THE FRAGILITY OF ISLAMOFASCISM
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Thursday, 01 February 2007
[This is the text of a speech I am giving to the Council for National Policy at Amelia Island, Florida, Friday, February 2.]
[snip]
It was in 1984 that I gave my first speech to CNP. It was entitled The Coming Collapse of the Soviet Union. There are a few fellow old-timers right here who were there. Most people back then couldn't even imagine a world in which the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
Yet I went on to predict something even more unimaginable -- that the Soviet collapse wasn't far off in the distant future, but that it was coming fast.
The End of Islam
By God's grace, we are living in momentous times, which could be the beginning of the end of Islam.
Muslim states are the most severe persecutors of Christians and radical Muslim extremists are the most vicious terrorists, hijackers, kidnappers, suicide bombers and assassins in the world today.
And I try not to post excerpts from Palestinian news sources or obviously biased blogs. That would be too easy and equally wrong.
An truly interesting/sad story that happened over 20 years ago to the young boy.
Since then over one million have died in Rwanda and probably 200,000+ have died in Darfur.
**Darfur is very much the result of the global jihad.**
Not to mention
the hundreds of thousands killed by dictators and evil people around the world. My point? It had nothing to do with
the "evil" of Islam. The world, in many places, is evil. We are blessed in the USA.
**Wow. The first time JDN can say something nice about America. I'll be sure to remember this.**
But "20,000 useful idiots" (I am glad you consider them "useful") :evil: believe more killing is wrong. Hard to refute.
An truly interesting/sad story that happened over 20 years ago to the young boy.
But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period - I am addressing myself to the School - surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.
Fareed Zakaria is by no means perfect but I really like this article as an explanation of why just being a democratic does not necessarily mean good.
http://www.fareedzakaria.com/ARTICLES/other/democracy.html
November, 1997
Foreign Affairs
The Rise of Illiberal Democracy
By Fareed Zakaria
The tension between constitutional liberalism and democracy centers on the scope of governmental authority. Constitutional liberalism is about the limitation of power, democracy about its accumulation and use. For this reason, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals saw in democracy a force that could undermine liberty. James Madison explained in The Federalist that "the danger of oppression" in a democracy came from "the majority of the community." Tocqueville warned of the "tyranny of the majority," writing, "The very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority."
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Rachel's post is an important one, but I too am confused by its presence here. Where would it better belong?
Amazing how those that leave the religion of peace have to live like mob informants.
WSJ
Europe's Hezbollah Hesitation
Brussels is still reluctant to call the Shiite terror outfit what it is..
Surprising no one, Bulgarian investigators said Tuesday that two of the perpetrators of last year's bombing in a Bulgarian resort city were members of Hezbollah. But don't think the news has changed many minds on the Continent about calling the Shiite terror outfit what it is.
Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign-policy chief, said she emphasizes "the need for a reflection over the outcome of the investigation." How large-minded. "There is no automatic listing just because you have been behind a terrorist attack," EU counterterrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told the EUObserver online newspaper last week that "It's not only the legal requirement that you have to take into consideration, it's also a political assessment of the context and the timing."
There's also Sylke Tempel, editor of the German magazine Internationale Politik, who told the New York Times: "There's the overall fear if we're too noisy about this, Hezbollah might strike again, and it might not be Israeli tourists this time." So the EU can't designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization because Hezbollah might respond by committing terrorism. The July bombing killed a Bulgarian bus driver in addition to five Israeli tourists.
Brussels has resisted blacklisting Hezbollah on the excuse that the group has military and civilian wings, and that clamping down on the former would cripple the latter and thus destabilize the Hezbollah-dominated government of Lebanon. Yet Hamas also has terrorist and civilian wings and runs part of a government, and the EU has designated it as a terrorist group for a decade.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Ashton told reporters on Wednesday that adding Hezbollah to the terror list is one of "several options" the EU is considering. We'll believe it when we see it. Meantime, Europe's failure to designate Hezbollah means the group continues to operate on the Continent, using it as a base for money-laundering and fundraising. Some of it is even tax-deductible.
At least Israel is still taking the fight against Hezbollah seriously. Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak acknowledged this week that Jerusalem was responsible for a recent jet attack in Syria that destroyed a weapons convoy en route to Lebanon. Israeli officials have long warned that they will act militarily to stop Syria's armory from falling into Hezbollah's hands after the Assad regime falls.
