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| ISIL: a clear and present danger to world peace. |
Since the beginning of 2014—the year in which the world was to mark the
one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I by leaping headlong into
new situations fraught with grave threats for world peace—several regional
conflicts have morphed into worldwide concerns. All of these are critical,
difficult to solve and risky in that they pose a catalyst for world conflict:
the war in Syria, the war in Ukraine, the exchanges of missile fire between the
Israeli government and Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip, all of these have
this year shaken the foundations of world peace. But perhaps the most immediate
and high-profile of these threats has been the swift rise of the fundamentalist
terror organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL.
Without a doubt, ISIL is a clear and present danger to world peace and
democracy. But it is worthwhile reflecting that it is as much an indirect
threat, because of how burgeoning fear of its rapid advances might affect the
quality of Western democracies through the self-defensive initiatives that they
themselves implement, as it is a direct threat, because of the barbaric
fundamentalist actions that it is carrying out. ISIL is violently challenging the
West—as well as the Middle East—by seeking not only to impose its authoritarian
Islamist crusade on the Arab world (and thus, if successful, place it off
limits to relations with democratic Western nations), but also to send its
jihadist fanatics out into the rest of the world to wreak havoc on what it
considers the corrupt societies of Western Christian and Jewish infidels.
Now often referred to simply as the IS or Islamic State, the
Sunni-fundamentalist ISIL has evolved simultaneously with the better-known
al-Qaeda Islamic terrorist movement. But it is far less politically flexible
and far more fanatically focused than al-Qaeda. So much so that, while the two
groups formerly fought side by side against the Bashar al-Assad regime in
Syria’s three-year-old civil-turned-regional war, al-Qaeda earlier this year
publicly broke all ties with ISIL due to the latter’s relentlessly brutal
tactics and to its notorious intractability. Since then, the Sunni insurgent
group has declared itself a “caliphate”, also grandly claiming de facto
religious authority over the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Its immediate goal is
not only to take physical control of Iraq and Syria, but also to eventually win
control over the entire Levant region, which includes Cyprus, Israel, Jordan,
Lebanon, Palestine, and portions of Turkey. Its ultimate goal is to bring all
Muslims everywhere in the world under its political control. And their main
rule for all of these objectives would appear to be zero tolerance of any but
their own politico-religious ideology. Quite simply, those conquered must
choose between ISIL-style Islam and death. And as if to illustrate, in its
rampage across the Middle East, ISIL has tortured and murdered thousands of
civilians in the most horrific of ways: beheading, crucifixion and mass
execution among them.
While the goals of ISIL may sound insanely ambitious, it is worth
recalling that they are no more so than those of other fundamentalist fanatics
before them—the Fascists and the Nazis, to name just two examples. And while its
following may be relatively small, its ranks have grown nearly tenfold in the
past couple of years and today are estimated to total anywhere from 30,000 to
50,000. Nor is this surprising as radical extremist movements go: Hitler’s
earliest followers could (and did) fit into a beer garden.
The threat of ISIL to the Middle East is of obvious and serious concern
to the West—if for no other reason, because the group is concentrating its
combat efforts on taking the most oil-rich areas that it can—but its ability to
sow terror on the streets of Western capitals is of even graver concern to
governments in the West, since recent intelligence is demonstrating that
converts to Sunni extremism in Europe and the United States may number into the
thousands. This provides easy access by such foreign-trained terrorists to
their countries of origin and neighboring nations in the West. And nowhere is
this trend more prevalent, it would appear, than in Britain.
According to counterinsurgency experts, a typical British ISIL recruit
is a male in his twenties, with at least some university education and a
history of some sort of Muslim activism. Many are from middle class families of
Muslim origin. These young men frequently commence their radicalization through
contact with Islamist propaganda on the social networks, which ISIL is
particularly adept at using for recruitment.
According to at least one expert, Britons who become ISIL recruits usually
fall into one of three categories. One recruit type is made up of
thrill-seekers, youths who have previously been involved in gang-related
activities in their urban neighborhoods in Britain and are attracted to ISIL
because of its glorification of armed violence, the sophisticated weaponry that
it shows off on the Internet, and the camaraderie that ostensibly flourishes in
the group’s training camps in Syria (or al-Sham in the ISIL lexicon). A second type comprises dangerous sociopaths
who are merely attracted to ISIL’s extroverted brutality, people who want to
join up precisely because it’s the most ruthless outfit around and because the
idea of committing heinous crimes against humanity with complete impunity is
attractive to them—and clearly, to a terrorist organization like ISIL, this
type of cold-blooded killer is of great practical use, as witnessed by “Jihad
John’s” decapitation of American journalist James Foley on an ISIL video tape.
Finally, the third type of recruit is the idealist. Islamist idealists form
part of the “spiritual” core of groups like ISIL, because they are the “moral justifiers”
of extremist actions.
