ISIS cannot be destroyed through military operations. Terror will only cease with the collapse of its ideology.
From initially talking of bringing “democracy” to the region, the USA - which has been fighting radical Islamist organizations ever since the 9/11 attacks - is now talking about “eradicating” ISIS. It is of course impossible to ignore the contribution that America has made to the building of peace in various parts of the world, such as Kosovo. The sensitivity it displays on the subject of supplying humanitarian aid to almost everywhere in the world, despite its own economic problems, is also praiseworthy. There is also no doubt that democracy needs to come to Islamic lands and that the violence of ISIS needs to cease to exist for the sake of world peace. The important thing, however, is how this is to be done.
One concrete fact stands after 13 years of military operations, from Afghanistan to Libya and from Nigeria to Iraq, radical terrorist groups have not ceased to exist through military force, violence and oppression, on the contrary, they grow even stronger.
Statistics reveal that the USA has spent some $7 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq. Again according to the figures, $10 million of US taxpayers’ money goes to the fight against terror every hour. The lives that have been lost are, of course, beyond any material measurement.
That picture can be changed, however. This is what needs to be done:
1. All kinds of military operation, including air strikes, just further anti-Americanism. Such strikes lead to civilian deaths, damage cities and destroy infrastructure, causing increasing fury in the countries concerned and that fury mostly benefits radical organizations. Spending billions of dollars on producing people opposing it, and thus providing human resources for terror organizations, is a most undesirable state of affairs for the USA.
2. Although killing off the leaders of terror organizations is presented as an effective technique by some military analysts, looked at from a wider perspective, no results are actually obtained from it at all. In the most recent incident, 25 people lost their lives in a suicide attack on a UN convoy in the immediate wake of the killing of the leader of al-Shabaab. Violence grows in proportion to the scale of the destruction, resulting in a vicious circle of violence.
3. In order to break the spiral of terror, it is essential to see the factors affecting people in the region and to assess them accurately. The most influential of these factors is without doubt Islam.
4. President Obama’s emphasizing that ISIS is not representative of Islam is a most valuable and important step: However, the ideology that ISIS does represent needs to be accurately identified. Indeed, ISIS does not represent Islam and Muslims, but unfortunately many of the values it espouses are based on interpretations found in basic Islamic works. Careful examination of the basic works of Sunni Islamic culture such as those of Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud and Tirmidhi shows that they do refer to primitive and barbaric modes of punishment such as “striking on the neck and stoning,” even though these are not in the Qur’an. First and foremost, these remarks must be removed from Islamic sources and there must be a return to the essence of the faith, to the Qur’an in other words. The whole Islamic world must be told, in detail, that there is no violence in the Qur’an and that such interpretations are incompatible with the Qur’an.
5. If we want a spirit based on love, compassion, understanding and affection to prevail across the Islamic world, the way to bring this about is a return to the moral values of the Qur’an, which have been ignored for centuries. Through such concepts as, “You have your faith and I have my faith” and “There is no compulsion in the faith,” Islam laid the foundations of secularism and democracy 14 centuries ago. Once people live by the Qur’an, nobody can be accused of heresy for belonging to a different sect, nobody will be killed for being a Christian or Jew, no criminals will be crucified and nobody will be enslaved because of a different ethnic origin. When people abide by the Qur’an, everyone, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim or atheist will live as first-class citizens, democracy will function properly and universal law will ensure the provision of justice.
6. Therefore, what needs to be done is to expose, with evidence from the Qur’an, the invalidity of the information that ISIS and other radical terror groups use as supposed evidence and that appears in various Islamic sources. Thousands of young Europeans and Americans who have joined ISIS can be won back through education and by revealing the truth instead of error, not by killing tens of thousands of people in
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