Combating Islamism Effectively

The author makes several key points to consider while dealing with the threat of Jihadism and the spread of of militant 7th century Islamization.

Three Reasons to Think Internationally About Islamism
 By Elliot Friedland
 It’s easy to feel like anything that happens outside of your country is something happening far away, to someone else, that doesn’t impact you. It’s not true, however. Despite the fact that we live and operate in states, the power networks which control our lives are increasingly not anchored to any one country but are tied to financial, philosophical, cultural and ethnic groups which span borders.
Theorists have discussed these developments for some time.
Political theorist Hedley Bull described this trend in 1977 as “neo-medievalism,” pointing out the similarities in terms of structural complexity between the modern period and the High Middle Ages in Europe. In the Medieval period, as now, state entities contended with multinational bodies above them, sub-state administrative entities below them and pan-national religious and financial institutions spanning them. Since the 1970s the world has become even more interconnected.
Islamic extremism as a pan-national religious ideology stands apart from national loyalties and is a prime example of this trend.
Here are three reasons to start thinking internationally about the issue.


Money Flows Globally
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal is a Saudi businessman and one of the richest men in the world. Among his other holdings he is the second largest shareholder in 21st Century Fox, owns a stake in Twitter and the Savoy Hotel in London. He has also gave $20 million to Georgetown University to fund the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and $20 million to Harvard to fund Islamic studies there.
It is perhaps unsurprising then that these institutions have drawn controversy. Professor Jonathan Brown, a Georgetown professor, gave an equivocating talk on Islam and slavery, saying “I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us, and we’re owned by people” and “Consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex.”
There is of course no way to prove that the Saudi money behind Georgetown has encouraged these views, but it certainly hasn’t publicly opposed them.
This is just one example of how the international flow of capital impacts the wars of ideas over the issue of Islamism, but its power is greatly enhanced by the speed of modern communications.

Ideas Travel Instantly
“Where are you” is the quintessentially 21st-Century question. It makes no sense in any era before the invention of the mobile phone. Now we can communicate instantly this enables news and ideas to travel globally, where we don’t even know where the other person is.  We can discuss rolling 24-hour news cycles of events happening thousands of miles away, enabling remote crises to have a domestic impact.
The perfect example of this is the recent controversy over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which sparked tension in California. After riots in Israel following a terrorist attack in which two policemen were killed, two imams in California delivered anti-Semitic sermons inciting hatred against Jews. The backlash forced one of the imams to issue an apology.
Rapid communication combined with 24-hour news cycles turned a foreign terrorist incident into a domestic problem.
But the ability to communicate instantly wouldn’t mean much if there weren’t groups on the other side of the world we felt close enough to to communicate with.

Personal Networks and Loyalties Span Borders
Many immigrants share family ties to the countries they came from. These ties are frequently maintained to the second or third generation, especially in places like the UK, where Pakistani-origin families routinely return to Pakistan to visit relatives.
Many of those reading this will have ties to countries other than the one in which they live. Family or friends may reside abroad, or people may have business interests in other countries. “Dual citizenship is an irreversible incident of globalization,” Law Professor Peter Spiro of Temple University wrote in the New York Times. “Its acceptance appropriately recognizes multiple national identities in a more mobile world.”
At the level of the ordinary citizen, this means that international groupings such as the ummah, the global Islamic community or the global Jewish community may hold loyalties and identity ties beyond one’s country. It means that many people have accounts with transnational corporations such as Facebook or Google and so they can plug in and operate anywhere in the world with ease.
At the higher political level it means that international networks collaborate to achieve desired goals independent of national considerations. Consider the appearance of the head of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he explicitly linked Brexit to Donald Trump.
In the Wikileaks scandal it was revealed that Cherie Blair, wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair, arranged a “woman to woman” meeting between the wife of the Emir of Qatar and Hillary Clinton.

For terrorists personal international links, transnational funding and ease of communication have facilitated radicalization and aided the growth of the international jihadist movement.

The fact that the world has become more interconnected is in and of itself morally neutral. The same developments which have empowered jihadi networks have fostered many positive developments as well, like being able to stream the same shows on Netflix in any hotel in the world.
Efforts to treat each country as an isolated case will never treat the problem at its root. Rather than attempting to seal off from the world, we have the option to face international problems in an international manner and collaborate with those around the world who wish to challenge radical
Islam effectively.via The Clarion Project

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