The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (25 page)

At that point Harf was interrupted by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who said: “We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime or 50 lifetimes. There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor Muslims, and as long as there are poor Muslims, the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join. We can’t stop that, can we?”

Harf responded: “We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.”
⁹¹

Harf was roundly ridiculed for these remarks, but what she said was just a particularly unconvincing statement of the same line that many other U.S. officials have been pushing over the years. In October 2014, Harf’s boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, had given essentially the same analysis of the rise of the Islamic State. “The extremism that we see,” he said, “the radical exploitation of religion which is translated into violence, has no basis in any of the real religions. There’s nothing Islamic about what ISIL/Daesh stands for, or is doing to people.” (“Daesh” is an insulting name for the Islamic State derived from the Arabic acronym for ISIS and loosely resembling the Arabic words for someone who “crushes something under foot” or “sows discord.”)
⁹²

Instead, it was all about the poor envying the rich: “We’re living at a point in time where there are just more young people demanding what they see the rest of the world having than at any time in modern history.” They don’t have it because of . . . global warming: “And that brings us to something like climate change, which is profoundly having an impact in various parts of the world, where droughts are occurring not at a 100-year level but at a 500-year level in places that they haven’t occurred, floods of massive proportions, diminishment of water for crops and agriculture at a time where we need to be talking about sustainable food. In many places we see the desert increasingly creeping into East Africa. We’re seeing herders and farmers pushed into deadly conflict as a result. We’re seeing the Himalayan glaciers
receding, which will affect the water that is critical to rice and to other agriculture on both sides of the Himalayas. These are our challenges.”

So as far as Kerry was concerned, jihad terrorism was all about poverty—poverty brought about by global warming. If that poverty were alleviated, presumably jihad terror would evanesce worldwide.

The secretary of state also blamed Israel: “As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the ISIL coalition, the truth is we—there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt—and I see a lot of heads nodding—they had to respond to. And people need to understand the connection of that. It has something to do with humiliation and denial and absence of dignity.”
⁹⁵

The idea that poverty causes terrorism (of which the idea that the jihadis just need jobs is one variant) is, in fact, U.S. government policy: the United States spent billions building schools, hospitals, and roads in Afghanistan under the assumption that once Afghans were well educated and had access to modern services and amenities they would not turn to jihad.

And in October 2013, the idea that poverty is responsible for terrorism was cemented even more firmly as a cornerstone of U.S. policy at a meeting of the Global
Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), when Secretary of State John Kerry and Turkish Foreign Minister (and soon to be Prime Minister) Ahmet Davutoglu launched what they called the “Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience,” which was intended to counter “violent extremism” essentially by giving potential jihad terrorists economic assistance.
⁹⁶

Kerry spoke about the importance of “providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment” into jihad groups.
⁹⁷
The GCTF devoted $200 million to this project, a core element of Barack Obama’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program.
⁹⁸

Kerry said this money would be used for “challenging the narrative of violence that is used to justify the slaughtering of innocent people.”
⁹⁹
How? By giving young would-be jihadis jobs: “Getting this right isn’t just about taking terrorists off the street. It’s about providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment. In country after country, you look at the demographics—Egypt, the West Bank—60 percent of the young people either under the age of 30 or under the age of 25, 50 percent under the age of 21, 40 percent under the age of 18, all of them wanting jobs, opportunity, education, and a future.”
¹⁰¹

This initiative is foredoomed. In reality, study after study has shown that jihadists are not poor and bereft of economic opportunities, but generally wealthier and better educated than their peers. A 2009 Rand Corporation report, for example, found that “terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.”
¹⁰²
Rand’s Darcy Noricks noted that “terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.”
¹⁰³

The
Economist
reported in 2010:

           
Social scientists have collected a large amount of data on the socioeconomic background of terrorists. According to a 2008 survey of such studies by Alan Krueger of Princeton University, they have found little evidence that the typical terrorist is unusually poor or badly schooled.
¹⁰⁴

A National Bureau of Economic Research study likewise found that “the risk of terrorism is not significantly higher for poorer countries.”
¹⁰⁵

But none of this has sunk in among the political elites. In his inaugural address as caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said of the unity of Muslims from all over the world in the caliphate, “If kings were to taste this blessing, they would abandon their kingdoms and fight over this grace.”
¹⁰⁶
That in a nutshell explains why Harf and Kerry are wrong, and why the “Global Fund
for Community Engagement and Resilience” is a gargantuan boondoggle. It doesn’t take into account the fact that human beings have souls, and that they long to do something that matters—to be part of some great cause.

The Muslims who have flocked to the Islamic State from all over the world have done so because they long to be warriors for the restoration of the great caliphate, the center of the unity of the Muslims worldwide, the tip of the spear of worldwide jihad against the infidel—just as young men have always flocked to join great causes throughout history. ISIS gives their lives meaning and purpose. This movement to join the global jihad is not about poverty or lack of economic opportunity; it is about living a life that means something.

There is absolutely no chance that these young men will trade being a noble mujahid, waging jihad for the sake of Allah, for a chance to greet people entering Walmart or to spend their days saying, “Would you like fries with that?” Kerry spoke about “humiliation” and “absence of dignity” that supposedly drives Palestinians to the jihad, with no apparent appreciation of how his plan was asking the warriors of Allah to forsake Allah’s battlegrounds for what, in comparison, is exactly that: humiliation and the absence of dignity.

Chapter Four

HOW THEY DID IT—AND WHO’S TRYING TO STOP THEM

T
he Islamic State is the wealthiest and most successful terror group in the history of the world. If it is able to maintain control over its territory for an extended period, it will provide a modern-day example of how a gang of warriors and thugs is able to make the transition from warfare and violent intimidation to stability and governance.

Throughout history, others have made this transition—from the Germanic tribes that harassed the Western Roman Empire to the Ottomans who harried the Eastern Roman Empire and ultimately extinguished it altogether. And let’s not forget the Palestine Liberation Organization, which, if Barack Obama gets his way, is about to make the final step from terror organization to respected national government.