Explaining ISIS
There’s a must-read article in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood, entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.”
What does it want? Oh, not so much. Merely to rule the world, and to have the apocalyptic vision in which it believes fulfilled. The reason its actions don’t appear to make much rational sense (it seems to be bent on outraging everyone) is that ISIS is not operating under the usual premises, it is operating from what it believes to be a divinely-inspired vision of wholesale slaughter and destruction (including, perhaps, that of many ISIS members) that will lead to its ultimate success.
And Wood makes it very, very clear that this vision is in line with a certain fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and the Koran (Wood’s piece is so long and so important that it is hard to excerpt from it and do it justice, so I recommend you read the entire thing):
…Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to Haykel. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.
According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ”˜Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ”˜Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”
You might say that ISIS is a Muslim revivalist movement, with the goal of going back to its vision of an original Islam as described in the Koran. It is very, very serious about this, and it is attracting a lot of people:
If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”
The vision includes a caliphate and sharia law, which is even worse than you probably already knew. For example:
Before the caliphate, “maybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,” Choudary told me. “These laws are in abeyance until we have khilafa”””a caliphate””“and now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example, individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the territory where the caliph is applying these laws.
There was some expression of puzzlement in this thread about what ISIS is referring to when it talks of “Rome.” Wood’s article gives a clue:
The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam…
…Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. “Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said a masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who’d been held captive for more than a year.
Whether “Rome” is the West itself, or Christianity, or some large segment of Christianity (sometimes referred to as “crusaders”), it is the force predicted to be defeated in the final apocalyptic showdown with Islam that ISIS believes Islam/ISIS will win.
The apocalypse in which ISIS believes is not exactly the same one meant by Christians, although it features at least one of the same cast of characters:
After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth, but Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus. An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus””the second-most-revered prophet in Islam””will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory…
On this theory, even setbacks dealt to the Islamic State mean nothing, since God has preordained the near-destruction of his people anyway.
Wood goes on to explain other things that might seem puzzling or obscure about ISIS: its demonstrations of cruelty, its refusal to accept any borders, its attitude towards treaties and voting. His suggestion for meeting the ISIS threat rejects ground troops and recommends the slow squeeze to be accomplished by bombing and the assist of other Islamic countries, but he acknowledges it will take a long long time with much suffering along the way.
Wood dismisses the ISIS-inspired jihadis in Western countries who have already killed Westerners as relatively unimportant, and Wood seems to think that ISIS’s concentration will remain on activities in Muslim lands rather than in Europe or America. I’m not at all sure that will continue to be the case; I think their attacks in the West will be stepping up, and that they also would not hesitate to pursue some sort of rogue nuclear assault if they can manage it, a possibility Wood does not even mention.
In summary: you may not be interested in holy war, but holy war is interested in you.
[NOTE: Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. I was surprised to see an article this hard-hitting appear in that publication, but encouraged by the fact that it did. The Atlantic used to be a relatively evenhanded periodical on “war on terror” issues, particularly when Michael Kelly was editor, but in recent years it has veered more to the left.
I don’t pretend to think that one article will matter, and certainly it will not change Obama’s mind (nor does it even argue against his present policies). But it certainly should put to rest the “not Islamic” meme, at least for many of those liberals who are moved to read it.]
Could someone please make arrangements for Mr. Haykel to speak with Baraka Obama?
Perhaps he can help Obama along with the notion that ISIS is a radical Islamist manifestation. Or not…
Clarityseeker:
I believe Obama knows full well.
Obama not only knows full well, but sympathizes with their cause.
Both hate the west equally.
Damn, he fooled me again. He is such a kidder…
Your summary says it all:
you may not be interested in holy war, but holy war is interested in you.”
Yes, we MUST destroy this ideology and its followers or pass the troubles onto the next generation.
Just as we didn’t do much about The Iranian revolution, and now we are having to deal with a stronger Iran (and a soon to be nuclear one?)
Hitler wasn’t content with just the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia; nor will ISIS be content with just their own lands being under their rule.
Destroy them now or deal with them for the next generation or two.
I remember a TV reporter asking a US soldier why he was willing to fight in Afghanistan and he replied: “So, my son won’t have to.”
Amen. Too bad our current leaders don’t get that.
Exactly. When the B-52s start bombing, then you’ll no we’re serious.
