Letter From Australia (About Denmark’s Jihadis)

Nanny State Extremism

Tim Blair
Monday 29 December, 2014
The Telegraph

To a certain extent, Australia’s jihadist contribution to the Islamic State cause in Syria and Iraq is a self-solving problem. Our brave soldiers of Allah are evidently such incompetent warriors that they are being killed at almost the same rate as they arrive.

“The overall number of Australians currently fighting with or supporting Islamic extremist groups in Syria and Iraq has remained consistent over recent months,” ASIO deputy director-general Kerri Hartland told a Senate hearing earlier this month.  “However, this does not reflect a reduction in the number of Australian travellers. Instead it reflects the relatively high casualty rate for Australians, with the numbers of new arrivals roughly keeping pace with the fatalities.”

Keep it up, lads. Danish jihadists may be slightly more intelligent, not only surviving in greater numbers but also running back to Denmark after realising that glorious martyrdom is not a great long-term career choice. This presents obvious problems for Danish authorities, who besides dealing with an already-agitated Islamic minority in their small nation – less than one-quarter of Australia’s population – must now cope with extremists made even crazier by their Syrian frolics.

Police in the Danish port town of Aarhus have opted for the total wimp approach with their jihad returnees. “Rather than jail time, they’re given medical care for their wounds, a therapist for post-traumatic stress, and even help with homework and job applications. Their parents are also offered counseling,” reports Public Radio International. So they are actually rewarding Islamic State extremists. It’s a “get ahead by removing heads” jihadi cuddle program.

“We see this as crime prevention,” Jorgen Illum, the police commissioner in charge of the ridiculous program, told PRI. “We want to prevent young people from becoming radicalised to an extent that they might be a threat to the society.”

Considering that they’ve already signed up for warfare, it might be a little too late to worry about further radicalisation. They’re already as radicalised as they can be. It might also be doubtful that Danish therapy and homework assistance can overcome some of the education programs being run for jihadists in Syria.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Maria Abi-Habib last week revealed the full horror of Islamic State’s training regimen for new recruits. For example, children as young as eight are given lessons in beheading – using captured Syrian soldiers as practice victims.

Abi-Habib spoke with former Islamic State fighter Jomah, who has since fled for Turkey. The 17-year-old described instructors bringing three terrified Syrians before the class and calling for volunteers to behead them.”The youngest boys shot up their hands and several were chosen to participate,”Abi-Habib reports. “Afterward, the teachers ordered the students to pass around the severed heads.”

“It was like learning to chop an onion,”Jomah recalled. “You grab him by the forehead and then slowly slice across the neck.”

Good luck to any western authorities attempting to recalibrate blood-drenched graduates from Islamic State’s killbot colleges, although Jomah himself seems quite unmoved by his introduction to throat-slashing. “I’d become desensitised by that time,” he said. “The beheading videos they’d shown us helped.”

That’s nice of them.

Following 45 days of training and a 15-day post grad course, junior jihais are divided into roles that suit their particular levels of extremist madness: becoming suicide bombers, joining the battlefield, guarding military installations or serving as bodyguards. According to a 14-year-old ex-trainee interviewed by Abi-Habib,”the stupid ones were always chosen for suicide bombers.” Which possibly explains the high Australian fatality rate.

Those Australians who survive their jihadi holidays and crawl back to our country face less friendly treatment than is dished out by the Danes. “Obviously you don’t go off fighting in foreign lands –not as a member of the Australian Defence Force – and come back and think you are not going to be on our radar,” Queensland Police Commissioner Ian Stewart said last week. “And that’s because of the experiences that they have, and the skill set that they pick up by being involved in fighting elsewhere.”

Stewart continued: “There is a potential for those within the community to commit terror, a criminal act and I don’t think we can drop our guard for one second.”

This seems like a realistic approach. Even better, of course, would be to subject all returnees to the long jail sentences available under new counter-terrorism laws. Word of these laws is said to have convinced some jihadists to hide in Syria rather than return home, which is the best outcome of all.

Well, second best.

Fearful Astonishment

Like a Wolf on the Fold

A CNN reporter/researcher, Juergen Todenhoefer has travelled in ISIS territory and a report has been published of his findings and experiences.  The CNN report is here.  There is nothing particularly surprising in the report, but what is evident is that the reporter, his crew, and CNN hierarchy are the one’s who are surprised.