The mark of a serious foreign policy is the ability to acknowledge reality, even when it's politically inconvenient. The EU's Hezbollah hesitation does not suggest a serious policy.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/10/bill-maher-liberals-too-soft-islam-elephant-room/
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/09/19/france-abandons-the-islamic-state-name-and-starts-calling-the-terror-group-something-that-they-hate/
http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/isis-releases-flames-war-feature-film-intimidate-west
The subject line comes from my father, who always ended business meetings with that question. Big theories are great, but what do we do tomorrow at 0900?
I may not agree with each and every one of the following, but the general thrust of it is most worthy of consideration:
http://pamelageller.com/2015/01/here-it-is-the-solution-to-stop-jihad-sharia-and-islamization-now.html/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV69IjsUGQs
http://chrishernandezauthor.com/2015/02/18/stop-alienating-muslim-good-guys/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427044/christians-isis-genocide-obama-administration?xLD0Ky6aRhL2Gd1c.01
Calmly and dispassionately let's assess her proposed strategy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12008690/The-real-clash-of-civilisation-is-inthe-Wests-attitude-to-terror.html=
I'm thinking that the term "possible terrorist attack" should be replaced with "jihadi raid".
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/04/01/islamist-violence-threatens-judeo-christian-civilization.html
http://www.investigativeproject.org/5241/islamist-terror-growing-in-lethality
https://info.publicintelligence.net/SMA-NarrativeSpace.pdf
Two POTH (NYTimes) articles I posted this morning raise some very important questions.
For us here, listing the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization has been a simple and obvious call, but the consequences from blow back in the Muslim world may be something we have not fully considered.
Similar issues in the McMaster-Trump article.
https://clarionproject.org/why-does-europe-have-high-numbers-of-jihadis-compared-to-america/
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/isis-criminals-converts/426822/
Reborn Into Terrorism
Why are so many ISIS recruits ex-cons and converts?
An ISIS flag in a Lebanese refugee camp Ali Hashisho / Reuters
Simon Cottee Jan 25, 2016 Global
In 2014, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the organizer of the November 2015 Paris attacks, appeared in a video, driving a pickup truck with a mound of corpses in tow. Speaking to the camera before driving off, he said: “Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco. Now, thank God, following God’s path, we’re towing apostates.” This was a derogatory reference to his victims, who, in his mind, were renegades from the Muslim faith and thus legitimate targets for slaughter. But it was also a telling allusion to his own irreligious past, before he found God and joined ISIS and started murdering people.
Indeed, Abaaoud was once a wayward soul with a rap sheet. His sister Yasmina told The New York Times that Abaaoud didn’t show any particular interest in religion prior to his departure for Syria, and “did not even go to the mosque.” But he had gone to prison several times, and it was apparently there, like so many Western jihadists, that he grew radical.
Brahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up in the Paris attacks, seems to have been intimately acquainted with criminality as well: The bar he owned in Molenbeek, Brussels was shut down by police a week before the attacks over concerns about the illegal sale of drugs there. And Brahim’s brother Salah, a suspected Paris assailant who remains at large, was not your typical finger-waving ideological fanatic: He reportedly visited gay bars and was more likely to be seen rolling a joint than a prayer mat.
Related Story
The Pre-Terrorists Among Us
According to a recent Washington Post article, Abaaoud and his crew of assassins represent a “new type of jihadist”—“part terrorist, part gangster,” who uses “skills honed in lawbreaking” for the ends of “violent radicalism.”
“European jails have been breeding grounds of Islamist radicals for years, particularly in Belgium and France,” the Post’s Anthony Faiola and Souad Mekhennet write. “But recently, criminality and extremism have become even more interwoven, with recruits’ illegal behavior continuing even after they are shown ‘the light’ of radical Islam.”
This is an acute observation, although it’s scarcely surprising that Westernized recruits to ISIS are just as deviant and lawless as their patrons in Syria and Iraq—the true originators of punk jihad, where anything goes and nothing, not even the weaponization of children, is off-limits. After all, the spiritual founder of ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was a violent thug both before and after his embrace of Salafi jihadism.
