summary: as explained in Lee Harris’s book, The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to The West, the goal of Jihadis is death for Allah - fanaticism and fanatics cannot be reasoned with, only exterminated - the targeting of the leadership of Jihadi groups and terrorist-sponsoring nations states is one of the most critical realities: cut off the head of the snake and the death of the body follows - we in the West carry the seeds of much destruction in our own societies if we hesitate and fail to conduct such operations - simply stated, dialogue and reasoned discussions are doomed to failure when dealing with an enemy who is bent on you and his destruction

Elizabeth Duckwall’s Spotlight

August 23, 2008

How do you deter those who are already dead?

A good question. A martyr seeking, longing for death, is already dead in his own mind. Often he cares not about his life or yours, as the afterlife is more important than the one lived in the flesh. The Gathering Storm Report available through The Gathering Storm blog submitted an analysis of Laurent Murawiec’s 2006 report for BESA Center for Strategic Studies Bar-Ilan University, a “must read.”

The Gathering Storm Report follows my redaction:

“Contemporary jihad is not a matter of politics at all (of ‘occupation, of ‘grievances,’ of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and Zionism), but a matter of Gnostic faith. Consequently, attempts at dealing with the problem politically will not even touch it.”Gnosticism is “a collective pathology of the mind.”

…Gnosticism is belief in a fantasy that is taken to be more real than the common reality: they do not believe what they see, they see what they believe.

For 500 years Europe was convulsed by by Christian Gnostic insurrections:

…They mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, threatened kingdoms and overthrew dukedoms, they slaughtered Jews, priests and rich people, they created their own, grotesque, bloody, totalitarian ‘republics.’ “Soon we shall drink blood for wine,” one of the leading insurgent writers stated, “those who do not accept baptism… are to be killed, then they will be baptized in their blood.” And another one: “Accursed be the man who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of the enemies of Christ. Every believer must wash his hands in that blood… every priest may lawfully pursue, wound and kill sinners.” And “the Just… will not rejoice, seeing vengeance and washing their hands with the blood of sinners.” Hear Thomas Müntzer: “curse the unbelievers… don’t let them live any longer, the evil-doers who turn away from God. For a godless man has no right to live if he hinders the godly. The sword is necessary to exterminate them… if they resist let them be slaughtered without mercy… the ungodly have no right to live, save what the Elect choose to allow them… Now, go at them… it is time… The scoundrels are as dispirited as dogs…Take no notice of the lamentations of the godless! They will beg you… don’t be moved by pity… At them! At them! While the fire is hot! Don’t let your sword get cold! Don’t let it go lame!”

Today’s Islamic Gnostic has the same belief structure:

The believers – here, the jihadis - are the Elect: they, and only they, know God’s plan for the world; they have been chosen by Him to fight and win the final, cosmic battle between God and Satan, and bring about perfection on earth, in this case, the extension of God’s writ and dominion, the Dar al-Islam, to mankind as a whole. Everybody else is wrong and evil, jahili, and an enemy who can and should be killed at will. Reality, Creation, that is, is irretrievably perverted. The Perfect are “an elite of amoral supermen” (Norman Cohn), who know what reality ‘really’ ought to be. They are engaged in transforming the world so that it conforms to the ‘second reality’ that they alone know, thank to their special knowledge, gnôsis. In order to get from A to B, from the evil today to the perfect tomorrow, torrents of blood have to be shed in exterminatory struggle, the blood of all those whose actions or whose very being hinder the accomplishment of the Mahdi’s mission. Owing to their extraordinary status, the Perfects are above all laws and norms. Everything they do is willed and sanctioned by God. Their intent (niyyah) vouches for their acts. They alone are able to determine life and death. The power this ideology confers upon its believers is intoxicating. They love death more than we love life.

How did Europe deter and put down the Gnosticism that threatened European civilization? The only successful way is the final solution, the only thing that worked: they killed them.

Does this sound like Adolph Hitler’s solution? Obviously Hitler’s cadre were modern pagan Gnostics. But then, Gnosticism, or irrationality seems to resurge from time to time.

What did Europe do to crush the insurrectionary Gnostics in the Medieval and late- Medieval era? Churchill once said: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Likewise I’ll have a kind word for the Inquisition (not the Spanish one, though), which did quite a job cleaning up the mess. They rounded them up and they killed them. Thomas Müntzer was defeated, captured and beheaded in 1525. The ‘King’ of the Anabaptists of Münster, John von Leyden and his aides, were executed in 1535. As a terrible warning, their bodies were suspended in iron cages from the tower of St. Lambert’s church in the town. Those who survived hit in wait for better days. What they had found is that their insurgency was hopeless, that it was useless, and that sticking one’s neck out was a sure way to lose it. Their will had been broken. Enough of a trauma had been inflicted to do so. […]

The defeated European Gnostics went underground, their sole hope resided in the clandestine conveying of their beliefs, especially to their children. Society cannot eliminate the Gnostic beliefs, but can make the strain dormant instead of virulent. Jihad is integral to Islam and derives from its most fundamental tenets. […]

Once their leaders had been exterminated, the Medieval insurgents of Europe disbanded and scattered.

