The Engines that Drive the Jihad

Arrest Jihad’s preachers and teachers today or kill four terrorists tomorrow… take your pick but decide quickly

The Engines that Drive the Jihad

In the days after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and the thrilling response of the French people to the attempt to intimidate them, any number of media commentators have talked about ‘root causes’ of terrorism.  They mention that Westerners have to reach out to tame the ‘angry young men’ who are the agents of the Jihad’s terrorism.

No we don’t.

Well, yes we should reach out to address the ‘root causes’ of terrorism and the hand we reach out should at least hold handcuffs… although Charlie Hebdo’s metaphorical bladder on a stick wasn’t such a bad idea either.

First off, anyone who wants to address the root causes of terrorism needs to be dissuaded from thinking that some sort of socio-economic engine drives terrorism; or that terrorism is really political at heart.  While the practice of terrorism is as changeable and shifting as the dark arts in a Harry Potter novel, there is one immutable hard fact that has always been at its core:  People commit terrorism because they want to.

This is the one constant truth that needs to be recognized and addressed in counter-terrorism.

Inevitably, the terrorist is someone who chooses to commit terrorism.  They are the inadequate who seek recognition, the indigent who seek purpose and the dull who crave excitement.  At heart, the terrorist is someone who longs to be the flag-waver on the barricade, the shadowed figure of sinister menace, or the holder of a great ‘truth’ the rest of us fear to accept (never mind that most of us are utterly uninterested in that truth).

The violence of the terrorist is always – in the mind of the terrorist – meant to inspire one audience and shock the rest of us.  The great mass of humanity are the timid who have to be coerced, driven or destroyed because we are in the way of some great grand vision.

What always changes is the nature of that vision that the terrorist embraces.  Once it was the revolution craved by the Marxist and the Nihilist Anarchist.  It has been the ecological community of all life in a new age ever so fuzzily imagined by ecoteurs and the Animal Liberation Front.  It has also been the forging of a great new society where the People or the Race that the terrorist imagines he represents finally rules supreme.

The terrorist adopts the ideology that allows him (and sometimes her) to commit violence and that ideology shapes their behaviour.  Marxists thought in terms of revolutionary theory, while the reverence for life espoused by the Animal Liberation Front made it difficult—though not quite impossible – to commit direct homicide.

The problem is that the Islamic Jihad has much more horsepower under its hood than a mere ideology.  Some ideologies promise to build a shining new Jerusalem wherein the future will be perfect and unknown generations will honour the terrorist who made them possible… in this they ape the promises of religions.

The Jihad movement is the militant expression of a major religion and this has given them an extra bank of cylinders in the engine of their motivations.  The political and quasi-religious ideology of al Qaeda has been shaped and honed so that the franchises that al Qaeda has created have become cults in their own sense.

ISIS and Boko Haram are not only fighting to create a political regime based on Sharia Law… but they are truly apocryphal. They fight to bring on the Mahdi, their version of the Messiah, who will yield a transformation of the entire world.

Worse still, the ideologue proselytizes by persuasion (although it is often an easy sell to the aspiring terrorist); and lets his material and ideas percolate into the mind of the new recruit.  The Jihad movement, however, is also using the tools of a cult to drive that proselytization.

Instead of taking months or years to turn the impressionable into partisans of the cause, the Jihad movement uses cult-like religious practices to take weeks to turn the impressionable into unwavering believers.  They recruit much faster than most terrorist groups have ever done, and embed their ideology much more deeply.

We are up against a supercharged engine of fanaticism that can draw more recruits and convert them faster than any terrorist group we have encountered before.  Forget fiddling around with ‘root causes’, if we don’t promptly reach out with handcuffs for the Jihad’s preachers and teachers, we’ll have to be reaching out with sword in hand because we will be in a desperate fight.

Arrest one today or kill four tomorrow… take your pick but decide quickly.

By John Thompson