It seems to me that you could change the word "jihad" to "crusader" in your essay and I'd believe it was something published by The Onion.

One could argue that associating muderers, rapists, and gangsters with "jihad" will have the opposite effect over time and turn "jihad" into a dirty word in Islamic cultures. I think it would be far better if "Holy Warrior" was associated with criminals that prey upon the innocent than defenders of Islam.

Nash:

I think it would be far better if "Holy Warrior" was associated with criminals that prey upon the innocent than defenders of Islam.

Yes, that would be nice. But the reality is that it's not going to happen.

Why are some conservatives so wedded to the idea that we must, must, must have a final Armageddon between Christendom and the ummah? Millions will die on both sides... but hey, can't make an omlet without breaking a few heads!

Why do so many insist that virtually every Moslem in the world wants to murder us all and take over the world? There is no evidence for that claim; as a matter of fact, as I have pointed out several times, the two largest Moslem organizations in the world -- collectively about 70 million Moslems -- emphatically reject militancy, terrorism, global caliphism, and even have no problem with Israel.

Why do many conservatives insist that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with non-imperialist democracy, when we currently have at least four stable Islamic republics that have good relations with the West and are not launching attacks or supporting terrorism? (Possibly five, if you count Pakistan; we'll see what happens when Nawaz Sharif takes over.)

Opening an ideological front against global caliphism is not a joke; it's an urgent necessity. As is using language to deny the terrorists the cultural, moral, and legal legitimacy they desperately need for their murderous victory. We must give the ummah the language of rejection, just as we consistently gave such language to those oppressed by Communism.

I don't know why this is such a foreign concept to so many otherwise sane and rational people. Did we spend the Cold War referring to Communism as "historically inevitable social justice" and commies as "defenders of the proletariat" and "heroes of the people?"

Or did conservatives all stand and applaud when Ronald Reagan accurately described the Soviet Union as the "evil empire," and denounced Communism as a murderous ideology and Communist leaders as corrupt?

Words matter. If even we keep calling bin Laden and his ilk "holy warriors," the effect will not be to taint that phrase; the effect will be to undercut opposition to al-Qaeda and convince millions of Moslems that maybe eternal "holy war" against the West really is Allah's will.

Dafydd

Wow, well argued. I'm impressed. (Seriously.)

I'm not totally convinced, though. The big problem I see is associated with the fact that Muslims almost universally see takfiri as being a bad thing -- but they almost universally see killing a person who's converted from Islam as being perfectly logical. Thus, what they condemn is not the act of killing, but rather the act of declaring someone to not be a good Moslem.

Yet this is precisely the act we (in the West) must demand of Moslems -- to judge for themselves which Moslems correctly represent Islam, and purge the rest from their religion.

Thus we cannot condemn takfiri; rather, we must encourage it, and try to teach that it must be practiced separately from the killing.

Wtanksleyjr:

I don't quite agree: We needn't demand that Moslems consider people like Zawahiri and bin Laden to be "non-Moslems;" we need them to understand that there are many types of Islam (just as there are many sects of Christianity), and there is no necessity to accept the tenets of other sects... particularly when they're demonstrably bad for the country.

I personally think that the religion preached at the particular Trinity United Church of Christ that Obama used to be a member of (before resigning yesterday) is lousy, anti-American, and racist. But I wouldn't excommunicate them from Christendom, even were I a Christian; I would emphasize that I'll have no truck with their version of Christianity, because I think it vile.

Similarly, I have met Jews who practice what seems to me a very soulless, joyless, ritual-bound version of Judaism. But I certainly don't deny that they're Jews and wouldn't excommunicate them from world Jewry, even were I a religious Jew (despite the fact that most of them would excommunicate me!)

I really, really like the version of Islam practiced in Indonesia's Nahdlatul Ulama: They are very religious, very conservative, sharia-believing Moslems; but they believe that sharia only has value when practiced as a personal decision, not when forced upon everyone, Moslem and infidel, as part of the secular law -- very like the way most Orthodox Jews think of the laws of kashrut.

