Guest Post: RAND Islam and CIA Islam too…
So they are failing, and Miss Bernard and her cronies at Rand and Pentagon should know that their plan would fail because Allah is the best of planners! And that the fundamentalists and extremists, whom they despise, are not only going to win in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they will continue their march, until they drag your people, the Jews, out of the Holy Land and plant their black banners on the roof tops of Jerusalem.
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The most serious issue raised by this first, hasty skimming of al-Awlaki’s “Battle of the Hearts and Minds” is that of the impact of US (“kufr”) attempts to turn Islam away from the jihadist path (to use a shortcut phrase for now) on the sort of da’wa (preaching :: da’wa or “call” :: recruitment) that al-Awlaki is doing.
If he had read the rest of the paragraph he quoted from US News, he’d have found the words “U.S. officials say they are wary of being drawn into a theological battle” — and so they should be — imagine for a moment the response if the Saudis poured “tens of millions of dollars” into an attempt to remake Christianity or the US Constitution in a manner more to their liking… by means both overt and covert.
The analogy is not exact by any means — the US is attempting to bring acts of horrific violence to a close, the Saudis have no comparable need to change Christianity or the Constitution — but it may give one a sense of the emotion that a well-placed description of US attempts to support “RAND” — ie “moderate” — Islam might draw forth from impressionable young believer…
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Given time, I could go on. In effect, this post is either a note to myself that further research would be profitable, or a plea for further
research on the part of others, perhaps at RAND — or CIA?
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zen:
November 22nd, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Hi Charles,
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Great post, as usual. "RAND Muslims"? I would like to think that the great Sheik al-Herman ibn Kahn would have been highly amused by al-Awlaki’s sense of humor.
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On another level, there’s nothing particular to religion or Islam or even Islamism going on here with al-Awlaki. We have seen this kind of IO in many other contexts throughout history, a process of reification that that defines authenticity as the extreme outlier and de-legitimizes the more moderate currents of the overwhelming majority.
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For example, Black Panthers calling NAACP leaders "Uncle Tom’s"; Bolsheviks calling Marxist rivals "Radish Communists" ( Red on the outside, white on the inside); Rohm’s Stormtroopers and Nazi"Old Fighters" cursing Hitler’s post-1933 "March Violets"; Mao larding abuse on the "capitalist roaders" in the Party, and so on. Even before the French Revolution, literary and Salon circles and bourgeois clubs in Paris heaped withering ridicule and slander on the court at Versailles in a "dry terror" that presaged the real one. What the smirking, smug, al-Awlaki is doing in his videos and in tapping away on his keyboard amounts to a political " dry takfirism" against most of the world’s Muslims.
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Secondarily, and this is less obvious than trying to tar moderates with the stigma of RAND ( using bizarre nonsense is often an effective political smear because it invites the listener or reader to fill in their own negative definitions of the concept) is that al-Awlaki would like to stigmatize and innoculate Muslims from information sources that are drilling down and cracking the previous opacity of radical Islamist discourse which has generally enjoyed a "free ride" from effective Western criticism or challenge. We have seen this too before, when Communists and fellow travelers attempted to discredit Western critics of the USSR ( or of Castro, Mao, Pol Pot or whomever the favored tyrant happened to be) not because they were crude and reckless anti-Communists but because they were well-informed and effective analysts. al-Awlaki would very much like to make RAND and other expert non-Muslim sources of information about Islamist radicals politically untouchable in the Islamic-Arab world.
Steve Metz:
November 22nd, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I’ve been arguing for eight years now that the notion of American government agencies or their affiliates promoting what they define as "moderate" Islam is inevitably ineffective. This is stark evidence of why.
My greatest fear that sociopaths like Al-Awlaki are able to inspire another massive attack on the United States and Americans then conclude that they tried promoting "moderate" Islam and it didn’t work, so the only solution is to stop even trying to distinguish between violent sociopaths like Al-Awlaki or Nidal Hasan and the vast majority of Muslims. This would be a tragedy of epic proportions.
zen:
November 22nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Hi Steve,
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Agreed. No one here thought that Timothy McVeigh or David Koresh represented Christianity or that the radical racialist Right is anything but a crazed and dangerous fringe, but it is all too easy to generalize from an extreme example if we are dealing with a group about which most Americans arguably know very little. That we still have Congressmen in 2009 who do not know something as basic as the difference between Sunnis and Shia is a disturbing barometer of how poorly political decisions will be made in a crisis. This corrupts any attempt at formulating an effective strategy and lets radicals "play us" in a big picture sense and effectively outmanuver their mainstream co-religionists.
Seerov:
November 22nd, 2009 at 10:10 pm
The best model to defeat radical Islam is follow the strategy the Soviet/Western elite used to demoralize their own populations. We need to get Muslims to start questing the legitimacy of their very identities. We need to slowly inject the poison of cultural and ethnic self doubt into their cultural information systems (media, education, popular media). We also need to separate the genders by introducing feminism. The best way to make a people impotent/controllable is through "active measures." Here’s link to ex-KBG operative Yuri Bezmenov explaining the concept. He explains the KGB’s strategy at influencing the Western mind. I can’t recommend this video enough.
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=915448763957391352&ei=TrUJS6eILMfdlQf72by0Dg&q=kgb+active+measures&hl=en&view=2#
Seerov:
November 23rd, 2009 at 12:16 am
Of course most of you are correct in pointing out that information isn’t as free to flow in the Muslim world as in the West. So introducing "active measures" to the Muslim would be very difficult. I would hope that someone is examining this in our national defense apparatus?
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How do we get Muslims to start doubting/hating themselves as people do in the West? How do we create self-hating Muslims, similar to the self hating Westerners in America’s universities? Even the so called "moderate Muslims" that I’ve met can’t stop talking about the so called "Golden Age" and will constantly remind everyone of all the great things that Muslims introduced to the world ("did you know algebra is a Muslim word???").
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Contrast this with the typical Western freshman in college who, if nothing else, knows that the West is the source of all the world’s suffering. How do we create such beings in the Muslim world?
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This is how we make the Islamic world manageable?
Charles Cameron:
November 23rd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Hi Seerov — and thankyou for offering us the KBG model of human nature for our detailedconsideration. Ideologically speaking, that would be a"communist" approach, wouldn’t it? . I don’t see much need for us to become like an enemy we’ve already defeated, eh? ; )
Seerov:
November 25th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
That makes as much sense as calling maneuver warfare "Nazi."
Charles Cameron:
November 26th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
As you will. A happy thanksgiving to all…
U.S. Assassination Target, Muslim American, Awlaki on “RAND Islam” | America at War:
January 31st, 2010 at 6:31 pm
[…] Cameron, Guest Post: RAND Islam and CIA Islam too…, 22 November 2009, commenting on Awlaki’s […]
Isidro Pinks:
April 19th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
McVeigh was a insane individual that has received way more attention than he ever should have other than as an example of someone who was criminally insane.