Today's WaPo has an extended article profiling Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, Jihadist intellectual and author of a huge tract laying out a decentralized approach to Islamic terrorism after the fall of Afghanistan. Gentle readers who care about more than the headlines will want to give it a read (how's that for an insulting hook?).
In response, SWNID will observe that a decentralized jihad demands a particular kind of response from the West.
Part of this response is to continue to work to insure that no nation becomes a haven for Islamic terrorists, as Afghanistan was and Iraq could have become. That should be obvious, but it needs to be repeated as the West becomes weary of war.
A second, of course, is to work diligently at intelligence, including not only such things as datamining from phone records (a completely unintrusive measure that should be fully legal: how can anyone seriously think that the US Constitution of 1789 or its Bill of Rights forbids this?) but also--and this is the current weakness--live spies on the ground with the bad guys.
But here's the third that's not so obvious. Decentralized terrorist cells with weak links to each other are much more subject to being co-opted and neutralized by cultural and economic efforts than would be a centralized organization with a safe geographical base, tight communications, and a controlling hierarchy. The Jihadist who lives in, say, Seattle or Toronto or Nice or Lagos should surrounded by a culture that offers dignity, tranquility, and opportunity. These should be places where people can readily make a home, raise a family, enjoy friends, read and write books, listen to and make music, view and create art, and worship God.
In short, the West must continue to allow the human spirit to be human. And it must work to expand such liberty and opportunity to places where it does not exist (sub-Saharan Africa, central, south and southeast Asia).
Will Fariq Al-Carbomb continue to pursue his suicidal objectives when he sees that it's possible to live with liberty and pursue happiness, as Thomas Jefferson might have put it? Some will, of course. But even radical Islamists partake of the common human nature (there is such a thing, we insist). The power of the Jihadist ideal will be diminished to the degree that the West can continue to do what it has historically done: provide a safe haven for the flowering of humanity.
8 comments:
It seems the best way to combat this sort of decentralized terrorism is best outlined in Natan Sharansky's "The Case for Democracy".
Uh Fiona, have you every actually read any Plato? He's not among the materialist Epicureans or the Stoics to whom Paul preached. Plato's philosophical idealism is much more akin to Christian thought than that of the Homeric worldviews of the aforementioned schools.
SWNID, are you taking notes? Should we expect this in your class next semester? Aren't you glad that you earned your degree from an ancient Scottish university so that you could come here, make a blog, and be lectured about the New Testament? For me, this would be the fulfilment of all my education.
Fiona, do you honestly believe that salvation and correct philosophical thought deserve the same analogy? Though salvation may be all or nothing, the correctness of philosophical ideas is a bit more grey. It's better to have ideas that are close to correct than ideas that are entirely opposite he truth. I assume that neither of us believes that salvation is reliant on completely correct theology. Plato's thought is not complete, but reinterpretation of his works in light of the coming of Jesus has been one of the primary methods of Christian theology.
I pity the fact that you can only appreciate thought and art that you deem to reflect complete truth. And presumably, your judgment about every aspect of this truth is above reproach.
P.S. I have read Plato.
I will admittedly say that I am not an overly smart man. And I will also admit that I have not read Plato. What I can not add academically I can add in experience. I am a soldier, I have been to war, more than likely I am going back to war soon. I have dealt with Jihadist first hand. I justify my lack of forgiveness of these people by telling myself that they really aren't human. Humans surely would not do the thing that I have witnessed done to other humans. These animals glady give their own lives for the chance to hurt someone that has a simblance of connection to the US, in giving up their own life there is no disregard to the fact that they're going to brutally murder their own country men including women and children.
Now it is granted that this culture does not view children in the same regard that we do.
But none the less, I say the best way to take care of this problem is to hunt these animals down and kill every last one of them.
This though creates the problem that in doing this we become the evil America that these people say that we are. So we must win the hearts and minds of them and show them that Jihad isn't the answer. This is not going to be a quick solution, this is going to take generations. And even if America has the heart to stick this out, we will not be able to stop the idealist, just lower the sound of their screamings.
I want to thank my mindless sycophants for responding to Fiona. You have saved us the need to respond at all. But out of respect for Fiona's generation of multiple page views by readers of this blog, we will still respond briefly.
We assert that the value of Western civilization is relative. Your critique has force only if we assume it to be absolute. Western civilization is relatively better at taking care of humans than other civilizations, largely thanks to the influence of Christianity on its foundations. But it hasn't created the kingdom of God. When we talk politics, we talk relative goods for evil people, not utopia, salvation or other absolute goods.
OK?
And we are really shocked to learn that the New Testament condemns sin, human traditions, syncretism and the like. This is all news to us. I guess we should have read these books sometime.
Fiona, perhaps people (and here we refer to both ourselves and other commentators, including those who post and those who communicate with us by other means) keep misunderstanding the points of your posts because of the coherence of their content, or the lack thereof.
I (we use the singular to denote seriousness) honestly have no clue what your distinctive "worldview" is, and my experience suggests that the deficit does not lie with my ability to understand what other people write.
It seems that others who read your comments have the same interpretive struggle. Hence, they react as they do.
But keep posting. We appreciate the attention.
Fiona, SWNID says it best when he says most of us cannot understand the points you are trying to make. Most of the people who read SWNID's blog are fairly well educated, yet few comprehend your treatises. Perhaps if you wrote shorter entries, SWNID's gentle readers might "get" your opinions, convoluted as they seem to be. BTW, you need to take another look at Plato.
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