Like Abaaoud and Zarqawi, Siddhartha Dhar (a.k.a. Abu Rumaysah), the latest British-accented ISIS recruit to gain notoriety for his suspected role in the group’s videos, also broke dramatically with his past: He was a Hindu before gravitating toward radical Islam, although, unlike Abaaoud and Zarqawi, Dhar didn’t have a history of violence, robbery, or drug-dealing, and hadn’t done any jail time. Instead, he rented out bouncy castles to the kafirs he came to loathe.
These biographical traits have cropped up in numerous studies. In his survey of 31 incidents of jihadist terrorism in Europe between September 2001 and October 2006, Edwin Bakker found that at least 58 of the 242 perpetrators of these attacks—or 24 percent, a “strikingly high number,” he says—had a criminal record prior to their arrest for terrorism-related offenses. According to a study by Robin Simcox, of 58 individuals linked to 32 ISIS-related plots in the West between July 2014 and August 2015, 22 percent had a past criminal record or were in contact with law enforcement.
Simcox also found that 29 percent of these individuals were converts to Islam. Converts, he reported, accounted for 67 percent of American Muslims involved in committing or planning an ISIS-related attack—“a significantly disproportionate percentage, considering that they comprise only 20% of Muslims throughout the entire United States.” Converts are similarly overrepresented among convicted British jihadists. According to Scott Kleinman and Scott Flower, converts constitute an estimated 2 to 3 percent of Britain’s 2.8 million Muslims, yet “converts have been involved in 31% of jihadist terrorism convictions in the UK from 2001 to 2010.”
What is it about ISIS, and militant Islamist groups in general, that makes them attractive both to criminals and to converts or born-again Muslims?
In The True Believer, published in 1951, the philosopher Eric Hoffer suggested that mass movements hold a special appeal to “sinners,” providing “a refuge from a guilty conscience.” “Mass movements,” he wrote, “are custom-made to fit the needs of the criminal—not only for the catharsis of his soul but also for the exercise of his inclinations and talents.”
High-risk, high-intensity Islamist activism seems tailor-made for the needs of criminals and ex-cons.
This also applies to jihadist groups like ISIS, which promise would-be recruits not just action and violence, but also redemption.
In his 2005 study of al-Muhajiroun, a banned Islamist movement based in Britain with reputed connections to ISIS, Quintan Wiktorowicz detailed the multiple material and social costs attached to what he calls “high-risk Islamic activism.” He mentioned one al-Muhajiroun document in which members are sternly warned to refrain from behaviors ranging from “listening to music and radio” and “window shopping and spending hours in the market,” to “hanging out with friends” and “joking around and being sarcastic.” The organization’s activism, Wiktorowicz observed, is “fast-paced, demanding, and relentless.” It also bristles “against the mainstream,” generating a “kind of excitement often found in counterculture movements rebelling against the status quo.” Many members, he noted, “seem to enjoy their role as ‘outsiders.’”
But more crucially, Wiktorowicz argued, al-Muhajiroun promotes the idea of spiritual salvation—socializing its members to believe that their sacrifices in the here-and-now will be rewarded in the hereafter.
High-risk, high-intensity Islamist activism, in other words, seems tailor-made for the needs of criminals and ex-cons, providing them with a supportive community of fellow outsiders, a schedule of work, a positive identity, and the promise of cleansing away past sins.
Can the same be said for converts to Islam or born-again Muslims?
A common line of argument among scholars is that converts to Islam are insufficiently knowledgeable about their new faith and thus acutely vulnerable to extremist interpretations of Islam, which they lack the intellectual or theological resources to counter. While this explanation seems intuitively plausible, it assumes that converts to Islam know less about their newfound religion than Muslims who were born and raised into it. Yet the evidence for this claim is shaky, and at odds with studies showing just how engaged and well-versed many converts are in debates over matters of faith. The idea that converts, lacking in religious knowledge, are peculiarly susceptible to demagogic manipulation also carries the implication that those with a deep knowledge of Islam are unlikely to join jihadist groups. This, too, is a contentious point—and it’s unclear whether it could even be empirically established, given how contested Islamic knowledge is. More contentious still, this logic essentializes Islam as inherently pacifist, suggesting that some true or proper understanding of the faith would serve as a repellent against deviant jihadist interpretations. But what Islam is or isn’t is an open (and indeed volatile) question; there is not one “true” Islam, but a plurality of Islams, each competing for epistemological hegemony.
