Islam’s civil war at root of Paris attacks | Critical Analysis |Axisoflogic.com

Paris police officer Ahmed Merabet was shot dead point blank during an attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo magazine. (Handout)

After Ahmed Merabet, a French police officer, was killed outside the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris last week, his brother Malek said, “My brother was Muslim and he was killed by two terrorists, by two false Muslims. Islam is a religion of peace and love.”

It was moving, but to say all Muslims who commit cruel and violent acts in God’s name are “false Muslims” is like saying the Crusaders who devastated the Middle East 900 years ago were “false Christians”.

The Crusaders were real Christians. They believed they were doing God’s will in trying to reconquer the formerly Christian lands that had been lost to Islam centuries before, and they had the support of most people back home in Europe.

Similarly, Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly believed they were true Muslims doing God’s will. But there is an important difference from the Crusades: the supporters of the young French terrorists are a minority everywhere, and among Muslims living in Western countries they are only a tiny minority.

This is not a “war of civilizations”. Seventeen innocent people killed in Paris is not the equivalent of the Crusades. For that matter, neither was 9/11. These are wicked and tragic events, but they are not a war.

There is a war going on, but it is a civil war within the “House of Islam” that occasionally spills over into non-Muslim countries. .

Two of these Muslim civil wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were ignited by U.S.-led invasions in 2001 and 2003. Four others, in Syria, Libya, Yemen and the northern, mostly Muslim half of Nigeria, have begun since 2011.

In every one of these wars, victims are overwhelmingly Muslims killed by other Muslims. From time to time non-Muslims in other countries are killed too, and these killings do have a strategic purpose, but it’s not to terrify non-Muslims into submission. Quite the contrary.

The great Muslim civil war is about the political, social and cultural modernization of the Muslim world. Should it continue down the same track other major global cultures have followed, or should those changes be stopped and reversed? The Islamists take the latter position.

Some aspects of modernization are attractive to many Muslims, so stopping the changes would require violence, including the overthrow of most existing governments in Muslim countries. But that is the task Islamists and jihadi activists in particular, have undertaken.

The best way to gain supporters is to convince Muslims that modernization — democracy, equality, the whole cultural package — is part of a Western plot to undermine Islam.

This would be a more credible claim if Western countries are actually attacking Muslim countries, so one of the main jihadi strategies is to carry out atrocities that trigger Western military attacks on Muslim countries. That was the real goal of 9/11.

But smaller terrorist attacks that lead to mistreatment of Muslim minorities in non-Muslim countries also serve the cause. They create a backlash victimizing local Muslim minorities, generating “proof” of a war against Islam.

This strategy of making things worse to reach a goal has a name: “la politique du pire.”

There is a sub-theme in some Middle Eastern wars that muddies the waters: in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, radicalization has also revived and militarized the conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

There will be more attacks like the ones in Paris, because lost young men seeking a cause abound in every community. We can’t arrest them all, so we will go on having to live with some terrorism from Muslim and non-Muslim extremist groups and trying not to over-react — as we have been doing for decades already.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent Canadian journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

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