Why global jihad is losing Bobby Ghosh

I’m going to talk about the power of a

word jihad to the vast majority of

practicing Muslims jihad is an internal

struggle for the faith it is a struggle

within struggle against vice sin

temptation lust greed it is a struggle

to try and live a life that is set by

the moral codes written in the Koran in

that original idea the concept of jihad

is as important to Muslims as the idea

of grace is to Christians it’s a very

powerful word jihad if you look at it in

that respect and it there’s a there’s a

certain almost mystical resonance to it

and that’s the reason why for hundreds

of years

Muslims everywhere have named their

children jihad their daughters as much

as their sons in the same way that say

Christians name their daughters Grace

and Hindus my people name our daughters

bhakti which means in Sanskrit spiritual

worship but they have always been in

Islam a small group a minority who

believe that jihad is not only an

internal struggle but also an external

struggle against forces that would

threaten the faith or the faithful and

some of these people believe that in

that struggle it is sometimes ok to take

up arms and so the thousands of young

Muslim men who flocked to Afghanistan in

the 1980s to fight against the Soviet

occupation of a Muslim country in their

minds they were fighting a jihad they

were doing jihad and they named

themselves the Mujahideen which is a

word that comes from the same root as

jihad and we forget this now but back

then the Mujahideen was celebrated in

this country in America we thought of

them as as holy warriors who were taking

the good fight to the on

Godley communist America gave them

weapons gave them money gave them

support encouragement but within that

group a tiny small group a minority

within a minority within a minority

we’re coming up with a new dangerous

conception of jihad and in time this

group would come to be led by Osama bin

Laden and he refine the idea his idea of

jihad was a global war of terror

primarily targeted at the far enemy of

the Crusaders from the West against

America and the things he did in the

pursuit of this jihad was so horrendous

so monstrous and had such great impact

that his definition was the one that

stuck not just here in the West we

didn’t know any better

we didn’t pause pause to ask we just

assumed that if this insane man and his

psychopathic followers were calling what

they did jihad then that’s what jihad

must mean but it wasn’t just us even in

the Muslim world his definition of jihad

began to gain acceptance a year ago I

was in Tunis and I met the the Imam of a

very small mosque an old man 15 years

ago he named his granddaughter jihad

after the old meaning he hoped that a

name like that would inspire her to live

a spiritual life he told me that after

9/11 he began to have second thoughts he

worried that if he called her by that

name especially outdoors outside in

public he might be seen as endorsing bin

Laden’s idea of jihad on Fridays in his

mosque he gave sermons trying to reclaim

the meaning of the word but his

congregants the people who came to his

mosque they had seen the videos they had

seen pictures of the planes going into

the towers at towers coming down they’d

heard bin Laden say that that was jihad

claimed victory for it and so the old

Imam worried that his words were falling

on deaf ears no one was paying attention

he was wrong some people were paying

attention but for the wrong reasons the

United States at this point was putting

pressure on all its Arab allies

including Tunisia to stamp out extremism

in their societies and this Imam found

himself suddenly in the crosshairs of

the Tunisian intelligence service they

had never paid him any attention before

old man small mosque but now they began

to pay visits and sometimes they would

drag him in for question and always the

same question why did you name your

daughter your granddaughter jihad why do

you keep using the word jihad in your

Friday sermons do you hate Americans

what is your connection to Osama bin

Laden so to the Tunisian intelligence

agencies and and organizations like it

all over the Arab world

she had equaled extremism bin Laden’s

definition had become institutionalized

that was the power of that word that he

was able to do and it filled the this

this old Imam it filled him with great

sadness he told me that of bin Laden’s

many crimes this was in his mind one

that didn’t get enough attention that he

took this word this beautiful idea he

didn’t so much appropriated as kidnapped

and debased it and corrupted it and

turned it into something that was never

meant to be and then persuade that all

of us that it always was a global jihad

but the good news is the good news is

that the global jihad is almost over has

been loud and defined it he was dying

well before he did and now it’s on its

last legs opinion polls from all over

the Muslim world show that there is very

little interest among Muslims in a

global holy war against the West against

the the far enemy the supply of of young

men willing to fight and die for this

cause is dwindling the supply of money

just as important more important perhaps

the supply of money to this activity is

also dwindling the

the wealthy fanatics who were previously

sponsoring this kind of activity are now

less generous what does that mean for us

in the West does it mean we can break

out the champagne wash our hands of it

disengage sleep easy at night

no this engagement is not an option

because if you let local jihad survive

it becomes international jihad and so

there’s now a lot of different violent

Jihad’s all over the world in Somalia in

Mali in Nigeria in in Iraq in

Afghanistan Pakistan their groups that

claim to be the the inheritors of the

legacy of Osama bin Laden they use his

rhetoric they they even used the brand

name he created for his jihad so there

is now an al Qaeda in the Islamic

Maghreb there’s an al-qaida in the

Arabian Peninsula there is an al-qaeda

in Mesopotamia there are other groups in

Nigeria Boko Haram in in Somalia

al-shabaab and they all pay homage to

Osama bin Laden but if you look closely

they are not fighting a global jihad

they are fighting battles over much

narrower issues usually it has to do

