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Community Organizing Against Terror
In a short span of a holiday weekend, the world watched an ISIS-inspired gunman shoot up a cafe and synagogue. ISIS members also beheaded 21 Coptic Christians in Libya and burned 45 people to death in Iraq. This came on the heels of ISIS burning a Jordanian pilot to death in a cage and emailing American hostage Kayla Mueller’s family pictures of her dead body. Jordan responded with massive air strikes, as did Egypt.
Barack Obama responded with a selfie stick and golf.
On Monday night, State Department spox and Gap sales associate Marie Harf sat down with Chris Matthews, who asked how the current administration plans to stop the terror. Harf’s response was enough to make anyone go full Scanners: “We cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war.” Nazi Germany would have been relieved to hear that, but Harf continued.
“We need, in the longer term, medium and longer term, to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs…” At that point Chris Matthews’ eyes glazed over, but Harf kept at it:
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. You’re right. There is no easy solution in the long term to preventing and combating violent extremism. But if we can help countries work at the root causes of this? What makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business? Maybe we can try to chip away at this problem, while at the same time, going after the threat; taking on ISIL in Iraq, in Syria, and helping our partners around the world.
It isn’t a new revelation that Harf and this administration believe that the war against ISIS is not a war against terrorism, so this isn’t just a minor slip. She was revealing the Obama Administration’s only strategy for combating Islamists. Obama’s response after the massacre of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists was to call for a community summit to combat violent extremism. This administration is convinced that the road to defeating radical terrorism is no different than standing on a street corner with a clipboard.
The White House believes that poor, angry kids join ISIS because they don’t have jobs or economic opportunity and that somehow, if only the countries where fighters are radicalized and recruited had a banana stand or a mall in which to work, ISIS would cease to exist. This is an administration that, as Dan McLaughin of Red State put it on Twitter, “doesn’t believe in nation building but believes ISIS can be defeated by nation building.”
They believe this because Obama has spent his entire professional career community organizing a poor, angry populace who feel they have been wronged by an unfair economic system. Obama thinks ISIS exists in the same bubble of society that is angry about their hourly job at McDonald’s; burying children alive and torching people in a cage is just their way of expressing frustration. But ISIS doesn’t exist in Obama’s world of class warfare — they operate outside of it.
This administration fundamentally misunderstands ISIS’ beliefs because they themselves do not possess a core belief structure. Team Obama wants to community organize the world in order to shame Islamists into submission, because it’s the only thing the person in charge knows how to do. Obama thinks all ISIS wants is a living wage and some free birth control. But you can’t fight terror with Alinsky tactics. You can’t shame ISIS with class warfare because the structure in which ISIS believes isn’t based on economic class.
ISIS doesn’t care about capitalism. They don’t care about the electric company turning off their power or a garbage service refusing to pick up because of unpaid bills.
Harf and the administration are trying to write off ISIS as a product of poor economics when their entire belief structure isn’t based on capitalism. She flippantly describes ISIS fighters as “17-year-old kids who pick up an AK 47 instead of starting a business,” but ISIS isn’t recruiting fighters from the slums of southside Chicago. They are recruiting from mosques, academia, high technology, and the wealthy. ISIS doesn’t care about a living wage or whether HealthCare.gov is working. They don’t promote on performance; they promote on loyalty to the cause.
Obama has backed himself into an ideological corner by ruling out ground troops to defeat embedded ISIS strongholds because six years ago he ran on stopping war and withdrawing troops. The President is trying to defeat a brutal enemy the only way he knows how: by community organizing them to death. It is not going to work. ISIS will not be eliminated if instead of dropping bombs on their heads, he drops job applications.
Obama is the one constant in a world falling apart. He falls back on the only thing he knows how to do. The problem is that Saul Alinsky’s instruction manual doesn’t have a chapter on how to handle Islamic caliphates.
Published in General
Regards,
Jim
To be fair, they’re recruiting from losers in society. Not from the sources you described.
Second, we’ve been fighting Islamic terrorism now, on and off, for about…oh…40 years? How far have we gotten so far?
And third, there is obviously a reasonable argument to be made that terrorism’s breeding ground is in societies which are, in fact, backwards economically.
Is it Islam and culture? Yes of course. Is it also not part economics? Of course it is.
And I’m sure this isn’t an argument you heard here for the first time by Obama, is it? Pretty sure that was the cornerstone of Bush’s “hearts and minds” strategy too.
Regards,
Jim
Regards,
Jim
ISIS recruiting through British Mosques – http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/05/isis-recruitment-moves-to-radical-network-and-mosques
ISIS recruiting through web and technology
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2723346/Youre-not-young-die-British-jihadists-bid-recruit-boys-young-15-social-media-sites.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/isis-uses-social-media-to-recruit-western-allies/
ISIS recruiting from universities
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/382710/news/regions/student-says-isis-recruiting-members-from-mindanao-university
What ISIS wants from The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
Hope that clarifies questions you have about where ISIS loyalists are coming from.
