(np) What the Slaughter of Christians in Lahore Says About the Global Jihad

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Maajid Nawaz:

 > ... A jihadist guerrilla war is being waged against world order, and 
the international community is woefully unprepared to address the problem.

Many still deny this insurgency exists, and it is true that these 
countries have locally specific factors that contribute to their 
respective insurgent conditions. Yes, the groups behind these attacks 
are not under one central leadership, rather they are either affiliates 
or offshoots of competing jihadist groups.

But they all share one cause.

They are all—including ISIS—derived from, or affiliated to just two 
jihadist groupings: al Qaeda and the Taliban. In turn, jihadists all 
drink from the same doctrinal well of widespread, rigid Wahhabism. And 
they share the ideological aims of popular non-terrorist Islamists. They 
are all unified behind a theocratic desire to enforce a version of 
Sharia as law over society. Considering that non-violent Wahhabi and 
Islamist Muslims exist in their millions globally, this drastically 
increases the potential recruitment pool for jihadists. The insurgency 
could not succeed were this not so. There is no use in denying it.

For many years, liberals—and I speak as one—have refused to acknowledge 
the ideology of Islamism. All talk of “ideas” was seen to be nothing but 
a “neocon” line taken directly from the worst excesses of the George W. 
Bush years.

Ironically, due to this very fear of political incorrectness we wound up 
repeating many of the mistakes of the neocon era. While we feared to 
engage in a debate on values with Muslim communities, we tried to 
restrict the problem to the realm of mere criminality, as something to 
be dealt with by law enforcement or, failing a solution there, by the 
military—and ultimately by war, even if that word went unspoken. Under 
this doctrine, President Barack Obama developed a secret kill-list, 
preferring simply to assassinate his enemies, even if they were American 
citizens, and he has dispatching more drone strikes abroad than Bush 
ever did.

/Anything/ to avoid discussing ideas.

And so, as this global jihadist insurgency became impossible to ignore, 
we liberals reluctantly, euphemistically began naming the problem 
“violent extremism.” We used nauseating, limp State Department-coined 
phrases such as “al-Qaeda-inspired extremism” to refer to what was 
clearly an ideology. But as the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in his 
Pakistani hideout proved, we cannot arrest nor shoot our way out of this 
problem. “Defeating” al Qaeda was only ever going to give rise to a 
group like ISIS, because it was not al Qaeda that had “inspired 
extremism”; it was extremism that had inspired al Qaeda.

Our failure to recognize this as a civilizational struggle—one centered 
around /values/—has allowed the fundamentalist problem of Wahhabism, and 
the political problem of Islamism, to fester and metastasize. This 
struggle is an ideological one before it is a military or legal one. 
Vague platitudes that this has nothing to do with Islam—my own 
religion—are as unhelpful as saying that this is the essence of Islam. 
Extremism certainly has something to do with Islam. Not nothing, not 
everything, but something.

The Lahore bombing underscores the very religious character of the 
jihadists’ fanaticism. This was not about alienation in a European 
ghetto, or revenge for American and European airstrikes in the Middle 
East— the secular-sounding explanations offered as the motivations of 
people like those who carried out the Paris and Brussels attacks. Lahore 
was about pure, vicious religious intolerance, killing 
Christians—including Christian children—on Easter Sunday because they 
were Christians and not the kind of Muslims the murderers claim to be ... <

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/28/what-the-slaughter-of-christians-in-lahore-says-about-the-global-jihad.html?via=twitter_page


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