"The jihadi war will last forever." - Republished 4 June 2017

I have been asked to put something up that states my position as to "why they hate us."  I have written a lot about this kind of thing.  you can find all that in the SST archive.  pl

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Implicit in the rhetoric concerning this new phase of anti-jihadi warfare is the notion that "jihadism" is a passing phenomenon that can be destroyed and which will disappear as irrelevant to "modern" life.  It is also said that jihadism is "un-Islamic," a distortion and misrepresentation of a great religion.  In fact, jihadism is inherent in some views of what Islam is.

Islam, as I have often said, is a religion of laymen.  It has no hierarchy, no clergy, no sacraments.  There are only groups of Muslims of varying size who agree on what Islam and most especially what Islamic religious law (sharia) is.  This process of forming consensus (ijma') groups is endless and inevitable.  Some will say that Shia Islam has a hierarchy.  It does not.  In fact, The howza ("college" of Shia scholars) is merely another expression of consensus, in this case of consensus among scholars "elected" by acclamation from among their fellows.  The "authority" created by such acclamation is fleeting as each man's opinions are automatically disregarded after his death.  Much the same thing is true of the great Ulema (scholars) of Sunni Islam.

Therefore, for one group of Muslims, however large, to say that the consensus of some other group of Muslims is invalid or "un-Islamic" is merely vanity on a grand scale.  That is particularly true if the smaller, armed and violent jihad inclined group of Muslims are willing to fight, kill and die for their views.  Perfumed and elegantly dressed Muslim ladies are frquently heard expressing such disapproval of jihadis.  More vanity is expressed in this.  More vanity.

The spokesmen for the various parts of the US governnment are now engaged in telling the world that this unfavored group or that unfavored group are un-Islamic or the like.  More vanity.

The corpus of Islamic scripture contained in the Qur'an and the wildly varying collections of hadith (traditions of the early Muslims) is so vast that it contains ample justification for any sort of view desired.

We can kill our way to a state of relative quiet in which the jihadi impulse is suppressed for some time, perhaps a long time but that is all we can do.  Until the Muslims taken as a whole themselves see the futility of the unending struggle against the kuffar (unbelievers) we will always face the prospect of more violent jihad.  pl

Comments

[Babak Makkinejad]

Like who?

[Babak Makkinejad]

Learn Arabic and spend 3 years in Egypt and you will learn.

[Babak Makkinejad]

The Tunisian revolution lacked the leadership at the high caliber of men such as ayatollah Khomeini.
The successor regime did not have velayt faqih; which meant that no centralized spiritual authority exist there.
No surprises there, has anyone in that creole country read the Republic
of Plato?

[Sam Peralta]

Origin

You have missed an important observation of Col. Lang's with respect to Arab culture - zero sum.

[Serge]

Colonel,

I am not annem, but in the absent of his response I feel the urge to chime in:
Certainly the depredations committed by the UAS-supported,funded, and installed Iraqi Government post-2003 in their woefully misguided crusade factors into it, beyond the theological. We are talking about one
s relatives being raped, thrown in a heap of dozens on the cornerside with nail gun holes in their heads, and their anuses sewn shut with liquid cement. By the thousands from 2003 onwards,especially in baghdad(in the tens of thousands). This, beyond the Saddam-era(in the last days) islamization of the core ba'ath party, surely had a greater role in the rise of modern IS.

In syria, and don't get me wrong on the following, I am a fervent supporter of a secular syria ruled by the present structure: the same happened, on a much smaller scale, but given the wide range of it and the tribal structure of syria it doesn't matter. In 2011-2012 during the peak of Syrian gov panic, putting aside the lunatic Obama-era arab spring madness/propganda, the same torture and butchery occurred en masse, inflicted on the exurban majority sunni populace. The rape, imprisonement, torture, and murder of thousands. This was a larger source of grievance than Arab(GCC) money, by a long shot. And this is the source of the manpower available to the jihadis, both the foreign funded ones(HTS et al) and the non foreign funded ones(ISIS)

[turcopolier]

Sam Peralta

Yes, they do not really believe in win-win outcomes although the goal is normally to make zero sum outcomes palatable so that you don't have to fight the same fights over and over and watch your back perpetually for the strike with a fine Florentine hand. In business, war, politics there are always winners and losers. the factors leading to defeat or victory are not different in the West and among the Arabs. What is different is the way that defeat and surrender are handled among the Arabs. pl

[Keith Harbaugh]

Apropos of the title of this post:

“The Forever War”
by Patrick Buchanan, 2017-06-06
http://buchanan.org/blog/the-forever-war-127150

An excerpt (emphasis added; comments in square brackets are by KH)
(Note to Pat Lang: this seems to touch on many points you have discussed.):

By all accounts,
the killers [at the London Bridge and in Manchester]
bore no special grudge against those they murdered.
They appear not even to have known their victims.

