The Fallacy of Focusing on Islamic Radicalization
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
There are Jihadists from dozens of countries who
have joined ISIS. What do they all have in common?
The official answer is radicalization. Muslims in
Europe are “radicalized” by alienation, racism and
unemployment. Neglected by governments, Muslim youth
band together and become terrorists. Muslims in
Israel are responding to the “despair and
hopelessness” of the “Occupation”. Muslims from the
rest of the Middle East are angry over their
“dictators”. Muslims from the Ukraine? Who knows.
Radicalization comes packaged with a set of local
grievances and explanations. It contends that all
Muslim terrorism is a response to local conditions
and that we are responsible for those conditions.
Even though the “radicalization” is Islamic, it
denies that Islam plays a positive role as a
Jihadist goal. Instead, like Halal liquor or
hashish, it’s what Muslims turn to when they have
been disappointed in the West or in their own
governments. Islam is just what happens when a
Belgian Muslim can’t get a job.
And yet Islam is the only positive uniting factor
for Islamic terrorism.
Why otherwise should a Moroccan youth from a French
suburb who works at a nightclub, the son of a rural
Saudi farmer who has never been outside his country
and an American teenager who converted to Islam all
risk their lives to form an Islamic State? The
Jihadis of ISIS are a truly multinational and
multicultural bunch. They have traveled to two
foreign countries that most of them have never been
to.
What else unites them into a common identity that
they are willing to kill and die for if it isn’t
Islam?
Radicalization favors local explanations. But those
local explanations don’t add up nationally or
globally. Europe spends a fortune on social services
and yet Muslim terrorism has only grown worse. Other
immigrant minorities in Europe have lower
unemployment rates and aren’t blowing things up.
Removing Muslim dictators in the Arab Spring didn’t
lower terrorism; it vastly increased the power and
influence of Islamic terror groups. Nor have changes
in American foreign policy and greater outreach
lowered Islamic terrorism. If anything the scale of
the problem seems to have only become more severe.
The Israeli peace process with the PLO likewise
vastly increased the terror threat and no amount of
concessions has brought peace any closer. There are
stateless Muslims throughout the Middle East. Jordan
is filled with the same exact “Palestinians” as
Israel, many of whom are stateless and have few
rights, yet terror rates are far lower. Instead
Muslim violence spikes where there are religious
differences.
As we see in Iraq, Syria and Israel, religious
differences are more explosive than political ones.
And where religious differences don’t exist,
Jihadists create them by denouncing their Muslim
enemies as un-Islamic. ISIS is the culmination of a
process that you can see among “moderate” Islamists.
The official explanation is that a multitude of
local factors cause Muslim disappointment leading to
some sort of irreligiously religious radicalism
which can be cured by preventing that
disappointment.
We are expected to believe that there are hundreds
of explanations for Islamic terrorism, but not one.
And while no doubt individual choices and emotions
play a role in the making of a Muslim terrorist, the
same is true in the making of a soldier. An army
exists as part of a positive national ethos.
Reducing an army to a series of personal
dissatisfactions is absurd. So is reducing ISIS to
individually dissatisfied people while ignoring what
its members actually believe. It’s as absurd as
believing that Hitler became a monster because he
couldn’t get his painting career off the ground.
Islamic terrorism is a positive ethos. It is
horrifying, evil and brutal, but it is not some
nihilistic void. You can look at unemployment rates
in Brussels or dissatisfaction in Saudi Arabia, but
nobody decides to fight and die for a Jihadist group
because they’re having trouble applying for a job at
McDonald’s. They join because they believe in its
mission. Ignoring the organizing principle of
Islamic terrorism while focusing on local conditions
that might make Jihadist recruitment easier misses
the forest for the trees.
Radicalization programs, under euphemisms such as
CVE or Countering Violent Extremism, assume that
Islamic terrorism can be countered by forming a
partnership with Muslim groups and social services
agencies. While the West will ease Muslim
dissatisfaction by providing jobs and boosting their
self-esteem to make them feel like they belong, the
Muslim groups will tackle the touchy issue of Islam.
These partnerships achieve nothing because social
services don’t prevent Islamic terrorism; they
enable and fund the very no-go zones and dole-seeker
lifestyles that are a gateway to the Jihad.
Meanwhile the Muslim partners are inevitably
Islamists looking to pick up potential recruits for
their own terror agendas. Western countries fund
terrorism to fight terrorism and then partner with
still more terrorists to train their homegrown
terrorists not to be terrorists, or at least not the
wrong kind of terrorists. This is what happens when
the “Islam” part of Islamic terrorism is ignored and
outsourced to any Islamist who can pretend to be
moderate in front of a television camera for 5
minutes at a time.
None of this actually stops Islamic terrorism.
Instead it empowers and encourages it.
The Islamist alliances suppress any discussion of
Islamic terrorism as “harming” national security.
Condemn the Muslim Brotherhood and you’re
interfering with CVE efforts to stop terrorism by
“educating” Muslims on real Islam and helping the
Brotherhood take over entire countries to address
the political anger of Muslims. At least the anger
of those that are part of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And yet without discussing Islam, there is nothing
to discuss.
There are plenty of unemployed non-Muslims in
Europe. There are lots of bad governments all over
the world. The non-Islamic factors on which Islamic
terrorism is blamed are not unique to Muslims. Only
Islam is. Islamic terrorism is unique and so its
causes cannot be reduced to joblessness or bad
governments. A unique outcome suggests a unique
cause. And Islam is a unique cause. Islam is the
unique cause of Islamic terrorism. There is no way
to fight Islamic terrorism without acknowledging its
organizing principle, its objective and its
worldview.
You cannot fight “radicalization” without dealing
with what Muslim terrorists are “radicalized” to do.
Without Islam, all that’s left is the political and
sociological hunt for individual motives while
completely ignoring what unites these individuals
together. And so CVE plays the seven blind men while
ignoring the elephant in the room. And the terror
attacks and the futile efforts to avert them
continue.
The issue isn’t radicalization, it’s Islamization.
Islamization is what happens to individual Muslims
and to Muslim communities. Islamization is also the
goal of Islamic movements, overtly violent or
covertly subversive. Islamization is not the answer
of some radical preacher, but of the Islamic
religion. This is not about jobs in Europe or
democracy in Egypt.
Islam is not radicalized. It is radical. Like
Communism or Nazism, it offers a totalitarian answer
to everything. To truly believe in Islam is to
possess the conviction that every country in the
world must become Islamic and be ruled by Islamic
law. Islamic terrorism is one tactic for realizing
this conviction.
We cannot and will not defeat Islamic terror without
honestly and bluntly confronting Islamization.