The inability of the secular liberal Western mind to understand and take seriously Islamism in general and ISIS in particular never fails to amuse, in a grim sort of way.  The first thing which surprised Todenhoefer was the “glow in their eyes”. 

Todenhoefer told CNN the enthusiasm the ISIS militants showed was one thing that stood out.  “When we stayed at their recruitment house, there were 50 new fighters who came every day,” Todenhoefer said. “And I just could not believe the glow in their eyes. They felt like they were coming to a promised land, like they were fighting for the right thing.

Just why that should be surprising is puzzling, to say the least.  Have we not seen the glow in the eyes of febrile mobs protesting in the streets, demanding the right to kill unborn children on an industrial scale?  Have we not seen true believers in the West passionately committed to “noble” bloody causes.  It’s normal.  The media and the Commentariat support and laud them as cultural warriors.  What supercilious condescension to be surprised when Islamic acolytes show similar passion and commitment.

But even more confounding was that so many of the people Todenhoefer met were educated.  From President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron on down we Western rubes have been lectured by our betters to frame ISIS and Islamists as ignorant, uneducated savages whose poverty, oppression, and general ignorance have allowed them to be captured by a bloodthirsty savage cult.  The CNN reporter is almost breathless when he declares:

“These are not stupid people. One of the people we met had just finished his law degree, he had great job offers, but he turned them down to go and fight … We met fighters from Europe and the United States. One of them was from New Jersey. Can you imagine a man from New Jersey traveling to fight for the Islamic State?”

Can you imagine?  Yes we can.  It’s all to do with the ideology at work.  Can you imagine educated and civilised people from, say Australia travelling all the way to the Arctic Ocean to scale and board a deep sea Russian oil rig in an attempt to shut it down.  Ideology, particularly extremist ideology which believes an imminent danger threatens the entire human race, will produce just such commitment and illegality.

More confounding still–indeed one of the strengths of the ISIS fighters–is their willingness and desire to die on the battlefield.

He went on to say that one of ISIS’s main points of strength is their fighters’ willingness — even their will — to die on the battlefield.  Todenhoefer met one somewhat overweight recruit in a “safe house” who said he wears a suicide belt to every battle because he is too chubby to run away if he is cornered and would choose to blow himself up, rather than be captured.

Once again, because the West is so deeply wedded to its materialist ideology it cannot comprehend the ideology of others, let alone take it seriously.  You can only do that if you are self-conscious about your own position–and for generations secular materialism has been asserted, not proven or demonstrated or justified by argument. It is one of the most lazy pseudo-cults.

Therefore, lacking epistemological self-consciousness, the Western Commentariat is utterly inept when it comes to taking competing ideologies seriously.  Its standard MO when confronted with another ideology is to ridicule it.  If one cannot understand one’s own ideological fixations, nor ground them in reason, condescending mockery is the only response possible when faced with competing beliefs.  Oh, that, and the Obama/Cameron gambit, which we call the secularist’s “hoity-toity jape”: a baldly arrogant assertion that these Islamic people don’t really believe all this stuff.  They have been hoodwinked by darker forces and given half a chance they would morph into secular materialists, just like Obama and Cameron. 

Why would Western folk be confounded and shaken by the willingness of ISIS fighters to die for their cause?  It is only a few decades ago amidst World War II that we face the Divine Wind suicide fighter pilots of Japan.  If your cause is big enough, willingness to die (or make other people die for it) is to be expected.  This becomes even more normal when your ideology has a focus upon other-worldly realities (Allah’s heaven, Japan’s ancestor worship) or apocalyptic perfection in this world (the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the feminist’s sexual egalitarianism).  Western discombobulation over such things reflects the jadedness of the Western mind.

And then there is the eschatological relentlessness of Islam which troubles the Western secular materialist. 

One of the most remarkable episodes of Todenhoefer’s trip to the ISIS-controlled region came when he was able to conduct an interview with a German fighter who spoke on behalf of ISIS’s leadership. The man — clearly unapologetic about the group’s transgressions — vowed there was more to come; he also issued a warning to Europe and the United States.

“So you also want to come to Europe?” Todenhoefer asked him.  “No, we will conquer Europe one day,” the man said. “It is not a question of if we will conquer Europe, just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain … For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines.

“Our expansion will be perpetual … And the Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons. And those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed.”