Thank you Stephen and James for the truth.
No, that doesn’t mean they are recruiting “from”…those types of people. Using Facebook to recruit 15 year olds doesn’t mean they are recurring “from high tech and the wealthy”.
That doesn’t imply they aren’t recruiting loosers and marginals from these societies. Loosers and marginals are what the vast majority of the Islamists are, in any society.
So your argument was that ISIS is comprised of “the wealthy and elites” (I’m paraphrasing), so therefore it’s not an issue of “economics” since it’s not the poor, anyway.
But that’s obviously not the case. Most of them are either young impressionable idiots, or marginalized people. Look at who their “European” recruits are. Unemployed bums who lived off welfare in Europe, and were isolated from European societies.
The same applies to all Islamist movements. Who is the base for the Muslim Brotherhood? The illiterate poor peasants of Egypt. Who is the base for Hamas? The same. Who is the base for Hezbollah in Lebanon? Not the wealthy or middle class Lebanese, but the peasants who survive off Hezbollah’s welfare in Lebanon. Who is the base for Boko Haram? The villagers in the remote jungles. On and on.
Radicalism and terrorism is always based on the disgruntled.
The second point I made was…that this is pretty much the same strategy Bush had too. That’s what “hearts and minds” was all about. That’s what Bush’s idea that bringing “democracy” to the region would solve the problem.
Let’s not forget Flavien Moreau.
I’m so tired of this trope. Not sure that if this is the first time this administration has trotted it out, but it certainly isn’t new. As a former Intel guy, I’ve even heard it from some of our European allies who are also intelligence ‘professionals.’ I won’t belabor the point because you’ve addressed most things I could say. Great piece.
I had to look him up. It’s a sad story, young Flavien had to give up jihad because he missed going to the cafes for espresso and a Pall Mall.
It’s hard to be part of a group that is zealously anti-smoking when one is still addicted.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuusshhhhhhhh!!!!!!
Ooooooowwwaaaa!!!
Let’s never use the American military every again anywhere anytime. Hey, why don’t we just disband the Army, Navy, Air Force,..etc. Gosh some nasty Bush type might get control of it. We need to subject anyone who suggests the use of US military force anywhere anytime to a battery of sensitivity tests. Only if they can pass 100% then and only then will we consider it. Consider it means we will go play a few rounds of golf, wait a few news cycles, generate some phony meaningless issue to distract everyone, then propose some microscopic response that is a guaranteed fail and all the time making the most grandiose statements possible.
Jihadism is based on a literal interpretation of the Koran and has been for 1400 years. There are non-literal interpretations but those people doing the beheadings and the burnings aren’t interested. These Jihadists need to be dead as soon as possible. I would normally offer Unconditional Surrender as an option but I am remembering that Jihadists assume the right to deceive. They might use the Surrender as an opportunity for suicide tactics. I would not risk a single soldier’s life to accept their Surrender. Perhaps if they not only threw down their weapons but stripped naked and lay face down arms outstretched one could consider it. However, just killing them at this point would be much safer. I’m all for safety.
Regards,
Jim
Are we sure everyone in the Obama Administration didn’t work for a circus before going into government? They seem to excel so greatly at contortionism it’s almost unreal.
I don’t even know if I can believe these people anymore. To think that Mr. Obama could be elected to the most prestigious deliberative body in the world really says something about the legacy of the Senate, or at least the people who elected him. I firmly believe that the majority of Americans are smart, or at least rational thinkers, so it’s hard to understand how the President earned his office twice.
Maybe this is why the Founding Fathers didn’t introduce term limits in the Constitution; two terms would be more than enough time for the voters to sour on an unsatisfactory (to say the least!) presidency.
I’m sorry to disappoint you, son, but science says: incorrect. Political decisions are just economics when one gets down to it.
The other thing to take into account is that we have been spending centuries to get from a restricted suffrage of humans who tended to be more rational by their very categories, to universal suffrage which gave more and more irrational people the vote.
This administration has always been a joke, especially when it comes to foreign policy and combating Islamic terror. But when I heard this today it went from a joke to surreal. Obama and his administration are living in a freakazoidal world. For the sake of this country and western civilization, impeachment should be on the table as a very real option. I don’t think we can survive two more years of this insanity.
ISIS needs jobs? Doesn’t Romney have binders full of Islamists?
What this woman doesn’t understand is that ISIS adheres to a Koranic economic system where the government supplies subsistence to the people free of charge…basically the most utopian and unsustainable parts of Communism.
But hey, maybe she can start an inner city jobs program in Syria without getting her head cut off.
So the answer to Islamic terror is free junior college, job training and midnight basketball…..
Which is all…somewhat…true (I wouldn’t necessarily address “this woman”. She’s former CIA, and just a spokeswoman, so, whatever).
But, does this mean that our whole plan for the last 15 years in Afghanistan was a waste of time? We build all those schools and hospitals and roads and aqueducts in the hopes of winning hearts and minds, so that the Afghans wouldn’t join the Taliban.
