The Allure of Jihad is Conquest

"It is no surprise then that counter-radicalization initiatives are equally complex. Any counter-radicalization effort, while not ignoring other aspects, should take into consideration the centrality of religious issues for those embracing jihadism."
"[Those evincing interest in Islam were] extremely inquisitive [during the initialization of the radicalization. In the late stages, instead of questions, statements appear, often filled with confident pronouncements of their own knowledge."
Terrorist Chatter: Understanding What Terrorists Talk About

THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo

"There is unanimous agreement that it is not Muslims that carry out these [9/11, London's July 2005] attacks -- nay, not even human beings; rather they are Martians who come to Earth to cause all of this havoc in preparation to take it over."
Tarek Mehanna, Pittsburgh, Egyptian-American jihadist

Funded through the federal government's Kanishka program, a terrorism research branch led by Public Safety Canada that came into being leading from the recommendations of the inquiry into the 1985 Sikh terrorist Air India bombing, a study was commissioned and conducted by the American company Flashpoint to evaluate online activities of men born or raised in the United States who became active in the jihadist community.

This was an effort to attempt to find the common denominator; what it is that inspires young people to become involved in radical jihadism. And the opinion reached after interviews and examinations of the online activities of seven Muslim Americans concluded that none involved had much in common with one another. Other than, of course, that they were Muslim. They were led by their curiosity as Muslims to discover more about the branch of Islam that exhorts to jihad through violence and martyrdom.

It is not quite correct to disconnect all of Islam from jihad, since it is a major tenet of Islam that the faithful are obligated to extend themselves toward jihad. Not merely the inner psychological struggle of jihad to become 'better' Muslims to ensure that Islam is as deeply ingrained as possible in the psyche, but active, political Islam requiring the faithful to fulfill their duty to proselytize, to convince and influence, by whatever means -- and through aggressive violence if need be -- non-Muslims to surrender to the inevitability of becoming part of Muslim conquest.

Efforts to discourage extremism, the researchers concluded, must of necessity be flexible, tailored to the individual, since they found little to link individual jihadists to one another. Their interests were various and different enough that belief in Islam itself was their only defining linkage. Flashpoint examined 1,871 online posts composed by the seven men in a number of open forums spanning several years. The posts ranged from mere comments to lengthy screeds which the researchers placed in three categories: social, religious, political.

Since Islam itself encompasses all those categories and more as a religion concerned with wrapping a complete binding web around the lives of the faithful, the categories are meaningless. Stressing that their conclusion cannot be viewed as a comprehensive overview of what terrorists in the aggregate discuss and believe, they still anticipate its usefulness to guide authorities to devise counter-radicalization programs to dispel extremist thought, dissuading young people from joining Islamists abroad.

In which case their conclusion is a lost cause. While it makes eminently good sense to treat each individual as they present themselves as unique personalities, they are all bound to the fixed idea of Islam as the commanding religion of the global community, firm to the belief that no one has any option but to fully embrace Islam, and to deny that imperative is to deserve death. To state, as the study results do that the men all represented "avid seekers of knowledge and information on religion" elevates their cause to an undeserved level.

What motivates them is rage, resentment, hatred and a desire to avenge what they believe is a concerted Western drive to discriminate against Muslims, to damage the spiritual reverence in which the Prophet Mohammad is held, to defame and deride Islam. And since jihadis have invested so much of their purpose in life in upholding the fixation of Islam as the only true religion and Allah the one true god, all others pretenders, and the solution to all that infuriates them being violent conquest to bring Islam to its true status as not the foremost, but the only religion, and a Muslim elite as conquerors, the solution is an evasive one indeed.