Jobs For Jihadis–Really?

By Gregory J. Welborn

President Obama headlined the White House Conference on Violent Extremism with an impassioned call for jobs, no rx more jobs and lots of jobs so that terrorists won’t feel the call to arms. The specifics were a bit fuzzy – clearly to be worked out later in the rumble tumble of various high-level committees – but I half expected to hear about programs to teach “Electronic Activation Systems for Non-bomb Makers”, or “Aircraft Flight Dynamics for Pilots Who Want To Live”. The Middle East is deteriorating faster than anyone could have imagined, and this president’s solution is a Jobs-For-Jihadis bill.

What the Jihadis thought about the proposal is hard to tell. I’m not sure they had a chance to really monitor the conference’s progress; they’ve been pretty busy lately. In just the last several weeks, Jihadis burned to death a Jordanian pilot. They have organized and carried out the simultaneous beheading of 21 Coptic Christians. They produced, edited and distributed fairly high-quality videos of both events. 17 caged captured Kurdish fighters were paraded through streets in Iraq, presumably on their way to the ovens. Yemen has all but fallen to the Jihadis, while in Niger and Chad they have captured more territory. Advancing their reach beyond the immediate Middle East, in efforts mocking the “Je Suis Charlie” movement in Europe, Jihadis destroyed all the headstones in a French Jewish cemetery and fired automatic weapons into a free-speech gathering in Copenhagen.

21 Coptic Christians Executed

And the President of The United States calls for jobs. So accustomed are many Americans to hearing this president talk about jobs that his call had a momentary appeal to logic and common sense. Who doesn’t support good jobs? Who doesn’t support “good” government, another of the items within the President’s program? It seems funny in the context of all that’s happened – almost a bad joke Obama didn’t quite delivery correctly. But President Obama was absolutely serious; he, and others on the left, honestly believe that the lack of good jobs and sound governance are the root causes of terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth, and no other belief has hampered this president more from truly meeting the civilization challenge he faces.

It is a truism to say that jobs are a good thing, as it is to say that good governance is good. However, the opposite is not true. Lack of jobs and lousy government do not automatically lead people into terrorism. There are hundreds of millions of people on this planet who do not have decent jobs; they live in, or close to, poverty levels. There are equal numbers who live in countries managed terribly by their governments. These people are not killing and torturing others. Tibetans have lost their country to China. Many Indians live in poverty. Thousands of Christian Africans live in poverty and under oppression by their governments, and yet there is no large movement of any of these people toward terrorist tactics or terrorist organizations.

Africa

Tibet

Terrorism is a choice made because of a value system, a philosophy, which justifies it and/or calls for it in the name of some perceived greater philosophical or religious good. Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram and other such groups are motivated by a deeply held religious belief. They are all Islamic, drawing credibility from real historical interpretations of the Koran which call for violence against the infidels. The Jihad is a movement within Islam that has powerful adherents and respected religious leaders who justify and support the violence in the pursuit of their religion.

We can trace the calls for Islamic terrorism back to Ibn Taimiyyah in the 14th century and, more recently, to Sayyid Qutb in the 20th century. This is a strong movement within Islam to return to the “literal teachings of the Koran and the Hadith”. These people do not believe there is a middle ground between pure Islam and a life of decadence. Anything which is not purely, and literally, Koranic is by definition evil and must be stopped.

What this president does not understand is that modern terrorism is fighting more than a military campaign. This is not an effort to simply establish political bona fides in preparation for negotiations or an effort to simply win territory. Modern terrorism is fighting a philosophical and religious war; it seeks nothing less than to capture the soul of Islam. Theirs is a philosophy that directly challenges Judeo-Christian values and modernity. They recruit based not on the promise of jobs, riches or power, but on the promise that the Jihadi warrior will be doing the will of God and ridding the world of the infidel.

What’s morbidly fascinating here is that only our president, among all the world’s leaders, denies this reality. None of this is denied by leaders in the Muslim world. Most recently, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, President of Egypt, addressed leading Islamic clerics at Cairo’s al-Azhar university, telling them, “[they] need to revolutionize [their] religion”. He meant by that to reclaim for Islam that vein of the religion which might reasonably be expected to join other major world religions as a true religion of peace. In so doing, he is all but admitting that today Islam cannot legitimately be called as practiced a “religion of peace”. Only our president sees Islam for what he wants it to be, ignores the strains of that great religion which contradict his vision of it, and thus calls for jobs rather than for a full frontal assault against an enemy which will not accommodate, but will only surrender.

At a practical, real-politik level, our president must come to realize that the world needs moral leadership. This will not come from Russia, nor from China, and Europe is physically and emotionally spent. The world – including the parts of the Middle East that want to resist radical Islam – awaits the moral, philosophical and practical leadership that only the United States can provide.

Once again, we have arrived at an American moment – a time when our destiny is pushed upon us. Previous generations rose to that calling, to that demand, to that moral imperative. At a time such as this, the world needs more than a jobs program.

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About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a freelance writer and has spoken to several civic and religious organizations on cultural and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and 3 children and is active in the community. He can be reached [email protected]/5l.com

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