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Feb 24 2015

Islamic Arrogance, Rage, and Savagery


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

President Barack Obama cannot associate the word “radical” or “extremism” with Islam. It makes him choke. Hence, he cannot admit that Islam is at war with the United States.  After all, Islam is a world religion associated with monotheism. How can it be at war with America? In the surreal world of Barak Obama, 9/11 never happened or was a “workplace accident,”

Since Islam is a religion of peace, the notion of Islamic extremism is a non-sequitur. And since Islam is a monotheistic religion sharing moral precepts found in Christianity and Judaism,  it cannot possibly be at war with mankind.

Admittedly, Catholic theologian George P. Weigel is skeptical about Islam’s lofty reputation. He contends that “To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the “three monotheisms” or Abrahamic faiths” obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar tropes, he says “ought to be retired.”[1]

Like many secular scholars from a variety of nations, Weigel rejects the notion of “Muslim moderates.”  It thus appears absurd that Jews, famous for their rationality, should seek a genuine peace agreement by negotiations with their cultural and ideological opposites – Muslim Arabs whose mentality is fundamentally bellicose and arguably irrational. Indeed, the great intellectually liberated Islamic philologist and historian, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), has written that Arabs are a savage people, and that “savagery” describes their inherent character. But what is meant by “savage?”

According to that most erudite and marvelous Christian C. S. Lewis, “Savage beliefs are thought to be the spontaneous response of a human group to its environment, a response made principally by the imagination. They exemplify what some call pre-logical thinking. They are closely bound up with the communal life of the group.”

Consistent therewith, Moshe Dayan writes, “[The Arabs] live in a world which is not truth and they do this almost like a man who needs hashish … It often seems to me that all Arabs – and on all levels – act as though under the influence of drugs. Yet illusion is worse than a lie. You make a lie consciously and you dominate it, while the illusion will finally dominate you.”[2] This phenomenon is typical among savages.

It is futile to engage a savage in rational discourse, in which an idea is related to observation with a view of its affirmation or negation. The passion-driven and communal consciousness of a savage is impervious to reason.

This savage mentality is exemplified by the Taliban, whose religious police distributed placards in Afghanistan saying, “Throw reason to the dogs, it stinks of corruption.” (It would be futile to send one of these placards to President Obama, since he sacrificed s intellect long ago at the church of the Revered Jeremiah Wright.)

Obama can hardly be classified as a savage, but his contempt for truth – most clearly manifested in his saying America was founded by Muslims – which suggests he does not read serious books – exemplifies the deep-seated hatred of books manifested in the Muslim world.

Although savage beliefs may be dissipated by literacy, Muslims are famous for how few books they publish. Muslims account for 5% of the world’s population, yet produce only 1% of the world’s books. Muslims are also habituated to rote learning. This renders them more susceptible to the hackneyed remarks of demagogues. Obama displays little evidence of critical thinking.

In Modern Islam (1962), G. E. Von Grunebaum writes, “It is essential to realize that Muslim civilization … is. not vitally interested in analytical self-understanding, and it is even less interested in the structural study of other cultures, either as an end in itself or as a means of a clearer understanding of its own character and history.”

Bernard Lewis portrays Islam’s overweening arrogance and utter contempt for Western civilization in “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990). Contrary to Islam, the sages of Israel teach, “The Creator says of all who are proud, he and I cannot be together.” As stated in Proverbs 16:5, “The proud are despicable in the eyes of Hashem.”

Convinced of its possession of absolute truth, Islam cannot believe it is of any value to study cultures steeped in error. Hence it discourages among the faithful any incentive to understand other cultures from the latter’s own point of view. It is therefore ethnocentric folly that prompts Israeli and American officials to engage the Palestinian Authority in peace talks with the expectation of rational and reliable results, especially in view of the deeply ingrained cultural duplicity exemplified by the Islamic concept of taqiyya.

It never occurs to people like Secretary of State John Kerry, to say nothing of Israeli politicians, that in consorting with the Palestinians they are dealing with a savage culture, as was recognized by Ibn Khaldun and G. E. Von Grunebaum.◙

 

[1] George Weigel, Faith. Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Acton (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 17.