That was kind of the whole point. We were going to bring them democracy and all those wonderful things, go nation building, and change those countries into vibrant Western societies in a blink of an eye.
That…didn’t seem to have worked.
So at best you can criticize this for being a very…unoriginal plan…that’s been tried before. I won’t say by whom, cause we don’t need to go there.
Rabble-rousers rely on rabble, but the presence of rabble is not the problem. A) if it were, rabble would generate the same results here and there. It doesn’t. B) if it were, there would be wide-spread agreement about what to do with rabble. I realize that “give them jobs” is a variant of B), but playing about it, taking Harf and her ilk at their many words, they still propose to treat a symptom not a cause.
Nothing settles rabble like the death of rabble-rousers. Rabble when settled is just people like us.
Ms. Harf has alternatively been described as either appearing like a little girl playing dress-up or an SNL caricature.
There is an objective reason for this. In the photo at the top of the original post, look at Ms. Harf’s right eyglass lens! That’s the left side of the photo for any Democrats reading this. Note that her cheek line is continuous from the portion seen through the lens to below the eyeglass frame. That suggests the glasses are a prop. If the lenses had any significant correction, the portion of her cheek seen through the lens would likely appear shifted inward relative to the portion below.
Thus, Ms. Harf objectively looks like an SNL actress with non-corrective lenses or a child wearing a frame sans lenses.
As I have said, this is a hipster offense. We are being conditioned to accept nonsense from ridiculous people. The broad thrust of postmodernism as it matters to Alinsky is its power to make the masses (yes, that means us) question what we know, doubt what we feel, accept what we distrust, and surrender when we could have won.
ISIS isn’t the Taliban or al-Qaeda. ISIS is a VERY different animal. While some modernity could placate the Taliban or al-Qaeda both of whom had political aspirations, you could give every ISIS member a million dollars, a mansion and a high paying job along with a seat on the National Security Council and they would still cut your head off.
Their interest is the Caliphate and the end of times in an epic battle. That’s why they constantly invite the most powerful nation on earth and all our allies to a fight. That fight is part of their apocalyptic prophecy so they have to have it.
This women (not sure when that became an insult) is wrong about us not killing our way out of this. It is what ISIS wants. Their prophecy has us killing most of them before they get saved, believe it or not, by Jesus.
For context, Read the text from Wikipedia on the themes of Alinksy’s Rules For Radicals. It is no different than Obama’s own op-ed in the La Times this morning.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-obama-terrorism-conference-20150218-story.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals
“Obama has backed himself into an ideological corner by ruling out ground troops to defeat embedded ISIS strongholds because six years ago he ran on stopping war and withdrawing troops.”
You want ground troops back in Iraq + Syria + Libya? That is insane. Do you also want them in the Ukraine? It makes more sense to provide training and logistical support and air support while others fight on the ground. And surprise, that is exactly what O has been doing. Ultimately, this is their war Sunni vs. Shia, not ours.
Even putting the most charitable interpretation on her argument, it’s still silly.
It’s hard to deny that if socio-economic conditions were better in that part of the world, it might make terrorism less appealing to many potential recruits. But so what? Is there some way that she thinks we can bring hope and change to the middle east? We have to work with the hand we’ve been dealt.
We can argue that the root cause of terrorism is something other than the existence of terrorists. It might be true in some academic sense, but there’s no way to put that theory into practice. We have to respond as if the root cause of terrorism is the existence of terrorists.
As stunningly ignorant as Harf’s comments yesterday were, today I’m getting five times the ignorance reading comments from lefties who are trying to defend her comments.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Ok Trotsky, not a reason to seek it out however.
You won’t have to seek it out.
Remember, war is what ISIS wants. It will have it one way or another. It will have it whether you want to play along or not.
I’m sure there are plenty of “disgruntled” amongst the recruits of ISIS. Maybe most, maybe even all. But what are they disgruntled about? In what sense are they “marginalized?”
I suggest that the recruits that come from the West are disgruntled because they don’t fit into western society. They are the 2nd generation of Muslim immigrant families whose parents wanted a better life, both in material terms and in terms of the ability to live in freedom. The offspring find themselves bereft of identity, and they find it in Islam. Radical Islam is the most compelling kind to them, because it includes a complete rejection of the west that has rejected them. I recommend the great film, “My Son the Fanatic,” which had already explored this theme in 1997.
What about ISIS recruits from Muslim countries?
Many might very well be poor people and/or people without jobs. But there is absolutely nothing to do about that. If we could reduce the very high unemployment and poverty levels in Muslim countries (of course, we can’t) to moderate levels, there would still be enough ISIS recruits to force us to make war on them.
The only way to reduce the number of recruits is, pace Marie Harf, to kill them in large numbers quickly, so that the appeal of joining is reduced. No one wants to join a group just to get killed. They want to join to do some killing.