Calling It Like It Is

It is hard to tell very unpopular truths.  In the West to do so is to run the risk of falling afoul the myrmidons of political correctness, the minions of multi-cultural affection, or simply those who cow down to the fear of maybe, perhaps, offending someone's sensitivities somewhere, somehow.  In other countries, Pakistan is on the list near the top, to tell it like it is means to run the very real and present hazard of being killed by a person so warped by the perverse messages of faith as to lose his mental and moral moorings.

In the recent weeks a pair of blunt spoken advocates of human rights, particularly the right to one's personal conscience, have made it plain what is at stake in the struggle between the advocates of violent political Islam and their opponents.  The pair are French president Nicholas Sarkozy and Pakistani member of parliament Sherry Rehman.

In a speech a week ago to an interfaith conference in Paris, M. Sarkozy set his sights on the Mideast.  In specific he drew a steady bead on the violence perpetrated by Muslims on Christians.  He stated the campaign of bombings, shootings, beatings, and general intimidation was an effort at "religious cleansing."  The phrase is redolent of the damning "ethnic cleansing" against which the US and other countries employed armed force a bit more than a decade ago.

M. Sarkozy linked the two forms of "cleansing" as conjoined twins of evil.  As the French president sees life and the world, "religious cleansing" deserves the same sort of active opposition as did ethnic cleansing in the ruins of Yugoslavia.  The Muslim attacks on Christians as well as the lame efforts of Muslim majority governments to protect Christians are, in M. Sarkozy's view, assaults on the liberty of conscience, which is a bedrock principle on which French society and polity have existed for a mort of years.

Sherry Rehman is a pillar of courage in a swamp of cowardly violence.  She is a principled person whose goal is simply human rights for all Pakistanis--including Christians.  In this she is following the course set by Pakistan's founding father.  Her specific goal at the moment is the ending of the Zia era blasphemy laws.  To this end the former government minister and PPP heavyweight has introduced a Private Member's Bill to end the death threat of the blasphemy law.

As a consequence the lady has been marked for death by assorted clerics of the political Islam end of the Muslim spectrum.  She has been declared officially by these men as an "infidel," and branded "worthy of death" in fatwa after bloody fatwa.  No doubt all these death messages were presented in the name of "Allah the Merciful and Compassionate."

Thus the probability of Ms Rehman being done to death by a True Believer in the same manner as Salmaan Taseer is high, very high.  President Zardiiri with the courage of a startled rabbit has urged Ms Rehman to leave the country until the "situation is stabilized."  With a physical courage which matches her moral and intellectual bravery, Ms Rahmen has spurned the request.  Pakistan is her country and there she will live and die, triumph or fail.

Surrounded by tens of thousands of fear driven, insecure men who seek an identity in True Belief, the stance taken by Ms Rahmen can only excite the greatest respect.  She transcends borders with her stance and her courage.  Even should she die under the assassin's knife or gun, the coward's bomb, Ms Rehman must serve as a beacon for any and all Pakistanis who seek to see their country among the ranks of the Civilized States rather than within the narrow and reactionary tribe represented by such as Taliban in all its incarnations or al-Shabaab or the assorted Baby al-Qaedas--or the Iran of today.

The reformers of Pakistan are at the point of decision.  They can leave for the West which will welcome them.  They can lay low, hide out, talk only to one another, and hope the clerics and their mobs miss them.  Or, like the late Punjabi governor Salmaan Taseer and Ms Rehman, take a stand and fight it out against the forces of the Eighth Century.  They may die, but in that case their deaths will mean something.  If they do nothing, they will live with the knowledge that they failed in their obligation to themselves and their fellow countrymen.

M. Sarkozy for his part has tossed down the gauntlet to his fellow Western leaders.  They can either take up his challenge and repudiate the "religious cleansing" underway throughout the Muslim majority states with all the instruments of national power at their disposal or they can remain silent.  They can either stand on the side of the most basic human right of freedom of conscience or they can in their denial surrender to the forces of reactionary fear driven prejudice and hate.

