Virtually everything we do is in coalitions, and that emergence of effective coalitions — often ad hoc, for single rallies, or over months over a piece of legislation, or locally as activists find each other from groups with common interests — is an important trend from the last year. A lot of our work is in helping to incubate those coalitions, both by supporting other groups, and also by helping to incubate single-issue sites that can become battlegrounds in this war of ideas.
If you think of this in terms of war gaming, we need more pieces on the board (my emphasis). Our Islamist adversaries have a lot of pieces on the chess board, pieces they have been building with petrodollars for over a generation — new Islamic organizations like NAIT and ISNA (Wahhabi forces), pseudo-Western organizations to enforce the separation of Muslims from mainstream integration, such as CAIR, MAS, and MSA (Muslim Brotherhood forces), groups to effect infiltration and intimidation into existing Western NGOs and government agencies of Muslim Brotherhood supporters (FBI, U.S. Peace Institute, CIA, White House, Transportation Security Agency, Department. of Justice) .
A lot of Islamist dawa is about putting hundreds of organizations and individuals in place in each country’s civil and governmental institutions — not just in the USA. The strategy is one of colonization under Islamic Imperialism — for these Islamist groups to act as Muslim Brotherhood front groups, creating the parallel society of Shariah which will then be in place to take over as national sovereignty is corrupted and preoccupied with the chaos of civil war and terrorism. Gramsci, Qutb, Mao — various theorists of insurrection and colonization of the West have written on this. Our side is beginning to look at this now too, especially over the last half decade.
So much of what needs to be done right now is building up our own organizational capacity, finding people who can work together, and targeting key areas of weakness in our adversaries. Many groups are starting to do this.
I’ve worked with Muslims professionally over the years in various IT projects. Many train expertly as engineers, systems analysts and systems modelers. I wish I could see — because it exists somewhere — the system dynamics model that has been built, perhaps even by people I once knew, to model the Islamization of the West. It’s implicit, but given the skills and that Islamic cultural interest in the design of complex, internally referential systems, I suspect several models are out there competing for strategic dominance as the most useful tool. Our adversaries are wargaming our terms of surrender; it is up to us to build the wargames to define our terms of victory.
This is where our political leaders have failed so miserably, in failing to understand dawa, jihad, supranational terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism, the whole set of tactics as a single system. It doesn’t need a single political entity governing it, to function systematically. You can build these things fairly loosely and they still keep functioning. Read all. [HT: Gates of Vienna]
Those who desire to fill their meaningless lives with "something more" by giving in to slavery to the primitive Sacred in Islam will, undoubtedly, parrot the themes, justify their violence, and even fall into murderous rivalries within it. But, as Christine shows, the outline of the structure can have a world-wide scope, a seamless quality, and magnificent elegance. Don't credit superior intellect or approval by their deity. Credit the power of the primitive Sacred.
Want to see a glimmer of hope? Here is a magnificent witness to faith and evangelization.