Exactly. When the B-52s start bombing, then you’ll know we’re serious.
charles Says:
February 16th, 2015 at 5:14 pm
I remember a TV reporter asking a US soldier why he was willing to fight in Afghanistan and he replied: “So, my son won’t have to.”
Amen. Too bad our current leaders don’t get that.
And, his voters.
I blame the voters …
Charles, being a Liberal (large ‘L’) means never having to say, “I’m sorry”.
They will never admit that ousting the Shah was the beginning of a country gone to Shiite (pun intended).
They can’t bring themselves to admit that by pulling out of Vietnam in the manner they did (hastily), resulted in the mass killings of over 2 million people by the North Vietnamese.
They still cannot admit that their feckless leader’s inability (unwillingness) to negotiate a sensible SOFA agreement with Iraq resulted in a vacuum which brought about a “Junior Varsity” team that is beheading and crucifying and burning alive and raping and enslaving and brutalizing and…
I was surprised to see an article this hard-hitting appear in that publication
An informed and intelligent article in The Atlantic is a rarity. When I go to Hell I’m definitely bringing ice skates.
I am weary of windy explanations of what the jihadists want. It is all very simple, they want all to submint to allah and exalt the prophet. They want dominion over the entire planet. They want the caliphate of their wet dreams of 72 virgins. They want clitoridectomy for 9 year old girls. They want to stone their ddaughters who have been raped for dishonoring the family. They want to behead or burn all who oppose them. Fold it 5 ways and nuke it where the sun don’t shine.
…nor can they admit that the “Church hearings” did more damage than good to our intelligence community.
Nor can they acknowledge the incredible (irreversible) damage Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) did to our intelligence gathering in 1993 when he was cavorting around with Bianca Jagger and her friends in Nicaragua. The dope was Chairman of the Latin America Committee and eviscerated our intelligence infrastructure and systems. Almost single handedly but certainly with help from Bill Clinton and his administration. Yeeeeeeeeeeesh…
Islam is the “religion of peace.” Of course it is peace when every living person who disagrees has been killed or brought into slavery then everything will be peaceful. It’s that simple.
Nor will the Liberals ever admit to the overwhelming damage they caused through their “hero”, Edward Snowden…
Same goes for the damage caused by Diane Feinstein in her revelatory report released last year which results in irreversible damage to America—all because she had a bug up her ass and wanted to dish out some paybacks…WOW!!!
The inside baseball stuff is somewhat interesting if tedious and beside the point.
As always, it is distressing to see folks on the non-Left have such a high regard for this mostly load of nonsense (nonsense because it is so off the mark, and laughable for its breathless, precious apprehension of points which ought to have been understood years ago).
“You have to have standards,” Anjem Choudary told me. “Somebody could claim to be a Muslim, but if he believes in homosexuality or drinking alcohol, then he is not a Muslim. There is no such thing as a nonpracticing vegetarian.”
Ah! A man who makes more sense in a dozen words that the author made in twelve thousand.
Who gives a flying fandango if one man kills another in a disagreement over who – – in the essence of their mutual belief – – is more correctly emulating the monster he follows?
I care more about the vegetarians on my side who are confused about the nature of meat.
parker @ 6:11 PM – – Yep. Wish I had said that.
It is nice to read a post by a blogger who really gets it. thanks Neo.
“He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra.”
After 9-11 I spent about a year studying Islam and debating Islam and Christianity with a Muslim. Based on my experience I agree completely with the author. It has taken over 1000 years for Islam to reach this high point where World domination is actually within their grasp.
Speaking of Rome, in the original Hadiths that word probably referred to Constantinople (now Istanbul) not to the present city of Rome. In the days of Mohammad the capitol of the Roman Empire was in Constantinople so naturally when the desert tribes talked about the seat of the Roman empire they were talking about Constantinople. Since the original prediction that the Muslims would conquer Rome has already been fulfilled, ISIS apparently has a small problem interpreting the apocalyptic predictions about the Dajjal coming from Constantinople (Rome – Istanbul) since that city is now a Muslim dominated city. Incidentally according to some hadiths Dajjal is a Jew and the war against Dajjal ends with the extermination of Jews.
Wood’s article is very good; maybe the best I’ve yet read on what’s going on with ISIS. To bad it doesn’t offer any hope for a happy ending. But the truth can often be that way: painful.
Curious that his Long Strategy is the same as mine: don’t wallow with the ‘pigs.’