And I have never heard them condemn other mainstream versions of Islam; they just say such weaker sects aren't for them.

This is rather like Turkey, which has started funding madrassim all over the world recently -- specifically to counteract the radical militant Islamism of the Wahhabi/Salafist madrassim founded by the Saudis. The Turkish schools do teach Islam; but unlike the Saudi schools, they also teach all the normal academic subjects, including science classes, Eastern and Western literature, history, and mathematics.

From what I've read, they're like private religious schools here, including both religious and secular instruction.

Westerners can live side by side with Turkey, with the government of Indonesia (they have an al-Qaeda problem, but the government fights very hard against the terrorists), and with the government of the Philippines. We seem to get along quite well with Iraq and Afghanistan. And even Nawaz Sharif, who will probably be the next president of Pakistan after Musharaff is ousted, seems willing to live and let live with the West.

There is no intrinsic reason we cannot live together; but a combination of corrupt and brutal theocracies in some Moslem countries, leading to economic collapse and a failed State, leading to overwhelming fear and envy among the inhabitants, leading to militant Islamists and Qom-school Shiism radicalizes too much of the ummah.

Dafydd

Now that the fear of a global conflagration seems to be receding, it is indeed time (past time, but better late then never) to begin a multi-faceted rollback of caliphism. I am coming around to your view, Dafydd, that lumping all Muslims into the enemy basket is self-defeating. We will in fact need to cajole, bribe, or otherwise draw the majority of the ummah into a functional relationship with liberal democracy. In order to do this, we must give up our suspicion that they're all out to get us. Some of them are, and we need to isolate them while not alienating more of their co-religionists.

We are going to have to change the way we view this Long War, and review our strategy and tactics accordingly. So far, we have been using only our military as a weapon. It would be nice if we could get more of the government on the same page. A more universal message from myriad agencies, coupled with actual efforts to wean Muslims away from caliphism, would go a long way toward forcing the media to, if not cooperate, at least not be so obstructionist.

We are, fortunately, at the end of the beginning of the Long War, and I believe there is still time to work on these things.

Dafydd,

Let’s step outside this rhetorical dune of PC donkey dust for a moment and consider a few observations. (I’ll call them "street realities".) Let’s put some very basic facts together that form a pretty clear mosaic of what is happening. An almost cursory observation of this "terrorist" phenomenon and our efforts to deal with it, by anyone who can see through the prejudiced MSM and "Bush haters" on the left along with the warped PC mentality of those that attempt to justify, reconcile or otherwise rationalize terrorism, yields the following:

The perpetrators; Muslims (In almost all cases.)

Their religion; Islam

Their origin; The Middle East

Their weapon; Bombs, (worn, placed, driven or flown)…for now!

Their method; Suicide (Get close to a bunch of people and "pull the cord".)

Their "stated" reason; Jihad (Or, I lost my sense of humanity and want to kill a lot of people and if I - or more likely the weak minded nut cases I can convince to do this- must die in the process, that’s cool.)

The result; Lots of dead people. (Mostly civilians.)

The desired effect; Murder designed to terrorize the Infidels and have us walk away from this war. (Or anyone else nearby. An "equal opportunity" tactic.)

Their enablers; Power hungry Muslim fanatics, Muslim Clerics, Muslim theocracies, Muslim totalitarian governments, indifferent Muslims worldwide and their all too quiet Islamic communities.

The Islamic motive; Destroy the infidels (Western free civilized cultures.) and their influence on Muslim populations worldwide.

The Muslim Motive; Regain the power and influence once held by Islam.. "the good old days" from about 600 years ago back to the sixth or seventh century.

Why?; Who gives a damn. There can be no justification for a "cult of death".

In an attempt to sum this up into one simple sentence, I offer the following:

Fanatic Muslim Nut Jobs have embarked upon a war for Islamic dominance of the free world.