Converts to Islam are perennial outsiders. They are “doubly marginalized.”
A more promising explanation lies in the social situation of converts in the West, and their status as apostates or defectors from the non-Islamic faith or secular world into which they were born and acculturated. In an illuminating article on “court Jews and Christian renegades,” the sociologist Lewis A. Coser wrote, “The renegade is, as it were, forever on trial.” Indeed: “He must continually prove himself worthy of his new status and standing.”
Converts to Islam are perennial outsiders, fully belonging neither to the Muslim communities into which they convert nor to the communities they leave behind. They are “doubly marginalized,” as Kate Zebiri puts it in her study British Muslim Converts. This, more than any cognitive failings on their part, may explain the nature of their vulnerability to jihadist groups, which offer potential recruits not only belonging, but also seemingly irrefutable proof of commitment to the faith: self-sacrifice and ultimately death. It may also make them more lethal as jihadist talent, since their eagerness to prove their new commitment may push them to ever greater extremes.
Yet this hypothesis depends on the assumption that the converts in jihadist groups were in any meaningful sense converts to Islam prior to becoming jihadists, rather than the other way round: that they converted to jihadism before, or at the same time as, they became Muslims, so that their conversion to Islam was, as the political scientist Olivier Roy recently argued, “opportunistic” and thus a consequence of, and not an antecedent to, their conversion to jihadism.
One way of clarifying the sequencing in these situations would be to look closely at the convert’s social milieu and the circumstances in which he or she converted to Islam. According to Roy, the “second-generation Muslims and native converts” who dominate the European jihadist scene were “radicalized within a small group of ‘buddies’ who met in a particular place (neighborhood, prison, sport club)” and who “recreate a ‘family,’ a brotherhood,” often with biological ties. They are, he says, in the first instance attracted not to “moderate Islam,” but to the radicalism of violent Salafism, and correspondingly, “almost never have a history of devotion and religious practice.”
Radicalized European youth, disaffected from their own societies, are not seeking Islam, but “a cause.”
In short, Roy argues, echoing the findings of Marc Sageman and Scott Atran, radicalized European youth, disaffected from their own societies, are not seeking Islam, but “a cause, a label, a grand narrative to which they can add the bloody signature of their personal revolt.”
Hoffer reminds us how deeply personal that revolt can be. “A mass movement,” the philosopher wrote, “particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self.” For today’s repentant criminals and restless converts, whose “innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth,” the all-immersive and all-redeeming jihadist project seemingly offers the perfect solution.
:x
https://nypost.com/2017/12/11/family-of-port-authority-bombing-suspect-is-outraged-at-investigators-tactics/
Well , we are supposedly fighting ISIS world wide if not in Syria I guess
This and the murder of two young ladies on a mountain in Morocco serves as sobering reminders of what we need to keep vigilante about.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/world/mapping-isis-attacks-around-the-world/index.html
The Unconquerable Islamic World
Afghanistan shows the folly of mistaking Christian ideals for ‘universal’ ones.
By Robert Nicholson
Aug. 19, 2021 6:26 pm ET
Historians, soldiers and politicians will debate for decades the particulars of what went wrong during America’s intervention in Afghanistan. But a simple truth has been apparent for years: We Westerners failed not for lack of effort, but because military and economic power alone cannot change the Islamic world in a lasting way.
The U.S.-led coalition arrived in South Asia 20 years ago seeking justice after 9/11. Soon we turned into apostles of universal civilization, the idea that human beings everywhere would make the same basic decisions we made in building political community. We set out to establish a liberal democratic state, not realizing that politics lies downstream of culture, and culture downstream of religion. It never occurred to us that America was what it was because of Christianity, and Afghanistan was what it was because of Islam.
The political scientist Samuel Huntington was right: Islamic societies belong to a distinctive civilization that resists the imposition of foreign values through power. We may believe that argument or not, but trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and two decades of warfare have not proved otherwise.
Still, many remain blind to the obvious. Facing seemingly unrelated chaos in places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, Libya and Nigeria, our diplomats and strategists devise one-off responses that ignore the common ideologies and actors that link them. Finding piles of broken china around the room, they diligently glue the pieces back together, not seeing the elephant nearby whose feet are covered in ceramic dust.