[2] Cited in Michael Brecher, The Foreign Policy System of Israel (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 354-355; Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (Jerusalem: Steimatzky, 1976), 332.

Feb 24 2015

What ISIS Really Wants


The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

Graeme Wood  March 2015

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Islamic State's caliph: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. 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.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. 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.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.

Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. […] In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam. […]

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to […] the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.

I. Devotion

In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video tracing its origins to bin Laden. […] Notably unmentioned: bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, the owlish Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads al‑Qaeda. Zawahiri has not pledged allegiance to Baghdadi […] But the split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the making, and begins to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust of the latter.

Zawahiri’s companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda’s intellectual architect and the most important jihadist unknown to the average American newspaper reader. On most matters of doctrine, Maqdisi and the Islamic State agree. Both are closely identified with the jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, the “pious forefathers.” These forefathers are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.

Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man’s advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi’s penchant for bloody spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred of other Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. […]

Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. […] That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.

Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.

Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.

[…] the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.

Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. […] 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 […] 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. […] 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. […]

In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.

Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.” […]

“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.”

II. Territory

Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated to the Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many other places. Many have come to fight, and many intend to die. […]

The caliphate […] is not just a political entity but also a vehicle for salvation. Islamic State propaganda regularly reports the pledges of baya’a (allegiance) rolling in from jihadist groups across the Muslim world. […]

To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority. This last criterion […] is the hardest to fulfill, and requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State achieved that long before June 29 […] and as soon as it did, a Western convert within the group’s ranks …who was] “something of a leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a caliphate […] further delay would be sinful. […]

After Baghdadi’s July sermon, a stream of jihadists began flowing daily into Syria with renewed motivation. Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German author and former politician who visited the Islamic State in December, reported the arrival of 100 fighters at one Turkish-border recruitment station in just two days. His report, among others, suggests a still-steady inflow of foreigners, ready to give up everything at home for a shot at paradise in the worst place on Earth. […]

The caliph is required to implement Sharia. Any deviation will compel those who have pledged allegiance to inform the caliph in private of his error and, in extreme cases, to excommunicate and replace him if he persists. […] In return, the caliph commands obedience—and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are considered apostates. […]

III. The Apocalypse

All Muslims acknowledge that God is the only one who knows the future. But they also agree that he has offered us a peek at it, in the Koran and in narrations of the Prophet. The Islamic State differs from nearly every other current jihadist movement in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character. It is in this casting that the Islamic State is most boldly distinctive from its predecessors, and clearest in the religious nature of its mission.

In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political movement, with worldly goals in sight at all times—the expulsion of non-Muslims from the Arabian peninsula, the abolishment of the state of Israel, the end of support for dictatorships in Muslim lands. The Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running), but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. Bin Laden rarely mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to presume that he would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine comeuppance finally arrived. […]

During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the world.  […]

[Beliefs] based on mainstream Sunni sources […] appear all over the Islamic State’s propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.

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. […] During fighting in Iraq in December, after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure […]

The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the enemy as Rome. Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely.

After its battle in Dabiq […] the caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth […] 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. […]

IV. The Fight

The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group’s actions. Osama bin Laden was seldom predictable. […] By contrast, the Islamic State boasts openly about its plans—not all of them, but enough so that by listening carefully, we can deduce how it intends to govern and expand.

[…] detailed descriptions of how the Islamic State must conduct its foreign policy, now that it is a caliphate. It has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as “offensive jihad,” the forcible expansion into countries that are ruled by non-Muslims […]  the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential duty of the caliph. […] the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies—a holy order to scare the shit out of them with beheadings and crucifixions and enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.

[…] Islamic law permits only temporary peace treaties, lasting no longer than a decade. Similarly, accepting any border is anathema, as stated by the Prophet and echoed in the Islamic State’s propaganda videos. If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year. He may not rest, or he will fall into a state of sin. […]

The modern international system, born of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, relies on each state’s willingness to recognize borders, however grudgingly. For the Islamic State, that recognition is ideological suicide. Other Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, have succumbed to the blandishments of democracy and the potential for an invitation to the community of nations, complete with a UN seat. Negotiation and accommodation have worked, at times, for the Taliban as well. […] To the Islamic State these are not options, but acts of apostasy.

