ISIS needs to be destroyed

If you’re really interested, this is a fascinating article about ISIS. It’s long but well worth reading.

It defies summary, but a couple of points.
1.) ISIS is Islamic and it’s silly (if well intentioned) to deny this.
2.) They should not be confused with Al Qaeda. They have very different goals, and are frequently at odds.
3.) Their goals make sense if you accept their premises, some of which are supernatural and involve a form of end-times prophesy.

You should read the whole thing, though.

Thank you! This is an excellent article. I’ll have to finish it tomorrow. It IS long!

I like what it points out here about the ISIS islamic origins and constrictio"

“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, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.”

Not really. The Mongols took over Russia, vassalized Bulgaria, pillaged Poland and Hungary, and then got caught up in internal politics and left.

Yeah, they just couldn’t get enough, the dirty whordes . . .

Well, it won’t be the end of the world. Again, all their neighbors hate them. Soon as even one or two of them get their acts together, ISIS will be gone like the dust a Muslim washes off his hands before prayers.

Right. So why then should the US have to be the ones who take over the fight?

If you look at the first Gulf War really Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid the US and other allies to do their fighting for them. Will they do the same now?

We don’t have to. We can leave the situation alone, and Jordan and the Kurds, and maybe Assad and the Iraqis and the other Syrian rebel factions, will gladly do all the fighting and wipe ISIS off the map. (Whether they fight each other afterwards is a different problem, but of a more familiar kind which we are well used to dealing with by now.) Like I said, they wouldn’t even need U.S. air support – Jordan has an air force and ISIS does not.

But . . . there’s all this domestic American political pressure to Do Something About It. So . . .

I think the best analogy I can come up with is if some extreme fringe Christian group rose which followed only the old testament and only literally, lacking the tempering that Jews have done.

So they literally start back to stoning and keeping enemies of war as slaves , sacrificing animals in temple etc.

This doesn’t work totally I’ll admit but it is a vague idea.

ISIS is about getting back to the roots of Islam, ignoring all the tempering and reform and reinterpretation and such of the time following.

What pressure? Sure Americans are shaking our heads in disgust but I dont see anti-ISIS rallies in the streets.

Why would we need a rally? To tell the politicians to start bombing ISIL? If so, mission fucking accomplished.

They are not very rational messianics.

the rest of the middle east cares very much about the Iraq and the Syria, although americans do not. Try not to think that what you think is what the others think. They are historically productive centers and where there is much history dear to the arab islamic view point.

No it is not going to get much bigger, they are offensive to almost all muslims, they have already had their moment in taking by surprise people and stepping into a vacuum, but this is not to repeating.

There is an effect among some of the alienated youth including the young women that one can understand being attracted to this in its idealised form, in feeling if they wear the headscarf they are despised, if they are muslim and pious they are despised and spit on, etc. Is it not even evident on this board male americans and europeans making pronouncements about the oppression of the religion and showing no kmowledge, only hatreds, which is of course something that can drive youth into rebellious reaction. Even a secular person like me is annoyed by ignorant declarations.

How even sort of getting rid of the Talebans?

I see you get your history from the video games as of course this never happened in the real history.

but not in th Civ II game yes? :^)

This article I find to have many badly understood points about the Islamic history, the author did not well understand what he wrote about. I will not say that the DAESH is not coming from Islamic movements but they are clearly even violating the standard precepts of even the medieval islamic traditions, and making cherry picking in a way that is not coherent even under the oldest traditions. The author makes the mistake of accepting this cherry picking as the approach which is considered valid, but it is not.

It is not getting back to the roots of Islam and ignoring tempering, it is ignoring the fundamental lessons and even the basic law practices that go to the very beginnings, while only seizing on the piece meal justifications of violence. Murdering the hostages who are not even combattants or not even from the supposed nation you are fighting, the mistreatment of minorities that were already in an islamic country and thus under the protection, these are all violations of principals that go back to the medieval and even the earliest period. The initial conquests of Islam showed the lessons of pragmatism and a rejection of the violence for the sake of the violence - this is why they were successful (it is not to make a moral superiority, it was surely pragmatic).

To look to the DAESH is not to see a group that is truly taking lessons from the time of the Prophet, for then you would see not the chaotic violence and the criminal behaviors but something pragmatic and organised - this would be more dangerous of course.

No these are the psychopaths making cherry picking of any ad hoc and incoherent justification for the use of the violence because that is what they love.

This is why even among the salafiste thinkers there is rejection of them, of course they are using Islamic justificatioins but their chaotic and cherry picked usage is to any muslim with learning of the historical application of law very clearly not a logical - it is not making cotton candy views of the past as the article says, it is seeing that even under the more violent understanding in the medieval ages, the actual traditions did not accept the kind of behaviours and applications that these criminal psychopaths are showing.