This blindness is driven by a noble desire to see humans as equal, interchangeable beings for whom faith and culture are accidents of birth. But these accidents are non-negotiable truths for hundreds of millions of people who would rather die than concede them. Failure to comprehend this is a symptom of spiritual emptiness: Alienated from America’s Christian origins, millions cannot fathom how faith could play a vital role in binding humans together.
Euphemisms like “the Greater Middle East” reflect unease with a unified Islamic world. Never mind that Muslims themselves speak in such terms, or that local diversity between Indonesia and Morocco does not undermine the basic coherence of the umma. The House of Islam has many rooms, but it stands on a few pillars: The Quran is Allah’s final revelation, binding on all humanity; faith is a matter of private devotion as well as public law, best lived out in a state that blends religion and politics; and Muslims should, where possible, hold power over non-Muslims to ensure that Allah’s law is rightly enforced. It is doctrines like these that cause the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Hamas to fight the “Jews and Crusaders” who tread on land that historically belonged to Islam. But their commitments are far from radical; most Muslims see them as normative even if they fail to act on them.
New trends may herald changing times. The recent decision of four Muslim-majority countries to normalize relations with Israel was a risky, concrete act of friendship that deserves recognition. But such acts are still anomalous in a region where religious and secular Muslims overwhelmingly reject Israel, the U.S., and the Hebraic ties that bind them. Those who call for liberalizing traditional doctrines are brave souls but still statistical minorities.
The West cannot change the Islamic world, but neither can it ignore the world’s fastest-growing religious community. The best strategy will move from rollback to containment and prioritize the defense of American interests and allies over the promotion of values and institutions. Muslim Americans naturally merit the same rights as other citizens. Muslim-majority states that seek friendship with the U.S. deserve a warm welcome, especially when they make difficult decisions for peace. And the American government can still provide humanitarian aid to the casualties of intra-Muslim wars, with a special concern for non-Muslims caught in the crossfire. But overall, the U.S. needs to step back. The best way to honor American values is to stop forcing them on those who reject them.
Only Muslim majorities can decide the Muslim future. Washington must affirm their right to build organic societies that align with their values because they will do so regardless. This does not mean we will stand by when their choices cross American red lines, but the U.S. must affirm their right to make them.
The Islamic world may not change, or maybe it will—but it was never our job to decide. Our focus must be on curing the spiritual sickness that blinded us in the first place, recovering our own sense of civilizational self and reorienting our priorities accordingly.
Mr. Nicholson is president of the Philos Project.
September 2, 2021
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What the Taliban’s Resurgence Means for the Arab World
Could the Taliban's return to power present a threat to Arab nations?
By: Hilal Khashan
There have been mixed reactions in the Arab world to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Oman’s grand sheikh congratulated the Afghan people on what he described as a spectacular victory against aggressors. Radical movements, especially in Syria and Gaza, viewed the Taliban’s return to Kabul as a Western defeat in the war against Islam. The Syrian-based Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which considers itself a sister movement of the Taliban, saw the recent developments as representing the triumph of jihadism in Muslim countries.
But the ruling elite, especially in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have deep concerns about the Taliban’s return to power. The Saudis called on the Taliban to develop a comprehensive political arrangement that includes all segments of Afghan society. Similarly, the UAE expressed concerns over security and called on the Taliban to focus on bringing peace and stability. But both the concerns and celebrations seem out of touch with the reality that the Taliban does not present a serious threat to Muslim countries outside of Afghanistan.
The Making of the Taliban
The Taliban are a homebred movement with foundations in Afghan conservative society. Unlike al-Qaida and the Islamic State, they have no aspirations outside of their home turf; their focus is solely on Afghanistan and their Pashtun compatriots in Pakistan.
The group was founded in 1994 by Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, an Afghan city near the Pakistani border. His project was supported in part by Saudi funding dedicated to religious schools. Omar had lost his right eye in a battle against the Soviets, which withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Appalled by Afghan’s rampant corruption, he assembled scores of students from religious schools to help him establish a puritan Islamic state. Adopting “the Taliban” as the name of their movement, they seized control in 1996 of the whole country except Badakhshan province in the northeast, which was controlled by the Northern Alliance.
