* * *
Great essays tell big truths. A deeply reported piece in
next month’s Atlantic magazine does precisely that, and in a way devastating to
the Obama administration’s thinking on ISIS.
“What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor Graeme
Wood, is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.)
Mr. Wood describes a dynamic, savage and so far
successful organization whose members mean business.
Their mettle should not be doubted.
ISIS controls an area larger than the United Kingdom and
intends to restore, and expand, the caliphate.
* FUNNY... GLENN BECK HAS LONG SPOKE OF THE MOVEMENT TO
RESTORE THE CALIPHATE...
* JUST GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE...
(*SHRUG*)
Mr. Wood interviewed Anjem Choudary of the banned
London-based Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, who characterized ISIS’ laws of war
as policies of mercy, not brutality. “He told me the state has an obligation to
terrorize its enemies,” Mr. Wood writes, “because doing so hastens victory and
avoids prolonged conflict.”
* IN OTHER WORDS IT'S NOT SIMPLY MINDLESS SAVAGERY...
BEHEADINGS AND BURNING PEOPLE ALIVE ARE TACTICS! PART OF A STRATEGY!
ISIS has allure: Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are
believed to have joined. The organization is clear in its objectives: “We can
gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers
for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of
certain types of change . . . that it considers itself a harbinger of — and
headline player in — the imminent end of the world. . . . The Islamic State is
committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.”
The scale of the savagery is difficult to comprehend and
not precisely known. Regional social media posts “suggest that individual
executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few
weeks.” Most, not all, of the victims are Muslims.
The West, Mr. Wood argues, has been misled “by a
well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval
religious nature. . . . The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very
Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers,” drawn
largely from the disaffected. “But the religion preached by its most ardent
followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” Its
actions reflect “a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning
civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bring
about the apocalypse.”
* ONE MORE TIME...
Its actions reflect “a sincere, carefully considered
commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment,
and ultimately to bring about the apocalypse.”
(*PURSED LIPS*)
Mr. Wood acknowledges that ISIS reflects only one -
minority - strain within Islam.
“Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But
pretending it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that
must be understood to be combated, has already led the United States to
underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”
* WHY THIS FOCUS ON THE UNITED STATES? LET TURKEY... LET
EGYPT... LET SAUDI ARABIA... LET JORDAN... DESTROY THESE ANIMALS. IF NEED BY,
LET FRANCE... GERMANY... THE EUROPEANS PROVIDE ASSISTANCE!
He quotes Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, the leading expert
on ISIS’ theology. The group’s fighters, Mr. Haykel says, “are smack in the
middle of the medieval tradition,” and denials of its religious nature spring
from embarrassment, political correctness and an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense
tradition.”
* YES, YES... OBAMA'S AN A--HOLE. THIS GOES WITHOUT
SAYING! STIPULATED...!!!
The Islamic State is different from al Qaeda and almost all
other jihadist movements, according to Mr. Wood, “in believing that it is
written into God’s script as a central character.” Its spokesman has vowed: “We
will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.” They
believe we are in the End of Days. They speak of how “the armies of Rome will
mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria.” The battle will be Rome’s
Waterloo. After that, a countdown to the apocalypse.
Who exactly is “Rome”? That’s unclear. Maybe Turkey,
maybe any infidel army. Maybe America.
What should the West do to meet the challenge? Here Mr.
Wood’s tone turns more tentative. We should help the Islamic State
“self-immolate.”
Those urging America to commit tens of thousands of
troops “should not be dismissed too quickly.”
* YES THEY SHOULD BE...!!!
* AGAIN... SEND IN TENS OF THOUSANDS OF TURKS... TENS OF
THOUSANDS OF "ALLIED" ARABS... EGYPTIANS... IRAQIS... EUROPEANS IF
NECESSARY...!!!
ISIS is, after all, an avowedly genocidal and
expansionist organization, and its mystique can be damaged if it loses its grip
on the territory it holds. Al Qaeda, from which ISIS is estranged and which it
has eclipsed, can operate as an underground network. ISIS cannot, “because
territorial authority is a requirement.”
But ISIS wants to draw America into the fight. A U.S.
invasion and occupation, Mr. Wood argues, would be a propaganda victory for
them, because they’ve long said the U.S. has always intended to embark on a
modern-day crusade against Islam. And if a U.S. ground invasion launched and
failed, it would be a disaster.
The best of bad options, Mr. Wood believes, is to “slowly
bleed” ISIS through air strikes and proxy warfare. The Kurds and the Shiites
cannot vanquish them, but they can “keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its
duty to expand.” That would make it look less like “the conquering state of the
Prophet Muhammad.” As time passed ISIS could “stagnate” and begin to sink. Word
of its cruelties would spread; it could become another failed state.
(But that death, as Mr. Wood notes, “is unlikely to be
quick,” and any number of things could go wrong, including a dangerous
rapprochement with al Qaeda.)
Mr. Wood’s piece is bracing because it is fearless — he
is apparently not afraid of being called a bigot or an Islamophobe. It is
important because it gives people, especially political leaders, information
they need to understand a phenomenon that may urgently shape U.S. foreign
policy for the next 10 years.
In sorry contrast, of course, are the Obama
administration’s willful delusions and dodges.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
They reached their height this week when State Department
spokesman Marie Harf talked on MSNBC of the “root causes” that drive jihadists,
such as “lack of opportunity for jobs.”
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
She later went on CNN to explain: “Where there’s a lack
of governance, you’ve had young men attracted to this terrorist cause where
there aren’t other opportunities. . . . So how do you get at that root causes?”
She admitted her view “might be too nuanced of an argument for some.”
Yes, it might.
* NOONAN SHOOTS... NOONAN SCORES!
It isn’t about getting a job. They have a job: waging
jihad.
(*SIGH*)
* SAD... BUT TRUE.
* THIS HARF WOMAN IS CLEARLY A FOOL.
The president famously cannot even name the ISIS threat
forthrightly, and that is a criticism not of semantics but of his thinking.
* LOOSELY DEFINED!
ISIS isn’t the only terrorist group, he says, Christians
have committed their own sins over history, what about the Crusades, don’t get
on your high horse. It’s all so evasive. Each speech comes across as an attempt
to make up for the previous speech’s mistakes in tone and substance. At the
“violent extremism” summit this week he emphasized Islamic “legitimate
grievances” and lectured America on the need for tolerance toward American
Muslims.
Of extremists he said: “They say they are religious
leaders — they are not religious leaders, they are terrorists.” But ISIS and
its followers believe they are religious leaders, prophets who use terrorism to
achieve aims they find in religious texts.
* YOU... DUMB... BASTARD... OBAMA...!!!
On the closing day of the summit the president said,
“When people are oppressed and human rights are denied . . . when dissent is
silenced, it feeds violent extremism.” Yes, sure. But isn’t ISIS oppressing
people, denying their human rights and silencing dissent?
“When peaceful democratic change is impossible, it feeds
into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only available answer.” Yes,
sure. But the young men and women ISIS recruits from Western nations already
live in peaceful democracies.
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