Todenhoefer asked the fighter about their treatment of other religions, especially Shia Muslims.  “What about the 150 million Shia, what if they refuse to convert?” Todenhoefer asked.  “150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it does not matter to us,” the fighter answered. “We will kill them all.”

Ouch.  That does not compute in the mind of a secular humanist.  Oh dear.  Never mind. 

At the end of the piece, Todenhoefer provides a conclusion:

“I think the Islamic State is a lot more dangerous than Western leaders realize,” he said. “They believe in what they are fighting for and are preparing the largest religious cleansing campaign the world has ever seen.”

And that just might make your average, jaded, self-righteous secularist a mite uncomfortable.   The fulcrum upon which this whole matter will turn is this: long ago the West lost belief in anything that was worth dying for–unless of course it was our unborn children who continue to be “appropriately” sacrificed on the altar of our own cowardly self-worship. 

Maybe–just maybe–the Living God has raised up the Divine Wind of ISIS, like He raised up the Assyrians of old, not because the Assyrians were just but because our fathers had become so evil.  In which case, the only appropriate response in the West would be for all to repent humbly before God, and seek His forgiveness in Christ while there is yet time, for we have been so arrogant and foolish.  Otherwise . . .

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. . . .

Cry the Beloved Country

Vicar of Baghdad: Christian Children Are Being Beheaded by ISIS for Refusing to Convert to Islam

BreitbartLondon

By Donna Rachel Edmunds  

2 Dec 2014

Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, has told of how Christian children in Iraq were beheaded by ISIS forces for refusing to convert to Islam. Around 250,000 Christians have fled northern Iraq in the face of ISIS. They were the last remaining Christians in a region that had been home to more than one and a half million Christians before the war.

White, who has been ordered by the Archbishop of Canterbury to leave Baghdad for fears over his safety, spoke movingly of the plight of the Christians during a recent interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Christian Today has reported.

“Things were bad in Baghdad, there were bombs and shootings and our people were being killed, so many of our people fled back to Nineveh, their traditional home,” he said. “It was safer, but then one day, ISIS – Islamic State. They came in and they hounded all of them out. They killed huge numbers, they chopped their children in half, they chopped their heads off, and they moved north and it was so terrible what happened.”

He told of how ISIS militants were forcing people, including children, to convert to Islam under threat of death. “They came to one of our people the other day, one of the Christians. They said to one man, an adult, ‘Either you say the words of conversion to Islam or we kill all your children.’ He was desperate, he said the words. And then he phoned me and said, ‘Abouna [Father], I said the words, does that mean that Yesua [Jesus] doesn’t love me any more?’ I said, ‘Yesua still loves you, he will always loves you.’

“Islamic State turned up and said to the children, you say the words that you will follow Mohammed. The children, all under 15, four of them, said ‘No, we love Yesua, we have always loved Yesua, we have always followed Yesua, Yesua has always been with us.’ They said, ‘Say the words.’ They said, ‘No, we can’t.’ They chopped all their heads off. How do you respond to that? You just cry.”

Prime Ministerial Panic

A Wall Too Far

Historically, walls were built to keep enemies out and provide security and protection to inhabitants.  Hadrian constructed “his” wall to keep out the marauding barbarians.  Likewise the Great Wall of China served to protect citizens from northern barbarians.  [What is it about the “north” you may well ask?]  There is not a single instance in recorded history of walls being constructed to keep citizens imprisoned inside a nation.

Until the Berlin Wall.  That is the first instance known when a nation constructed a fortified wall, not to protect from hordes of Berliners trying to gain entrance to the socialist workers’ paradise of East Germany, but to keep their own citizens from leaving.  They, under the tender embrace of a socialist paradise, were prisoners in the own country.   Berlin Walls can only exist when states have assumed dictatorial, totalitarian powers. 

New Zealand has plenty of walls.  Normally, they function well via immigration controls, passports, and border security.  Generally the barbarians from the north are kept at bay.  All this is perfectly normal and consistent with human practice since Cain began rampaging on the earth.  Defence is a divinely lawful state function.  Only those who represent no clear and present threat to the nation and its citizens are permitted to enter the country, regardless of the visa type.  But over the past year circumstances have emerged which have the country coming dangerously close to erecting its own version of the Berlin Wall.  We are dangerously close to removing the long established liberties of the renunciation of citizenship and self-exile.

