Defeating a Religious Ideology
"I've got a lot of things on my plate, but my top priority is to defeat ISIL and to eliminate the scourge of this barbaric terrorism that's been taking place around the world."
"There's no more important item on my agenda than going after them and defeating them."
U.S. President Barack Obama
Conventional wars can be fought, and they can be won or lost. Such conflicts see opposing armies meeting on fields of battle. One side or the other wins, or there is a draw and a consequent withdrawal until the succeeding battle ensues. Eventually there will be a resolution. The chaotic wars roiling parts of the world today don't, however, fall into conventional categories. There are the cold wars that are being resumed and they are generally stand-offs, not active combat situations.
In tribal geographic areas there are wars of decidedly irregular rules where both national troops and insurgents run amok among the civilian population, looting, ransacking, raping. And then there are deployments of peacekeepers via the United Nations and they too appear to become irregular in their behaviours since all too many stand accused of preying on the vulnerable they are sent to defend. It's hard not to be cynical about the state of world affairs and its petty war-mongering.
The war of which President Obama speaks is not a war but a conflict of ideological dimensions relating to religious fundamentalism of a religion that has swept across the globe since its seventh-century inception, through conquest, not gentle persuasion and peaceful kindliness, since the most elemental of its precepts is jihad. Those who speak in support of a peaceful Islam speak of jihad as an intellectual struggle to refine oneself and become closer to the motivating spirit of Islam.
Those who have experienced the dread menace of jihad know it for a violent pathology of hatred and vengeance which just incidentally either slaughters any who are not sufficiently attuned to hard-core Islam, or willing to convert themselves to complete surrender to the worship of Islam, body and soul. It is the ideation of Islam as the preserve of the faithful to Allah willing to entirely subjugate themselves and their futures to his worshipful command at its most fundamental, as a creature in bondage that must be defeated, and that is a tall order.
Faith is immune to reason, to intelligent discourse, to moderation. Once the basic tenets of a faith have been absorbed and become the motivating force of life for a spiritual lifetime they become fixed and the faithful fixated by them, for total acceptance is the only option within Islam. And now, the West is faced with the inexorable advance of a deadly pathology that venerates martyrdom and celebrates mass murder as a divine accomplishment aided by the faithful.
It seems now universally agreed that one terrorist group among all others poses as the most threatening to global stability, with a territorial base of its own, though it is within it a moving target as it both advances and recedes as the tides of conflict take it. But it has, to the present trained an estimated 400 representative jihadis with the specific order and capabilities to target Europe in waves of death-deliverance by a number of interlocking terror cells similar to those which attacked Paris and Brussels.
Theirs is the choosing of the time and the place of attack; their only goal to be successful in spreading the horror of never knowing where and when such an attack will take lace, with its gruesomely deadly consequences. Europe is in the learning stages, Israel has had the experience. These somewhat autonomous cell networks exemplify the appeal of ISIL's mandate to destroy and sow fear in the West, by the level of the threat they pose.
They are far more sophisticated in the planning and the execution of their deadly raids than their cruder counterparts like al Shabaab and Boko Haram, and just as effectively barbaric in their bloody assaults. Training camps in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere -- Afghanistan comes to mind -- are the training grounds to teach best practice techniques in bomb-building and attack strategies.
The ringleader of the November 13 Paris attacks boasted that his entry into Europe had been with a multinational group of 90 fighters, scattered "more or less everywhere", biding time, planning.
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| The Paris attacks |
Labels: Carnage, Islam, Jihad, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Friday, March 25, 2016
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