DoD official: Al Qaida will be defeated by its own ideology
A former Princeton professor who is leading the Pentagon's war of ideas against terrorism said last week that Al Qaida ideology is flawed and will ultimately lead to its defeat as an idea system.
“The ideology contains the seeds of its own destruction,” said Michael Doran, deputy assistant secretary of defense for support to public deployment.
Doran cited four main reasons, including the global extremist ideology’s failure to meet the needs of local people, its advocacy of killing Sunni Muslims and killing innocent civilians of all kind, and last because its call for indiscriminate killing is contrary to “about a thousand years of traditional Islamic teaching.”
“And all those factors together, in the right circumstances, I think, undo Al Qaida,” said Doran, the Pentagon’s official in charge of ideological efforts against Islamist extremism.
Also In This Edition
The three distinctive characteristics of Al Qaida extremist ideological are “takfirism” or the branding of other Muslims as non-Muslim and thus making them apostates and targets of the extremists; second is a Leninist-style concept that extremists place themselves as a “vanguard” of a movement for radical Islamic change; and last is the secret cellular structure that while not part of the ideology it encourages the creation of it.
The ideology has spread because of the simplicity of the message and the notion of the vanguard has made it attractive.
“It's a message that can be translated; a global message that can be translated into local circumstances very easily, because what it says to an individual is the Muslim world, the Islamic community, is under threat,” Doran said. “The threat is grave. The very existence of the Islamic community is at stake. And the only way to save it is to take drastic action now.”
“So it divides the world up into black and white,” he told reporters at the Foreign Press Center. “It says who's on the black side, who's on the white side, and it says, ‘Here's how we do things.’ And that message has appeal to a lot of people in a lot of different circumstances.”