The United States and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State belatedly and in an apparent daze. The group’s ambitions and rough strategic blueprints were evident in its pronouncements and in social-media chatter as far back as 2011, when it was just one of many terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq and hadn’t yet committed mass atrocities. Adnani, the spokesman, told followers then that the group’s ambition was to “restore the Islamic caliphate,” and he evoked the apocalypse, saying, “There are but a few days left.” Baghdadi had already styled himself “commander of the faithful,” a title ordinarily reserved for caliphs, in 2011. […]

If we had identified the Islamic State’s intentions early, and realized that the vacuum in Syria and Iraq would give it ample space to carry them out, we might, at a minimum, have pushed Iraq to harden its border with Syria and preemptively make deals with its Sunnis. That would at least have avoided the electrifying propaganda effect created by the declaration of a caliphate just after the conquest of Iraq’s third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama told The New Yorker that he considered ISIS to be al-Qaeda’s weaker partner. “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” the president said.

Our failure to appreciate the split between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the essential differences between the two, has led to dangerous decisions. Last fall, to take one example, the U.S. government consented to a desperate plan to save Peter Kassig’s life. The plan facilitated—indeed, required—the interaction of some of the founding figures of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and could hardly have looked more hastily improvised.

It entailed the enlistment of Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, the Zarqawi mentor and al-Qaeda grandee, to approach Turki al-Binali, the Islamic State’s chief ideologue and a former student of Maqdisi’s, even though the two men had fallen out due to Maqdisi’s criticism of the Islamic State.[…] the decision to play matchmaker for America’s two main terrorist antagonists reveals astonishingly poor judgment.

Chastened by our earlier indifference, we are now meeting the Islamic State via Kurdish and Iraqi proxy on the battlefield, and with regular air assaults. Those strategies haven’t dislodged the Islamic State from any of its major territorial possessions, although they’ve kept it from directly assaulting Baghdad and Erbil and slaughtering Shia and Kurds there.

Some observers have called for escalation, including several predictable voices from the interventionist right (Max Boot, Frederick Kagan), who have urged the deployment of tens of thousands of American soldiers. These calls should not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly genocidal organization is on its potential victims’ front lawn, and it is committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls.

One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

And yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment. Add the incompetence of our previous efforts as occupiers, and we have reason for reluctance. The rise of ISIS, after all, happened only because our previous occupation created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the consequences of another botched job?

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.

The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest. Al-Qaeda’s core is rare among jihadist groups for its focus on the “far enemy” (the West); most jihadist groups’ main concerns lie closer to home. That’s especially true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its ideology. It sees enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the expansion to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much directly: in November he told his Saudi agents to “deal with the rafida [Shia] first … then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] … before the crusaders and their bases.” […]

A few “lone wolf” supporters of the Islamic State have attacked Western targets, and more attacks will come. But most of the attackers have been frustrated amateurs, unable to immigrate to the caliphate because of confiscated passports or other problems. Even if the Islamic State cheers these attacks—and it does in its propaganda—it hasn’t yet planned and financed one. (The Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in January was principally an al‑Qaeda operation.) […]

Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.

Even so, the death of the Islamic State is unlikely to be quick, and things could still go badly wrong: if the Islamic State obtained the allegiance of al‑Qaeda—increasing, in one swoop, the unity of its base—it could wax into a worse foe than we’ve yet seen. The rift between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda has, if anything, grown in the past few months; the December issue of Dabiq featured a long account of an al‑Qaeda defector who described his old group as corrupt and ineffectual, and Zawahiri as a distant and unfit leader. But we should watch carefully for a rapprochement.

Without a catastrophe such as this, however, or perhaps the threat of the Islamic State’s storming Erbil, a vast ground invasion would certainly make the situation worse.