It’s all the fault of ISIS and their international recruitment efforts.  ISIS, of course, is seriously Islamic.  It believes in a world-wide Islamic totalitarian rule and, therefore, is actively recruiting Islamists everywhere around the world to do one of two things: either to travel to join the jihad effort to establish the initial “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, or engage in jihad against non-Muslims in their home country.  We have not seen anything like it in the West since the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s, when communist powers actively recruited fighters in Europe to travel to Spain to fight for the communist Republicans against the anti-Marxist monarchists, as well as engage in a bit of domestic destabilization. 

New Zealand’s Prime Minister, John Key says that we face a clear and present danger from malcontented citizens leaving the country to travel to the Middle East to get jihadi training and experience, then returning home to carry out bombings and killings here.  Therefore, he is seeking enhanced powers to detect, interdict, and cancel the passports of these zealots before they leave the country.  In other words, the Prime Minister wants to erect a Berlin Wall, and is seeking the legal authorisation and powers to do so.

The changes were a response to the growing risk of radicalised fighters returning to New Zealand to carry out domestic attacks. Mr Key said in a statement: “As I said earlier this month, New Zealand’s risk and threat profile is changing and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has been successful in recruiting New Zealanders to its cause.” [NZ Herald]

This, we believe is a wall too far.  Since when has our country cancelled passports on the pretext of nefarious activities those citizens may or may not get up to when ex-border and which they may or may not continue when they return to New Zealand?  Since when do citizens get tried and become criminals because of the possibility of what they might do?  Sure, conspiracy to commit a crime is itself a crime, but the bow gets rather long in this case: a person suspected of leaving the country with the intent to join a jihadi group and be trained in bomb making etc. and, further, it is suspected they will eventually return to New Zealand to kill and maim innocent people.  To prevent the State’s suspicions becoming reality, it is seeking Stazi-like powers to spy and cancel passports well in advance of any criminal activity whatsoever.  We, however, are compelled to proclaim, “Prime Minister Key–tear the wall down!” before you even attempt to build it.

It is well within our historical liberties to cancel passports once a person has actually gone overseas and engaged in crimes.  We are under no-obligation to maintain the citizenship of a self-exiling criminal.  But it is well beyond the boundaries–in fact, right off the reservation–to cancel passports before they leave on the grounds that they may possibly one day return and commit similar crimes here in New Zealand–thereby imprisoning citizens in this country.  It has “Stazi” written all over it.  We say once again, we have no principial objection against the state cancelling a passport and citizenship for Kiwis who have travelled and committed crimes overseas.  Take, for example pederast sex tourists committing crimes in countries like Thailand, being apprehended by Thai authorities, and their guilt proven.  Cancelling a passport and erecting a Hadrianesque Wall to prevent them coming back into the country is well within historical legal practice.  But preventing them leaving in the first place on the grounds they may return to New Zealand to engage in pederasty here is another matter entirely. 

Moreover, it is inevitable, that in order for such Berlin Wall type restrictions to function, policing and espionage upon citizens must needs increase–which is precisely what our present government is now seeking.  The bottom line is this: the risk of zealots leaving to join in murderous mayhem overseas does not constitute a clear and present danger to this country.  If they do leave, and if they do engage in such activity whilst overseas, passports and citizenship can be revoked to prevent their coming back into the country.  The nations that let them in will have to deal with the problem they permitted in the first place. 

Walls like Hadrian’s and China’s Great Wall protected citizens.  Walls like Berlin’s egregiously oppressed citizens.  Let’s have nothing to do with the latter.   

Myopia and Living in Denial

Send In the Clowns

A US Republican congressman recently opined that Vice-President Joe Biden was only two shoes short of a clown. The jibe was intended to remind the country why Republicans don’t want to impeach the President. Were Obama to go, Joe would ascend to the Oval Office. It’s a scary thought to many.

ISIL’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own. Today we grieve together, yet we also recall that the indomitable spirit of goodness and perseverance that burned so brightly in Abdul-Rahman Kassig, and which binds humanity together, ultimately is the light that will prevail over the darkness of ISIL. President Obama

But the jibe was a double entendre. The irony of the second meaning refers to that which Joe Biden presently lacks (two clown feet). Obama has them in spades. He is the clown complete with two enormous feet. The only time he opens his mouth is to change them. That’s why he is qualified for the top job, and Biden is a pale understudy. Uproariously funny.

