when Islam’s rational thinkers, the
Mu’tazilites, had total political support. Sufi Muslims, Islam’s mystical
branch, are also historically powerful players in moderating the field. Newer
alliances include modern-day outliers including Muslim reformists and
futurists.
This is where we take a page from history and look to see
who holds the same views as us, building from it a hybrid new allied force that
goes beyond traditional powers. A problem born of faith needs first and
foremost people of the faith. Secondly, it needs individuals who can understand
that there won’t be a heroic landing on the coast of Normandy. Our D-Day is at
least a generation away.
Recognize a
Scattered Geographic Playing Field
Wars in the last century were geographically
recognizable. Today, no such clarity exists. Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam is a
Belgian-born French citizen of Moroccan ancestry. At least one of the
terrorists killed in the Paris attacks was suspected to be a refugee of unknown
origin; it would be near-impossible and highly-resource intensive to verify
passport documents. The San Bernardino shooters were self-radicalized
Pakistanis. Last week, a New York pizzeria owner and a naturalized U.S. citizen
from Yemen was sentenced for recruiting for the Islamic State.
Today’s enemies don’t wear a uniform. They don’t have
distinguishable accents or a unified language. They don’t have the same country
of origin. In fact, there is nothing that unifies them beyond radical Islamic
ideology.
This means the battle isn’t just an issue with ISIS,
which has become the predominant focus of most leaders and public opinion.
Radical Islamic terrorism isn’t going to end with taking the fight over there; there is no “over there,” or
playing whack-a-mole, a fact that Brussels has already conceded to, admitting
it is being challenged in tracking radicals. The war is taking place multiple
fronts and in several forms. It is ultimately a war of ideas and the
battlefield is the mind.
Winning this war is going to take leadership that can
recognize and advocate for the four frames: language, ideology, alliances, and
geography. We’re going to need leaders who can bring together a team of
outliers who are unafraid of being disliked, because the choices that need to
be made are going to be unfavorable—and we need the same caliber of character
with iron resolve as in generations past. Nothing less will suffice if we want
to win this.
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