If you read just one article today about ISIS, read Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS Really Wants”
I can’t imagine that you’ve traveled anywhere across the conservative internet today without coming across a link to Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS Really Wants.” It’s a long article, but so informative and important that it would be a good thing if everybody took a few minutes out of their day to read it. Indeed, I’d make everyone in Obama’s administration read it often enough to have it memorized.
A lot of what Wood has to say is familiar to all of us who haven’t been pretending that ISIS is just a JV Team of malcontents taking the name of Allah in vain. Wood destroys any claim that ISIS isn’t Islamic:
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 what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following 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.
[snip]
The distinction between apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
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. (The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) 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.
The reality here at home is that we have become such a secular state that we are incapable of recognizing religious fanatic passion (or the equally scary secular fanatic passion). Wood’s article is rich in detail about ISIS’s ideology and the way it differs from other radical Islamic ideologies. He explains how ISIS’s confident fanaticism He it excites and incites Muslims all over the world, in no small part because it’s viewed as being the strongest of strong horses.
Those of us paying attention knew a lot of this, but Wood’s article is an excellent summary of this information. It’s lucid, detailed, knowledgeable, and has the advantage of being published in the still rather respected Atlantic, which is not the kind of magazine Progressives are allowed to deride.
For me, though, the most interesting part of the article was learning that ISIS and the Mad Mullahs of Iran, even though they are mortal enemies (the former Sunni and the latter Shia), still have something terribly, horribly, existentially dangerous in common: They both believe in a coming apocalypse. Moreover, unlike end-of-days Christians, whose only active role in preparing for the coming Apocalypse is to prepare both their souls and their survival supplies, the Mad Mullahs and ISIS believe that, through their acts, they have an obligation to hasten the end of days:
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.
[snip]
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. McCants says a prominent Islamist in Iraq approached bin Laden in 2008 to warn him that the group was being led by millenarians who were “talking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions” based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive. “Al-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders] to say ‘Cut it out.’ ”
For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need. Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the world—might look. Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do not yet have the status of doctrine. But other parts are based on mainstream Sunni sources and 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.
“Only God knows” whether the Islamic State’s armies are the ones foretold, Cerantonio said. But he is hopeful. “The Prophet said that one sign of the imminent arrival of the End of Days is that people will for a long while stop talking about the End of Days,” he said. “If you go to the mosques now, you’ll find the preachers are silent about this subject.” On this theory, even setbacks dealt to the Islamic State mean nothing, since God has preordained the near-destruction of his people anyway. The Islamic State has its best and worst days ahead of it.
I have been saying forever that there can be no Cold War-like “mutually assured destruction” with Iran. It worked with the Russians because they didn’t want to die any more than we did. They may have insulted us as soft Western capitalists, but whether you’re a soggy capitalist slug or a hard-edged communist cockroach, you have a strong innate desire to live. Knowing that if you drop the bomb you die too is definitely a deterrent to dropping that bomb.
That deterrent is meaningless to people in the grip of apocalyptic fanaticism. If asked them “You do realize, don’t you, that if you bomb Israel or America, their last acts will be to reduce you to rubble?” these fanatics will fervently answer “Yes, and that’s a result devoutly to be wished.”
Obama has this starry-eyed Leftist notion of partnering with Iran to fight ISIS. He seems incapable of understanding that they’re both equally fanatic and that they’re both death cults that want to be active participants in the nuclear destruction of the world, their own nations included (if necessary). For this failure of understanding alone Obama should be impeached.