Certainly these facts were not stressed during my studies of European history. Instructors taught that the “evil” Catholic Church was determined to annihilate all that opposed spiritual and political power by rooting out disbelief and accusing all of heresy and witchcraft.

Which of the contemporary Gnostics should “rooted out” be killed? According to Murawiec, all those involved:

Contemporary jihad, like its emanation, terrorism, is an integral chain: as long as it is islamico-glamorous to be a cleric who issues fatwas calling for the murder of Israeli civilians or American GIs, the cleric will go on. Once dead, he will stop. So will the chairman of a charity that funnels money to jihad. So will the senior intelligence officer who trains or smuggles them, the predicator who incites, the madrasa or university professor who brainwashes, the prince who lies for terror, the ayatollah who sends out teams of killers, etc. This is deterrence after the French expression they have been shot pour encourager les autres. Jihad is the operative ideology of a number of states; states can be pinned down and hit. This approach is a variant of the notion of decapitation, or of the formulation of nodal targeting given by air power theorist Col. John Warden. Less than the jihadi hardware, it is the jihadi software that has to be hit – but not by soft power.

This is the only way to flush out the irrationality, the sickness of the mind that threatens the world.

European Christian Gnosticism was bad enough: Unfortunate for the Middle Ages. But they did not have weapons of mass destruction or cohorts of suicide bombers. Islamic Gnosticism has become an existential crisis for Western civilization, and we must protect ourselves. Unfortunately the Islamic Gnostics have convinced many Westerners to cultural self-suicide.

Coincidentally, an upcoming discussion of Laurent Murawiec’s The Mind of Jihad will be held on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at the Hudson Institute.

Here is The Gathering Storm Report’s analysis:

IsraPundit reports on a recent paper by BESA Center for Strategic Studies Bar-Ilan University entitled “Radical Islam: Challenge and Response”

This a very scary paper for those who think we are dealing with a rational enemy - the jihadists - and we can somehow deter them from their actions if we would only try and understand them through rational discussions. The paper is a must-read but I’ll summarize the important points here.

According to the paper, we are not dealing with a rational enemy as we did in the past. The Cold War is a good example of deterring an enemy steeped in a rational belief system. MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - kept the Soviets at bay until their economy imploded and the Cold War ended. Their desire to live was the most important deterrent of all.

But we are not dealing with an enemy who values life - theirs or anyone else’s. Laurent Murawiec, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. who is the author of the paper explains.

“Deterrence works because one is able credibly to threaten the center of gravity of the enemy: the threat of inflicting unacceptable losses upon him, whether in a bar brawl or in nuclear escalation. Deterrence works if the price to be paid by the party to be deterred hugely exceeds his expected earnings. But deterrence only works if the enemy is able and willing to enter the same calculus. If the enemy plays by other rules and calculates by other means, he will not be deterred. If the calculus is: I exchange my worthless earthly life against the triumph of Allah on earth, and an eternity of bliss for me, if the enemy wishes to be dead, if to him the Apocalypse is desirable, he will not be deterred.”

Murawiec goes to make the distinction between those that are religious and the ideological religious. As many have said, myself included, Islam is not just a religion. It is a socio-political ideology. “The difference between the religious and the ideologically religious is this: the religious believer accepts that reality is a given, whereas the fanatic gambles everything on a pseudo-reality of what ought to be. The religious believer accepts reality and works at improving it, the fanatic rejects reality, refuses to pass any compromise with it and tries to destroy it and replace it with his fantasy.”

Or in other words, a fanatic is one who when proven wrong - redoubles his efforts. Murawiec continues. “Contemporary jihad is not a matter of politics at all (of ‘occupation, of ‘grievances,’ of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and Zionism), but a matter of Gnostic faith. Consequently, attempts at dealing with the problem politically will not even touch it. Aspirin is good, and so is penicillin, but they are of little avail to counter maladies of the mind. I am emphatically not saying here that the jihadis are “crazy.” I am saying that they are possessed of a disease of the mind, and the disease is the political religion of modern Gnosticism in its Islamic version.”

This is what I have been saying for the last two month. Islam is a form of mental illness and the current struggle in Islam is not so much a battle over its soul than a battle over its mind.

Murawiec goes on. “Soldiers kill. Terrorists kill. Modern Jihadis lap the blood. Inseparable from contemporary Arab-Muslim jihad are the idealization of blood, the veneration of savagery, the cult of killing, the worship of death. Gruesome murder, gory and gleeful infliction of pain, are lionized and proffered as models and exemplary actions pleasing to Allah. These are no merely reflections of a pre-modern attitude toward death.”

