First of all, radical Islam is no threat to Western values. It certainly does exist, and certainly is hostile to Western values, but it is no threat because its appeal in Western nations is so very limited -- and its appeal in Islamic nations not much greater. That is why jihadists resort to terrorism. It is a tactic of the politically weak. When a faction knows it is not strong or numerous enough to have any hope of winning its goals on the battlefield or at the ballot box, then it may turn to terrorism as a way of inflating its perceived strength. That is the whole point.
And Islam as such is not going away. Today, one human being in five is a Muslim. 100 years ago, one human being in five was a Muslim. 100 years from now, one human being in five will be a Muslim. Radical Salafist jihadist Islam may or may not survive that long, but the Islamic faith certainly will.
Now it is a problem that some Muslims who grew up in the West are disaffected from it and sympathetic to the jihadists. Glen L. Carle reviews Radicalized: The New Jihadists and the Threat to the West, by Peter R. Neumann:
And Islam as such is not going away. Today, one human being in five is a Muslim. 100 years ago, one human being in five was a Muslim. 100 years from now, one human being in five will be a Muslim. Radical Salafist jihadist Islam may or may not survive that long, but the Islamic faith certainly will.
Now it is a problem that some Muslims who grew up in the West are disaffected from it and sympathetic to the jihadists. Glen L. Carle reviews Radicalized: The New Jihadists and the Threat to the West, by Peter R. Neumann:
And what of the “foreign fighters” — the jihadists from Europe and elsewhere of whom so much is made? There have been upwards of 21,000, with upwards of 4,000 from Europe, more than all previous jihads of the past 30 years. Two points bear noting:
First, Neumann fears that perhaps 300 of them may seek to commit acts of terror like the attacks in Paris and Brussels in 2015, which killed 130 and 39 people respectively. But Neumann quotes other experts, too, some of whom are former colleagues of mine, with whom Neumann takes issue. Their research has found that none of the foreign fighters — zero — who have returned home from their jihads have sought to commit acts of jihad. Neumann is surely right to state that the return of foreign fighters from the Syrian war will call for the close attention of every country’s law enforcement and intelligence authorities for years to come. I personally find zero an unlikely number, and would evaluate the number of individuals of real concern for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to be in the hundreds in the West. This does not mean that hundreds will commit terrorist acts in the coming years, but that hundreds merit attention.
Second, Neumann points out that “what unites [jihadists] is not some demographic or socio-economic marker, but their lack of identification with the Western societies they (or most of them) were born and grew up in.” In my own counterterrorism work, counterterrorism officials I met with in numerous countries described the jihadists we were pursuing in almost identical terms. We knew the profiles of many of the individuals. In my discussions I often called them “little losers.” In other countries my counterparts referred to them with some variation of the expression popularized by terrorist scholar Marc Sageman: as a “Bunch of Guys” or “the BOG.” In every case this meant that they were singularly unimpressive guys. These men could still kill — and some have. But the phenomenon remains one of marginal men. Neumann gets it right:
[The] “Salafists’ pitch is aimed squarely at the stranded, the directionless and the left behind… young people with an immigrant background who don’t know where they belong, children from broken homes, petty criminals, drug addicts and outsiders.
It is clear from reading Neumann that what we face at home is not that “Islam is the problem,” and thus those Muslims among us are not “the problem” (just as Islam is not the “solution”), although there are small numbers of Muslims who are and will be inspired by the Islamic State and will act as “inspired” jihadists. This is a distinction and description of the nature of the threats facing us that the would-be Crusader for Western purification and world terrorism expert Donald Trump would do well to learn. (Perhaps Neumann should put it in a tweet, and thus increase the chance of educating the new commander-in-chief.) Neumann is as clear as one can be about what will happen if our leaders continue to seek bogeymen and to misunderstand how to fight the Islamic State and jihadism in general.
So what is to be done? The most important thing is to realize that there is no simple, quick solution — and certainly no purely military one. Instead of solving the political, sectarian and social problems in Iraq and Syria, it would further exacerbate those tensions. The result: more chaos, not less — and an even more successful Islamic State.
Trump needs to understand — as unlikely as it is that he will — that the miserable and desperate Muslim refugees now condemned to purgatory or death are not the ones trying to kill us and impose a perverted version of Sharia Law on infidels and believers alike. Treating them as a bacillus and locking them out confirms the jihadists’ view of the United States, even among the nearly 1.6 billion Muslims who are hostile to “radical Islam,” and makes terrorist attacks far more likely. It is as though Trump were taking his orders from the jihadists, so as to strengthen them, rather than taking steps to weaken and defeat them.
The crisis we confront is found among those Muslims dislocated psychologically by modernism, globalization, secularism — the inevitable trends of social and economic development. These men need to be watched, and stopped. But they are less a coherent movement than they are a potentially lethal sociological phenomenon of anger, perverted idealism and anomie. What we face with the Islamic State is not a primarily religious phenomenon of jihad — “radical Islam” — breaking out in global strength. It is, as Neumann notes, the marriage “between chaos and desire for order” among the Sunni populations of Syria and Iraq, exploited by absolutely ruthless jihadists, many of whom are sincere believers and many of whom are opportunists.
So, ISIS and jihadists pose a big problem to address; but not the makings of a religious war, no matter what the jihadists believe and say, despite the existence of a strain of radical Islamists, and no matter what the Islamic State proclaims and does. Unless our fears make them larger than they are.