After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the Taliban were removed from Kabul but continued to pursue a national project to end the occupation and reestablish a model Islamic political system. During peace talks in Qatar in 2020 that led to the agreement to end the war, the Taliban assured the U.S. that they would not provide shelter to al-Qaida fighters and that it would engage Afghanistan’s vulnerable populations in political and social integration talks. But considering the group’s history, many Arabs didn’t take its promises seriously. The Taliban had told the U.S. after the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that they were committed to preventing Osama bin Laden from launching attacks on American assets from Afghanistan – though they also claimed that the U.S. provided no evidence implicating bin Laden in the two attacks. After 9/11, the Taliban refused to turn in bin Laden and other al-Qaida personnel, viewing them as allies that had helped liberate Afghanistan from Soviet invaders. Only three countries recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. (In 2004, when Mohammad bin Zayed became crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the UAE stopped supporting Islamic political movements.)
(click to enlarge)
Jihadism in Disarray
The Taliban was founded to promote civic values compatible with the teachings of Islam. Al-Qaida, on the other hand, was focused on combating Christians and Jews, whom it blamed – in addition to self-serving national governments – for the travails of Muslims. In 1988, Osama bin Laden and other Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan established al-Qaida in Peshawar, Pakistan, as a decentralized, transnational movement. The group’s fighters eventually left Afghanistan and returned to their countries of origin, seeking to bring down unpopular regimes throughout the Arab world. In the wake of the Second Gulf War, they also launched al-Qaida’s first attack against the U.S. in 1993, detonating a bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City.
Al-Qaida and its affiliates have a presence in many parts of Asia and Africa, including the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus, India, Egypt’s Sinai, Somalia, North Africa and the Sahel countries. However, they haven’t managed to bring down an existing government, largely because U.S. airstrikes and local security forces have kept them in check. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and targeted airstrikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, decimated al-Qaida’s backbone. The group weakened and splintered, setting the stage for the rise of the Islamic State. Unlike al-Qaida, whose attacks primarily targeted the West and Israel, the Islamic State chose to deal with the enemy within, i.e., the nation-state. Its history goes back to the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood splintered following the 1967 Six-Day War, leading to the emergence of many Islamic movements dedicated to toppling the secular Egyptian government and installing an Islamic state in its ruins.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant appeared in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and gathered momentum among alienated Sunni Arabs in Anbar province. In 2014, the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, with a force totaling just 1,500 men against more than 45,000 Iraqi troops. U.S. airstrikes and ground forces halted their expansion toward Baghdad. With the participation of the peshmergas and the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, a U.S.-led coalition soundly defeated IS in Iraq by 2017 and in Syria a couple years later.
The Islamic State-Khorasan, the group responsible for last week’s attack on the Kabul airport, emerged in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. Khorasan is a historical region in Central Asia, where the group seeks to operate. In addition to Afghanistan, the region includes Pakistan, India, Kashmir, eastern Iran and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, populated mainly by Muslim Uyghurs. IS-K’s membership is multinational and includes Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Chechens, Uyghurs, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. It has roughly 1,500 active members and does not have wide appeal among the Afghan population. In 2018, the Taliban decisively defeated the group in the Battle of Darzab. Even though IS-K has demonstrated an ability to stage high concept, bloody operations, it does not have the military capability to conquer territory – though Afghanistan’s neighbors, namely China, fear that it might attract young recruits from their restive populations.
The Decline of Political Islam
Arab uprisings saw the rise of Islamic political parties in a number of Arab countries, but their popularity has steadily declined ever since. In 2012, Mohammed Morsi, a candidate representing the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency in Egypt’s only democratic election since the 1952 military coup. A year later, the army ousted him, outlawed the Brotherhood and issued harsh prison terms for Brotherhood leaders and activists. In Tunisia, which political observers described as an exception to the turmoil that plagued Arab states, President Kais Saied suspended the parliament last July and concentrated most state powers in his hands. The popularity of the Islamist Ennahda party peaked in the 2011 general elections, in which it received 37 percent of the vote. In 2014, it received 28 percent, which declined to 20 percent in 2019. Charges of corruption and mismanagement have steadily chipped away at the party’s popular appeal.
