Psychological Warfare and Terrorism (de fanging Islam)

In a recent column, I suggested that one of the best ways to fight terrorism is by undermining the terrorist’s ideology. For example, by undercutting the belief that seventy-two virgins await the young martyr in paradise, you simultaneously undermine the will to fight.

That’s not to say that the standard method of fighting terrorists—with guns—can be safely abandoned. The propaganda war works best when it is reinforced by the shooting war. The more convincingly force is applied on the battlefield, the more convincing will be the ideological arguments.

If, for example, you’re an ISIS fighter and you see your buddies on the battlefield fall victim to an occasional bomb or bullet, that won’t necessarily shake your faith in the brides-to-be. As long as the war is going well, and as long as there’s a senior officer or two around to assure you that your fallen comrades are now enjoying their reward in paradise, your basic assumptions can remain intact. If, on the other hand, you look around and see nothing but death and destruction and no surviving officers to make sense of it all, you may begin to doubt the whole enterprise.

Just as importantly, a devastating defeat will have a salutary effect on people far away from the battlefield. The fellow in Brussels or Brisbane or Boston who’s thinking of joining the jihad will now have second thoughts—not only about ISIS, but also about the ideology that fuels it. Even fanatics can become realists in the face of overwhelming facts. In short, doubts can be accelerated by defeats.

Most people, of whatever religion, like to think that God is on their side of the battle, but in Islam belief and battlefield success are more closely linked than in, say, Christianity. Indeed, the seemingly miraculous military successes of Muhammad and the caliphs who followed him were taken by Muslims to be a proof that Islam is the true religion. Conversely, the religion of Islam has never fared well when its imperialistic ambitions have been thwarted. After Napoleon’s invasion and subjugation of Egypt, and subsequent European conquests and colonization of the Muslim world, Muslims began to seriously question the efficacy of Islam. As Islam scholar Raymond Ibrahim observes:

It was one thing to hold unhesitatingly to Islam and Sharia when Islam was conquering and subjugating non-Muslims, as it had done for well over a millennium. It was quite another thing for Muslims to remain confident in the Islamic way when the despised Christian infidels were conquering and subjugating the lands of Islam with great ease—displaying their superior weapons and technology, not to mention all the other perks of Western civilization.

During the colonial and post-colonial era, Muslim nations looked increasingly to the West as a model of emulation, and increasingly they looked away from Islam. Religious fanaticism declined, the jizya collection and the dhimmi laws were abolished, and, according to Ibrahim, “By the middle of the twentieth century, the Middle East’s Christians were widely seen, particularly by the educated elites and those in power, as no different from their Muslim counterparts.” Islam had been so thoroughly defanged by mid-century that, if Americans thought about it at all, they thought of it in terms of comedy movies like The Road to Morocco or Broadway musicals like Kismet.

The point is that this more moderate Islam of the not so distant past was made possible by Western military power and by the secular strongmen who succeeded the colonial rulers. Likewise, the recent renewed appeal of fundamentalist Islam has been made possible by shows of force: the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan, the bombing of the World Trade Center and numerous other successful terror attacks, the Arab Spring revolutions and, most recently, the march of ISIS across Syria and Iraq.

Such victories against technologically and/or numerically superior forces create a psychological momentum which makes militant Islam all the more appealing to potential recruits. Psychological momentum, however, can be halted and reversed by decisive battlefield defeats. The idea that nothing is ever accomplished by war is not quite true—as evidenced by the current pacifist inclinations of our former enemies, Japan and Germany. In this respect, it’s heartening to see that some Catholic leaders are coming around to acknowledging that, on occasion, there is no alternative to military force. I recently criticized Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, for blaming terrorism on poverty and injustice, but in his address to the UN Security Council, he also called for intervention to combat the Islamic State:

My delegation wishes to recall that it is both licit and urgent to stop aggression through multilateral action and a proportionate use of force.

He was referring, of course, to the Catholic Church’s teaching on just war. One of the conditions of a just war is that force must be used proportionately. If you bulldoze my barn, I shouldn’t respond by burning down your house with all the people inside. The trouble is, when dealing with a group like ISIS, it’s difficult to say what constitutes proportionality. We are battling an armed force which also happens to have considerable symbolic significance for others. In figuring what a proportionate response would be, we have to take into consideration ISIS’ ability to inspire both lone-wolf and well-organized terror attacks around the world. Consequently, it’s crucial not only to degrade and contain ISIS, but to defeat it, and to defeat it in such a way as to crush the dreams of would-be jihadists.