ISIS would actually ENJOY having ground combat fighting with ‘Crusaders’ — even if their own bloodletting reached apocalyptic levels.
One should expect this kind of wicked fighting to go on and on and on.
There are NO weapons productions facilities of any note within the control of ISIS.
So, even their captured weapons: M198 howitzers, M1 tanks will dissolve into ‘park monuments.’
( The grit of the ISIS desert is toxic to any machine.)
So, the correct play is to let time destroy their best assets.
Any material aid sent to Baghdad will morph into additional ISIS assets.
There have been no exceptions, so far.
BTW, their American equipment is ‘castrated’ — and NOT equal to that in the US Army. (Electronics is the first to be remotely hacked — and the tanks were never equipped with the high tech American-British armor plate. — That’s why ALL of their M-1 tanks were brand spanking new production. (!)
In the Soviet era such gear was referred to as “monkey models.”
I knew a woman who spent six months in a jail in Morocco. She uttered the most succinct description of the islamic world that I have ever heard.
“They beat their animals, they beat their women, they beat each other. It’s all they know.”
Draw your own conclusions.
I have.
Folks, please put this article out there on Facebook and via email, etc.
It’s rare to have a hard-hitting article on the Black Death from a left-leaning source that your libby friends might actually read.
Every whack of the sledgehammer helps.
Here in Moscow on the Hudson, people have been (since the Hebdo massacre) starting to get really pissed off, even the Useful Idiots.
So much for the “moderate” muslims.
Let us not kid ourselves.
A day of a Jew in Paris, Hollande’s pompous remark about Bibi beginning with the words” I will not allow anyone in Israel” notwithstanding:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2956040/Journalist-puts-Jewish-skullcap-walks-streets-Paris-filmed-hidden-camera-safe-streets-are.html
“Choudary said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its incomplete application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead murderers and cut off thieves’ hands. “The problem,” he explained, “is that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia–the whole package–they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.” That whole package, he said, would include free housing, food, and clothing for all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work could do so.”
Let’s see, unlimited barbarity plus free sustenance. What’s not to like? These Salafis (Choudray is a Salafi imam in Great Britain) have got it down. Allah will provide. This is mythical/magical thinking. Much like the progs believe that the “Government” will provide. No wonder Churchill called Islam a retrograde religion.
Sharia is Allah’s law? Made up by Mohammed while he sat in a cave. This article really gets to the difference between Islam and Christianity. Christ said to render unto God that which is God’s and unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. The basis for separation of church and state. Christian faith is about our relationship with God. Government among humans is about our relationship with each other. In Islam there can be no separation of church and state. Thus, the very foundations of Islam are incompatible with the accepted norms in the West. A very important issue in deciding what is to be done to defend ourselves against this menace.
This is a long and involved piece. It renders much needed facts about the core beliefs of Salafi Islam and points out the various divisions within greater Islam. They are not a monolith as we sometimes like to believe. One thing they all seem to believe though is that Islam will rule the world. Only the date is uncertain.
I won’t belabor what I think needs to be done. I’ve laid it out a couple of times in past comments.
A similar article by Paul Berman in (of all places) the NYT. Definitely worth a read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/the-philosopher-of-islamic-terror.html
El Baraque is seriously delusional in his denial of the obvious.
Europe is Europe’s to lose.
That is, if they haven’t already lost it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VyBBNQPPoXU
And so, maybe it’s because Europe has decided to commit suicide that they have been so avidly trying to convince, cajole, persaude, threaten and/or force Israel to do the same.
(At least they’re not being hypocritical….)
Could one perhaps say the same thing about Obama’s America?
(Perhaps?)
Well, you had to know this was coming:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/17/marie-harf-state-department-on-islamic-state-cant-/
File under: Eyes wide shut
UKRAINE: Putin Is Preparing a Large-Scale Hybrid War in Europe
https://en.informnapalm.org/putin-preparing-large-scale-hybrid-war-europe/
ROPWA: An outstanding article. I think it gets to the source of the problem – the vision of Sayyid Qutb. Qutb has defined the differences between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in an understandable fashion. That he believes there is a grave religious error in separation of church and state defines the exact point of contention between the West and Islam. The Salafis and other fundamentalists in Islam have taken his writings in The Shade of the Quran” as the true path for Muslims.