Arab Spring
(click to enlarge)
In Morocco, King Mohammad VI placated protesters’ demands for political reforms by appointing a prime minister from the Justice and Development Party, which won 23 percent of the vote and the most seats in the 2011 elections. In 2016, the party won 27 percent of the vote and held on to the prime minister’s office. The law prevents a single party from winning an absolute majority in Morocco, where the king still reigns supreme and the Justice and Development Party’s success did not translate into real political power. In Yemen, the Islah Party, which in the last parliamentary elections in 2003 came in second to the ruling General People’s Congress party, lost much of its influence since the 2011 uprising. The surge of the Houthi rebels and their seizure of most Islah strongholds, in addition to the UAE’s hostility toward Sunni political Islam, made it irrelevant.
The Arab uprisings and the emergence of militant Islamic movements overshadowed other Islamic movements in the region that were focused on politics and opposed to violence. There is no justification for Arab concerns that the Taliban takeover will make Afghanistan a refuge for Islamic movements, a base for militant training, and a launchpad for subversive activities. The Taliban are not a transnational group, and Islamic movements in the Arab region should not expect to receive support from them. IS-K is focused on Central Asia, not the Arab world, but it’s still doubtful it can develop the capacity to mount serious attacks on Afghanistan’s neighbors. Neither the Taliban nor the Central Asian states will allow the group to become a real threat. Afghans from different political leanings are self-contained people with a particularistic worldview. The events of the past decade indicate that militant Islam cannot win.
It's inspiring the global jihad, from Saudi, to Iran, from Denmark to Detroit.
Watch.
September 2, 2021
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What the Taliban’s Resurgence Means for the Arab World
Could the Taliban's return to power present a threat to Arab nations?
By: Hilal Khashan
There have been mixed reactions in the Arab world to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Oman’s grand sheikh congratulated the Afghan people on what he described as a spectacular victory against aggressors. Radical movements, especially in Syria and Gaza, viewed the Taliban’s return to Kabul as a Western defeat in the war against Islam. The Syrian-based Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which considers itself a sister movement of the Taliban, saw the recent developments as representing the triumph of jihadism in Muslim countries.
But the ruling elite, especially in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have deep concerns about the Taliban’s return to power. The Saudis called on the Taliban to develop a comprehensive political arrangement that includes all segments of Afghan society. Similarly, the UAE expressed concerns over security and called on the Taliban to focus on bringing peace and stability. But both the concerns and celebrations seem out of touch with the reality that the Taliban does not present a serious threat to Muslim countries outside of Afghanistan.
The Making of the Taliban
The Taliban are a homebred movement with foundations in Afghan conservative society. Unlike al-Qaida and the Islamic State, they have no aspirations outside of their home turf; their focus is solely on Afghanistan and their Pashtun compatriots in Pakistan.
The group was founded in 1994 by Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, an Afghan city near the Pakistani border. His project was supported in part by Saudi funding dedicated to religious schools. Omar had lost his right eye in a battle against the Soviets, which withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Appalled by Afghan’s rampant corruption, he assembled scores of students from religious schools to help him establish a puritan Islamic state. Adopting “the Taliban” as the name of their movement, they seized control in 1996 of the whole country except Badakhshan province in the northeast, which was controlled by the Northern Alliance.
After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the Taliban were removed from Kabul but continued to pursue a national project to end the occupation and reestablish a model Islamic political system. During peace talks in Qatar in 2020 that led to the agreement to end the war, the Taliban assured the U.S. that they would not provide shelter to al-Qaida fighters and that it would engage Afghanistan’s vulnerable populations in political and social integration talks. But considering the group’s history, many Arabs didn’t take its promises seriously. The Taliban had told the U.S. after the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that they were committed to preventing Osama bin Laden from launching attacks on American assets from Afghanistan – though they also claimed that the U.S. provided no evidence implicating bin Laden in the two attacks. After 9/11, the Taliban refused to turn in bin Laden and other al-Qaida personnel, viewing them as allies that had helped liberate Afghanistan from Soviet invaders. Only three countries recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. (In 2004, when Mohammad bin Zayed became crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the UAE stopped supporting Islamic political movements.)
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Jihadism in Disarray
The Taliban was founded to promote civic values compatible with the teachings of Islam. Al-Qaida, on the other hand, was focused on combating Christians and Jews, whom it blamed – in addition to self-serving national governments – for the travails of Muslims. In 1988, Osama bin Laden and other Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan established al-Qaida in Peshawar, Pakistan, as a decentralized, transnational movement. The group’s fighters eventually left Afghanistan and returned to their countries of origin, seeking to bring down unpopular regimes throughout the Arab world. In the wake of the Second Gulf War, they also launched al-Qaida’s first attack against the U.S. in 1993, detonating a bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City.
