RUTHFULLY YOURS

“We have to accept that we are in a long war. That this has no easy answers.”

Georgetown University professor and terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman made this grim diagnosis while recently speaking at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The institute’s presentation “Post Caliphate: The Future of the Salafi-Jihadi Movement” gave a distressingly sober examination of why victory over the world’s militant groups will not come any time soon.

Referencing the 2011 American SEAL killing of Osama bin Laden and the demise of other Al-Qaeda leaders, Hoffman pointed out that five years ago, that militant group was widely believed to be on the downward slope toward collapse. But last February, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spoke to the United State Committee on Armed Services and “painted a remarkably bleak and melancholy picture of a newly resurgent Al-Qaeda.” In a now-famous 1998 interview, bin Laden said that he welcomed “the opportunity of martyrdom, because I am completely confident that my death will produce thousands of more Osamas.” According a slide showing the number of Al-Qaeda affiliates currently operating across the globe from Nigeria to Indonesia, bin Laden’s dream may well have been realized.

According to Hoffman, the “conventional wisdom in recent years was also that [the Islamic State] would remain an entirely local phenomenon” in the Middle East. But ISIS attacks like the November 2015 event in Paris have disproved this thesis. Such miscalculations “should make us very sober about any conception that we have a good pulse on ISIS even today – much less that we truly understand the dynamics and the evolution of the broader jihadi movements.”

Hoffman warned against unfounded optimism, pointing out that the Islamic State’s expulsion from Iraq would not end the group’s widespread threat. According to his presentation, at a minimum, ISIS will go underground like Al-Qaeda did, using international terrorist strikes in particular to keep the organization vibrant. But many analysts “don’t consider one of the worst case scenarios,” he said, “and that is the potential for some sort of reconciliation between Al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

Militant groups like the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda don’t just disappear. They are continuously attempting to rejuvenate themselves. “These groups – for more than a decade and a half – have been able to withstand the greatest onslaught directed against terrorists in history, often by the most technologically advanced military in the history of mankind,” Hoffman said, pointing out that this phenomenon seems to confirm the jihadist belief in “their divinely-ordained struggle: that there will be travails; there will be setbacks. But that victory is still possible.”

The lesson the Trump administration might learn from the disastrous mistakes of its predecessor is that the main sources of terrorism in the region are political Islam and all its related religious groups. All these radical groups, including ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Jabhat Al-Nusra and Hamas have been spawned by a political Islam driven by the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The fight, therefore, should not be against Islam, but against political Islam. Islam needs to be practiced the way other religions are, as a private personal faith that should be kept separate from public life and politics, and whose expression should be confined to worship only.

Mosques, whether in the Arab and Muslim world or in the West, should be places of worship only and must not transformed to centers for polarizing society or for recruitment by political religious groups.

After each Islamist terrorist attack in the West, the public is divided into two camps: one angry and one indifferent. The problem with defeating Islamist terrorism seems to be that either it is attacked by conservatives who call Islam an evil cult or it is forgiven entirely by liberal apologists. What, then, is the answer?

One of the main failures in Western analyses of the origins of terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa is that the West attributes them to a lack of democracy and a lack of respect for human rights. This is, indeed, part of the cause, but the root of the problem is a lack of development and modernity. U.S. President Donald Trump did not exaggerate when he said that the Obama administration’s foreign policy was disastrous. It was catastrophic mainly for two reasons. One was the knee-jerk support for the “Arab Spring” and for extremist Islamic political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The second was the alliances the Obama administration built with unreliable countries such as Qatar, which supports radical political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, Obama made the mistake of continuing to try to appease Iran’s theocratic regime.

The Arab Spring’s uncalculated, hasty attempt to establish so-called democracy only generated more turmoil and chaos in the region. Certain radical political groups simply exploited the elections to serve their own political and sectarian agendas; that swoop for power only resulted in more authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, as have played out, for instance, in Egypt, where we have witnessed the murder of civilians and police officers by the Muslim Brotherhood. In other countries, the situation is even worse; attempts to install democracy have totally destroyed the state and facilitated the spread of terrorist militias, as in Libya.

Stockholm is on edge tonight after a mid-afternoon vehicle attack on a busy downtown shopping district that Prime Minister Stefan Löfven quickly branded a terrorist attack on Sweden.

At least four people were killed and 15 injured after an attacker drove a truck down Drottninggatan street, sending pedestrians diving into shops for cover. The Spendrups brewery truck had been stolen earlier in the day, the company said; witnesses said the driver didn’t seem experienced behind the wheel of the truck.

The Local newspaper in Stockholm said there had been reports of shots fired near the Åhlens City department store, which the truck ran into, and in the city’s Fridhemsplan district, but police hadn’t confirmed either report.

The U.S. Embassy in Stockholm recommended that U.S. citizens in Sweden “avoid unnecessary travel at this time.”

