Laurent Murawiec

Deterrence works because one is able credibly to threaten the center of gravity of the enemy: the threat of inflicting unacceptable losses upon him, whether in a bar brawl or in nuclear escalation. The calculus deterrence relies upon is: is it worth it? Deterrence works if the price to be paid by the party to be deterred hugely exceeds his expected earnings. But deterrence only works if the enemy is able and willing to enter the same calculus. If the enemy plays by other rules and calculates by other means, he will not be deterred. There was nothing the Philistines could have done to deter Samson. If the calculus is: I exchange my worthless earthly life against the triumph of Allah on earth, and an eternity of bliss for me, if the enemy wishes to be dead, if to him the Apocalypse is desirable, he will not be deterred.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the Mayor of Tehran, he insistently proposed that the main thoroughfares of Tehran should be widened so that, he explained, on the day of his reappearance, the Hidden Imam, Mohamed ibn Hassan, who went into the great occultation in 941 AD, could tread spacious avenues. More recently, he told the Indian Foreign Minister that “in two years, everything will be settled,” which the visiting dignitary at first mistook to mean that Iran expected to possess nuclear weapons in two years; he was later bemused to learn that Ahmadinejad had meant that the Mahdi would appear in two years, at which point all worldly problems would disappear.

This attitude, truly, is not new, nor should it surprise us: Reality is invaded by belief, and belief in turn shapes the believer’s reality. The difference between the religious and the ideologically religious is this: The religious believer accepts reality and works at improving it; the fanatic rejects reality, refuses any compromise with it and tries to destroy it and replace it with his fantasy.

Ahmadinejad wants to hasten the reappearance of the Hidden Imam, whose coming, in traditional Muslim, and especially Shiite apocalyptics, will be the Sign of the Hour, that the End of Days is nigh. The task of the Mahdi, when he reappears, will be to lead the great and final war which will bring about the extermination of the Unbelievers, the end of Unbelief and the complete dominion of God’s writ upon the whole of mankind. The Umma will inflate to absorb the rest of the world.

Contemporary jihad is not a matter of politics at all (of “occupation,” of “grievances,’ of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and Zionism). Consequently, attempts at dealing with the problem politically will not even touch it. Aspirin is good, and so is penicillin, but they are of little avail to counter maladies of the mind. I am emphatically not saying here that the jihadis are “crazy.” I am saying that they are possessed of a disease of the mind, and the disease is the political religion of modern Gnosticism in its Islamic version.

Let us flash back in time to Sept. 28, 1971, in Cairo. The prime minister of Jordan Wasfi al-Tell, who had been threatened by the Palestinian movement in retaliation for the so-called Black September of 1970, walks into the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. “Five shots, fired at point-blank range, hit [him]… He staggered… he fell dying among the shards of glass on the marble floor. As he lay dying, one of his killers bent over and lapped the blood that poured from his wounds.”

Soldiers kill. Terrorists kill. Modern jihadis lap the blood. Inseparable from contemporary Arab-Muslim jihad is the idealization of blood. Gruesome murder, gory and gleeful infliction of pain, are lionized and proffered as models and exemplary actions pleasing to Allah. I have collected, as can anybody, dozens of examples of human sacrifice inflicted by the Islamic jihadi of all stripes. This pornography of crime is endless, from the gratuitous killing of a Leon Klinghoffer to Mohammad Atta’s instructions, “You must make your knife sharp and you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter,” to the Behesht Zahra, the ‘Paradise of Flowers’ graveyard near Tehran with its Fountain of Blood, or this report on the killing of an Algerian intellectual: “Dr. Hammed Boukhobza who was killed by a group of Islamist terrorists in the city of Telemly. (…) He was not just killed in his apartment, but his wife and children who wanted to escape were forced to watch how he was literally cut to pieces, his entrails slowly drawn out while he was just barely alive. The terrorists obviously liked to watch the suffering, and they wanted the family to share their enjoyment.”

The accumulation of such deeds shows that they are not an epiphenomenon but are central to the purpose of the jihadi. They are aired 24/7 on TV channels such as al Jazeera and many others. They are avidly watched and celebrated. Think of images and videofilms of assassinations, Daniel Pearl, Paul Johnson, ‘live’ killing for the viewing public. This is thanatolatry, martyropathology or nihilism: when an entire society orients itself in this direction, that society is becoming suicidal. A society that gears its young toward killing and actively seeking death is making choices that bring
about its extinction. “We love death more than you love life.”
The believers – here, the jihadis -- are the Elect: they, and only they, know God’s plan for the world; they have been chosen by Him to fight and win the final, cosmic battle between God and Satan, and bring about perfection on earth, in this case, the extension of God’s writ and dominion, the dar al-Islam, to mankind as a whole. Everybody else is wrong and evil, jahili, an enemy liable to be killed at will. The Perfect are “an elite of amoral supermen,” to use Norman Cohn's phrase, engaged in transforming the world so that it conforms to the ‘second reality’ that they alone know, thank to their special knowledge, gnôsis. In order to get from the evil today to the perfect tomorrow, torrents of blood have to be shed, the blood of all those whose actions or very being hinder the accomplishment of the Mahdi’s mission.

For five hundred years, from 1100 to 1600, Europe was wracked by Gnostic insurrections, from the Flanders to Northern Italy, from Bohemia to France: Pastoureaux, Taborites, Flagellants, Free Spirits, Anabaptists, etc. The belief-structure just described was theirs. They mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, threatened kingdoms and overthrew dukedoms; they slaughtered Jews, priests and rich people; they created their own, grotesque, bloody, totalitarian ‘republics.’

