The New Statesman offers a refreshing change from The British media’s infatuation with the “anything but religion” excuse for the horrors committed by Muslim extremists. In their recent piece, “From Portsmouth to Kobane: The British jihadis fighting for ISIS,” they interview a number of UK residents who have made the long trek to Syria and Iraq to fight for the Islamic State.
Lack of time precludes me from any gloss beyond the above, but I’ll add reader Adrian’s take on it:
Interesting article from The New Statesman on the motivations of British born Isis members. Not much mention of western imperialism. Plenty of religion.
Maybe Greenwald et al could just possibly find some underlying enmity for western imperialism that even these poor saps don’t realise they have…..or, they could just listen to what they actually say.
No need for masochistic self flagellation when these guys make things so explicit.
A couple of excerpts from the article:
“I saw the situation in Syria but people said it was Muslim versus Muslim, it’s not jihad, so I backed off,” Jaman said of these events. That was the message coming from large sections of the British Muslim community, although it has failed to dissuade scores of young men from making the journey to Syria. For Jaman and many others, it was exposure to more extreme opinions online that proved more seductive than the message from their local imams. These fatwas Jaman found on the internet preached, for example, that Shias were not “true Muslims” and should therefore be fought. Jaman became convinced that the Syrian war was a battle over the future of Islam.
. . . Rahman was different – he craved martyrdom. “Life is for the hereafter,” he wrote online. “So if god has told me to go out and fight, and has promised us victory or martyrdom, then our life is only a small sacrifice . . . The main reason [to fight] is to please our creator by making his religion the highest.”
Of course there is not only one motivation for everyone, or even for a single person:
There are those who are principally motivated by the region’s human suffering, whom we call missionary jihadis; there are martyrdom seekers, who regard the conflict as a shortcut to paradise; there are those simply seeking adventure, for whom the supposed masculinity of it all has great appeal; and, finally, there are long-standing radicals for whom the conflict represents a chance to have the fight they had been waiting for. These divisions are apparent even within Jaman’s cluster.
What is striking among the panoply of reasons given by the UK residents who go to fight for ISIS is the absence of “Western colonialism” as a motivation. What “colonialism” there is is simply Obama’s decision to bomb ISIS—a far cry from the claims of people like Pape and Greenwald that ISIS is the direct descendant of Western intervention in the Middle East:
Others, however, have adopted a much more aggressive posture. One fighter I speak with regularly – and who I have come to regard as among the more thoughtful – has been radicalised by American intervention (he asked that I withhold his nom de guerre). Much of the old rhetoric that we were used to hearing in the aftermath of the Iraq war has returned: that the US is waging a war on Islam itself, not just on Islamist terrorism. What is most significant about this fighter’s animosity is that he is not a member of Islamic State and is allied with groups that have fought it in the past.
But, as I once told Sam Harris, even if jihadis claim that their motivation is religious, the apologists always deny that, looking for “deeper” explanations (almost invariably putting the responsibility on the West). But if they say their motivation is colonialism, well, we take it at face value. What kind of double standard is that? And what would it take for us to accept the motivations of jihadis at their word?