V. Dissuasion

It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State “a problem with Islam.” The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them. […]

That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may convince some potential converts that the group’s message is false, and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn’t last until the end of time.

Feb 24 2015

Shoebat: The Ottoman Conquest Of The Middle East Begins


This is all occurring because of Obama’s Arab Spring!

Feb 20 2015

Major U.S. magazine breaks with Obama admin by calling ISIS Islamic and apocalyptic


This is a good analysis pass it on so the truth gets out there before they shut down the web.

StMA's avatarConsortium of Defense Analysts

In his bestseller book, People of the Lie, the late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, M.D., wrote that just as physicians must first properly diagnose and name a disease in order to cure it, we must first name a problem in order to combat it.

Although ISIS/ISIL calls itself the Islamic State, President Barack Obama refuses to identify the group that now controls a third of Syria as either Islamic or a state. Instead, in his speech of Sept. 10, 2014 and since, he calls the Muslim jihadists — who have been slaughtering Christians in Iraq, Syria, and most recently beheading 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya — generic “terrorists.”

Taking their cue from Obama, U.S. media like NBC News also call ISIS “terrorists,” absent any qualifying adjective. And although he denounced the beheading of the Coptic Christians and called them “martyrs,” Pope Francis similarly refuses to identify their killers as…

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Feb 20 2015

Report: White House Strategy Team Terrified Of Netanyahu Speech – Plotting Ways To “Alinsky” Israeli Leader – “Isolate, Ridicule and Marginalization” Top List


Maybe the truth will get out yet!

Feb 20 2015

Identifying and Purging America’s Enemy


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

“A War America Can’t Win” is the title of an article I wrote a few days after having gazed, horror struck, at the rubble of the World Trade Center. In that article I said you can’t defeat an enemy unless you first identify him. Although Professor Newt Gingrich echoed this remark the other day in Iowa, more than fifteen years have elapsed since 9/11 and America has yet to define its enemy – and the enemy, unsurprisingly, was not defined by Gingrich.

The reason is pathetically obvious, for the name of the enemy is nothing other than ISLAM – Islam without descriptive adjectives, be it “radical,” “militant,” “extremist,” “political,” “fundamentalist,” etc.

America is so far from identifying its enemy that the benighted American people, with no small help from their academic mentors, have twice made the most powerful apologist of this enemy, Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States!

Before explaining this inanity or insanity, I must explain that no government official in America dares say that Islam is the enemy if only because that would define the enemy as a world RELIGION – a no-no in the lexicon of liberal America.

If this was not enough to veil the truth about this intolerant and venomous religion, Islam not only has 1.6 billion votaries, but this enormous number of worshipers of the toxic Qur’an rules than 50 nations. These Muslim nations, moreover, are represented in the world’s capital of hatred and hypocrisy the United Nations General Assembly. In that mélange, America, a colossus, has a single vote vis-à-vis diminutive Djibouti, a nation whose population is less than that of Brooklyn, New York!

Towering in the UN with more than fifty members, totalitarian Islam is appeased by an ensemble of democracies.  These democracies ignore the demonstrable fact that Islam is not only the greatest enemy of democracy, but also of Western Civilization. That Western civilization represents the primacy of reason versus primacy force in human affairs, and that this civilization embraces – of once embraced – the moral values of the Greco-Christian and Judaic heritage, no longer hold sway in the “community” of nations.

Although imperialism is a basic tenet of Islam, whose reach is everywhere, no civilized nation so much as thinks of organizing an alliance against this non-localized scourge of mankind, whose fabricated monotheistic veneer overawes post-Christian Europe and the evangelical atheism of the United States.

America and Europe, emasculated by secularism, exist in a state of denial. They willfully ignore blatant reality, that the American-led West is involved a civilizational conflict with the Islamic-led East. This is a RELIGIOUS WAR more total than the religious wars of the sixteenth century. The present East-West conflict began with the Khomeini Revolution of 1979, arguably the most significant revolution in the last 2,000 years.