“Soon we shall drink blood for wine,” one of the leading insurgent writers stated, “those who do not accept baptism… are to be killed, then they will be baptized in their blood.” And another one: “Accursed be the man who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of the enemies of Christ. Every believer must wash his hands in that blood.” Hear Thomas Müntzer: “Curse the unbelievers… don’t let them live any longer, the evil-doers who turn away from God. For a godless man has no right to live if he hinders the godly. The sword is necessary to exterminate them….if they resist let them be slaughtered without mercy….the ungodly have no right to live, save what the Elect choose to allow them….Now, go at them…it is time….The scoundrels are as dispirited as dogs….Take no notice of the lamentations of the godless! They will beg you….don’t be moved by pity….At them! At them! While the fire is hot! Don’t let your sword get cold! Don’t let it go lame!”

By and large, the same words are heard from a variety of Islamic radicals. “Die before you die!” Ali Shariati tells the Shiite believer. “He who takes up a gun, a kitchen knife or even a pebble with which to arm and kill the enemies of the faith has his place assured in Heaven…” said Ayatollah Fazlallah Mahalati, organizer of Iranian assassination squads. “To allow the infidels to stay alive means to let them do more corrupting. To kill them is a surgical operation commanded by Allah….we have to kill….war is a blessing for the world and for every nation, it is Allah himself who commands men to wage war and kill….It is war that purifies the earth,” said Ruhollah Khomeiny. Article 15 of the Hamas charter explains: “I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill!”

In modern times in the West, as Eric Voegelin and Norman Cohn have shown, the ideology morphed and took on secular forms – Nazis and Bolsheviks in particular. Islam was heavily burdened by Gnostic contents and historically shaped by a tribal matrix that inherently fosters Manichean tendencies (“them” vs “us”). The jump from mere religion to religious ideology was easy. It was achieved in the 19th century by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. It was followed by Abu Ala Mawdoodi, Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, Ruhollah Khomeiny, Osama bin Laden. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Deobandi of South Asia, the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyya, the Taliban, the Wahhabi, all of whom share this outlook.

Knowing this, how do we deter the modern Gnostic warriors, the jihadi?

Mainly, we do not. Those who are dead already, who consider themselves dead to the world and only alive to the Afterworld, those who wish to die, generally cannot be deterred. Gnosticism is belief in a fantasy that is taken to be more real than the common reality: they do not believe what they see, they see what they believe. This cannot be deterred. Deterrence might have worked before contemporary jihad was able to reach critical mass, sometime in the early to mid-1990s.

Contemporary jihad, like its emanation, terrorism, is an integral chain: as long as it is islamico-glamorous to be a cleric who issues fatwas calling for the murder of Israeli civilians or American GIs, the cleric will go on. Once dead, he will stop. So will the chairman of a charity that funnels money to jihad. So will the senior intelligence officer who trains or smuggles them, the predicator who incites, the madrassa or university professor who brainwashes, the prince who lies for terror, the ayatollah who sends out teams of killers, etc. This is deterrence after the French expression: they have been shot pour encourager les autres. Jihad is the operative ideology of a number of states; states can be pinned down and hit.

What did Europe do to crush the insurrectionary Gnostics in the Medieval and late- Medieval era? Churchill once said: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Likewise I’ll have a kind word for the Inquisition (not the Spanish one, though), which did quite a job cleaning up the mess. Thomas Müntzer was defeated, captured and beheaded in 1525. The ‘King’ of the Anabaptists of Münster, John von Leyden and his aides, were executed in 1535. As a terrible warning, their bodies were suspended in iron cages from the tower of St. Lambert's church in the town. Those who survived hid in wait for better days. What they had found is that their insurgency was hopeless, that it was useless. Their will had been broken.

One martyr will have followers, ten martyrs will be admired and emulated. One thousand dead martyrs who died unheralded die in vain. If Ahmadinejad and others die in vain and uselessly they will not die as martyrs but as slobs. For the Gnostic, for the jihadi, his death is the only thing that matters to him: take that away and nothing is left. It does not mean, as the jurors of the Moussaoui trial were apparently led to believe, that “you cannot make a martyr out of him, since this is what he wants.” Make his death a lonely, useless, ignored death. Unextraordinary, unromantic, trivial deaths shatter the glory of the jihadi’s death.

This puts to the test our own, cherished values, the rule of law, the worth of human life, sovereignty, international law. I hear: “If we behave in this way, we become like the enemy.” I think this to be a foolish view: after all, not even Dresden made the Allies into Nazis, not even Hiroshima turned America into its enemy. Instead, after using the most terrible instruments of war, we turned our enemies into friends, their ruins into blooming cities.

I am often asked about ‘Muslim moderates.’ I invariably answer that anti-Nazi Germans existed, but were inaudible, and therefore played no role. Muslim moderates will only be a factor if they are heard, at whatever the cost to them.

The defeated European Gnostics went underground. Their sole hope resided in the clandestine conveying of their beliefs, especially to their children. Society cannot eliminate the Gnostic beliefs, but can make the strain dormant instead of virulent. Jihad is integral to Islam and derives from its most fundamental tenets. The severing of that link is not going to happen soon. But throughout history, when Islamic conquerors met their match, they stopped. When they met crushing defeat, they retreated, and found the ulama and the faqih to justify this, like prophets who announced the Rapture for yesterday, 8:09 am, and reschedule it for next year.

Once their leaders had been exterminated, the Medieval insurgents of Europe disbanded and scattered. Applying high-tempo attrition and nodal targeting to the jihadi apparatus worldwide (by which I emphatically do not mean ‘terrorists’ alone or even in the first place) seems to me to be a modern equivalent. If I may say in homage to the chain of command that orchestrated his elimination, Sheikh Yasin was not in the habit of wielding pistols – he wielded death. It is those who deploy the undead who must be the priority targets.

Laurent Murawiec is a Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute. This is an edited version of his essay for the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.