Obama as the consummate clown entertained us all recently with his formal statement lamenting the sad death of an US aid worker, Peter Kassig, murdered by ISIS. Adopting the mien of a celebrated and revered Doctor of Theology, Obama emphatically assures us that Kassig’s murder had nothing to do with Islam and its teaching.

It is just this kind of chutzpah and ideological drivel which makes Obama the laughing stock of most of the world. His utterance in this instance reminds us of risible afflations of Soviet disinformation at the height of the Cold War, or, more recently, out of Pyongyang, North Korea.

Bold Witness to the Truth

Muhammad and Islam’s Sex Slaves

by Raymond Ibrahim
FrontPage Magazine
October 16, 2014

Once again, Islamic State Muslims are pointing to Islam in order to justify what the civilized world counts as atrocities.

According to an October 13 report in the Telegraph,

Islamic State jihadists have given detailed theological reasons justifying why they have taken thousands of women from the Iraqi Yazidi minority and sold them into sex slavery. A new article in the Islamic State English-language online magazine Dabiq not only admits the practice but justifies it according to the theological rulings of early Islam. “After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharia amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated,” the article says.

As for “theological reasons” for sex slavery “according to the Sharia,” these are legion—from male Muslim clerics, to female Muslim activists. Generally they need do no more than cite the clear words of Koran 4:3, which permit Muslims to copulate with female captives of war, or ma malakat aymanukum, “what”—not whom—”your right hands possess.”

The article continues:

But most of it [Islamic State “article” or fatwa] is devoted to theological justifications for Islamic State behaviour, citing early clerics and the practices of the Prophet Mohammed and his Companions during the early years of Islamic expansion.

Indeed, while many are now aware of the Koran’s and by extension Sharia’s justification for slaves, sexual or otherwise, fewer are willing to embrace the fact that the prophet of Islam himself kept and copulated with concubines conquered during the jihad.

Muhammad seized for himself as rightfully earned booty (or ghanima) a young woman, after killing everyone dear to her. According to authoritative Islamic sources, she hated him for it. If that is not rape, what is?

One little-known story is especially eye-opening:
During Muhammad’s jihad on the Jews of Khaybar, he took for himself from among the spoils of war one young woman, a teenager, Safiya bint Huyay, after hearing of her beauty. (Earlier the prophet had bestowed her on another Muslim jihadi, but when rumor of her beauty reached him, the prophet reneged and took her for himself.)

Muhammad “married” Safiya hours after he had her husband, Kinana, tortured to death in order to reveal hidden treasure. And before this, the prophet’s jihadis slaughtered Safiya’s father and brothers.

While Islamic apologists have long tried to justify this account—often by saying that Muhammad gave her the honor of “marriage” as opposed to being a concubine and that she opted to convert to Islam—they habitually fail to cite what Islamic sources record, namely Baladhuri’s ninth century Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (“Book of Conquests”).

According to this narrative, after the death of Muhammad, Safiya confessed that “Of all men, I hated the prophet the most—for he killed my husband, my brother, and my father,” before “marrying” (or, less euphemistically, raping) her.

So there it is. Muhammad seized for himself as rightfully earned booty (or ghanima) a young woman; he took her after killing everyone dear to her—husband, father, brothers, etc.  And, according to authoritative Islamic sources, she hated him for it.  If that is not rape, what is?  In fact, this incident is regularly cited by former Muslims as one of the greatest anecdotes that convinced them that Islam and Muhammad are not of God.

Nor, as expected, was Muhammad alone in this sort of rape. For example, Khalid bin Walid—the “Sword of Allah” and hero for aspiring jihadis around the world—raped another woman renowned for her beauty, Layla, right on the battlefield—but only after he severed her “apostate” husband’s head, lit it on fire, and cooked his dinner on it.

If this is how Muhammad—whom Koran 33:21 exhorts Muslims to emulate in all ways—behaved towards conquered female “infidels,” should there be any more surprise concerning the Islamic State’s behavior?

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a CBN News contributor. He is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).

Just So Stories

Islamic Casuistry

The cognitive dissonance in the West at ISIS atrocities is as much a scandal in some ways as the atrocities themselves.  We have grown used to justifications and defences for Islamic violence put forth by Western  politicians yet they remain scandalous.  The Western Commentariat insists upon framing the violence of Islamic jihadis in Marxist terms and categories.  People there are poor.  They are oppressed.  The only way to purify themselves is by bloodshed and brutal violence.  Such self-willed blindness is sickening in every way. 

