I came into work one day amidst rumors that a colleague would soon be leaving us. Not strange on the face of it. People come and go all the time. But this time, the reason the colleague was leaving was unique.
The young man decided to act on his conviction to go fight alongside the Kurds in Syria against ISIS. To leave it all. A cushy, albeit ordinary, office job. Friends, family, familiarity. His motorcycle. At least he'd still have his cigarettes.
Colleagues gossiped about him and mocked his decision for days around the water cooler. No one could understand why anyone would intentionally put themselves in harm's way, intentionally flee comfort and ease. Especially someone with no military training.
As Americans, our soft modern sensibility doesn't understand why ordinary people would make radical change based on deep convictions – convictions not centered around economic or material considerations.
The failure to understand this mindset will kill us if we don't wake up.
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I was fortunate enough to run into the colleague in the stairwell the week before he left. I asked him abut his decision. He said he wasn't particularly religious, but that he felt so strongly that the Kurdish Christians needed someone to stand up and help them defend themselves against the persecution of ISIS that he was willing to forgo his current life to help. He said he had never felt that strongly about anything in his whole life. I could sense the depth of seriousness in his belief as he looked me in the eye.
I conveyed my respect for his decision and promised my prayers would be with him.
Later I thought more about everyone who was mocking his decision and the root of his conviction behind his back, those who saw no value in the radical actions taken as a result of a pulsating, deep, persistent belief.
This belief was mocked the same way many of our leaders mock the serious belief of our enemies, the way they whitewash the true root cause of hegemonic Islamism – the psychopathic, end-times beliefs that are the true prime movers behind the Shia Twelvers in Iran and the Sunni Apocalyptic death cult that is ISIS.
Our politicians, and the great unwashed masses of low-information citizenry, are quick to replace the true root cause with assigned catalysts focused around economics, poverty, foreign policy grievances, power struggles for oil and whatever material, circumstantial, non-religious explanation they can try to touch.
All of this is folly. And the continued attacks worldwide will intensify with frequency and severity until we admit, understand and face the true root cause of this evil – this serious belief or our enemies.
It's the same belief Thomas Jefferson confronted in the 18th century as he went to war against the Barbary pirates. It had nothing to do with oil, jobs, or U.S. foreign policy then, and it really has nothing to do with any of those superficial sub-issues now.
It has to do with the serious, core belief of our enemy that they are religiously commanded by their faith to kill and conquer those who don't believe as they do (Quran Sura 9, Verse 29). It has everything to do with the eschatological beliefs of our enemies that inform them that they must hasten the arrival of their promised One, their Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi or the Twelfth Imam, by deliberately causing bloodshed, chaos and war with all infidels. Because only once the world is washed in blood will their messiah grace the world with his re-appearance.
We mock this like my co-workers mocked my colleague for going to fight ISIS – because we don't believe in serious belief, because as a culture we are bereft of serious belief. We are instead addicted to comfort and hamstrung by a belief in unending materialism, technological supremacy and celebrity worship.
We mock in comfort while they plan with unbridled, calculated, murderous intent.
If we continue to undervalue the heroic serious beliefs of our soldiers, citizens and allies while simultaneously ignoring, mocking and disregarding the serious beliefs of our enemies, we do so at our own ultimate peril.