The US and UK no less than France have long stood for freedom of belief.  It would be shameful as well as self defeating for either Prime Minister Cameron or President Obama to fail to measure up to the French President.  It is to be hoped that M. Sarkozy will bring the matter of Christian killing, Christian intimidation, Christian terror to the attention of Mr Obama when they meet in Washington a few days hence.  It is to be devoutly hoped that Obama will shed his pose of multi-culturalism and tell it like it is with respect to events in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Nigeria, and other Muslim majority states.

Quite simply the "religious cleansing" deserves the same measure of response as did the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia.  Any less is to say the assorted conventions on human rights espoused by the UN and subscribed to by the US as well as all the Muslim majority states are, as Bismark once was reputed to have said, "mere scraps of paper."  It is also to cast aside a foundational principle of the US.

For the American president as for the reformers of Pakistan the choice is simple: Fight or surrender.  For the US, the second choice is to admit to self-inflicted defeat.

You Bet, Bucko, It's Going To Be A Very Long War

Recently, a friend sent the Geek a very useful review of the foundational literature on which the edifice of violent political Islam has been predicated.  It is more than simply a useful primer in the intellectual basis for the current and future conflicts between the US and other civilized states and the Trigger Pullers For Allah, it gives a strong measure of support for the contention that we are facing a global insurgency with the Bombers Of The One True Faith as the opponents.

An insurgency consists of the quest for political power by an identifiable group of politically disaffiliated people who use a mix of armed and peaceful means to acquire political power at the expense of the status quo authority.  It does not matter if the status quo authority represents the majority of any given population.  Nor does the absolute size of the disaffiliated group matter.

Historically, insurgencies have been frankly political in both nature and goal.   Whether the insurgency was of the offensive variety, (usually referred to as "revolutionary)," or defensive, ("wars of national liberation" or "wars of independence"), the stakes have been limited to political domination of a definable geographic area.  The motives have been rooted in a sense of political emasculation or, more uncommonly, economic exploitation.  The quest has been simply to redress the grievances, peacefully if possible, violently, if that was the only option.

Never before has the human race been confronted with an insurgency which has the political core so wrapped with religious ideology as is the case with the advocates of violent political Islam.  Never before in the entire bloody record of human conflict has there been an insurgency without geographic limits.  Due to the universalism resident in the ideology of Islam and the presence of Muslims in virtually every country on Earth, the developing insurgency by those who espouse political Islam is an absolutely new phenomenon.

As every student of insurgency knows well, such wars are promoted and waged by numerical minorities.  Even insurgencies with globe rocking outcomes (such as the French, Russian, or Chinese revolutions or the American War of Independence) are the creations of minorities too small to register on public opinion polls--had such existed at the time.  The first shots of the current insurgency were fired in Iran by a minority so small that the Shah's security services initially dismissed the advocates of Ayatollah Khomeini as being less than a nuisance.

Insurgencies are like avalanches.  The smallest dislodged stone results in catastrophe.  It is for this reason that the oft proclaimed position by the Obama administration and other apologists for Islam that only a tiny minority of extremists is responsible for the deaths and destruction which have plagued the world for decades now is false--fatally so.  The stone has been kicked--get a grip on it.

Even today, years into the "Global War on Terror," it is no doubt true that most Muslims do not actively support the insurgent efforts of al-Qaeda, Taliban, and the others.  This does not matter.  The majority of the Russian population did not support the Bolsheviks--or even know Lenin existed.  Most colonials wanted only to be counted out of the war during the long years of the American War of Independence.  The same was true in Iran even though the Shah was widely and soundly despised.

However, the current insurgent dynamic resembles its smaller, more localized progenitors in other ways as well.  As has always been the case, the status quo authority has had the initiative--and misused it in ways which has driven the insurgency to spread and deepen.

For all too many years the US and other civilized states either ignored the signs of the coming insurgency or, worse, deprecated their meaning.  For example, the administration of Ronald Reagan ignored the evil synergy between the Islamization campaign of President Zia in Pakistan and turning over the endgame of the proxy war in Afghanistan to the Pakistanis.  Later, the Clinton administration totally misread the significance of the declaration of war against the US issued by Osama bin Laden as well as the several attacks on US interests and forces conducted by al-Qaeda.

