Edward Snowden's jihad

The NSA whistleblower's battle against US surveillance fits into a modernist reading of jihad as a fight for betterment.

By Mark LeVine

Al-Jazeera

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A few brave men

It is highly instructive that the courage of a few brave men such as Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have done more damage to the hegemony of the well-entrenched and normally unchallenged US war racket than any number of al-Qaeda-inspired or -directed terrorist plots could have achieved. Indeed, the fact that Snowden didn't become intoxicated by such power, but instead sought to shut it down at the source is an action of revolutionary potential, if others take up his call. It is a true inner and greater jihad.

If a couple of relatively minor intelligence workers such as Manning and Snowden could access information that upends so many of their government's policies, and the lies and half-truths upon which they're based, imagine what 20, or even 200 could do. They might actually get Americans off their couches and into the streets to demand the kind of political reform that the political class has thus far had little incentive to enact.
We don't have to call it jihad, but after a dozen years of a disastrous and bloody "war on terror" with the Muslim world, there are definitely worse ways to define it. However people want to describe it, these individuals have shown their peers in the governmental, intelligence, military and corporate bureaucracies across the world that they too have a choice - that merely continuing as cogs in oppressive machines cannot be considered the legitimate, or even only, choice left to them - even if the alternative comes at a steep price.
Let us hope at least a few are inspired to follow their course."