Likbez for complacency

“In Nigeria, 48 people were killed by militants of the Boko Haram group; In Kenya, the militants of the Ash Shabab group stopped here from Somalia stopped the bus and killed 28 passengers who could not utter a Muslim prayer; In Iraq, dozens of people were killed in the city of Ramadi, where the caliphate fighters invaded ” - these are messages in only one day. All killers belong to radical Islamism.

A member of the “Ang Nusra Front”-Al-Qaeda units in Syria and Lebanon-sits in a tank near the city of Aleppo, Syria. November 25, 2014. Photo: Reuters/Hosam Katan

The number of Muslims in the world is approaching 1.5 billion - of which extremists, and even more so terrorists, are probably less than 0.01%. But this is an insanely energetic, fanatical, merciless and fearless minority, at the disposal of which is the Internet. The ideas of radical Islamists are very popular among Muslim youth, people from more than 80 countries poured into the territory controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, thousands of Europeans go to fight the Arab East, turning before this in Islam.

Nuances

What is the difference between Islam and Islamism? Ask people on the street - almost no one will say. Those who guide the information system and propaganda in Russia and spend an incredible amount of the airtime and newspaper strips in order to brand America-they do not even think about organizing, for example, on TV some mini-roller-ticking themes. Let's try to do it for them.

In the most compressed form, we can say: Islam is a religion and lifestyle, the basis of a whole civilization, an element of the identity of hundreds of millions of people, which gives rise to the solidarity of the world Muslim community. Islamism is a political movement based on a radical ideology, the essence of which is the conviction that all the troubles of the Muslim world are from oblivion of the foundations of a “pure, righteous, true Islam of ancestors”, from attempts to perceive foreign values ​​and the secular structure of society that is not suitable for Muslims. Under the theoretical cover of the ideas of the fundamentalists (in Arabic “salafites”, from the word “salaf”, ancestors), a cohort of Islamist-practitioners, “people of business”, wrestlers against “western aggressors and decomposing the influence of the corrugated West” grew, and they wage this warfare-jihad. It is all the more important to arrange all points over the “i”, dispel myths and stereotypes that managed to form around a modern radical-Islamism.

Myths

The first myth: radical-Islamism supposedly wages the struggle against Christianity. But the fact of the matter is that the Islamists consider Western society not Christian, but godless, immoral and corrupted. "Civilization of the neckline" - as they call it. It is also insolvent that radicals, extremists and ultimately terrorists are disadvantaged and desperate people from poor countries. On the contrary, these are almost always immigrants from wealthy families who have received a good education. And just in the poor countries, starting, for example, with Bangladesh and ending with the states of tropical Africa, where people live by $ 1 per day, there are no terrorists. Of the 19 militants who participated in the Operation "Manhattan" (as it calls al-Qaeda*

Terrorist acts in New York and Washington September 11, 2001), 16 were citizens of Saudi Arabia, one of the richest countries of the world. Among the volunteers who came from the Arab countries to fight in the ranks of the IG, about 40% are young people from Tunisia, countries with a population, not too starving and the most competent in the Arab world.

The hopes that successful economic development has completely failed to prevent the spread of extremism and terrorism. Those who were sure: they should give people work and decent living conditions, they will not have the point of “going into terror” - they are deeply mistaken. As a matter of fact, such complacency has long been refuted by historical experience. European anarchists of the 19th century, Russian Narodnaya Volya and Socialist -Revolutionaries - are they immigrants from the midst of hungry, poor and desperate people? Is higher education an obstacle to the assimilation of extremist views? Let us recall the Western European intelligentsia of the 30s of the last century: educated young people who, as they believed, were not satisfied with the “vulgar bourgeois life” with its banal values ​​of Christianity, righteous and prosperous life, equality, democracy, etc., all of them in search of the meaning of existence, elevated motives and great goals turned either to Marxism or to Marxism or to Marxism or to Marxism. fascism. By the way, many young Germans, French or Dutch today accept Islam about the same motives: communist and fascist ideas have gone out of fashion, Maoism also did not justify the hopes of those who, like Sartre, saw the only alternative to the dim capitalist civilization. But here is Islam - maybe there is a Simery Truth in it?

It is impossible not to notice the similarities between the totalitarian ideologies of the 19th century and Islamism of our days: they all give an extremely simple, even primitive, black and white picture of the world, divided into “our”, righteous and correct, and “strangers”, enemies. Islamism is an ideology, of course, the totalitarian, and the “Islamic state”, which jihadists want to build, of course, will be the state of theocratetically hereditary. Categorically rejecting the secular type of state, Islamists do not recognize democracy, as well as parliamentarism, the republic or even the monarchy.

Roots

What attracts Muslims from different countries, for example, into the ranks of the Islamic State? The ideology of Islamists is based on the generally recognized basic values ​​of Islam. So, all Muslims will agree that only their community is special, true (the Qur'an says: “You are the best of the communities created for the human race”), and it should dominate the world, in fact, the infidels are rule, Americans. Therefore, there is great injustice. The followers of Osama Ben Laden are fighting to eliminate her, how to not support them?

The struggle against the secular model of society, allegedly imposed by the West, also directly follows from the attitudes of Sharia, which categorically does not allow the actual (and not formal) equality of women with men and the existence of the sphere of life, uncontrolled religion. In a word, radical Islamism is not some kind of illness. Its roots are in some basic, organic positions of Islam, but distorted and adapted for the needs of violence and terror.

Threats

On September 10, Barack Obama, announcing the new US strategy to combat the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, called the IS a real threat to the national interests of the United States. He was believed. Not only because Switches from IG began to cut off their heads to Americans and British and attacked Iraqi Kurdistan, threatening to enslave the Kurds, the only reliable US partners in the entire region. The Middle East itself does not have the meaning for the West, as during the Cold War. Moscow is no longer needed for a counterbalance for a counterweight, and the situation with the supply of strategic raw materials is changing - the United States itself turns into oil exporters. If it was only about local wars, there would be nothing to worry about the West. But Western politicians understood what the Russian leadership did not want to realize: the world was faced with the danger of not regional, but a global scale. No wonder the coalition, which inflicts air strikes on the positions of IG in Syria and Iraq, included Jordan and the Gulf of States, led by Saudi Arabia. After all, now no one can feel safe anywhere - the firing, made by a converted Islamist from the locals in the parliament of distant and quiet Canada on October 22, is an extra confirmation of this. In addition, shots in Ottawa are probably not the last. How to behave after returning to their native penalties, foal-volunteers from European countries who fought in the Arab East is an open issue.