False policy linkages between the rise of violent political Islam and the relations between Israel and the Palestinians did nothing to bring the emerging threat into clearer focus.  Rather, they did the opposite, encouraging American policy makers in the incorrect belief that peace between Israel and the Palestinians including the successful establishment of the "Two State Solution" would end the growing insurgency.

Another similarity between the Muslim insurgency and its smaller, localized precursors is the mix of violent and peaceful techniques.  The quest for special accommodations to Muslim sensitivities or religious practices by peaceful political, judicial, or public relations means constitutes an effective way of (to use the old Leninist term) "boring from within."  The overarching even if unstated goal of these efforts at "accommodation" is the slow sapping of political will in the US and other countries.  Without political will to continue the war against the Trigger Pullers of the Prophet, the war is lost regardless of what happens on the battlefield.

The presence within American political and public opinion molding elites of apologists for Islam--including the violent political sort--is another point of identity between the present insurgency and its historical progenitors.  The American Declaration of Independence was written with a firm eye on influencing elite opinion in Great Britain.  The existence of a pro-American faction in the British elite was well known in the colonies and the Declaration was a transparent effort to strengthen its potency in parliament.  Note well that the Continental Congress chartered a fast schooner to carry a copy directly to England in order that Edmund Burke and others of the county Whigs persuasion would get the best, latest ammunition.

Similarly, the Russian Revolution--the second one, the one which brought the Bolsheviks to power, had strong supporting voices in the US and Europe.  Lenin might have disparagingly called John Reed and his fellow travelers as "useful idiots," but the utility of these mouthpieces cannot be overestimated.  The Muslim insurgents are equally or better served by their apologists and exponents today.  And, they know it even in the mountains of the FATA.

The final point of coincidence between today's global insurgency and the earlier versions is the most important.  The ultimate test in an insurgency is the political will of the contestants.  The side which can absorb casualties and accept suffering, the side which can spend endless time in a war without milestones or phase lines without losing its political will to continue, is the side which will win.

In this most crucial of areas the present correlation of forces favors the Bombers of the Koran.  There are two major forces at work which move in opposite directions to the disadvantage of the US and other civilized states.

The combination of religion with local, national grievances and causes of political disaffiliation provide a powerful wellspring of political will to say nothing of recruitment.  The power of religious identity is also seen in the total absence of any popular demonstrations by Muslims anywhere against the actions of the advocates of violent political Islam--this means most Muslims either tacitly support the insurgency or have been cowed into silence.

In the US and the West generally there is an identity crisis within the elites.  There is also a sapping conflict between the views and beliefs of the common people and the self-defined elites.  The result is an uncertainty as to who we are and what we are all about which can do nothing but sap political will.  This sapping is exacerbated by the nature of Western culture today with an emphasis on the material and secular with a concomitant unwillingness to confront frankly the threat before our eyes.  Of course, the present and persistent economic decline of the US and Western Europe does no service in this area.

The dynamic hinted at by the present correlation of forces (the Geek loves that old Soviet term) is not favorable at all.  It implies the war will continue for a long, long time with the US and others losing, staying on the defensive for many of the years ahead.  In this way the future will resemble World War II on steroids--a long period of defeat, failure, retreat until the awesome potentials both physical and spiritual of the US and other civilized states is aroused, mobilized, and employed with full vigor.

Until and unless that day of turnaround comes, our future is one of greater constriction, greater fear, greater sense of futility.  The best that can be hoped for is that we will hit bottom quickly so that the rebound can occur before it is one day too late.

It Sure Would Be Best If Religion Left Foreign Policy

Former New York City mayor, Ed Koch, blogs at the JPost. Today he (correctly) reams out President Obama on his approach to the Mideast generally and Israel in particular. The downside is that his reasoning is predicated on religion--and only religion.

Hizzoner emphasizes religious confession--Jewish, Christian, and Muslim--to the exclusion of real world considerations of national and strategic interest or even the reasonably compelling factor of shared values, practices, and orientations. He seems to be of the view that religion trumps all other inputs to the evaluation of alliances, the definition of hostile powers, or the coinciding nature of national and strategic interests between nation-states.

