I don’t see how this is true. Using “Islamism” seems like a really bad choice to me since I think 90%+ of the population will hear that and think it means the same thing as “Islam” (you’ve met people, right?). Saying “That’s not Islam, that’s…” is exactly what we’re talking about here, it’s just the choice of the word “Islamism” seems like a poor one. That’s why I say it’s academic. I mean, from the Daily Beast article again:
Both of these reactions will render us blind to the real wellspring of this insurgency’s appeal: the Islamist ideology, as distinct from the religion of Islam.
There you have it: “Islamist ideology as distinct from the religion of Islam.” In other words, “That’s not Islam, that’s Islamism.” The fact that we are even debating this shows what a terrible job the article does of getting across it’s message. If we replaced “Islamism” with, “a doctrine of forced conversion” or “thinking we should kill people in the name of religion” or “thinking it’s okay to kill people” then we’d be expressing what the problem is much more clearly. It’s an accident of history that we are having this discussion about Islam and not about Christianity, Buddhism, communism, or fascism.
They are very well funded, and we ought to stop participating in that funding. That is my point. The way to combat groups like this is to address their sources of funding, and to stop play-acting in their propaganda by taking our own extremist stances.
Your reasoning here is sound - just because their move was calculated to create a certain reaction doesn’t mean that reaction isn’t the right one. I think we’ve done a lot of bombing and we haven’t seen a lot of positive results from it. I think we ought to stop telling ourselves that if we just kill a few more people then that’ll be okay. But that’s just a hunch. I think we have a lot of evidence that our policies towards the middle east haven’t been working but not a lot of evidence to tell us what a more effective way forward would be.
One thing I definitely agree with Nawaz about is that this is, to a great extent, a PR war:
This did not happened overnight and could not have emerged from a vacuum. ISIS propaganda is good, but not that good. No, decades of Islamist propaganda in communities had already primed these young Muslims to yearn for a theocratic caliphate.
I still don’t understand what route Nawaz is suggesting. There is this, “We have to understand what we are arguing against so we can argue against it,” line going on, but he seems to think he understands what he is arguing against and doesn’t provide the counter-arguments that would be used. PR is very rarely about having a good argument, and you generally don’t have to even understand your opponent’s argument to win a debate in the minds of the audience. Our best argument that we are not an enemy worth fighting would be to actually be not an enemy worth fighting. That has nothing to do with countering ideology and everything to do with reducing discrimination, reducing incoming inequality, and putting an end to missile strikes on weddings and funerals.