As war historian Victor Davis Hanson has observed, successful military leaders strive to not only defeat the enemy, but also to discredit his ideology. This does not mean the killing of every last man on the enemy side, but it often involves the killing of the enemy’s dreams. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Allied generals forced Nazi officials and thousands of nearby residents to take humiliating tours of the concentration camps and, in some cases, forced them to bury the dead prisoners. The prosecution of Nazi officials at the Nuremberg trials also helped to ensure that the Nazi dream would never rise again. Nazism was so thoroughly discredited as an ideology that, for decades after, no one—except for a few on the fringes—wanted to be associated with it in any way.

The Islamic State itself seems to fully understand the symbolic side of war. The crucifixions and ritual beheadings are not senseless acts, they are acts calculated to send a message. On one occasion, after capturing 250 Syrian soldiers, the Islamic State militants forced the prisoners to strip to their underwear and then paraded them in front of cameras before marching them to the place of execution. The message? Those who resist ISIS will suffer both defeat and dishonor; they fight for a worthless cause.

The ISIS campaign of psychological warfare, crude and ugly as it seems to the Western mind, has had the intended effect. Rallies to support ISIS have popped up in numerous Western cities, other Muslim groups have pledged their solidarity, and more and more Muslims are flocking to join its army. In ever-distracted America, football fans are abuzz about a penalty imposed on a Kansas City Chiefs player for prostrating himself in Muslim prayer after scoring a touchdown. Since Christian players are not penalized for similar behavior, fans were outraged. Meanwhile, on the same day, a much more significant sports-related event was playing out in Casablanca, Morocco. A video posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute showed a sizeable group of fans—perhaps one hundred—chanting “ISIS! ISIS!” and then “Allahu akbar, let’s go on jihad! Allahu akbar, let’s go on jihad!” American football fans—that is to say, Americans in general—might want to take note of the ever-expanding ISIS fan base. They might also do well to consider that the penalty ISIS imposes on losers is considerably more severe than fifteen yards.

If and when we get around to defeating ISIS, let’s hope we administer a psychological defeat as well—one that shows up not only the impotence of their fighting force, but also the emptiness of their vision. Else ISIS will rise again in some other form under some other name.

Exactly how this would be done is difficult to say. We are not, hopefully, going to descend to the level of displaying severed heads. And parading troops in their underwear is inconsistent with our concept of human dignity. Indeed, the whole idea of imposing a humiliating defeat goes against the grain of our highly developed sensitivities. Nonetheless, it seems time to reconsider our politically correct policy on waging war with terrorists—a policy which seems to say that war is simply a misunderstanding, and that after we’ve defeated you quietly and without fanfare, we will give you a clean cell and a copy of the Koran untouched by infidel hands because, of course, your religion has nothing to do with your terrorist behavior.

If we wish to avoid endless wars with jihadists, we should conclude our war with the Islamic State in such a way that Muslims around the world will rethink the notions of Islamic jihad and Islamic martyrdom. It’s not as improbable as it sounds. Not so long ago, historically speaking, Turks, Egyptians, and other Muslims who read the writing on the wall did rethink Islam. Faced with a West that was not only militarily powerful, but also culturally confident, they opted for a more muted form of Islam.

Editor’s note: The image above titled “Napoleon and his General Staff in Egypt” was painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1867.

HOW ISLAM—AND THE EVER-PRESENT THREAT IT POSES TO HUMANITY—COULD BE BROUGHT TO AN END IN ONE, SIMPLE STEP

Matthew Bracken writes:
Your commenter James P. writes:
Muslim refusal to engage in rational debate, engage in self-examination, or permit “humorous” attacks on their religion are not weaknesses. They are mighty strengths! They are not Islam’s “brittle glass jaw”; they are its bulging biceps! These attributes generate fear in their enemies, and cause their enemies to seek to avoid provoking Muslims and to appease Muslims when they are angry.

I agree that these attributes of Islam have proven to be a great advantage to it as a war religion for 1,400 years. However, we are now seeing before our eyes a paradigm shift that may bring about the end of Islam in the present generation. Samuel Huntington spoke of Islam’s “bloody borders,” but until the modern era, the true scope of the horror was only realized by the victims living on those borders who were under constant attack (the ultimately unsuccessful and now condemned counter-jihad we call the Crusades being the notable exception). Five hundred or a thousand miles from Islam’s bloody borders, it was always difficult to make people understand the existential threat Islam presented to all non-Muslim societies. After its early rampant “break out” period, when seen in the context of each generation, Islam appeared to be merely biting off one more small slice of territory at a time. And on it marched, generation after generation, always moving forward, rarely being pushed back, impervious to self-examination or reformation, as deadly in our modern times as it was at the beginning.

