Paris Jihad: will of Allah or blasphemy?

"I strongly reaffirm that the road to violence and hate can never solve the problems of humanity ! And to use the name of God to justify taking this route, employing these methods, is blasphemy." (Pope Francis in a letter dated 14th November 2015 to cardinal André Vingt-Trois, Archbishop of Paris).

The Argentinean pontiff is at loggerheads with the ideology of the Wahhabi/Salafi jihadist extremist militant group of Sunni Islam (the largest Muslim denomination) that inspired the Paris jihad. Despite the angry denial of the rest of Islam, the jihadists are convinced they are acting in the name of Allah, the same monotheistic deity the Christians call God and the Jews call Yahweh. This is an ideological dispute that has been going on for the past fifteen years.

Will of Allah or blasphemy? Who knows? Are the jihadists and the Pope referring to the same deity, that of Abrahamic monotheism? If so, who is authorised to interpret the will of Allah, God or Yahweh, if there is such a deity? Who can pretend to be the sole repository of the truth? That is an ideological dispute that has been going on for two thousand years.

According to the latest macabre statistics at the time of writing, there were about 130 people killed and 350 wounded during the attacks in Paris on Friday 13 November. Some of the jihadists blew themselves up. As they proudly declare : "we love death more than you love life".

That is what impresses me most. How is it possible to brainwash so many young people to the extent that they willingly transform themselves into human bombs? Moderate Muslims say that they are not true Muslims, that it has nothing to do with the Muslim religion. Yet I cannot imagine anything more powerful than to persuade so many fine, healthy, intelligent young people to kill and wound as many innocent people as possible before blowing themselves up or deliberately exposing themselves to a hail of police bullets. If it is not religion, what is it that motivates them?

My mind goes back to the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. I still have visions of those two hijacked aircraft crashing into the twin towers and seeing them collapsing down to the ground like a pack of cards, one after the other. It was a horrific sight I shall never forget. The force and energy involved must have been tremendous. Where did all that energy come from?

Certainly not from Osama bin Laden and his jihadist organisation, al-Qaeda. It came from the two Boeing 767s of the United and American airlines. All the hijackers did was to turn some of the might and power of America against itself and destroy nearly 3 000 innocent lives and a major capitalist symbol that dominated the New York skyline at the time.

The same strategy is now being applied by al-Baghdadi and his organisation, the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), that has captured part of Syria and Iraq and finances its operations with the oil revenues of that territory ($1 million per day). While the Americans have developed sophisticated technology allowing them to operate unmanned drones against ISIS via satellite from bases in the US, ISIS has developed brainwashing techniques that allow it to deploy "human drones" composed of citizens of the countries they attack. It is using the insider knowledge and facilities of penetration and circulation of local citizens who are virtually undetectable in order to wage war against their own people.

In his recent televised broadcasts to the French people, president François Hollande, no doubt in anticipation of the need for legal justification of retaliation, heavily insisted on the fact that the Paris attacks of Friday 13 November were acts of war. The problem is that most of the jihadists were of French nationality and there were only eight of them. It seems a bit problematic to qualify that as war perpetrated by a foreign power, particularly since the foreign power in question is the so-called Islamic State which France does not officially recognise as such. The legal qualification of terrorism would appear to be more appropriate and if it could be proven that the attacks were under foreign direction then they would qualify as international terrorism. If not, they would represent domestic terrorism,

These vicious attacks were heavily charged with symbolism: an obscurantist religious ideology attempted to annihilate the "city of light" that promptly defended itself. The French "traitors" who were deemed to have collaborated with the enemy were quickly identified, tracked down and ruthlessly eliminated. The president then sent the flagship of the French navy, one of the world's most technologically advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the "Charles de Gaulle" (named after the head of the French resistance during the second world-war), to combat ISIS in Syria.

The Pope's accusation of blasphemy, allegedly committed by the Jihadists, and the French president's prompt reaction of dispatching the "Charles de Gaulle" to the fray, is reminiscent of the French rushing off to lead the First Crusade at the behest of Pope Urban II in 1095.

It is, indeed, a strange war, a war of obscurantist religious ideology waged against the diffusion, particularly among the middle and lower income classes, of ideas of tolerance, individual rights and freedoms, gender equality, scientific knowledge and social progress. It is a war of the merchants of death and contrition waged against the free exercise of ordinary existence in a modern secular democracy.

It was in the 18^th century that the Enlightenment fractured the tectonic plate that underpins western civilisation and created a rift that has become a huge gap. Part of humanity moved out of the shadows. The rest stayed behind. Like all tectonic activity it will be a long time before the movement can be reversed. Many more dramatic upheavals and disruptions to our peaceful existence can be expected to occur over the coming years.