Al-Qaida and its affiliates have a presence in many parts of Asia and Africa, including the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus, India, Egypt’s Sinai, Somalia, North Africa and the Sahel countries. However, they haven’t managed to bring down an existing government, largely because U.S. airstrikes and local security forces have kept them in check. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and targeted airstrikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, decimated al-Qaida’s backbone. The group weakened and splintered, setting the stage for the rise of the Islamic State. Unlike al-Qaida, whose attacks primarily targeted the West and Israel, the Islamic State chose to deal with the enemy within, i.e., the nation-state. Its history goes back to the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood splintered following the 1967 Six-Day War, leading to the emergence of many Islamic movements dedicated to toppling the secular Egyptian government and installing an Islamic state in its ruins.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant appeared in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and gathered momentum among alienated Sunni Arabs in Anbar province. In 2014, the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, with a force totaling just 1,500 men against more than 45,000 Iraqi troops. U.S. airstrikes and ground forces halted their expansion toward Baghdad. With the participation of the peshmergas and the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, a U.S.-led coalition soundly defeated IS in Iraq by 2017 and in Syria a couple years later.
The Islamic State-Khorasan, the group responsible for last week’s attack on the Kabul airport, emerged in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. Khorasan is a historical region in Central Asia, where the group seeks to operate. In addition to Afghanistan, the region includes Pakistan, India, Kashmir, eastern Iran and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, populated mainly by Muslim Uyghurs. IS-K’s membership is multinational and includes Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Chechens, Uyghurs, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. It has roughly 1,500 active members and does not have wide appeal among the Afghan population. In 2018, the Taliban decisively defeated the group in the Battle of Darzab. Even though IS-K has demonstrated an ability to stage high concept, bloody operations, it does not have the military capability to conquer territory – though Afghanistan’s neighbors, namely China, fear that it might attract young recruits from their restive populations.
The Decline of Political Islam
Arab uprisings saw the rise of Islamic political parties in a number of Arab countries, but their popularity has steadily declined ever since. In 2012, Mohammed Morsi, a candidate representing the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency in Egypt’s only democratic election since the 1952 military coup. A year later, the army ousted him, outlawed the Brotherhood and issued harsh prison terms for Brotherhood leaders and activists. In Tunisia, which political observers described as an exception to the turmoil that plagued Arab states, President Kais Saied suspended the parliament last July and concentrated most state powers in his hands. The popularity of the Islamist Ennahda party peaked in the 2011 general elections, in which it received 37 percent of the vote. In 2014, it received 28 percent, which declined to 20 percent in 2019. Charges of corruption and mismanagement have steadily chipped away at the party’s popular appeal.
Arab Spring
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In Morocco, King Mohammad VI placated protesters’ demands for political reforms by appointing a prime minister from the Justice and Development Party, which won 23 percent of the vote and the most seats in the 2011 elections. In 2016, the party won 27 percent of the vote and held on to the prime minister’s office. The law prevents a single party from winning an absolute majority in Morocco, where the king still reigns supreme and the Justice and Development Party’s success did not translate into real political power. In Yemen, the Islah Party, which in the last parliamentary elections in 2003 came in second to the ruling General People’s Congress party, lost much of its influence since the 2011 uprising. The surge of the Houthi rebels and their seizure of most Islah strongholds, in addition to the UAE’s hostility toward Sunni political Islam, made it irrelevant.
The Arab uprisings and the emergence of militant Islamic movements overshadowed other Islamic movements in the region that were focused on politics and opposed to violence. There is no justification for Arab concerns that the Taliban takeover will make Afghanistan a refuge for Islamic movements, a base for militant training, and a launchpad for subversive activities. The Taliban are not a transnational group, and Islamic movements in the Arab region should not expect to receive support from them. IS-K is focused on Central Asia, not the Arab world, but it’s still doubtful it can develop the capacity to mount serious attacks on Afghanistan’s neighbors. Neither the Taliban nor the Central Asian states will allow the group to become a real threat. Afghans from different political leanings are self-contained people with a particularistic worldview. The events of the past decade indicate that militant Islam cannot win.
https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/the-war-continues-and-we-are-losing?s=w&utm_medium=web