Murawiec offers some very gruesome examples.

· Sept. 28, 1971, in Cairo. The prime minister of Jordan Wasfi al-Tell, who had been threatened by the Palestinian movement in retaliation for the so-called Black September of 1970, walks into the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. “Five shots, fired at point-blank range, hit [him]. He staggered and he fell dying among the shards of glass on the marble floor. As he lay dying, one of his killers bent over and lapped the blood that poured from his wounds.”

· This report on the killing of an Algerian intellectual: “Dr. Hammed Boukhobza who was killed by a group of Islamist terrorists in the city of Telemly. He was not just killed in his apartment, but his wife and children who wanted to escape were forced to watch how he was literally cut to pieces, his entrails slowly drawn out while he was just barely alive. The terrorists obviously liked to watch the suffering, and they wanted to family to share their enjoyment.”

· “We love death more than you love life.” From an al-Qaeda communiqué. “This pornography of crime is endless, from the gratuitous killing of a Leon Klinghoffer to Mohammad Atta’s instructions, “You must make your knife sharp and you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter.” The accumulation of such deeds shows that they are not an epiphenomenon but are central to the purpose of the jihadi.”

Murawiec continues. “As I said, a soldier kills, a jihadi loves to kill. And what was the dismal arithmetic conveyed by some jihadi that since the Americans had purportedly killed a lot of Muslims, the Muslims were “entitled” to kill 4 million Americans, children included? Torah recounts the end of human sacrifice: it forcefully states that God’s Law is THOU SHALT NOT MURDER that was adopted by Christians. Today’s jihad is a giant regression to pre-Abrahamic times, to Moloch and Baal.”

Finally, Murawiec poses the question, “How do we deter the modern Gnostic warriors, the jihadi?”

His answer is not pleasant. “Mainly, we do not. Those who are dead already, who consider themselves dead to the world and only alive to the Afterworld, those who wish to die, generally cannot be deterred. Faith has been described as a belief in things invisible. Gnosticism is belief in a fantasy that is taken to be more real than the common reality: they do not believe what they see, they see what they believe. This cannot be deterred.”

“If our enemy was merely ‘terrorism,’ we could defang it, admittedly at great cost: by destroying the Saudi-Wahhabi nexus and their grip on power, by wiping out the Iranian Ayatollahs’ strength, and by squeezing hard the noxious Pakistani military-intelligence establishment - all in all, the linchpins of Muslim terrorism. Once this infrastructure of terror collapsed, much of terror would. But terror itself is nothing but the principal paramilitary instrument of jihad: the operative concept is jihad, not terror. Some workarounds work. The way in which Israeli military and security forces have ruthlessly sapped the strength of Islamic terror, notably by a high-tempo attrition of its leadership cadre, is exemplary and should be studied and emulated elsewhere.”

He continues. “Contemporary jihad, like its emanation, terrorism, is an integral chain: as long as it is islamico-glamorous to be a cleric who issues fatwas calling for the murder of Israeli civilians or American GIs, the cleric will go on. Once dead, he will stop. So will the chairman of a charity that funnels money to jihad. So will the senior intelligence officer who trains or smuggles them, the predicator who incites, the madrasa or university professor who brainwashes, the prince who lies for terror, the ayatollah who sends out teams of killers, etc.”

“Jihad is the operative ideology of a number of states; states can be pinned down and hit. This approach is a variant of the notion of decapitation, or of the formulation of nodal targeting given by air power theorist Col. John Warden. Less than the jihadi hardware, it is the jihadi software that has to be hit - but not by soft power.”

And he makes a good point here. “One martyr will have followers, ten martyrs will be admired and emulated. One thousand dead martyrs who died unheralded die in vain. If Ahmadinejad and others die in vain and uselessly they will not die as martyrs but as slobs. For the Gnostic, for the jihadi, his death is the only thing that matters to him: take that away and nothing is left. It does not mean, as the jurors of the Moussaoui trial were apparently led to believe, that “you cannot make a martyr out of him, since this is what he wants.” Make his death a lonely, useless, ignored death. Unextraordinary, unromantic, trivial deaths shatter the glory of the jihadi’s death.”

“Jihad is integral to Islam and derives from its most fundamental tenets. The severing of that link is not going to happen soon. But throughout history, when Islamic conquerors met their match, they stopped. When they met crushing defeat, they retreated, and found the ulama and the faqih to justify that, like prophets who announced the Rapture for yesterday, 8:09 am, and reschedule it for next year. But let us remember that most of the faithful are not turned off by the ludicrous failure of their prophet’s prophecies, precisely because they live in the ’second reality.’”

Murawiec ends with this proposal. “Applying high-tempo attrition and nodal targeting to the jihadi apparatus worldwide (by which I emphatically do not mean ‘terrorists’ alone or even in the first place) seems to me to be a modern equivalent. It is those who deploy the undead who must be the priority targets.”