Though they appear to be inevitable, what can we do to attenuate their impact? Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. That seems intelligent.

Perhaps the jihadists are not so much the problem as they are the wrong solution to a problem that is inherent to most modern democracies: the difficulty of many young people finding their rightful place in society and obtaining a certain amount of pleasure and satisfaction.

Vulnerable young people have always been ideal prey for gurus of all sorts, particularly gurus of religious sects. More recently, the al-Qaedas, ISIS and Boko Harams of this world have entered the market in a big way, capitalising on the immense possibilities offered by the internet. These well structured jihadist organisations have many talented gurus of different cultures and nationalities who are experts on the latest personalised brainwashing and recruiting techniques. ISIS has even compiled a recruitment guide describing the most vulnerable profiles to target and the methods to be employed. Surprising as it may seem, Muslims are not listed among the more vulnerable targets.

The gurus progressively lead their young victims through a psychological process that isolates them from their school teachers, their friends and finally, their families, persuading them, at each stage, that they are being manipulated and prevented from living their lives as they should.

At the end of the process, the only person the victim trusts is the guru. He is exfiltrated out of his home country guided by the guru to the destination of the recruiting organisation. On arrival, he is taken in charge by the jihadists and from that moment on there is a dramatic change of décor. His passport is confiscated and he loses his identity. He is given a jihadist name.

He is then put through a process of dehumanisation, making him totally indifferent to the plight of others, irrespective of who they are or how badly they are treated. Female victims are veiled from head to foot with a black burqa and married to a jihadist or to several jihadists in succession at brief intervals giving birth to numerous children. It has also been reported that, in many instances, male victims are submitted to mass rape and treated as objects in order to depersonalise and reify them as part of the dehumanisation process.

The apprentice jihadists are not known to receive any formal religious education but lead the lives of the group in which they find themselves. This may or may not include some form of religious practice. However, a belief in martyrdom, a hatred of infidels, and a commitment to violent jihad is the basis of their lifestyle. They are brainwashed into believing that if they die fighting to defend their jihadist religious doctrine they will go to heaven and receive 36 virgins as a reward for their sacrifice. The "life impulse" (posited by Schopenhauer and later developed by Freud)is progressively repressed and they become dominated by the "death impulse", the impelling desire for death and destruction.

The apparently inexhaustible source of human drones and bombs the jihadists are able to tap into is quite impressive. The human weapons they produce and train are remarkably efficient and dispose of much greater autonomy than anything the US or any other nation can produce.

Of course we are the ones who are providing the jihadists with the endless supply of raw material for the production of these human weapons which return like boomerangs to destroy us. What can we do to prevent it?

In France, a not-for-profit organisation known as the CPDSI (Centre for the Prevention of Sectarian aberrations associated with Islam) was mandated in April 2014 by the French Ministry of Internal Affairs to study the problem and implement appropriate measures to control it. The head of the organisation is Ms Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist of religion with experience working with people indoctrinated by gurus of religious sects.

According to the Director of Public Prosecutions in France, François Molins, in November 2014 there were 1 132 French citizens operating in jihadist networks, of whom 376 were in Syria and Iraq including 88 females and 10 minors. However, some observers esteem that this total has increased to about 1 600 over the past twelve months.

The CPDSI, provides ongoing assistance to about 750 families who have turned to it to help prevent their children joining the ranks of ISIS in Syria. So far, none of them have done so.

Ms Bouzar explains that provided the young victims have not reached the final stage of the dehumanisation process there is hope that they may be recuperated. However, this cannot be achieved by appealing to their reason, through logical argumentation. They are convinced they are superior beings and that everyone is jealous of them and simply trying to denigrate them and their ideals. To un-indoctrinate them, Ms Bouzar and her team employ a technique they call "Proust's madeleine".

This is in reference to an incident narrated by Marcel Proust in the first volume, "Swann's Way" or "The way by Swann's", of his epic novel in seven volumes on the theme of involuntary memory entitled "In search of Lost Time" or "Remembrance of Things Past". The taste of a small madeleine cake dipped in tea brings back fond memories of when he was a child.

Ms Bouzar works closely with the parents of the victims to help them recall and reproduce some pleasant event the children experienced prior to their indoctrination in order to bring back fond memories of that experience. It is through the affect (emotions) of their children that the parents are able to revive whatever remnants of humanity remain buried deep inside them and bring them back to life and reality again and re-establish a meaningful relationship with them.

As an additional measure, Ms Bouzar and her team enlist the help of "repentant" jihadists with a profile as close as possible to those of the victims and have them explain how they were indoctrinated until they managed to see the difference between myth and reality and realise that they had been manipulated.

However, Ms Bouzar insists on the importance of the role of the parents in the effort to un-indoctrinate their children. She esteems that the parents have to do 60% of the work.