In many ways, I can understand Qutb’s despair with the rampant non-spirituality/secularism of the West. I am often in despair about it myself. Where I differ with Qutb is that I believe in free will. I believe that all humans have the opportunity to be spiritual and to have a relationship with God…..or not. It is theirs to take or leave. Forced spirituality by a theocratic government is false religion.
It is plain to me that there is little chance of peaceful coexistence between the West and Islam unless Islam reforms.
For those who say Islam can’t reform, I direct you to Qutb’s own concerns that Islam was moving toward separation of church and state. Countries like Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Jordan are all examples of Muslim majority countries with separation (however loosely) of church and state. In Qutb’s view and that of his followers, they are all haram. There are Islamic scholars who don’t agree with Qutb. As well as many individual Muslims who accept the spiritual side of Islam and reject the political side. One quick example is Zhudi Jasser, an American Muslim who is speaking out against political Islam.
Read about him here:
http://aifdemocracy.org/about/staff/founder-president/
This article has focused my mind more clearly on the true, underlying causes of Islamic jihad.
There still uncertainty of the western power in fighting ISIS.
The fact is there are a lot of bits and pieces of talks from different sources make the western involvement with ISIS phenomena most know there are known unknowns;
from the new link below it bazaar this man talking as the western power have no tools to target or track down on those small groups and personal, this bring back to memory in 1991 war when US forces hunting down the Scud Missile luncher with its very limited crew in same area and region western Iraq and they finish them,
Also were are the US DRON?
ABC News’ Martha Raddatz reports from Jordan on efforts to contain ISIS, and an inside look at ISIS recruiting.
https://nz.news.yahoo.com/video/watch/26299885/isis-recruiter-speaks/
JJ,
While Qutb repudiated Marxism with all other Western -isms, modern political Islamists have always struck me as a totalitarian, Marxist revolutionary hybrid. Extreme 20th-century activists to the Nth degree. Compare their efforts to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and note how stubborn and pervasive Marxism is even without a field-tested centuries-old religion as a genetic element.
“Sharia is Allah’s law? Made up by Mohammed while he sat in a cave.”
———————
Assuming that Mohammed even existed. There’s a very credible argument that he was essentially created out of thin air by the Arabs as a cultural defensive mechanism after they accidentally ended up defeating the Sassanid Persian Dynasty. The lack of typical “ruler things” of the period such as personalized coinage is seen as lending credence to that theory.
An alternate theory is that the things Mohammed actually said have been distorted beyond all belief. The Koran wasn’t assembled during his lifetime. And iirc the official biography and primary source of information about his life was written over a century after his death. There are quite literally no first-hand – or even second-hand – sources of information about him.
The president of Egypt gave a speech on January 1, 2015 that severely criticized the thinking of the Muslim religious authorities. If you read the following excerpt carefully, it’s clear that they are not different from ISIS in any significant way. His comment that it is inconceivable that 1.6 billion Muslins can live only if 5.4 billion non-Muslins die is quite revealing in how closely aligned ISIS is with Islam as it’s preached in the mosque and woulde be practiced everywhere that the opportunity arose.
“I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing–and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
That thinking–I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”–that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!
Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants–that is 7 billion–so that they themselves may live? Impossible!
I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema–Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.
All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.
I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost–and it is being lost by our own hands.”
Let me briefly quote Walter Brandmueller:
“Sharia is founded upon a threefold inequality: between man and woman, between Muslim and non-Muslim, and between freeman and slave. In essence, the male human being is considered a full titleholder of rights and duties only through his belonging to the Islamic community…”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1550790/posts
Eric: “modern political Islamists have always struck me as a totalitarian, Marxist revolutionary hybrid. Extreme 20th-century activists to the Nth degree. Compare their efforts to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and note how stubborn and pervasive Marxism is even without a field-tested centuries-old religion as a genetic element.”
There is certainly an element of that in their thinking. Pace Choudary’s desire for free food, housing, and clothing as being part of total sharia. The USSR made inroads in the ME during the Cold War. In fact, one reason we stayed involved in the region was to counter them so the oil supplies wouldn’t fall under their control. Marxist ideas were definitely known in Muslim circles.