It’s really that simple! Terrorist suicide bombing is but the opening tactic in this war. For the moment they apparently can’t afford to deliver much more. When will we, as the leader of a number of free Western nations, begin to take them seriously? I doubt that you will ever find a headline like the above statement in the MSM, or such an admission from the left. But so what! Some one, or a real coalition of powerful nations, needs to deal with them now, before they gain the weapons to do much more harm.

So, what is the real deal with Iraq anyway? It’s the portal into the third battle of this war.

It is truly unfortunate that this war will continue to be fought on a reactionary basis. I have a great deal of difficulty accepting a premise that we are entering a phase of this war wherein the US under "liberal" rule, along with western European and Middle-Eastern governments will, in earnest, do what it takes to preempt and stop terrorism. The actions required within their respective countries remain too unpalatable, both politically and among their populations. Those in power have too much to lose. (Unless the terrorists can up the ante.) At best, we may just be approaching the end of the beginning of this war. I believe that this war will be a long drawn out reactionary/evolutionary process with mostly unwilling participants. There can be no clear-cut straight-line strategy to win it, and too many liberal talking heads and politicians want to wish it away. ******** begets more ********.

[Watch the language please, Running Roach; this is a family blog. Thanks, the Mgt.]

I have to agree with Charles Johnson's take on this: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30159_NYT_Agrees_with_Bush_Administration

Your argument sounds great but I think misses the point: by infidels using a different vocabulary, will this really affect the masses of Muslims that do not buy into that ideology or those who do? I think not. Most Muslims, I doubt, think of themselves as Jihadis; I imagine they think of themselves as practicing Muslims. Jihadism is a fixation on a variant of Jihad placed on an external and extreme obsession: Keep your focus on killing infidels, pass on to heavenly bliss.

Good points, as usual. I also realize (in hindsight) that one good reason to use 'takfiri' as an insulting characterization of the irhabists is that most of them actually unarguably _are_ takfiri, and are viewed with at least fear by other Moslems because of it.

Unfortunately, the fear seems to only rarely result in action against the takfiri -- perhaps Moslems would rather submit to a harsher version of sharia than they would condemn a takfiri who's acting to promote sharia against the harbists (i.e. you and me).

To summarize and bring this back on topic: I see your point that this memo does introduce reasonable terminology. I reiterate my point, however, that it does so in a total vacuum of application or planning, with the inevitable result that our own warriors (whether soldiers or diplomats) will know less about the enemy, and the enemy's supporters will not be told anything different.

This is propaganda (in the good sense) that can only possibly be used against us (a bad thing).

I personally think that the religion preached at the particular Trinity United Church of Christ that Obama used to be a member of (before resigning yesterday) is lousy, anti-American, and racist. But I wouldn't excommunicate them from Christendom, even were I a Christian; I would emphasize that I'll have no truck with their version of Christianity, because I think it vile.

I'm not an expert on "their version of Christianity", but the stupid things I've heard from their church have been totally irrelevant to Christianity.

The stupid things I hear and see from the irhabists have been almost uniformly accepted as fundamental to Islam by their Islamic brethren. For example, the stupid thing about takfiri isn't the excommunication (every group must be capable of defining its own boundaries); it's the killing; and yet the takfiri are condemned not for killing but for excommunicating.

The only way I see to overcome this problem within Islam is to either kill them all, or to convince them all, or to convince the majority that the irhabists are truly not Moslems. The latter task sounds the most plausible -- but not in an environment where excommunication is itself heretical.

I really, really like the version of Islam practiced in Indonesia's Nahdlatul Ulama: They are very religious, very conservative, sharia-believing Moslems; but they believe that sharia only has value when practiced as a personal decision, not when forced upon everyone, Moslem and infidel, as part of the secular law -- very like the way most Orthodox Jews think of the laws of kashrut.

May I please have a link? I wasn't able to find any confirmation (or refutation) of this position online. I'd like to use that claim against some strong anti-Moslem arguers.