with ethnicity or race or sectarianism

or it’s a power struggle more often than

not it’s a power struggle in one country

or even a small region within one

country occasionally they will go across

the border from Iraq to Syria from

Nigeria to a sorry from Mali to Algeria

from Somalia to Kenya but they are not

fighting a global jihad against some far

enemy but that doesn’t mean that we can

relax I was in Yemen recently where it’s

the home of the last al Qaeda franchise

that still aspires to attack America to

attack the West it’s old-school al Qaeda

you may remember that these guys they’re

the ones who tried to send the underwear

bomber here and they were using the

Intel

to try and instigate violence among

American Muslims but they have been

distracted recently last year they took

control over a portion of southern Yemen

and ran it Taliban style and then the

Yemeni military got its act together and

ordinary people rose up against these

guys and drove them up and since then

most of their activities most of their

attacks have been directed at Yemenis so

I think we’ve come to a point now where

we can say that just like all politics

all jihad is local but that’s still not

reason for us to disengage because we’ve

seen that movie before in Afghanistan

when those Mujahideen defeated the

Soviet Union we disengaged and even

before the fists had gone out of our

celebratory champagne the Taliban had

taken over in Kabul and we said local

jihad not our problem

and then the Taliban gave the keys of

Kandahar to Osama bin Laden he made it

our problem

local jihad if you ignore it becomes

global jihad again the good news is that

it doesn’t have to be we know how to

fight it now we have the tools we have

the know-how and we can take the lessons

we learned from the fight against global

jihad the victory against global jihad

and apply those to local jihad what are

those lessons we know who killed bin

Laden SEAL Team six do we know do we

understand who killed bin Laden ISM who

ended the global jihad there lie the

answers to this - the solution to local

jiya who killed bin Laden ISM let’s

start with bin Laden himself he probably

thought 9/11 was his greatest

achievement in reality it was the

beginning of the end for him he killed

3,000 innocent people and that filled

the Muslim world with horror and

revulsion and what that meant was that

his his idea of jihad could never become

mainstream he condemned himself to

operating on the

lunatic fringes of his own community

9/11 didn’t empower him it doomed who

killed bin Laden ISM Abu Musab Zarqawi

killed him he was the especially

sadistic head of al-qaeda in Iraq who

sent hundreds of suicide bombers to

attack not Americans but Iraqis Muslims

Sunni as well as Shiites any claim that

our Qaeda had to being protectors of

Islam against the Western Crusaders was

drown in the blood of Iraqi Muslims who

killed Osama bin Laden the SEAL Team six

who killed bin Laden ISM al Jazeera did

al Jazeera and half a dozen other

satellite news stations in Arabic

because they circumvented the old

state-owned television stations in a lot

of these countries which were designed

to keep information from people al

Jazeera brought information to them

showed them what was being said and done

in the name of their religion exposed

the hypocrisy of Osama bin Laden and al

Qaeda and allowed them gave them the

information that allowed them to come to

their own conclusions

who killed bin Laden ISM the Arab Spring

did because it showed a way for young

Muslims to bring about change in a

manner that Osama bin Laden with his

limited imagination could never have

conceived who defeated the global jihad

the American military the American

soldiers did with their allies fighting

in faraway battle fields and perhaps the

time will come when they get the

rightful credit for

so all these factors and and many more

besides we don’t even fully understand

some of them yet these came together to

defeat a monstrosity as big as bin Laden

ISM the global jihad you needed this

group effort now not all of these things

will work in local jihad the American

military is not going to march into

Nigeria to

take on Boko Haram and it’s unlikely

that SEAL Team six will rappel into the

homes of al-shabaab leaders and take

them out but many of these other factors

that were in play are now even stronger

than before half the work is already

done we don’t have to reinvent the wheel

the notion of violent jihad in which

more Muslims are killed than any other

kind of people is already thoroughly

discredited we don’t have to go back to

that satellite television and and the

Internet are informing and empowering

young Muslims in exciting new ways and

the Arab Spring has produced

government’s many of them Islamist

governments who know that for their own

self-preservation they need to take on

the extremists in their midst we don’t

need to persuade them but we do need to

help them because they haven’t really

come to this place before the good news

again is that a lot of the things they

need we already have and we are very

good at giving economic assistance not

just money but expertise technology

know-how private investment fair terms

of tray medicine education technical

support for training for their police

forces to become more effective for

their anti-terror forces to become more

efficient we’ve got plenty of these

things some of the other things that

they need we’re not very good at giving

maybe nobody is time patience subtlety

understanding these are harder to give I

live in New York now

just this week posters have gone up in

subway stations in New York that

describe jihadis savage but in all the

many years that I have covered the

Middle East I have never been as

optimistic as I am today that the gap

between the Muslim world and the West is

narrowing fast and one of the many

reasons for my optimism is

because I know there are millions

hundreds of millions of people Muslims

like that old Imam in Tunis who are

reclaiming this word and restoring it to

its original beautiful purpose bin Laden

is dead

bin Laden ISM has been defeated his

definition of jihad can now be expunged

that jihad we can say goodbye good

riddance to the real jihad we can say

welcome back good luck thank you