Discussion for article #232673
Right, young Muslims join the Global Jihad to reintroduce slavery, make legal and permissible sex with captured women, to force women out of public life, to blow up âhereticalâ sects of Muslims such as Shias and Ahmediyas, reinstitute blasphemy laws, etc. as a means of upending the current global elite.
Are we expected to take this essay seriously or was this just space-fill for TPM?
3 Likes
Interesting article. The only problem is our elites donât seem to be interested In addressing anybodyâs problems but their own. Once our elites realize that addressing the concerns of others including young Muslims is in their enlightened self-interests will we have a chance to achieve a just and stable society. Right now world elites are eager to limit entry to their ranks. It is harder and harder for a young person to get started in a career that promises to allow for fulfillment, especially early fulfillment, of their aspirations and dreams. . The sad thing is most members of the âI have mine, go fuck yourselvesâ crowd are so clueless it never occurs to them that holding out a hand up is in their self interest. They view the helping hand as mere charity, when it is really a defense to the kind of youthful disaffection that has led young Muslims to global jihad.
6 Likes
And you donât think wanting to feel the power associated with holding a weapon over people trembling in fear is the key.
1 Like
Probably the same reason so many poor minorities go into US armed service. They canât find anyone to give them a job.
2 Likes
What you are talking about is young Muslims want to feel powerful. The actions promoted by the jihadist leaders have selected to energize their converts. The specific behaviors you describe are hopelessly anti-social, but there are other ways we can empower young people. By the way, when our young people engage in wars to counter the jihadists we are empowering them to stand strong in defense of our society. they act as the mirror image of the young ant-social jihadists. Ying and Yang. .
1 Like
It is about power. The same reason alienated young men in Chicago join gangs. There are financial rewards, but the main incentive is power, often armed power. Money, sex, and, especially, respect are a draw so irresistible that it is embraced in the full knowledge that the most likely outcomes are prison or an early death. The picture accompanying the article says it all.
2 Likes
I thought this article was going to be a link to video of that protest in Texas.
1 Like
Or the poor in general, regardless of race
1 Like
Assimilation? This is the same argument that was used against Irish and German immigrants in the US. Letâs not even get into the argument about blacks because they were brought here as slaves. Itâs a convenient lie not a truth.
2 Likes
We do a lousy job as a society empowering young men and women. You want to know why the greatest generation was so greatâthey were empowered as young men and developed the feelings of responsibility that drove them the rest of their lives. I am not proposing starting world war III or sending all young men and women into the army, but we need to find ways to empower our young people or they are going to continue to be attracted to gangs and jihad.
7 Likes
Like joining the Marines or the cops, right?
It obviously makes sense and passes the common sent test to think:
As the Global Capitalists (the Oligarchs) like the Kochâs, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, the Saudi Royal family, the Big 5 Egyptian Oligarchs, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, and the rest of the Davos crowd gain more and more money and more and more power, that the Jihadists will have an easier and easier time finding recruits in the Middle East and around the globe.
As the Kochâs get richer and richer and more political and more fascist, there will be more and more extremists giving up on society and looking to fight back!
Yes - that passes the common sense test. It is pretty clear that runaway wealth concentration from Republican trickle down economics is not only a threat to the US Democracy, it is a threat to the world!
5 Likes
@ronbyers and @scaramouche ,It is about power and the chance to change things with that power.
But these young men are also a product of non-assimilation or the isolation we enforce among young Muslim men with our societal racism. Everywhere they turn there is some wacko attacking Muslims. Look at the Texas Legislator making Muslims pledge allegiance before getting in her office.
No Go zones? Try being a young Muslim at the airport. Women will be snatching their children close when you walk by. Thank goodness for Sikhs taking some of the pressure off Muslims by wearing turbans that confuse the crap out of conservatives who never really have a clear picture anyway.
Try even a normally intelligent discussion here, and someone will start talking about the intrinsic spark of hatred infused deep in the brewing of Islam.