But let us not overlook the civilizational and therefore quasi-religious conflict known as the Second World War, in which 16 million Americans were conscripted to fight atheistic Nazi Germany in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Notice, however, that that war differs in a most crucial respect from today’s conflagration.

In the Second World War, the United States and its ally Great Britain harbored no doubt about the evil nature of their enemy, Nazi Germany. Today, however, the university-bred doctrine of moral and cultural relativism has obscured the old distinction between good and evil. Generation after generation of college students have been corrupted by relativism. They graduate college and become the leading opinion makers and policy makers of the West. Emasculated by relativism, they lack the moral confidence and stamina of the older, more American generation. Relativism has sapped their will, their readiness to designate Islam as EVIL despite Islam’s use of children as human bombs, a depravity beyond that of the Nazis!

The key problem is this. No American official would dare suggest that that moral depravity is intellectually ignored or obscured by the academic doctrine of multicultural moral relativism. This doctrine, which has been permeated by higher education in the democratic world, has emasculated the West vis-à-vis Islam. Just ponder a few quotes from the mentors of students who will eventually become the opinion makers and policy maker of the West, indeed, who will be ensconced in the foreign office in Washington and London, there to espouse the doctrine of moral equivalence – say between Israel and the Palestinian – and thus make a mockery of “Western Civilization.”

  • “Whatever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate or aversion, evil … For these words of good[and] evil … are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so …”[1]
  • “If I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money,’ I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money.’ In adding that this action is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it…. If I now generalize my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing money is wrong,’ I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning, that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false.”[2]– Alfred Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic(1936, 1946) England’s leading exponent of logical positivism knighted by the Queen!
  • “Ethical axioms are not necessary truths because they are not truths of any kind.”[3]– Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy(1951) Founder of the Berlin Circle of logical positivism in the United States
  • “The phantoms[ideas] formed in the brain are … sublimates of their material [economic] life-process … Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of Consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.”[4]– Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The German Ideology.

These nihilistic doctrines, which have corrupted the minds of Americans and Europeans, have actually modulated the mentality of Barak Obama. The mind of this first “post-American” has been so corrupted that he can’t utter the words “Islamic terrorism”! Indeed, he can’t associate Islam with Islam’s most notorious moral imperative, ofJihad!

This incredible state of affairs, the consequence of a long-ongoing erosion Judeo-Christian morality, hence, of an inability to distinguish good from evil, was foreshadowed the day after 9/11 when President George W. Bush uttered the statement that Islam is a “religion of Peace”! This mindless remark, repeated countless times by other American politicians, and never publicly and effectively revealed as a mockery of 1,400 years of Islamic history, leads to the conclusion that, given the pernicious influence of moral relativism, America cannot win the war against its declared enemy. Therefore, since moral relativism permeates the mentality now manifested by the occupant of the White House, it follows that America cannot survive Islamic Imperialism as long as the Congress of the United States or the American people do nothing to relegate Barack Obama to the political culvert from which he arose.

 

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 32 (emphasis added).

[2] A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Penguin, 1936), 110-111. Ayer (1910–1989) was a major purveyor of the emotive theory of ethics.

[3] Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Oakland: University of California Press, 1951), 280.

[4] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 14 (emphasis added).

Feb 20 2015

“I’m Okay, You’re Okay”


By Paul Eidelberg

The Americans had other grievances, but it took the British tax on tea to start the American Revolution of 1776. We live in a different era.

Since the value of tea now makes the value of human life worthless, as it is among Muslims, President Obama assures us that America is not at war with Islam. No one should be surprised by his taking time off from his job as America’s commander-in-chief to play golf.

His doing so is less a commentary on him than on America and American education. We need to bear in mind, that sports have taken the place of religion in American life, just as the mall has taken the place of the church. And we should also remember that our Colleges and Universities foster an “I’m okay you’re okay” mentality, which makes Islam okay as well.

If this corrupts the minds of youth, it doesn’t begin on campus, even though that’s where cynicism is dignified by academics with Ph.D.s in psychology or anthropology, or maybe sociology or political science. These academics have learned that we are all okay. What some people call “terrorists” is really freedom fighters looking for a job. You don’t need four years of college to learn this.