None of this denies the importance of religion, particularly majority religion, in establishing the context surrounding any nation-state's definition of self, or the nature of its national and strategic interests. There is, for example, utterly no way of separating Israel, the state, from Israel, the national homeland for Jews, wherever they may reside. Israel is the ultimate refuge, the final bastion for Jews everywhere. It is the state which serves as a guarantee for the safety of Jews under threat anywhere in the world.

That is the greatest, longest lasting, and most important "lesson learned" from the Nazi regime's Slaughter of the Innocents between 1933 and 1945. The extreme reluctance exhibited by supposedly civilized, progressive, secular, and liberal states to offer safe haven to the Jews of Germany, Austria, and other countries shows for once and for all that only a Jewish nation-state can be trusted to welcome Jews in danger.

Nor can the centrality of Islam in the making and executing of policy in nation-states be ignored or underestimated. There is and can be no separation of polity and community of faith in Islam. Unlike either Christianity or Judaism which admit of a separation between the state and the institutions of faith, Islam prohibits even the slightest hint of daylight between the two.

However context alone does not determine foreign policy, define alliances, or identify enemies. The determinants, the definers, the identifiers are found in the ways in which factors of context merge with other, more discrete factors.

For example, Israel is not only Jewish, it is also a liberal democracy with institutions not at all dissimilar from those in Western Europe, the US, Japan, and other such nation-states. Israel, like other civilized states, has a free press, a high degree of governmental transparency, a strong commitment to the rule of law, a heavy focus upon equality of opportunity. Israel, again like the overwhelming majority of civilized states, has a regulated free market economy. And, perhaps most fundamental of all, it places the highest value on the dignity and autonomy of the individual citizen.

All of these non religious factors provide a firm basis for the establishment and development of a web of coinciding national interests. There are as many bases for an array of coinciding national interests between the US and Israel as exist for our bilateral relations with any and all European nation-states or Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and a few other countries. In short, religious terminology is irrelevant.

The overwhelming majority of Muslim majority countries do not share any basic values, imperatives, or goals with the US. It is difficult to the point of impossibility to point out a Muslim majority polity which has produced a government with a dedication to pluralism, transparency, democracy, or the dignity of the individual citizen.

The record of the membership of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in the observance of human rights is somewhere between appalling and nauseating. The same harsh judgement is appropriate when considering the primacy of the rule of law.

Freedom of expression is a null referent in the Muslim majority states. Thought crime is not only a reality in the Muslim states, it is a reality where the death penalty is applied. Only in the Muslim view of law are "crimes" such as apostasy and blasphemy punishable by death.

The bitter ground truth is that whether religious terms are employed or not, the nation-states dominated by Muslim ideology are guided, motivated, informed by an ideological agenda which is antithetical to the cultural matrix and the institutions arising from this matrix throughout the civilized world. There is no need to mention the religious strictures which have produced the antipathy between Muslim dominated polities and those of the civilized states, it is enough to reference the results: the pronouncements, the demands, the intransigence, the flat-out, full bore hostility.

It is needful to oppose Muslim states not because they are Muslim but rather because they stand in automatic opposition to most if not all of what the US and other civilized nation-states stand for. This is not unlike the need to oppose the old Soviet Union not because of Communism or Marxism-Leninism per se but rather because the Soviet Union sought to make a world order which was utterly unacceptable to the US and other countries.

Muslim states, particularly those in which the more ambitious advocates of political Islam hold forth, seek a new world order. It may be that these seekers after a new caliphate are self-delusional but that does not make them any less of a real world threat. Whether Iran or Turkey, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, the designers of the new global political alignment are positing and pursuing a goal which is inherently inimical to the US and other civilized countries.

No less than a world dominated by National Socialism or Fascism or Marxism-Leninism, a globe in which Islamism rides high would be a place most unfriendly to the US. As a Great Power, the US has an obligation to pursue a global political, economic, and social order in which it can flourish, (to steal from an old US Army ad campaign) "be all it can be." As a Great Power, the US has the duty to block the efforts of hostile camps to succeed in achieving their goals.

To this end it is necessary that the US do now what it has done repeatedly over the past seven decades--identify countries with which we have the greatest and strongest coinciding national interests and work together to defeat threats. It is evident that the US has a wide number of strong coinciding national interests with Israel.

None of these, pace, Mr Koch, have anything directly to do with religion. All have much to do in a manner quite direct with the calculus of national and strategic interests.