These all diminish from what it is to have been born a Muslim.
"Western military might."
At its core, the global jihad presents itself as a challenge to the status quo, to a global order where the cultural, political, and economic positions of ruling elites in the West prevail, at least in part because of Western military might.
It is indeed unfortunate for the West that so many of the munitions murdering Muslims are stamped âMade in Americaâ or âFabrique Francaise.â The nightly news does its part in bragging about the days drone kills of this or that now-dead âtop levelâ al Qaeda/ISIS/TERRORIST -TERRORIST - TERRORIST.
Israel, the best friend any terror cell recruiter ever had, maintains a healthy kill ratio of 25 Muslims to 1 Jew. Its a pretty simple formula, a Palestinian kills or threatens an Israeli and POOF a city block in Gaza City is turned into a sand pile for the use of stray cats.
Israel doesnât just kill Muslims on a daily basis, it comes up with all sorts of ingenious ways to steal land from Muslims. Forget to get a building permit for that piece of fence you put on your window to keep settlers from piling stones in your living room? Too bad, so sad, happy eviction and hello to the new family of settlers and the soldiers sent to guard them in your now former residence.
There is no quick or lasting military or intelligence fix.
Indeed. We and our back-stabbing friends have tried everything, including instilling and incubating extremists â It is OK, we were fighting Communism then.
Hereâs my post on the creation of ISIS and al Qaeda type terrorism:
THE TRUE BELIEVERS
When we get to al-Qaeda and ISIS we finally find a large percentage of religious fanaticism. Members join to wage religious war. But even here, in the midst of true terrorists, the ideology is not uniform. As much as 25% of ISIS members were recruited from Western countries. Many of these fighters are returning home disillusioned either from excessive violence, menial chores or learning that they were lied to. There are also increasing reports of executions surfacing for those ISIS catches trying to return. Yet ISIS has developed a slick and effective online recruiting campaign to keep its ranks full.
Even with ISIS and al Qaeda fighters coming from around the world the heart of this religiously inspired terrorism still pumps from Saudi Arabia.
We hear of Wahabbism, a cult of purity that developed in the sparse and barren Nejd of Saudi Arabia. Despising the Shia practices of praying to saints and making pilgrimages as being polytheistic, al Wahhab also viewed regularly practicing Sunni as impure and lumped both Sunni and Shia in as worse than infidels and subject to death and loss of property at the hands of his pure followers.
We might not hear of Wahabbism today had it not been for a political union between al Wahabb and the founder of the House of Saud, Muhammad bin Saud, offering loyalty of the faithful for protection by the local leader bin Saud.
Its much that way today, with Wahabbism the main sect in Mecca and Medina including many members of the Saudi royal family. Only now the Saudis have exported Wahabbism from their sparse region into densely populated Pakistan and from there into Afghanistan. To our everlasting shame, we helped in every way we could in the hopes of bloodying the Russians in their Afghan campaign.
A great grandson of Muhammad bin Saud, Prince Bandar, has taken up the familyâs calling to protect the faith. Prince Bandar, once so close to the Bush family that he was known as âBandar Bushâ has been involved from the start in the late 70s. Osama bin Laden, from a family intimately close with the royal line was also there at the begining.
âWhen we came to Afghanistan to support the mujahedeen in 1979, against the Russians, the Saudi government asked me officially not to enter Afghanistan due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership. They ordered me to stay in Peshawar, because in the event the Russians arrested me that will be a proof of our support of the mujahedeen against the Soviet Union.â Osama bin Laden
Prince Bandar, then Saudi Ambassador to the US agreed:
"Bin Laden used to come to us when America â underline, America â through the CIA and Saudi Arabia were helping our brother mujahedeen in Afghanistan to get rid of the communist, secularist Soviet Union forces, to liberate them. ⌠Osama bin Laden came and said, "Thank you. Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us to get rid of the secularist, atheist Soviets."PBS.org
In the same interview the Prince recoiled at the idea that bin Ladenâs role was exagerated and he wanted to make sure credit went where he felt it belongs:
The reason they won that war is because America and Saudi Arabia put $1 billion each to give them arms, training, equipment, and lobbied for them worldwide. So letâs not overexaggerate. âŚ.