I see Qutb’s dream of a utopian Islamic theocracy as a version of the utopian dreams of many thinkers down through the years. Plato’s Republic may have been the first, but there ere probably some utopian dreams even before him. It seems to be based on the need to reject the failed nature of humans and replace it with a dream of the perfectibility of humans when they live under the proper governmental system. Such ideas are attractive to people at all times down through history.
junior:” There’s a very credible argument that he was essentially created out of thin air by the Arabs as a cultural defensive mechanism after they accidentally ended up defeating the Sassanid Persian Dynasty.”
Do you have some cites for that? I know Robert Spencer has written a book that questions Mohammed’s existence. Are their other sources?
Paul in Boston: IMO, al Sisi has got the right of it. Islam must reform if they hope to exist long term in the modern world. Once the oil runs out, they will no longer be able to create problems on the scale they do today. He has provided an opening, which could be used by our President to enlist Muslims who want reform in the fight against the fundamentalist Islamists. ISIS, with their over the top vicious barbarism, are laying the groundwork for that to happen – if Obama would but seize the chance.
JJ –
Sorry, I don’t have any further information on it. I read about the theory a while back, and can’t remember where (I try to stay away from disreputable sources; but my article reading is typically based on the equivalent of “Oh, shiny!”, and I make little effort to keep track of where I found any given item for later reference). Someone mentioned it elsewhere earlier today (after I posted here), and mentioned Spencer’s name in conjunction with it. So he is likely still the primary proponent of it.
Also,
Your description of Obama’s lack of initiative where al-Sisi’s comments are concerned reminded me that he (Obama) did pretty much the same thing during Iran’s Green Revolution. Iranians started massive popular protests against their government… and Obama said it wasn’t his place to help them out.
Eric,
You hit upon one of my favorite hobby-horses – a kind of Marxist (or proto-Marxist) root in a lot of the rhetoric and worldviews of jihadis. JJ, you hit on this as well, although I think it goes beyond the political program espoused by any given jihadi ideologue like Choudrey. The key seems to be fully imbibing the whole oppressor/oppressed narrative, and applying it to your particular moment in time. That, plus the apocalyptic talk, seems typically Marxist to my way of thinking.
Before Wood’s article, a Hudson Institute scholar named Laurent Murawiec wrote a book on this subject (The Mind of Jihad), looking at both the Marxist underpinnings of jihadism, as well as it’s precedents in gnostic millenariasm from the turn of the 1st Century. Very interesting stuff.
Both William Shirer and Lawrence Wright addressed the phenomenon in more direct terms, with Shirer discussing how some of the most fanatical Nazis were, just a year before, plastering their walls with red banners and pictures of Lenin. Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower, interviewed a Muslim convert who knew Zawahiri when he was younger. He noticed a similar thing, in how the rhetoric Zawahiri was adopting was uncannily similar to the sayings and arguments the convert had heard and used when he was a young radical Marxist in Europe.
Colin, et. al.
Islamism = Islam + Communism 30%=70%
The fanatics not only know of Communism — its ECONOMIC ‘vision’ is now incorporated within the dogma of the jihadis. (some exceptions)
If you were to read the ACTUAL missives from their mouth pieces you’d swear they’d been printed at Berkeley California!
Islam, per se, HAD NO ECONOMIC CORE, no solution for how to run a modern society. It was all caravans and brigandage. PERIOD.
Looting is not anywhere enough to keep the ummah fed.
It is OUR MSM that ‘edits’ (filters out) the Communist planks from the jihadi press releases.
For much more detail on this go to the “Gates of Vienna” blog. The ‘Baron’ has written up a LONG detailed string of research on this very topic.
The FUSION of Islamic thought and Communist ideology is hardly surprising: Arafat was a KGB asset.
For DECADES the KGB has been distributing agitprop in the muslim middle east.
Consequently, their arguments have been folded into the historical islamic superiority/ inferiority complexes of the ummah to create the farrago of hatred that stews in the febrile minds over there.
This (tortured linkage between Communist agitprop and Islamic creed) is the zany basis for the recurrent: poverty causes islamic ire schtick we hear of constantly. (Harf, anyone?)
WITHOUT Communism, Islam would have no relevance for the modern world. No viable program of ‘economic restructuring’ that replaced brigandage.
&&&&&
It’s well to remember that AQ is ENTIRELY centered around deposing the Saudi royals. That’s ALWAYS been at the heart of OBL’s agenda. (Hence his eviction.)