It's probably worth noting, though, that they'll have to do a bit more -- they'll have to actually condemn the "non-mainstream" Islam in which irhabists swim. (I should note that the government of Indonesia actually does actively condemn them, so that's a good start; religious condemnation is more to the point, though.)

-Wm

RunningRoach:

The error in your syllogism is that it implicitly makes the mistaken logical leap from all international terrorists are Moslems (which is nearly true) to all Moslems are international terrorists, which is patently false.

This magnifies our enemies to the point where victory is impossible.

You also appear to believe that even those Moslems who are not terrorists are apathetic to terrorism (at least against infidels); but an alternative explanation is that they think it's evil to kill infidels or apostates merely for their beliefs... but they simply don't know what they can do about it, given that they live in totalitarian tyrannies. Their own governments would kill them in a second if they so much as objected.

Thus, you cannot assume they don't care or actively collaborate, any more than you could have assumed that an individual German family in 1941 supported the Nazi depravities, merely because they did not fight against the Nazis: If they saw themselves as alone and powerless, they might have lost all hope of changing things.

But if, then, someone came along and empowered them -- by giving them a contrary German philosophy and ideology, for example, along with an organization that supplied brotherhood and alliance against the Nazis -- you might have been astonished at how brave that family might suddenly become.

As this is pure human nature, the same is almost certainly true in the ummah:

• People who believe themselves to be alone and powerless generally do not throw away their lives fighting evil; they make whatever accomodation they can with the devil;
• But people who are surrounded by others who share their view, even if they're in a minority, are much readier to risk their lives against the evil doers... as we have increasingly seen in both the Sunni and Shiite areas of Iraq since the counterinsurgency began.

Don't expect miracles. But by the same token, don't assume diabolism.

Michael Babbitt, Wtanksleyjr:

Your argument sounds great but I think misses the point: by infidels using a different vocabulary, will this really affect the masses of Muslims that do not buy into that ideology or those who do?

Yes, I believe it will.

One of the great discoveries of neurolinguistics is this: It's obvious that "how we think" affects "how we speak; but -- less obvious but equally true -- "how we speak" affects "how we think."

George Orwell used this premise in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the government has created "Newspeak." The premise is that, by eliminating from the vocabulary the words for concepts they didn't want (freedom, dissent, individualism, etc.), the concepts themselves would literally become unthinkable.

While such a simplistic method doesn't work, of course (as Orwell himself demonstrates in that novel), it is actually true that by changing what something is called, you affect the way people think about it -- Shakespeare notwithstanding.

E.g., when socialists began calling themselves "Progressives" in the early twentieth century, they successfully got the rest of the country to imagine that they represented the future. For a long time, until capitalists were able to change the language themselves (leading people to think of themselves not just as consumers -- literally, "people who eat," which puts the fearful focus on whether you'll have bread tomorrow -- but as investors who think in terms of principle, interest, and profit), Capitalism almost became unthinkable.

The militant Islamists consistently call themselves "jihadists" and "mujahedin" (holy warriors). At the moment, we use the same terminology... so there is no conflict: Everybody on the planet seems to agree that bin Laden and Ahmadinejad are fighting on the side of Allah -- and that logically, therefore, the West is fighting against Allah.

But if we were to consistently use the opposite terminology, calling them "hirabi" (unholy warriors), "irhabi" (terrorists), death cultists, and suchlike, then the rest of the ummah would at least see that we dispute the fact that the militant Islamists are the ones on the side of Allah.

Rather than a war between those who are with God and those who are with Satan or atheism, in which there is only one right side to a believing Moslem, we would at least be signalling that it might be a war between people who think God wants us to do A, and people who think God wants us to do B... in which a mainstream, religious Moslem could take either side, depending on what A and B are.

