Dear America,
It appears at last that the Islamic Jihadist movement has gone too far...for Muslims. Even Hezbollah, which is widely regarded as a radical, and even terrorist organization has condemned the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satirical-cartoon magazine, along with the internet disseminated beheadings of bound and helpless westerners, the kidnappings of little girls, and the whole-sale slaughters of small school children and whole villages in Africa as inimical to the existence of Islam in the modern world...doing more harm to the Prophet Muhammad than childhood education or any book, film or drawing could ever do. And it seems that even the Muslim community in France as a whole has been galvanized by what it recognizes as events that do not burnish, but rather tarnish the international perception of Islam and besmirch the faith over a billion and a half human beings. French Muslim clerics have publicly condemned the terrorism that has ignited a broad based French demonstration of sentiment against not Islam as a whole, but against the intolerance of diversity demonstrated by the Jihadist few who perpetrate these acts of bestial terror. But the real test is not in the words uttered, even if they are shrieked from the rooftops. The real test is in the actions that are taken, and in the identities of those who take them, that ensue upon these signal acts of gratuitous brutality and cruelty.
The unfortunate truth, it seems to me, is that the primitive forces riddling world-wide Islam are not accessible from without. We drop bombs on the Islamic State, and with some effectiveness lately, but no matter how many we drop, and no matter how effective, the will of the very few among Muslims to inflict pain, suffering and fear on the rest of the world cannot be crushed by military force alone. Nor can we identify the villainous culprits who would inflict their views on us all by the use of intelligence gathering and espionage. The identities of these putative Muslims is known to others either on the fringes of the movements concerned or in the Mosques where they worship by virtue of the stridency of their pronouncements, both public and private. The key to defeating Islamist terror is not forces from without, but forces from within. This latest heinous act and its sequel in a Jewish delicatessen in Paris that apparently was intended to facilitate the escape of the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo massacre have precipitated the appropriate response from the Muslim community, but it remains to be seen whether that indignation, and perhaps even consternation born of fear that a holocaust-like mentality will surge in the rest of the world and become a groundswell of sentiment toward revenge and extirpation like that which led to the extermination by the Nazis of millions of Jews and others, will inspire a unified Muslim campaign to expose and purge from the ranks of civil Islam all those who would victimize the rest of us.
Though it is the case, and always has been, that the victims of Islamic extremism have been other Muslims, no countermovement has formed as yet. That has been the missing mechanism in the fight against the inhumanity that characterizes Islamic Jihad as conceived by movements like ISIL, al Qaeda and the Nusra Front, which now has turned its bellicosity toward even Hezbollah in light of condemnatory statements made in the aftermath of the terrorism most recently in the news in France and Lebanon. Thus, it may now be the case that the militants have turned on the wrong Muslims and thereby promoted their own destruction. Hezbollah has demonstrated not just resilience, but competence in its activities in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Israel, and that formidability, together with the lack or restraint and integrity in which they indulge, could be the harbinger of the destruction of the malignancy of what might be referred to as Jihady imperialism. Now, if the Muslim population of the world takes up activism in pursuit of those whose actions besmirch them all, there could be substantial progress toward the eradication of radical Islam for the benefit of all.
Time will tell how far the current, tumescent indignation over terrorism will go and how long it will last, but without it, the effort to extinguish terrorism as a substitute for proselytizing will be a decades long, if not an endless, slog. So it is time for the reactionary social forces that have led to calls for exclusion of Muslims from German immigration policy, among other things, to unite with anti-reactionary millions from within Islam. They are oddly natural allies in the fight against the terrorism scourge that affects us all, and from that unity will arise not just a formidable force against brutality, but a union of interests that can guide mutual tolerance in a world of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. We can be united in the fight, and thus we can ensure that such movements as plague society today cannot emerge again.
We are all in this together.
Your friend,
Mike
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