The Way of the Warrior

The French public is lining up to join army, army reserves, police or whatever other state organ with a militaristic orientation that will take them on. A rabbi previously an American Jewish Press award winner is now publishing a book called 'The Israel Warrior's Handbook'. It seems everyone's keen to be a soldier. Jihadists must be chuckling over their tea (they don't do champagne) watching us gear up for the war of religion they've been trying hard to convince us exists.

Daesh and its ilk are reminiscent of the landsknechts and other wandering Mediaeval European hedge knights who descended on unprotected villages to slaughter and pillage and hole up. Our Sunni bandit 'knights' of today have the same outlook but better weapons. They take over territory that they have no capacity for managing effectively over time. Rapine, slavery and butchery is the order of the day.

 

The authorities in a region affected by mounted troupes of medieval villains would eventually get round to slaughtering or expelling the cancer that they represented, but the dislocation caused by never-ending local conflicts, especially during the Hundred Years War and the later Thirty Years War, ensured that new groups of bandit horsemen emerged on a regular basis. This we see today in the Arab and other dysfunctional Muslim lands where new Al-Qaedas and Boko Harems are popping up year after year.

One doesn't 'declare war' on such criminal trash so dignifying them as the 'enemy'; one eliminates them in a massive police action using all the technology at one's command. One doesn't tolerate terms like 'Islamic State' since the likes of Daesh lack the attributes of a civil state. Just as no-one in the Middle Ages expected a robber baron and his followers to develop a social conscience, we can have no expectation that murdering Sunni jihadist units will ever join the community of nations.

I have real doubts that the answer is larger armies, bigger domestic police forces, or new 'warrior' groups packed with vengeful citizens who believe like Hollande that we are 'at war' with fundamentalist Islam. Better is a coordinated international 'police' action using already highly-trained special forces working under a UN mandate to capture or exterminate these psychopaths who are a danger to all nations. A cancer is cut out or killed so that it cannot spread to other parts of the 'body of nations'.

Islam as the Lightening Rod for Rage Against The Machine

"A religion is defined not just by its holy texts but also by how believers interpret those texts — that is, by its practices. The ways in which believers act out their faith define that faith." "The slaughter in Peshawar, like the mass beheadings by the Islamic State, tells us something about the character of contemporary Islam and of Islamism."

148 people, mostly children, killed by the Taliban in Peshawar school massacre at the end of 2014

 "It tells us even more about the state of contemporary politics, and especially of radical politics."  "The character of anti-Western sentiment has changed strikingly in recent decades." "Anti-imperialists of the past saw themselves as part of a wider political project that sought to modernize the non-Western world, politically and economically. Today, however, that wider political project is itself seen as the problem."

"There is considerable disenchantment with many aspects of modernity, from individualism to globalization, from the breakdown of traditional cultures to the fragmentation of societies, from the blurring of moral boundaries to the seeming soullessness of the contemporary world. In the past, racists often viewed modernity as the property of the West and regarded the non-Western world as incapable of modernizing. Today, it is radicals who often regard modernity as a Western product, and reject both it and the West as tainted goods."

"The consequence has been the transformation of anti-Western sentiment from a political challenge to imperialist policy to an inchoate rage against modernity. Many strands of contemporary thought, including those embraced by 'deep greens' and the far left, express aspects of such discontent. But it is radical Islam that has become the lightning rod for this fury."

From NYT Sunday Review 'Radical Islam, Nihilist Rage' by Kenan Malik

Pernicious Beliefs

“The terrorists need to be condemned and remembered for what they did,” Dr. Ahmed said “but when you associate their religion with what they did, then you are automatically including, by association, one and a half billion people who had nothing to do with these actions and who ultimately the U.S. would not want to unnecessarily alienate.”

Akbar Ahmed is the chairman of the Islamic studies department at American University in Washington D.C.  He is referring to a seven minute film, 'The Rise of Al Qaeda' to be shown at the soon-to-open National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City. This film is creating controversy around how Western countries speak about Islam and Muslims. Unlike Dr Ahmed I cannot see how it is possible to disassociate Islam from the World Trade Center massacre. The outrage was undertaken in the name of Allah, and so those who must reshape what is undertaken in the name of Allah are those who make up the majority of our world's Muslims. The new museum's curators are responding to the victims' and the general public's deep anger.  Denying the Islamic nature of the 9/11 atrocities does not serve truth. Indeed to pretend that Al Qaeda is an organization somehow disconnected from Islam is absurd. Wahhabi Islam is at the core of its raison d'etre.

The dilemma of how best to respond to the excesses of religious crusaders also applies to how we in Western societies respond to the Creationist crusade of fundamentalist churches. No-one will be physically hurt by the teaching of this absurd notion in American schools, but the wider Christian community needs to step up to the plate and push back much more aggressively against a deeply anti-science notion that both denies and seeks to supplant what the rest of us see as demonstrably true. The same need to be counted applies to non-Wahhabist Muslims. We who are non-believers are mostly bystanders in that we do not have the understanding of religious nuance required to argue effectively against the idiocies of belief preferred by Jihadists and Creationists.

Both violent adherence to Islamic Jihad and the intolerant Creationism of some Bible literalists are profound affronts to the rational and civil society we have been trying to nurture in the West since the Age of Enlightenment. Moderate believers benefit from a tolerant polity. We need to hear a lot more from them to counter the  highly exclusionary doctrines propagated by their coreligionists.