The city’s subway and bus system was temporarily shut down. “Be aware that it will be difficult to move around the city,” continued the message. “…Review your personal security plans, remain aware of your surroundings, including local events, and monitor local news stations for updates. Be vigilant and take appropriate steps to enhance your personal security.”

According to the Aftonbladet newspaper, a man in custody was stopped for unspecified suspicious demeanor. Sources told the paper that the man had confessed to driving the truck and had minor injuries from the truck crash. Police were also open to the possibility more people could have been involved.

Last month’s anti-corruption demonstrations in Russia are being interpreted, again, as a sign that the reign of Russian President Vladimir Putin is nearing its end. Some in the West even claimed that in his haste to interfere with foreign countries’ domestic affairs, Putin has neglected to pay attention to the growing influence of the local opposition, especially social media, on the young generation that grew up in Russia, since he was first elected President in 2000.

The demonstrations that followed opposition politician Alexei Navalny’s expose online of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s vast corruption raised little concern in the parliament, which rejected Russia’s Communist Party’s request to probe Medvedev’s wealth.

The Prime Minister shrugged off the allegations. However, he is far from being popular in Russia, while Putin’s popularity is soaring.
According to Gullp’s December 2016 survey, Russia’s economic and corruption problems are not attributed to Putin. “More than eight in 10 Russians (81 percent) in 2016, said they approved of the job Putin is doing,” said the report. With such popularity, expect Putin, who describes his presidency as “service to the Fatherland” to run for his fourth term as president in next year’s election. He may even scarify Medvedev to satisfy the public’s demand to curb the State’s corruption. After all, Putin has been successfully using corruption as a strategy in domestic and often foreign affairs for the past 17 years. Nonetheless, to many Russia observers, the recent demonstrations are a sign of the public’s growing dissatisfaction with Putin. As former Director of CIA, R. James Woolsey put it, “Putin has taken things back, maybe not all the way to Ivan the Terrible, but to, say, Nicholas II on a bad day.”

While Putin faces many problems, the U.S. Tomahawk missiles’ retaliation attack on Syria’s Shayrat Air Base and American declarations that it was Russia’s complicity or inability to stop Assad’s chemical weapons attack that killed at least 85 men, women, and children in Khan Sheikhoun, offered him a new opportunity to defend Russia’s honor and demonstrate his leadership’s skills. Russian Patriotism is in his favor and is likely to increase Putin’s popularity at home.

“What Will Follow Putin?” asks Norman Bailey, Professor of Economics and National Security, The National Security Studies Center, University of Haifa. “From the lower depths of despair (and the offices of the KGB) Vladimir Putin emerged. Putin reestablished despotic control internally and externally executed a series of brilliant maneuvers to restore the status of Russia in the world. He used all the instruments of statecraft: diplomacy, propaganda, economic measures, subversion, military display and war (in Georgia and Ukraine).

The woman sitting opposite me, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit and a duck-egg-blue turtleneck, can’t go anywhere, at any time of day, without a bodyguard. She is soft-spoken and irrepressibly sane, but also—in the eyes of those who would rather cut her throat than listen to what she says—the most dangerous foe of Islamist extremism in the Western world. We are in a secure room at a sprawling university, but the queasiness in my chest takes a while to go away. I’m talking to a woman with multiple fatwas on her head, someone who has a greater chance of meeting a violent end than anyone I’ve met (Salman Rushdie included). And yet she’s wholly poised, spectacles pushed back to rest atop her head like a crown, dignified and smiling under siege.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, is Islam’s most eloquent apostate. She has just published a slim book that seeks to add a new four-letter word—dawa—to the West’s vocabulary. It describes the ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad. It is, she says, the greatest threat facing the West and “could well bring about the end of the European Union as we know it.” America is far from immune, and her book, “The Challenge of Dawa,” is an explicit attempt to persuade the Trump administration to adopt “a comprehensive anti-dawa strategy before it is too late.”

Ms. Hirsi Ali has come a long way from the days when she—“then a bit of a hothead”—declared Islam to be incapable of reform, while also calling on Muslims to convert or abandon religion altogether. That was a contentious decade ago. Today she believes that Islam can indeed be reformed, that it must be reformed, and that it can be reformed only by Muslims themselves—by those whom she calls “Mecca Muslims.” These are the faithful who prefer the gentler version of Islam that she says was “originally promoted by Muhammad” before 622. That was the year he migrated to Medina and the religion took a militant and unlovely ideological turn.

At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali—now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where I also work—is urging the West to look at Islam with new eyes. She says it must be viewed “not just as a religion, but also as a political ideology.” To regard Islam merely as a faith, “as we would Christianity or Buddhism, is to run the risk of ignoring dawa, the activities carried out by Islamists to keep Muslims energized by a campaign to impose Shariah law on all societies—including countries of the West.” CONTINUE AT SITE