Seen from this perspective, there is little difference between this last
type of ISIL recruit and many of the American fighters who gladly volunteered
to invade Iraq in 2003. Just as those idealistic Americans bought into the provably
groundless story that they were avenging their 3,000 countrymen who died in the
nine-eleven terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and that they were
making the world safe for Western democracy, these Islamist idealists go to
Syria to avenge the women and children murdered by the Assad regime or to Iraq
to avenge the hundred thousand civilians who have died as a result of the 2003 US-led
invasion and subsequent decade of civil war in that country, while, more
importantly, gaining ground for Islam. Even the extremist idealists who eventually
become such battle-hardened veterans that they no longer think of themselves as
heroes coming from abroad to take revenge on Western-backed regimes will, nonetheless,
frequently become fanatical crusaders invested in the argument that they are
the keepers of the faith and of the territory of Allah and that it is their
duty to impose and dispense God’s will, by wielding his swift and mighty sword in
Iraq and the Levant.
In general, it is hard for Western Christians and Jews to comprehend the
jihadist holy war being waged by Islamic fundamentalists against the rest of
the world at large and we do so, for the most part, by classing them in the
same category with other types of anarchic terrorists. But to do so is to miss the point and to underestimate
their resolve. It would be wiser to view the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism
as comparable to the Christian Crusades that, for nearly 200 years, from the 11th
to the 13th centuries pitted “Knights for Christ” against what were
considered “Islamic infidels”—as well as against any other “enemies of the
Church” that successive pontiffs marked as such. Like the Christian Crusades,
Islamic Jihad is frequently more politically than religiously motivated and it
is just as often peopled by cut-throats, mercenaries, and power-hungry fortune hunters
as its Christian counterpart was. But at its core, as in the Crusades, Jihad is
driven by religious fanaticism and social fundamentalism, forces capable of
breeding self-justification for the most heinous of acts against any and all
“infidels”, since the essential purpose is to either convert or exterminate the
“enemy” in the “holy name of God”.
In view of this reality, then, perhaps the single most important factor
that the West should be bearing in mind—as it continues what promises to be a
prolonged struggle against the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism—is
that of its own core beliefs and social mores. Up to now, that hasn’t been the
case. In a very real sense, as of September 11, 2001, jihadist extremists have
been winning ground from Western democracy, simply by instilling fear in the
government and in the citizens of the United States and its allies. And it is
of utmost importance that this situation be remedied and that the ground lost be
won back, in terms of human and civil rights as well as the rule of law and
rules of engagement.
Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism has managed to undermine the most
essential bases of Western democracies, starting with the United States, simply
by using their own fear against them. Reeling under the effects of panic, the
leader of Western democracy has eroded human and civil rights through
exceptional laws and procedures implemented in the wake of nine-eleven and, in
doing so, has given rise to previously unthinkable occurrences: the suspension
of constitutional guarantees for anyone deemed a terrorist, the circumventing
of major international treaties on the treatment of prisoners of war, government
violation of citizens’ right to privacy in telecommunications and the mail,
pressure brought to bear on the media, arbitrary arrests without charges by a
court of law, the utilization of operative methods employed by dictatorships
long criticized and targeted by Washington for sanctions, including the limited
use of torture within the country by agencies under federal government control,
the pressing into service of third party countries for the purpose of torturing
and interrogating persons of interest, and the creation of lists of individuals
marked for extermination under orders from the Executive Branch of government.
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| General Carlo Dalla Chiesa |
In the 1970s, General Carlo Dalla Chiesa, the one-time leader of Italy’s
elite national police, the Carabinieri,
who was placed in charge of that country’s strategy in fighting the Red
Brigades terrorist organization, referred to the danger, in confronting a
cunning and ruthless non-traditional enemy, of turning into something no better
than one’s rival if one loses sight of the rule of law. On the occasion of the
abduction and subsequent murder of elder statesman and former Prime Minister
Aldo Moro many voices were raised calling on Dalla Chiesa to use
non-traditional methods such as torture to find out where the renowned politician
was being held. But in the face of this growing sentiment, the general
responded: “Italy can survive the loss of an Aldo Moro, [but] it will not
survive the implementation of torture.”
His message should today stand as a warning to the United States and
other Western democracies, which at other times in their history have served as
the moral and ethical compass for the rest of the world. As the West seeks to
form and lead a worldwide alliance to provide a solution to the ISIL challenge,
it should focus on also winning hearts and minds by clearly demonstrating,
through exemplary conduct, that Western democracy is up to that challenge and
that the hard and fast rules of secular democracy and the rights of Man are not
simply hollow terms, but practicable values that are far superior to the
fundamentalist ideologies against which the West is attempting to defend the
world.
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