Besides, Internet is a lot cheaper than college tuition, and you don’t have to bone up for a final exam. Also, if you’re fed up with the left-wing academics that comprise three out of four teachers in the social sciences, you can always turn on FOX News for a red, white, and blue snapshot of good ole America. Of course, FOX is not Obama’s favorite news outlet, whose reporters think we are at war with some entity that has no name. Nevertheless, you must not offend Muslims. As for  Jews, they are open season.

Obama is really cool.  ISIS and its beheadings have not deterred POTUS from deploring Islamophobia. He’s quite blasé about the centrifuges Iran has been accumulating, and Iran’s space launch vehicle inventory only makes him yawn.  Obama should feel free to play another nine holes of golf. The U.S. is not at war with Islam.

Feb 20 2015

Obama’s Denial and America’s Looming Disaster


By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States, has emphatically declared, “We are not at war with Islam.” This is comparable to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt saying “We are not at war with Nazism,” whose Storm troopers were poised to overrun and terrorize all of Europe as well as North Africa.

In this war America raise 15 million solders to defeat any nation that flew the Swastika, Germany’s death’s head insignia, the equivalent of Islam’s scimitar.

In saying “We are not at war with Islam, Obama was not engaging in the cultivated prevarication of Islamic taqiyya. After all, did not President George W. Bush say as much the day after 9/11 when he described Islam as “a religion of peace,” as have academics such as John Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University?

Indeed, what else but denial could Obama utter since he publicly exalts the Qur’an as “holy”? How could America possibly be at war with Obama’s holy book without being at war with Obama?

True, former Muslims, having renounced Islam, have called Islam a religion of war. They echo Winston Churchill’s famous remark that the Qur’an is the “Mein Kampf” of war, which may compound the reason why President Obama returned a bust of Churchill to London. Churchill was also a colonialist who said this of Muslims:

Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.[i]

If Churchill were alive today, his warning of the 1930s regarding the imminent war with Nazi Germany would be magnified tenfold regarding Islam’s declared war against Western Civilization. Obama’s denial of this war not only intensifies and magnifies its scope, His denial disarms us and may lead to Islam’s conquest of the world, the goal of Muslim leaders from Mohammad to the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose hatred of the West is Islam’s spearhead, Iran.

Feb 15 2015

Judge Jeanine Pirro: “Mr. President, You Need To Get Serious About What’s Going On in the Middle East”


Once again there is one sane voice in the country that of Judge Jeanine Pirro!

Feb 14 2015

The Moderate Vanguard


By Tabitha Korol

Just when everyone’s attention has been directed toward ISIS and some of the most despicable crimes ever committed, and our government is loathe to war with our planet’s unequalled brutality, Jordan’s King Abdullah assumed the role of world leader. Such activity continues to distract us so that we ignore the evils unfolding within our own country – the war of the Moderates who exploit children in incalculable ways.    

ISIS and Boko Haram, who hope to establish a shared Muslim empire, have lured thousands of American and European children to join their jihad against Western civilization. The UK mirror reported that, within a single two-week period alone, the Islamic State kidnapped about 3,000 Yazidi women and children, and Boko Haram kidnaps young girls by the hundreds from private schools for sexual slavery. European teenage boys are persuaded to join ISIS with cash offers, rap videos, and tales of adventure. Young women are enticed by adventure and romance, only to be forced to live in the nude as sex slaves, beaten, shared among friends, and raped to bear the next generation of jihadists. The International Labour Organization estimates 1.2 million children are trafficked for exploitation each year.

Chechen Muslims, with their violent history, were responsible for the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis, when they captured 1,200 people (including 777 children), terrorized and raped the hostages. The death toll was 331, including 186 children. Palestinian Muslims have bombed Israeli school buses and built terror tunnels that led to children’s dormitories and classrooms.

In America, boys and young men are brainwashed in mosques to join ISIS’s fight for Allah. Schools, such as the Universities of California, have become a hotbed of anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s. Given a diet of Islamic propaganda in textbooks and videos, the public schools are now “encouraging” and praising Allah (which leads to wearing complete burqas and forced conversion).

