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