A friend of mine has a granddaughter named Isis (born in 2013, I think). Fortunately, she’s young and has a nice middle name they’re going to be using.


When I see videos of those long ISIL convoys I fantasize about napalming the whole thing. I wonder why that hasn’t happened.

I wonder if the US military with its, what, $1.5 trillion budget can handle the job. A fleet of stealth fighters and a few billion dollar aircraft carriers won’t do the trick.

I think this observation–which is essentially what that Atlantic article argues too–gets it fundamentally wrong.

ISIS is distinctly modern. It’s theology–Salafism–was a reactionary response to modernity, and in particular to colonialism and secularism. While it claims to want to go back to an idealized past, the past it conjures up isn’t the real past. It is a fake past crafted in their minds to suit their modern needs of rejecting real and perceived Western imperialism, crafted to suit a fight against a Shi’a government in Iraq, and crafted to be consistent with tactics of terrorism.

I think many in the West tend to picture Medieval Europe when thinking about Medieval Islam. That is where people were being burned at the stake for apostasy, while in the Arab World Jews and Christians were considering whether to convert to save a little money at tax time. Medieval Islam was a lot more liberal than the Islam of ISIS and extremist Salafis. Certainly it was more accepting of pluralism, both within Islam and among the major religions. There is very little evidence of, say, forced conversion, much less the kind of genocide against Christians and Shi’a trumpeted by ISIS.

Edit: I see I somehow missed Ramira’s post saying similar things. Sorry to pile on.

I think the overall point being missed… is that they (in their minds) have no choice. It never ends… simply put… They’ll going long haul. The Caliphate must be restored and everyone must either covert or subjugate themselves to Islam. The others… particularly the Shia… aren’t muslims to them. I don’t think its a money/power grab… they’ll go until they end up like the Khmer Rouge…

They are an apocalyptic religious cult that wants to return the Arabian peninsula to the Seventh Century that…is expert at Twitter? That is happy to recruit people who have to buy Islam for Dummies before leaving? That doesn’t care about actual scholarship about the age to which they seek a return? That just so happens to adopt theology that perfectly suits their contemporary needs: asymmetric warfare against a Shi’a government allied with Western forces?

It just doesn’t quite fit. It’s obvious that their religious ideology takes a back seat to what is convenient to them in taking power. I don’t know why that really affects how we fight them, but if it is important, then we should get it right.

The phrase “useful idiots” comes to mind.

Please don’t use that name. They are now The Performance-Art Collective Formerly Known As DAESH/ISIS/ISIL/IS.

I think you misunderstand the point of the article. It states very clearly that Islamic State is not in any way related to mainstream Islam, either past or present, and is roundly rejected by the majority of Muslims worldwide. The point is that they think they are acting according to genuine Islamic principles, and they hold that they have re-established a caliphate. At this point it doesn’t matter what is valid or what they do or do not cherry pick. They have their own ideology and it behooves us to understand it, rather than merely dismissing it as not truly Islamic. If they were merely a handful of lunatics meeting in a disused basement perhaps they could be ignored–though even a handful of lunatics can do a fair amount of damage–but they control territory larger than some European Nations, they have thousands of adherents, and are attracting disaffected people from all over the globe. If we are going to defeat them we need to understand them and their long term plans, not merely dismiss them as heretics.

ETA: I may have missed your point. If you are saying that the article gets it wrong about Islamic State’s actual ideology or plan, I’d be interested to hear you expand on that.

Kevin Drum’s summary of the recommended Atlantic article: Quote of the Day: What ISIS Really Wants – Mother Jones

From the Atlantic: [INDENT]Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.[/INDENT] Sure, they’re Islamists, just like Koresh was a Christian. But that shouldn’t stop us from a little Agit-prop as well as the drawing of some reasonable lines.

The author continues that their medieval outlook gives the broader Islamo-Christian neurotypical community some advantages. Firstly unlike al Qaeda, they need to control territory. Otherwise they are not a caliphate. And we can block them from expanding, which they see as their duty. And if they’re not expanding, they just look like an incompetent and tyrannous government. So bleeding them slow isn’t a bad strategy.

I read elsewhere that caliphates have pretty stringent requirements for the top leader. So the group is also somewhat more vulnerable to decapitation strikes than Al Q.

It may not take anything more than one big, public defeat. And, yes, they can capture heavy weapons and machinery of war, but which Koranic verse do they recite to repair them?

These are not smart people.