That is changing now, because today the entire world sees Islam’s true face revealed when Muslims go into these insane rages after perceived insults to Mohammed. Their ingrained lack of introspection means that Muslims can easily be provoked into going beyond the stealth-mode they normally follow beyond Islam’s bloody borders, waking up the world to the existential threat Islam poses to all non-Muslim societies. Down the centuries, the West has often had appeasers and accommodationists as leaders, men who were willing to cut short-term local deals that over time always led to incremental Islamic advances. And these weak Western leaders were the only men who mattered, era by era. Today, as a contrast, average citizens around the world are beginning to understand how to push Islam’s automatic rage buttons, and this changes the former equation in a fundamental way. As you mentioned, videos released by lone, non-state actors at the right time could be used to torpedo the next sell-out by Western appeasers, such as over the inclusion of Turkey in the EU.

Another fundamental difference today from prior centuries is that millions of people understand that Islam has another tremendous weakness, another glass jaw, and that is their worship of the black moon rock in Mecca as Islam’s literal god-head. This black rock enshrined in the corner of the Kaaba is essential to Islam in a way that nothing in Judaism or Christianity is. The Cross lives in the hearts of Christians, and Christianity would not be destroyed if Jerusalem or Rome were destroyed. But that physical black rock in Mecca is the “hard drive” of Islam. Muslims believe that it contains all of the sins of all of the observant followers of the Prophet since the time of Mohammed, as sort of an Islamic Doomsday Book. Two of the Five Pillars of Islam involve the physical worship of that black moon rock. One is the Hajj to Mecca where pilgrims walk in a circle around the rock, and the other is the five-time daily prayer performed in its direction. (The other three pillars are ephemeral: the Shahada conversion prayer, the tithe, and observing Ramadan.) A religion that is impervious to change or self-examination (which James P says are strengths) cannot suddenly be reduced to The Three Pillars of Islam after 1,400 unbroken years as the Five Pillars of Islam.

In ancient Islamic history, the black moon rock was once stolen by a competing tribe, but after a brief time it was “found.” Islam carried on because nobody outside of a very small circle of imams even knew the rock was missing before it was replaced. But if Mecca was suddenly turned into a giant crater, there would be no way to conceal the fact from the world at large, including every Muslim. Today, observant Muslims believe that if every infidel nation fired every rocket and bomb at Mecca, Allah would turn them back or stop them in mid-flight. It is impossible for observant Muslims to believe that the Infidels could destroy the Kaaba, which is literally the physical manifestation on earth of their “greatest God.”

The Crusaders were only able to retake Jerusalem for a short time, and never got close to taking Mecca (assuming that they even understood its importance to Islam and had some notion of taking it). It was not within their power to threaten this source of Islam’s power and mystique, even if they had desired to do so. In all eras before modern mass communications, even if a Crusader “commando team” had made it to Mecca, it would not have changed anything, because the leading Muslim clerics would have replaced the black rock and rebuilt the Kaaba, and nobody would have ever known, in the same way that nobody at the time knew that the black rock had once been stolen and carried off.

Today, the entire world would know in the same hour that Mecca had been destroyed. This would destroy Islam as surely as the Aztec and Inca religions and empires were destroyed when the Spanish conquistadors captured and executed the “living Gods” at the center of the Aztec and Inca belief systems. If there is no Mecca, there is no Islam. There can be no Islam with three instead of five pillars, the two physical pillars having been destroyed by the Gods of the Infidels. “Allahu Akbar” means “our God is greatest.” This cannot be so if the Infidel God destroys the physical god-head of Islam, which is the black moon rock at the Kaaba in Mecca.

I have no expectation that any American president would order the destruction of Mecca, even if American cities had been destroyed with nuclear bombs sent from a Muslim country with a clear return address. However, not all nations are as hamstrung by self-doubt and political correctness as we are. Russia, India, and Israel, I am sure, have Mecca on their target list. If Moscow, New Delhi, or Tel Aviv were destroyed by an Islamic bomb, I believe that Mecca would be wiped off the planet Earth the same day, even the same hour.

And that would spell the end of Islam, after its unparalleled 1,400-year reign of terror.

No Mecca, no Islam, as long as the world witnesses Mecca’s physical annihilation. There will follow a period of madness, with many Muslims committing mass suicide and mass terror, but more of them will become atheists or convert to Christianity (“the stronger horse”). In all cases, Islam as we know it will be finished. After fourteen centuries, the steady mantra “Our God is greatest” cannot become “We used to believe that our God was the greatest, but it was proven to be weaker, if not a fraud.” The glass jaw of Islam, its inability to self-examine or reform in any way, will prove to be its Achilles’ heel. The 1,400-year run of murder and madness will at last come to an end. After sixty generations, we may be the one to witness its ultimate destruction and collapse.

God willing.

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