Osama didnât follow instructions and went into Afghanistan where he continued to use his education and his experiences from his families vast construction empire to manage the logistics of getting recruits, weapons and supplies into the rugged Afghan areas where the Mujahideen fought from.
At the same time, other Saudis volunteers had brought their Wahabbism with them to the training camps set up by Pakistanâs intelligence agency, the ISI.
The ISIâs first major involvement in Afghanistan came after the Soviet invasion in 1979, when it partnered with the CIA to provide weapons, money, intelligence, and training to the mujahadeen fighting the Red Army. At the time, some voices within the United States questioned the degree to which Pakistani intelligence favored extremist and anti-American fighters. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the ISI continued its involvement in Afghanistan, first supporting resistance fighters opposed to Moscowâs puppet government, and later the Taliban.Washington Post
It was Pakistanâs intelligence service that made it possible for bin Laden to live unmolested in Pakistan for nearly 10 years.
But there was more going on besides bringing in fighters, the Saudis were exporting cash and their ultra-orthodox Wahabi purity, funneling millions into schools called Madrassas:
A madrassa is an Islamic religious school. Many of the Taliban were educated in Saudi-financed madrassas in Pakistan that teach Wahhabism, a particularly austere and rigid form of Islam which is rooted in Saudi Arabia. Around the world, Saudi wealth and charities contributed to an explosive growth of madrassas during the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. During that war (1979-1989), a new kind of madrassa emerged in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region â not so much concerned about scholarship as making war on infidels. The enemy then was the Soviet Union, today itâs America. Here are analyses of the madrassas from interviews with Vali Nasr, an authority on Islamic fundamentalism, and Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. PBS.org
** Now these Afghan madrassas, how they differ from the traditional madrassas is that they were not really so much concerned about scholarship. They were more concerned about training religious fighters who would go into the Afghan field and fight. I mean, the phenomenon of Taliban, meaning religious seminary studentsâ**
America helped spread Wahabbi extremism too, turning our industrial might into rabid textbooks preaching Jihad to the children of this region:
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school systemâs core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.
Decades later <a href=http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/7/afghan-fighters-americantextbooks.html">these textbooks keep on giving:
âInfidels are our enemyâ: Afghan fighters cherish old American schoolbooks
the rationale of this indoctrination in the ideas of warfare as religious duty rested on the assumption of the âimportance of starting early.â While the U.S. program ended with the collapse of Afghanistanâs communist government, its textbooks have spawned dozens of copies and revised editions, she said.
She managed to find several old copies of the Pashto-language books and a 2011 edition on sale in the Pakistani city of Peshawar as recently as last year. The Taliban, she said, continues to recommend these books for children.
This madrassa-inspired and Saudi-financed Wahhabi Islam is destroying indigenous Islam in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And now we are still dealing with Saudi exported Wahabbism in Syria and Iraq:
Yet although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century. In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism, and yet the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, condemning IS in the strongest terms, has insisted that âthe ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any wayâNew Statesman
And there are indications that Prince Bandar has again been pushing extremism:
How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the Isis takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally âGod help the Shiaâ. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."The Independent
BANDAR HAS LOST HIS JOB
âThank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,â John McCain told CNNâs Candy Crowley in January 2014. âThank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends,â the senator said once again a month later, at the Munich Security Conference.
McCain was praising Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the head of Saudi Arabiaâs intelligence services and a former ambassador to the United States, for supporting forces fighting Bashar al-Assadâs regime in Syria. McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham had previously met with Bandar to encourage the Saudis to arm Syrian rebel forces.