In a world dominated by ideologies of materialism and secularism, religious motivations fail to compute.  The effectual and actual cause of all things is matter–which loosely translates into money and the lack of it.  Poverty is the root cause of violence in the Middle East, Syria and Iraq, don’t you know.  Rarely has the world been treated to such condescension and arrogance on the part of its political leaders and attendant Commentariat.

Recording the violence is gaining air-time in the West.  The West’s justification and apologia for the violence is also getting air-time.  (It’s not really Islamic, don’t you know.)  What is getting shut down is the Islamic justification and rationale.  They do not fit the West’s self-imposed “hear no evil, see no evil” ideology.

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, born Ibrahim ibn Awwad ibn Ibrahim ibn Ali ibn Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarrai is the proclaimed Caliph of the Islamic State.  By now it should be evident to all that he is no dummy.  He is not an ignorant, illiterate boof.  He has a doctorate in Islamic studies.  ISIS is offering a religious justification for its treatment of captured innocents, based upon the Koran and the Hadith.  It’s just that it is inconvenient for the West to take that justification seriously.  It might offend some Muslims.  Hence the tortuous contortions on the part of Western politicians to find Western reasons that fit in with the secularist religion of the West.

Daniel Pipes, a student of Islamic doctrine and ideology, presents the ISIS case:

ISIS Boasts of Its Yazidi Slaves

A new article in the terror group’s journal justifies the appalling practice.  

By Daniel Pipes
October 16, 2014 
National Review Online

That the Islamic State has enslaved Yazidi women and children it captured is an established fact. For example, a United Nations report found that “300 [Yazidi] women had been forced into slavery.” Now, in its slick multi-language journal Dabiq, the terrorist group offers its theological justification for this practice.

Most of “The Revival of Slavery before the Hour,” a recently published four-page article in the English-language edition of Dabiq, deals with the title topic: how slavery will function as the Day of Judgment approaches. The remainder rationalizes the enslavement of Yazidis, a group numbering fewer than a million who live mainly in the Sinjar region of Iraq and adhere to a pre-Islamic religion that has come under Sufi influences. The article’s anonymous author argues that Yazidis are not monotheists but follow a creed “deviant from the truth.” Therefore, they do not deserve a protected (dhimmi) status.

He then explains the implications of this verdict, asserting first (square brackets contain my translations), that

the Islamic State dealt with this group as the majority of fuqahā’ [jurisprudents] have indicated how mushrikīn [polytheists] should be dealt with.

In other words, the Islamic State precisely follows what the premodern Islamic legal tradition had agreed upon.

Unlike the Jews and Christians, there was no room for jizyah payment.

Jizya, a tax paid by non-Muslims to their Muslim overlords in return for “protection,” is a privilege reserved to monotheists; not being monotheists, Yazidis lack that privilege.

Also, their women could be enslaved unlike female apostates who the majority of the fuqahā’ say cannot be enslaved and can only be given an ultimatum to repent or face the sword.

According to Islamic legal experts, Yazidis, not being apostates, may be enslaved.

After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharī’ah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority to be divided as khums [the one-fifth of booty that goes to the state].

The Islamic State has thus applied classic Islamic doctrine concerning war booty.

This large-scale enslavement of mushrik [polytheist] families is probably the first since the abandonment of this Sharī’ah law. The only other known case — albeit much smaller — is that of the enslavement of Christian women and children in the Philippines and Nigeria by the mujāhidīn there.

The above passage refers to the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines and to Boko Haram in Nigeria.

The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as the mushrikīn were sold by the [Prophet’s] Companions (radiyallāhu ‘anhum) [May God be pleased with them] before them. Many well-known rulings are observed, including the prohibition of separating a mother from her young children.

The Islamic State once again emphasizes that it goes by the book. Note the verb “sold.”

Many of the mushrik women and children have willingly accepted Islam and now race to practice it with evident sincerity after their exit from the darkness of shirk [polytheism].

The author then concludes with three hadiths (accounts of Muhammad’s sayings or doings) that confirm the utility of slavery to achieve conversions to Islam and win a place in heaven. Thus does enslavement benefit both the Muslim community (by enlarging it) and the individual slave (by making heaven accessible). What a great deal for everyone!

There are several things to take away from this.