Girls are not born with a sense of modesty. They are taught to feel unsuitable and subservient, whether through their schooling or the Islamic home environment, where the man dominates in a loveless marriage. From this environment, the young women will readily accept the burqa and its quality of escape and invisibility. Encumbered by these portable tents, they will also be prohibited from the joys of being American, from all forms of sports and social activities (even friendship between women), and they will learn to accept their captivity. Following these forms of conditioning, or being forced to lie (taqiyyah), they will assert their right to the restrictive dress code.

There is yet another consequence of burqas. In Islam, the idea of modesty is warped into becoming the woman’s shame of her womanhood, which undermines her security and self-respect. This results in an increase in female genital mutilation, and facial disfigurement by acid (already noted in our local upscale shopping mall when a young woman’s face covering slipped). Those who do not wear burqas will be at risk of being raped; the risk in Islamized Sweden and Denmark has reached epidemic proportions, comparable to Islamic countries. The more subjugated the women, the higher the overall crime rate in a tyrannical regime. When news reporters state that we have to defeat the Islamic ideology to win against ISIS, be reminded that we must also defeat the ideology’s permeation into our own lives.

Of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, it is estimated that up to 25% may be violent extremists, with the majority of Muslims in most Islamic countries favoring Shari’a law. Within the populace are the traumatized, fearful and irrelevant women, as well as the mentally challenged, both invariably disposable and “volunteered” for suicide mission. Another group, a courageous handful who speak out against parts of the Koran and for Islamic reform, has undertaken a daunting and dangerous mission.

And finally we have the Moderates, the comparatively discreet in Western society, who go about their daily lives inconspicuously, never speaking out against terrorism, all the while effecting changes in our land in gradual increments. They are the non-violent who nevertheless seek to establish a tyrannical regime here, in America. While citizens are battling the ACLU’s attempt to allow Muslim laws in Oklahoma, a Shari’a court has been established in Texas.   New school textbooks are crammed with indoctrinal material about Islam, with little about America and the other major religions, leaving parents in Massachusetts and Florida furious about the deceitful programs inflicted on their children. It is the Moderates who surreptitiously prepare proselytizing films and school excursions to mosques without prior parental notification, all changes that are meant to create a new generation of devotees and jihadists. Only recently, Florida parents exposed to the media the textbooks that contain several chapters on whitewashed Islam, with 100 pages of Judaism and Christianity missing.

Moderates are also the college students who, now brazen and empowered by a quiescent, ignorant, leftist administration, defend terrorist organizations, vilify Israel and call for her annihilation, and unite to attack Jewish students. Encouraged to invite outside speakers from terrorist groups (Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood), the Muslim Student Union (MSU) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) work together to impose their ideology and establish Shari’a laws and restrictions on their host population. Their leader, Azka Fayyaz, is now openly promoting violence and Israel’s destruction. A dedicated anti-Semite, she announced that Hamas and Shari’a have taken over the University of California, and is no doubt responsible for recent Nazi-style graffiti at a Jewish fraternity and Hillel House.

The families that allege to have come to the West in order to escape tyranny reared and nurtured their children in their home culture of intolerance and harshness. These Moderates are fast becoming the jihadists of tomorrow, eager to replace our way of life with theirs. They are the new devotees who celebrate the Islamic Eid with animals that are ruthlessly tortured and slaughtered for sacrifice, and demand particular accommodations from the public schools. They are the bystanders who cheer while non-moderates behead, torch, or throw their fellow human beings off cliffs. They are the ones who happily extend their hands to receive candy distributed on the occasion of a suicide bombing by one of their own. They are the parents of young women who leave home to join a Palestinian cause and become comfort women to Islamo-fascist barbarians, and are ultimately killed. They are the Moderates who believe that every punishment meted out in the 7th century Qur’an is acceptable today, against homosexuals, women, apostates, infidels, and more

These are the Moderates who are working to influence and change our children. Their clothes may remain unsplattered, but we may be certain that their hands are soaked in blood.