But shortly after McCainâs Munich comments, Saudi Arabiaâs King Abdullah relieved Bandar of his Syrian covert-action portfolioThe Atlantic
DONâT BLAME IRAN FOR THE RISE OF ISIS
The U.S., Western Europe, and their regional allies in fact bear most of the responsibility for the rise of extremist groups like ISIS. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Britain notably supported, was a strategic disaster. Contrary to speculation at the time, Saddam Husseinâs secular Baâathist regime prevented Al Qaeda from operating out of Iraq. Iraq had also been supported by the West before the 1991 Gulf War as a counterbalance against the revolutionary Islamic Republic during the Iran-Iraq War. The U.S.-led invasion changed all of that.
The Iraq War toppled Saddam, destabilized the country, and led to a wave of sectarian bloodshed. It also made Iraq a safe haven and recruiting ground for Al Qaeda affiliates. Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISISâs forerunner, was founded in April 2004. AQI conducted brutal attacks on Shia civilians and mosques in hopes of sparking a broader sectarian conflict. Iran naturally supported Shia militias, who fought extremists like AQI, both to expand its influence in Iraq and protect its Shia comrades. Iran cultivated ties with the Maliki government as well. Over the long term, Iran tried to seize the opportunity to turn Iraq from a strategic counterweight into a strategic ally. The U.S. didnât do much to stop it.TheDiplomat
DID THIS EVER WORK
âOne of the things that Obama wanted to know was: Did this ever work?â said one former senior administration official who participated in the debate and spoke anonymously because he was discussing a classified report. The C.I.A. report, he said, âwas pretty dour in its conclusions.â
It worked that one time in Afghanistan UNTIL the war with Russia ended and those fighters returned home to launch their newly learned skills upon the world: Backlash.
And we appear to have set ourselves up good, having been supplying weapons to anti-Assad rebels -who frequently go over to ISIS- since 2012
Hereâs the best summary of the current situation I have seen:
To be clear, the US did not create ISIS. That is, it did not fund and train ISIS in Syria in the way that it funded and trained the Mujahideen (from which al Qaeda emerged) to fight its proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Rather it is US actions in the Middle East that have created the conditions for the rise of a group like ISIS. Al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq until after the US invasion. Al Qaeda in Iraq was formed in 2004, and was the precursor organization to the current ISIS. It is the USâs reliance on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates to push back against the so called Shia Crescent (Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria, and for a time the Sunni Hamas) that prompted rich donors in the Gulf States to channel funds to ISIS in Syria. It is US and various dictatorshipsâ support of counter-revolutionary forces opposed to the Arab Spring of 2011 that allowed reactionary groups to grow while thwarting progressive ones. And finally, it is the USâs destruction of Iraq and its support for the Shia government that excluded and oppressed the Sunni that allowed ISIS to take control of such large parts of that country.
In short, it is the USâs War on Terror, and the part played by various regional actors that have fostered the rise of this virulent form of fundamentalism.
These are our crazies. They are vastly different from the nationalist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas - both of which are targets of Wahabbi extremism.
11 Likes
Agreed. If there were powerful media images promising young Christian men the opportunity to join a rampaging, lethal,glamorized corps of fighters in which they could heroically realize their potential masculine power, there would be hordes of them signing up right now.
Oh wait, have I just described the US army?
3 Likes
Yes, I think we need more articles like this, and I think youâre spot on with your points.
Iâd like to see more info about how high unemployment might be a radicalizing factor in those societies.
It was pointed out that the current uprising and civil war in Syria was preceded by a severe drought that was very disruptive to the economy.
Also interesting was how jihadism was finding appeal among youth from more-orthodox Muslim families, who become engaged with the more radical version promoted by jihadists as opposed to the more conventional religion practiced by their families.
It seems to parallel the attraction and growth of the more fundamentalist forms of evangelical Christianity, which also are relatively new forms of Christianity compared to Catholicism and mainline Protestantism, and more confrontational and militant â with their âspiritual warriorâ rhetoric â than their more established variants.
