Even Human Rights Watch noticed. But this report is suffused with denial that anything in the substance of Islamic beliefs could have a role here. Islamic jihad is almost always portrayed as a reaction to something; the assumption is that there has to be something to blame, and if it hadn’t happened, maybe the jihad would not have happened. It’s just a matter of not engaging in any of those objectionable practices — above all, not self-defense.
Indeed, it is an article of faith within the mainstream media that “radical” Islam is invariably caused by anything other than Islamic texts and teachings. “Four Die in Shoot-Out as Russia Faces Jihadist Threat (Update1),” by Lucian Kim for Bloomberg, September 25:
Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — Three insurgents and one policeman were killed in a gun battle in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, the latest in a wave of attacks rocking the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region.
The shoot-out took place after police stopped a car for a document check in Dagestan’s capital Makhachkala last night, state television reported today. The number of violent deaths almost tripled this summer as the fight between the authorities and Islamic militants in the North Caucasus also cost the lives of civilian bystanders and human rights activists.
The explosion of violence is the result of poverty, corruption and government neglect, according to both officials and their critics. Those factors combined with a militant brand of Islam that has replaced communism as an ideology means Prime Minister Vladimir Putin faces the worst instability in the region since he sent troops to subdue a rebellion in Chechnya a decade ago.
“One of the most dramatic results of that war is a joint insurgency operating under central command,” said Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Russia office. “It’s not separatism anymore, it’s a jihadist insurgency.”
Violent Deaths
By the middle of September, 424 people had been killed in attacks in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan this summer, almost three times the number of violent deaths in the same period last year, according to state-run news agency RIA Novosti. Those killings include an August suicide truck bombing at an Ingush police station that killed 25 and the July murder of Chechen human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. […]
Even as young people in most of Russia embraced western lifestyles and culture after the fall of communism, their peers in the North Caucasus gravitated toward the “active, militant” Islam of the Middle East and Persian Gulf region, Malashenko said. Protest against social ills, poverty and bad governance inevitably took on a religious character.
That raises an interesting question: why didn’t the other “young people in most of Russia” embrace a comparable ideology? They also dealt with economic and social upheaval in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. For that matter, protests against social problems have taken on a religious character for millennia: What matters is how the religion in question suggests one handle them.
“The radicalization was a gradual process. Now it’s matured and become critical,” said Adam Gazdiyev, the spokesman for Ingushetia’s representative office in Moscow. “It’s a law of physics: there was an ethical-moral vacuum, and the radicals began to fill it.”…