What ISIS Really Wants (From March 2015 at the Atlantic)
What ISIS Really Wants
by Graeme Wood at the Atlantic, March 2015
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/?utm_source=SFFB
"SNIP............
There is a temptation to rehearse this observationthat jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguiseand make it fit the Islamic State. 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 States officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to moderns. In conversation, they insist that they will notcannotwaver 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.
To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic States chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and smash his head with a rock, poison him, run him over with a car, or destroy his crops. To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishmentsthe stoning and crop destructionjuxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an uncircumcised geezer.)
But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops aloneunless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
............SNIP"
katsy
(4,246 posts)they find reprehensible? They will never take land away from us "infidels" so why not stay in their own lands?
There's no middle ground here. We either choke off their cash flow which will destroy the organization and ability to buy arms or we engage them full on.
In light of current events, including the mass graves of their female victims, I'm good with lots of boots on the ground.
applegrove
(118,832 posts)Last edited Sun Nov 15, 2015, 04:22 AM - Edit history (7)
need places in the world that are rich to be the biggest men of all. Hell, if they'll travel back to the 7th century to be the type of big men there were back then, they'll travel to Europe and North America too. If they are used to having complete control over other people in their nuclear family, or they want it, they easily project that to everywhere. Hell they probably feel contempt for men in the west who have to rely on merit of some sort to be successful in love and work and life(to whom ISIS followers used to feel like second class citizens). And the Koran, at over a thousand years old like many religious documents, backs them up. A small percentage of violent people then sign up for ISIS where simple manhood promises you incredible power over whether others live or die: they are leveraging being male into the ultimate power ISIS promises. For sure there is a lack of opportunity in the ME and their not so merit based economies. So by joinging ISIS, aspirations are filled, their grievancers attacked. What reptilian brain would not want that? Thankfully the wast majority of people in the region do not only follow their reptilian brains. But some do everywhere. It is how cults work around the world.