2 Likes
Wow, thatâs a compilation. Danke MartinâŚ
3 Likes
Yes, short of going to war again, we need to promote the same sense of shared national purpose that WW-2 fostered.
1 Like
The âsome people sayâ cop outs and false balance here are silly. but analogizing the motivation and ideology of youths attracted to the âglobal jihadâ/Al Qaeda movement to leftist youth movements of the past, or even to the frequently radicalized leftists and socialists who flocked to Spain to oppose fascism in the 1930s, is ridiculous.
The only real comparison to leftists I see here is to the strain of western leftists who spent the 1930s apologizing for Stalin, simultaneously pretending the violence and insanity of his regime werenât happening and, where acknowledged, were not an end unto themselves, but, rather, the unfortunate results of the oppression and opposition of reactionary forces within and without the USSR.
The insanely extreme violence isnât a means to an end, it is the end. The rightâs hysterically unself-aware insistence on simultaneously comparing this movement to fascism and communism because those are the worst words they can think of conceals a kernel of truth, which is that this movement represents a still nascent reemergence of the totalitarianism that made the twentieth century such a dark and bloody and dangerous century.
Weâve seen this play before. The unlimited commitment to unlimited violence as a means of accomplishing state goals, the incorporation of contempt for human life into party dogma. Foundational, if covert, denial of the existence of objective historical truth. The use of pervasive propaganda to generate hate and fear and fixation on leadership as the means to safety, combined with an unlimited and capricious use of terror as the primary means of controlling the thoughts of subject populations. The open, gleeful, commitment to the obliteration of the private life expressed most intimately through an obsessive need to regulate the sexual conduct of people generally and women most specifically. And, of course, rape. Lots of rape, as a means of asserting power and demonstrating powerlessness, as a tool for terrorizing newly subject populations and, above all, as a natural consequence of the elimination of both accountability and limits on conduct on those who have power.
And, as always, totalitarianism breeds itâs own totalitarian enemies, which are essential to the long term success of the project. There are people at work in this country, right now, who are every bit as dedicated to perverting Christianity into the same kind of totalitarian ideology these people have done with Islam. Theyâre just having a harder time getting traction, but theyâd love nothing better than a world where, instead of Oceania perpetually at war with Eurasia or Eastasia, we have Gilead perpetually at war with the Caliphate and, if that happens, some other ideology will come along to provide window dressing for a totalitarian movement of whoever or whateverâs left.
Left, right, theocratic, or neo-feudalist, itâs just SSDD. Itâs all about the being the ones wearing the boot stamping in humanityâs face forever, nothing more, nothing less. The object of war is war, the object of terror is terror, the object of breeding hate and fear is to drive people crazy, like lab rats who get shocked no matter which button they push, leading the seek refuge from terror by ever greater attachment to that which terrorizes them.
It is true that thereâs nothing special about whatâs motivating young westerners to join a movement like that. But itâs the same stupid shit that motivates most idiotic behavior by young people: alienation, a sense of powerlessness and ennui, and rejection of the mores of oneâs parents, either as normal rebellion or as a reaction to the sense that their conventionality is submission to oppression, rejection of what theyâre told by authority. Thereâs nothing special here, nothing uniquely Islamic or unique to Muslims about it. Thatâs the part no one seems to be able to wrap their heads around.
7 Likes
When the left and right talks about assimilation, they also mean the acquiescence of the âassimilatedâ to current hierarchies of power in the world.
I donât and I donât think this is true for most thoughtful people.
No assimilation means becoming Western, philosophically modern and more open and progressive than they ever would dare be in a Muslim dominated nation. Covering woman, preventing them from reaching their full potential, dietary laws, hatred of LGBT, a religion-dominated life - jettison these and you can assimilate. Without changing these things, youâre just living a parallel life largely disconnected from Western norms.emphasized text
2 Likes