This would allow non-violent versions of Islam -- such as the Najaf school of Shiism of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, or the version of Sunni practiced by Nahdlatul Ulama [Wtanksleyjr, here' the link], or even that practiced by Turkey and Indonesia in general -- to make the case that God's will-A, which demands murder of the innocent, raping women, torturing children to death, and committing human sacrifice, cannot be the true will of the God of the Book.

Many Moslems have the innate sense that they do not want to live in such a culture, where they are always looking back over their shoulder to see who is coming for them, or for their families, intent upon murdering them in the name of God.

It would give these "quietist" schools of Islam the linguistic legitimacy to preach that God's will-B, which allows individuals to choose how to worship God, to freely engage in commerce, to educate their wives and daughters, to walk the streets without fear of being doused with acid or beaten by self-appointed "guardians of public morals," and which demands tolerance of those who are different (even infidels!), is much closer to how all human societies want to organize.

These forces within Islam already exist, and they are already strong -- but knowledge of them is brutally suppressed in areas of the ummah ruled by irhabi and hirabi, for obvious reasons. Let's not hobble these non-violent horses at the starting gate by ceding to the terrorists their preferred self-description as the armies of the Lord. Instead, let us use our unmutable bullhorn to shout such "Quietism" over the walls... or at least open a breach so that these schools of thought can infect the totalitarian parts of the ummah.

Dafydd

Thank you, Dafydd. I'm reading that link and filing it for future use.

I think you've got a good point, and I'm glad you pursued it. To echo your point, "jihad" sounds insulting to us, but it doesn't sound that way to an Arab, and it sounds simply holy to a non-Arabic Moslem.

I still would value a positive propaganda plan much more than a simple adjustment of words, but I don't mind starting with this particular adjustment. I'm especially glad to see that they're not attempting to direct language back towards the word "fundamentalist" (as though the problem were in all people who revered any set of foundational principles).

Wtanksleyjr:

I still would value a positive propaganda plan much more than a simple adjustment of words, but I don't mind starting with this particular adjustment.

Oh, I'm sorry; I was going to respond to this point of yours, but I forgot.

Yes, absolutely; I'm 100% in agreement with you. I think I said in a post a while ago that we really need a patriotic, American Goebbels. (I searched but can't find it; maybe I just imagine, in my grandiose egotism, that I said it before.)

Dafydd

One more question/comment, only one more, really I mean it this time. Could you respond to this article, which puts this whole question much more clearly than I did?

In summary, the problem is that this tactic leaves the concept of 'jihad' totally untouched and sanctified. Calling al'Qaeda 'takfiri' makes sense, because they truly are, and the designation makes them truly anathema to the majority of devout Muslims. But who says that the next al'Qaeda -- and there are plenty of them -- will be takfiri? Our problem with al'Qaeda isn't their takfiri ways; it's that they seek to impose sharia on us by force. Complaining that they're takfiri isn't going to address our true complaint.

Hirabah doesn't cut it -- we can't declare a war hirabah, and Islam has no central authority that can. I don't even see how this one IS hirabah. We may want it to be, but wishing doesn't make it so.

Irhabi -- if we have to fight against a subset of the real problem (the current and historic meaning of "jihad" is the real problem), this is an excellent subset. It won't work in the context of a ground war, but it's a good start.

Hello Dafydd:

I have some rather lengthy comments in light of Jocelyn's response to you in the Weekly Standard. At any rate, here is my take:

http://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/2008/06/much-lizardly-ado-about-little.html

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

Wtanksleyjr:

One more question/comment, only one more, really I mean it this time. Could you respond to this article, which puts this whole question much more clearly than I did?

See there? Your challenge sparked a whole new blogpost!

Dafydd

GW:

I really like the Wolf Howling post (even though you mistook my point a bit -- but nowhere near as much as did Thomas Joscelyn!), and I'm working on a response both to you and to TJ (same post, I mean). I'll try to get it up on BL early afternoonish, so I'll have time to hit the gym and do some swimming...

Dafydd

Thanks for hissing in, . Now you can slither in with a comment, o wise. (sign out)