Why, then, did they kill these strangers, and themselves?

A BBC eyewitness suggests a motive:
“They shouted, ‘This is for Allah’,
as they stabbed indiscriminately.”

The murderers were Muslims.
The rationale for their crimes lies in the belief that
their bloody deeds would inscribe them in a book of martyrs,
and Allah would reward them with instant ascension
into the paradise that awaits all good Muslims.

Ideas have consequences.
And where might these crazed killers have gotten an idea like that?

Is there a strain of Islam,
the basis of which can be found in the Quran,
that would justify what the murderers did at London Bridge?

...

[Y]ears of such atrocities have effected
a near-complete cleansing of Christianity
from its cradle provinces in the Holy Land.

If these persecutors and killers of Christians
are apostates to
Islam, headed to hell for their savageries,
why have not all the imams of the world, Shiite and Sunni,
risen together to condemn them as heretics?

Clearly,
from the suicide bombings and shootings of civilians in the Middle East,
now across the West,
there is a belief among some Muslims that
what the killers are doing is moral and meritorious —
taking the martyr’s path to salvation.

When have the imams of Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, and West
ever stood as one
to condemn all such acts as against the tenets of Islam?

In condemning the London Bridge attack,
Prime Minister Theresa May said that
recent atrocities across England were
“bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism.”

Correct.
There is an extremist school of Islam
that needs to be purged from the West,
even as this school of fanatics is seeking to
purge Christianity from the East.

We are at war.
And the imams of Islam need to answer the question:
“Whose side are you on?”

...

Is our commitment to diversity broad enough to embrace people with Islamist beliefs?
Is our First Amendment freedom of speech and of religion
extensive enough
to cover the sermons of imams who use mosques to preach in favor of
expelling Christians from the Middle East and
an eventual takeover of the West for an Islam
where Sharia replaces constitutional law?

Are such Islamist beliefs not intolerable and perilous for our republic?

Clearly,
the West is in a civilizational struggle,
with the outcome in some doubt.

...

Today we are in the 16th year of a war begun on 9/11.
We are mired down in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Our victory in Afghanistan is being reversed by the Taliban.
[And, of course, there are many powerful people in the media and in politics
urging actions against Iran
which would lead to yet another war.]

While the ISIS caliphate is being eradicated in Raqqa and Mosul,
its elements are in two dozen countries of the Mideast.
Muslim migrants and refugees, ISIS and al-Qaida among them,
are moving into Europe.

Terrorist attacks in the West grow in number and lethality every year.
The new normal.
Now,
second-generation Muslims within Europe
seem to be converting to a violent version of Islam.

To fight them, we are being forced to circumscribe our sovereignty
and empower police and intelligence agencies of which
free men were once taught to be wary.

Wars, it is said, are the death of republics.
And we now seem to be caught up in an endless war.

[Babak Makkinejad]

You quoted:

"When have the imams of Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, and West ever stood as one to condemn all such acts as against the tenets of Islam?"

Statement of Iran’s then-President "Elder of Islam" Mohammad Khatami after September 11 2001 attacks on the United States:

“My deep sympathy goes out to the American nation, particularly those who have suffered from the attacks and also the families of the victims....Terrorism is doomed, and the international community should stem it and take effective measures in a bid to eradicate it.”

2 months later on CNN,

"I expressed my deepest sorrow to the people of America right after the tragedy, and I'd like to say how sorry I am, and express my sorrow. ...

What matters is that we must confront this phenomenon. We have to do it in a determined manner. We have to address the root causes of terrorism. We have to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice. And we must fight terrorist bases wherever they are. But again, we have to address the roots as well.

...What matters is that we must identify matters very clearly. We must not act too quickly. And we must also fight terrorist bases and hopefully we must move in a direction so that in the future no nationality, no country will face such tragic events again."

But the United States and the Western Fortress were not interested in Dialogue, only Regime Destruction.