By (male) blood, OBL was A YEMENI not a Saudi. Forget the passport schtick. It’s your father’s tribe that establishes a Muslim’s clan. (Borders are culturally denied by the ummah. It’s one big unhappy ‘family.’)
Since merely replacing the royals with one’s own — OBL and others have long fallen back upon Bolshevism / Socialism as a rationale for re-dividing up the oil ‘rent.’
[ For history buffs, the pre-Islamic Arabic Hajis sold WATER to caravans. (That and good luck charms.) This was the source of Petran wealth — its economic sustenance. When the disaster of AD536-539 occurred, the Petrans upped stakes and moved to the Hajiz — along with every other Arab.
It was at this time that Constantinople had food riots and suffered 95% de-population; that the granary of North Africa dried up and (permanently) blew away; and the rest of Arabia ‘evaporated.’
The meso American culture also collapsed at the exact same time, the Japanese culture had to ‘re-boot’ (Shinto — re-vamped at that time — which lasted up until the modern era.)
The very same trauma also ended the Western Roman Empire. This was its end. The sacking of Rome only lasted half a week! Then everyone came back and carried on!
The sacking of Rome was water off a duck’s back. No seige, no ethnic cleansing, you didn’t even have a city-
wide fire. ( AD64 ) So the historians have gotten everything all screwed up.
This is what happens when you don’t cross check tales from the past — especially when you don’t cross check history against forensic truth.
Economically, the Romans destroyed their own economy. Then the AD calamity swept them into total chaos — in the mid Sixth Century! ]
Mo’ came from a water-selling, good luck-selling clan.
Part of that good luck consisted of stroking the clan’s ‘god-rock’ around which they masoned up a structure.
Mo’ decided that the ‘daughter rocks’ must be de-moted — and that all of the reverence must be allocated to ‘Allah’ the father rock — which now is in the Ka’aba.
It is, of course, ejecta from the Krakatoa eruption of AD536.]
&&&&&&&&
Islam is of a NEOLITHIC ethos, 12,000 ybp not 1,200 ybp.
And its economic engine dates the same: brigandage!
Is it ANY wonder that the Gaia worshiping Left is aligned with Moon worshiping Muslims?
created out of thin air by the Arabs as a cultural defensive mechanism after they accidentally ?
Is this similar to promise land and chosen people
At this point, if Putin conquered Europe he would be doing them a favor.
The Bear will not be half as bad as the scimitar and sharia.
When ISIS says “Rome”, btw, they mean Rome. They actually mean the Pope (one of whom called the 1st Crusade) and Catholicism – which created both Islam (insofar as Islam is a Christian heresy) and modern Civilization in Europe itself.
They know – as few Westerners do – the spiritual truth about things. They know the way the devil knows the spiritual truth about things.
Good News: The devil loses in the end. In the end.
Japan,
Your xenophobia is revealing itself again.
Yes, we know, leave your country alone unless and until you experience a tragic Tsunami that wipes out your nuclear plant—-then send HELP to your beloved Japan.
Oh yes, I love the part where you’ve taken over Hawaii again with the “quiet migration”.
It’s a beautiful site.
What a maroon.
Thanks for the recommend.
The author writes Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes.
Yup. Instead they moved onto arcane racial and economic disputes, murdering far more people than in past centuries.
OK, people who want to establish the Caliphate are crazy violent… almost as crazy violent as socialists (in both socialism’s national and international varieties).
Japan –
No. The theory goes that when the Arabs conquered Persia, they came up against the fact that they’d just subjugated and imposed their will on a nation that had a rich, and more importantly long, cultural heritage. The rough equivalent would be a group of foreign nobodies suddenly conquering China (Persia wasn’t as big, but it had been around in one form or another for a *very* long time). And the Arabs had literally nothing to compare with that. So to deal with the resulting inferiority complex (and also presumably snooty looks from the conquered Persians), they created Mohammed as a cultural hero.
Prior to that the Arabs were a nomadic people living in the middle of a desert that was so barren that no one wanted it. The only reasons why anyone even cared about them were either to hire them as mercenaries for the perpetual wars between Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire, or because they were sitting on top of the various trade routes that passed through (as quickly as possible) the regions that the Arabs occupied. Much of what is popularly linked with “Arab” or “Islamic” culture is evolved from what existed in Persia at the time of the conquest.
Melanie Phillips explains. See what happens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak43aCg5Cjo
There shall be no mercy …
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