When considering Iran, or Pakistan, or Syria or any of the other Muslim majority polities, it is possible to parse the opposing national and strategic interests without reference to sacred writings, theological prestidigitation, fatwas or mosques and minarets. As one could find good and sufficient reasons to oppose Nazi Germany without having studied Mein Kampf, or the Soviet Union without having pondered Das Kapital, it is both easy and proper to stand against the intents of political Islam without having gone to the neighborhood madras to meditate upon the Koran or the life of the Prophet.

Since Americans tend to give ill-deserved deference to matters of religion, it would be in our best interests to take the religion out of discussing foreign relations. After all, the great game of nations is all about power in this life and gives no thought to whatever reward may await one in the next.

Welcome To A (Very) Dismal Future

Psychologists and their ilk have tried to topspin depression with studies showing that depressed people are more realistic in assessing their current and future situations than people who are not depressed. Perhaps this is true. It seems the US intelligence community thinks so.

Reading the Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR) with its dystopian view of the world and the US in 2025 is guaranteed to bring depression in its wake. This depressed state is enhanced by seeing the predictions as perhaps erring on the optimistic side.

The major take away of the QICR is that while the US will still be a Great Power, it will be far less of a Great Power fifteen years hence than even its diminished state today. The really Great Power will be China. While not stated with this bluntness in the QICR, it exists as a subtext in most of the document's four sets of scenarios.

Certainly the goal of the Gnomes of Beijing is that of presiding over China's emergence as the Really Great Power. That goal was explicit even in the snit thrown the other day in Copenhagen by the Chinese Prime Minister, who was bent out of shape by President Obama's unexceptional call for full transparency and accountability through international monitoring as regards emission controls and their effectiveness.

The Chinese shouted that such a monitoring and verification effort would compromise Chinese sovereignty and limit the country's economic growth. Even if this is not a necessary interpretation of the need for verification, any such international effort would carry the potential of impairing China's trajectory to Really Great Power status.

The QICR does call the nature and character of Great Power status into severe and genuine question in the first of its four sections. Entitled "Politics Is Not Always Local" this portion of the review raises the specter of transnational groups based on identity politics with access to weapons of mass destruction as well as high level capacities in cyberwarfare.

Identity politics has become a massive motivator of human behavior over the past fifty years. It doesn't matter if the basis of identity is racial, ethnic, religious, or ideological, when people derive their core identity from some external aspect, the capacity for True Belief and its implications becomes very high. Identity politics produces extreme actions. Extreme actions produce galloping instability in either a national arena or the global one.

The nation state as currently known will be under attack by identity politics powered groups including sub-national defensive insurgencies such as the Russians have become so familiar with in the Caucasus. China, even a China which is the Really Great Power of the 2020s, will be threatened with the same given the plethora of minorities under the Han yoke.

The nation state and its international system will also be under continued (and probably massively enhanced) pressure from Islamist practitioners of identity politics. The probability of this is, if anything, somewhat understated by the producers of the QICR. With the growing likelihood of Egypt going the way of Iran in the next few years, the number of potential sponsors or facilitators of Islamist jihadism is not going to lessen. It can only increase.

Should Pakistan go down the route pioneered by the mullahs of Iran, the Islamist jihadists would have not one but two potential nuclear suppliers. The use of such weapons by True Believers should never be underestimated. (Nor should Egypt's past and present role as a proliferator be overlooked, particularly with the high probability of the Muslim Brotherhood taking over long before 2025.)

The spooks correctly predict the further decline of the West. In the section "The World Without the West," the planners foresee a global dynamic in which Europe and the US are largely irrelevant, capable of being ignored with impunity by Iran, Russia, China, and India. (And others as well.) This projection seems counter intuitive given the size and economic strength of the European Union, but can be easily justified by the erosion of political will and national self-confidence on the part of its major constituent nations.

The same loss of political will can be envisioned for the US. The aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the effects of demographic changes in the American population as well as the economic consequences thereof will be profoundly weakening of both political will and material capacity to act independently on the global stage.

