Obama Says to Fight ISIS with Ideas

In a speech to the United Nations on September 29, 2015, President Obama acknowledged that military pressures will be insufficient to beat ISIS (also known as Daesh, ISIL, or the Islamic State): “Ideologies are not defeated with guns. They are defeated by better ideas—a more attractive and compelling vision.”

Unfortunately neither Obama nor any other Western leader has such a vision. They can’t allow themselves to understand that the selfishness and materialism built into the neoliberal worldview and embedded in the daily practices of global capitalism are precisely what people are protesting when they move toward various forms of religious or nationalist fundamentalisms.

The only way to defeat these fundamentalisms is to create what we at Tikkun’s Network of Spiritual Progressives call the Caring Society: Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth. This isn’t just a slogan, but a movement for building that reality. You can’t fight the longing for higher meaning and purpose in life, or the desire for community and connection. Many of these fundamentalist communities not only talk about these needs, but actually deliver—though only for their own members. Yet, this higher meaning and purpose is specifically ignored when politicians talk about “equal opportunity to compete in the competitive marketplace” in a capitalist-shaped world in which a fractional percentage of the population owns a vastly disproportionate amount of the wealth and is wrecking the environment to accumulate yet more wealth. These are not the values of the Caring Society, and they cannot possibly appeal to people around the world who have already experienced the emotional, spiritual, and economic devastation this marketplace delivers.

The first steps toward overcoming capitalist values would be for Obama or the next US President to convince the people of the United States that “homeland security” is best achieved through generosity rather than domination, and then to convert the military into an adjunct and non-violent overseer of a Global Marshall Plan (you can find and share details of our plan by downloading the full brochure at www.tikkun.org/gmp). When Western societies are viewed as caring more about human well-being and environmental sanity than about accumulating wealth and power for their corporations and richest individuals, we will have a leg to stand on in the ideological battle against the Islamic State, which is horrendously cruel to outsiders. In this contest, we want the West to win, but that will happen only if the West goes through a monumental process of tikkun (healing and transformation) of its economic and political institutions in accord with our proposed New Bottom Line (www.tikkun.org/covenant). We urge those who seek a caring society to join our movement.

Safety through Generosity

After ISIS bombings in Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad, many of us rightly feel the need to take steps to protect ourselves, our neighbors, and our country from extremist violence. Barring refugees is not a reasonable step, but performing security background checks is. Having security guards ask people to reveal their backpacks or briefcases before entering public spaces where many people gather and using metal and bomb detectors in those places are reasonable steps; invasive body searches are not. But it is an illusion to think that we can fully protect ourselves from people determined to cause harm, as the Israelis learned this past fall, when Palestinians stabbed Israeli civilians at random in an outbreak of despair at the continuing harassment and oppression they face living under the Occupation.

Yet historically, whenever people become focused on these short-term steps, they almost always lose sight of the underlying problems—in this case, our own role in creating or sustaining a global system of oppression. This role is not limited to the US-led destruction of Iraq’s national infrastructure or the failure to support the nonviolent opposition to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Nor can US oppression be reduced to simply the torture centers we’ve operated. It also includes the seemingly endless humiliation we’ve brought on people whose communities of meaning and purpose have been undermined by the selfishness and materialism that our...