In this context it is worth noting that recent opinion polls show that a high percentage of We the People expect that China will surpass the US in all the measures of hard power over the next twenty years. There seems to be no odor of despair over this eventuality. Neither does there appear to be much desire on the part of the US government to take measures which would reduce the disparity between Chinese and American hard power capacities.

In what should be a modestly optimistic section of the QICR, the prognosticators of spookdom see the BRIC as crumbling. The ending of any alliance potential between Brazil, Russia, China and India is a tribute to the continued power of nationalism. While nationalism may be anathema to the elites of the US and Europe, it is and will continue as a major force in other areas of the world. Ironically, the competition for resources and markets between Marxist tinged states such as Russia and China may prove yet that Marx was right about the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

When taken in conjunction with the impact of sub-national and trans-national non-state actors, the competition between Really Great Power China, Sort of Great Power Russia, Wannabe Great Power India and Regional Great Power Brazil will serve to diminish the threats all present to the interests of the US. This area seems to be one which can be explored by future US administrations with profit for the American national and strategic interests.

The neo-neo-mercantilism which will govern the actions of the BRIC nations will be complicated by the emergence of what the spooks term "mega-cities" forming their own policies regarding trade, economic goals, migration, and even "national" security. Mega-cities with their intense concentration of people, skills, markets, money, and (in some cases at least) intellectual property will be a major force in international affairs which has been undervalued before this QICR.

Mega-cities have the capacity even today to profoundly influence national policy. With the probable decline in power held by central governments for the reasons previously adumbrated, the ability of these massive congeries to practice independent operations regardless of central government desires will be a major complication for future American policy makers.

The most important consideration (leaving aside the relative decline of the US) is that the world of 2025 will be chaotically multi-polar. The proliferation of actors ranging from identity politics driven groups to mega-cities and trans-national corporations will combine with the erosion of central governments, the reduction of international restraints, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction to bring wars large and small into existence.

Problems ranging from crime to climate change, from migration control to the militarization of the arctic and cyberspace, from the erosion of ethical standards in biotechnology to the depletion of energy prime mover reserves will not only increase dramatically but threaten to spin beyond the control of people to handle. Overall the picture ain't at all pretty.

We are blessed (or cursed) by living in interesting times. The future appears to be even more interesting.

Are you feeling depressed yet?

Identity Politics With A Gun And A Bomb

Over the past few months there has been an incredibly sterile debate within the small circle of counterterrorism specialists. The focus of the debate has been on the importance or even the existence of an overarching command and control cell for Islamist terrorism.

One side, exemplified by former RAND corporation counterinsurgency expert, Bruce Hoffman, has taken the position that global Islamist terrorism has a pyramidal structure. At the top is a command and control authority. (OK, the Geek is a bit too reductionist, but the gist is accurate.)

The other side argues persuasively that the villain is now decentralised, often homegrown terror in which entities such as al-Qaeda serve as inspirations or ideological role models but no more. They deprecate the need to go after a supposed capo. (Again the Geek oversimplifies to save words.)

Reality is in the middle, like a thick post around which both camps trade shots. Terrorism, Islam rooted terrorism, while having some slight semblance of central command as shown in Afghanistan, is primarily diffuse, primarily local, primarily a matter of political identity on the part of participants.

The attack on the US Consulate in Istanbul the other day is a fine example of the decentralised sort. The dead amateur attackers came from economically, socially and politically marginal segments of the Turkish population. The same may be said of presumed associates of the dead men arrested by local authorities. (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-attackers12-2008jul12,0,882041.story)

The image drawn of impoverished, poorly educated, low income, no future also rans in life's race seems perfectly calculated to reinforce the view of those who argue that all Islam-rooted terror would cease if the US and other western countries would only alleviate global poverty, increase educational opportunities, etc, etc, etc.

The problem lies in the fact that so many jihadists and wannabe jihadists come from materially superior backgrounds, have enjoyed good educations and hold good jobs with both decent pay and status. Just think of the heavyweights of 9/11 or the medical types involved in last year's abortive London vehicle bombings and the incendiary drive-in at the Glasgow airport.

What gives?

Simple. There is one factor that links the wretched of Istanbul's slums, the physicians of Glasgow and the new legions rushing to Pakistan's FATA.

Get a grip on it: identity politics.

(The Geek bets you were expecting "Islam.")

And, right you are. Islam is part of it. But, only part. The real deal is Islam as identity.

Roll the word "identity" around your mouth a few times. Stop and think about a question you (along with damn near everyone who possesses a belly button) asked back in high school or the first couple of years in college.

The Question?

"Who am I?" or its close relative, "What am I going to do with life?"

Both of these along with an army of variants focus on the word "identity." The question, the problem of identity, is among the most basic of human dilemmas.

Some of us define identity on organic, internal bases including a judicious use of the dictates and expectations of parents, society as a whole, culture, and peer group. Most of us use a mixture of internal understandings and incorporated, received wisdom of the culture around us and people who are important to us.

Then there are those who derive their personal identity strictly from external sources. The source may be close like parents. It may be more distant and artificial such as an athletic team or a celebrity. It may be totally removed and artificial such as an ideology or a religion, a cause or a belief.

It is this final group of identity seekers which is so well described by philosopher Eric Hoffer's term "True Believer." For the True Believer, the Belief becomes the personal identity. The Believer is to the very core, the Belief. Without the Belief, the Believer ceases to exist.

The potential True Believer is an empty shell in human form. An empty shell waiting, eager to be filled by a Belief. The Belief may take any form. National Socialism, Marxist-Leninism, Environmentalism, Christianity, Islam.

All that is necessary is that the Belief provide meaning. That it provide an inclusive home. That it appear both universalist and sublime. That it provide a purpose for living--and a purpose worth dying for.

The potential True Believer may be one of Franz Fannon's "Wretched of the Earth." But that isn't necessary. True Believers are just as likely to come from mansions as hovels, possess university degrees as be grade school dropouts. They are just as likely to have incomes and status of note as to be shuffling from the unemployment line to the corner.

They simply have to be empty inside.

And, meet a Belief that promises to fill the void within.

Islam promises its Believers a community. It promises rewards both here and hereafter for those who Believe and live according to the rules and strictures of the Belief.

True Believers eschew compromise, tolerance, acceptance, negotiation, as Dracula does garlic and mirrors. True Believers (and the Belief that fills them) find their identity in forcing others to accept the Belief or in killing those who reject it.

To the True Believer any rejection of the Belief, any perceived insult to the Belief, any falling away from the Belief is tantamount to rejecting the personhood of the Believer. Anyone who mocks me, kills me can (and often is) the motto of the True Believer.

Islam is a perfect Belief for any potential True Believer. It promises the most fulfillment to the Believer. It demands fighting for and dying for the expansion of the Belief. It brooks no compromise with the non-Believer. It accepts no peace with the non-Believer. It demands revenge be taken for any rejection.

For a young man who feels adrift (as almost all young men do), Islam promises, even more than Christianity or Communism, a way and a life. It promises a Community, an all-inclusive home.

For the young man feeling empty inside (as so many young men do so often) it promises a feeling of fullness beyond that of any other competing Belief extant today.

It is a Belief worth fighting for.

It is a Belief worth dying for.

It is a Belief in which dying can be the highest form of living.

(The Geek has no problem with that as a concept. In his life and work, the Geek has seen time and time again that death is no big deal. He has seen that the big deal is in the manner of a man's death. Does the death have a purpose or not.)

When a person takes his total identity from a Belief, when he becomes a True Believer, he becomes truly dangerous. He is quite willing to kill with a clear conscious. He is quite willing to die as he is certain of his rightness and reward. He is convinced that his death will provide meaning through its purposefulness.

Since the True Believer is unwilling and unable to accept compromise, to give assent to anything less than total victory, the usual diplomatic and political approaches are bootless.

Compromise or the acceptance of less than total victory for the Belief strips the True Believer of his personal identity. He ceases to exist with greater finality and totality than would be the case with mere physical death.

The Islam rooted terrorist is practicing identity politics in its purest form. That is what makes it easy for Islam to garner more jihadists. It is what makes Islam rooted terror so difficult to defeat.

Make no mistake about it. Islam is a better Belief for the empty than the alternatives today. It promises the most and demands the least.

Remember killing is no big deal for him of clear conscious. Death is no big deal for him of certain mind and spirit.

The True Believer has both.