The article’s heavily Arabized English typifies the Islamic State’s discourse, both spoken and written. English provides structure but key vocabulary words are in classical Arabic, with dialect only slightly showing through (e.g., mushrikīn). The transliterations from Arabic are pedantically scholarly, complete with ‘ayns (‘) and macrons (ā, ī).

As in every other aspect of life, the Islamic State unabashedly and brutally applies premodern Islamic law, making no concessions whatsoever to modern mores. It seeks to establish a universal caliphate as though it were again the seventh century. Beheadings and enslavement being among the most shocking Koranic injunctions to a modern sensibility, the group most exults in precisely these and imposes them on those it considers infidels.

The wild, reactionary impulses of the Islamic State appeal to a minuscule number of observers, while its messianic zeal has carried it very far, very fast — from the borders of Turkey to the outskirts of Baghdad. But its actions appall the overwhelming majority, Muslim and not, which will lead to its inevitable collapse while it does irreparable damage to Islam.

— Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and the author of Slave Soldiers and Islam (Yale, 1981). © 2014 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

We do not doubt that millions upon millions of Islamic believers are aghast at what ISIS is doing.  But the ball is in their court to justify and explain why the ISIS denomination of Islam is not their respective brand of Islam.  We owe them all a respectful hearing.   We need to hear from them why the practices of ISIS are either not taught in the Koran and the Hadith, or, far more likely, there is a reason why such teachings need no longer be followed or regarded as authoritative. 
 

The Irresistible Power of God

Lights In Dark Places

As Shia, Sunni, and ISIS forces have swept over the landscape in Syria and Iraq Christians have been driven out, fleeing in the face of torture and death.  Some Christian enclaves have been there for more than a millennium.  It seemed as though this region would become Christian-less.  But, recent news would indicate something different. This, from Breaking Christian News: 

(Iraq)—Working in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region day and night to help meet the needs of people displaced by the threats and violence of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Mosul and other areas, members of an Iraqi ministry team recently came into contact with a colonel from the Kurdish forces battling ISIS.  

The colonel was serving as a division commander of the Peshmerga, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s armed forces, which have helped to slow the incursion of ISIS in its brutal push to establish a caliphate imposing a strict version of Sunni Islam. With the aid of U.S. airstrikes, the Peshmerga have also slowly retaken some territory. They are helping to secure the Kurdish capital of Erbil, where the ministry team assisted by Christian Aid Mission is supplying displaced people with food, clothing, beds and medicine.

“In all our travel to deliver the aid and preach God’s Word, we did not find anyone opposed to or rejecting our message. The challenge is how and when we will reach all those people with the message of salvation in the squares, sidewalks, roads, inside the tents and out, and everywhere”

The colonel had a few questions for the team members: What was the reason for offering all this aid? What was the motivation, what was the source of it?  “We spoke with him explicitly, explaining everything to him, saying that Christ taught us to love and express our love to the people in a practical way,” said the team director, who informed the officer that all relief items had been donated or purchased locally.

The Peshmerga colonel, whose name is withheld for security reasons, was quick to respond.  “You see the Arabs around you in the Gulf states, which claim to be religious Muslims, have not sent us anything but terrorists,” he told the ministry team members. “But you who follow Christ send love and peace and goodness to people every day.”  The conversation continued at length, the ministry team director said.  “After we had a long talk with him about Christ, he bowed and prayed, asking Christ into his life,” the director said. “And he said, ‘Today I am the happiest person—I’ve had the privilege of making this decision,’ and he received a copy of the Bible.”

The colonel’s experience was just one of many taking place in Iraq. In cities of refuge like Erbil for people displaced from their homes in other parts of Iraq, people are turning to Christ at a stunning pace. Tent churches are springing up in the makeshift camps. Under normal circumstances, mission strategies focus on how to proclaim Christ effectively, but the challenge now is keeping pace with the number who would receive Him, the director said.

(Photo via ChristianAid.org)

“The greatest challenge in the ministry right now is not whether these people will accept Christ or not,” he said. “In all our travel to deliver the aid and preach God’s Word, we did not find anyone opposed to or rejecting our message. The challenge is how and when we will reach all those people with the message of salvation in the squares, sidewalks, roads, inside the tents and out, and everywhere.”

Christian Aid Mission’s Middle East director said that as a result of this trend, some church leaders and workers for ministry organizations are remaining in Iraq even as the cruel practices of ISIS—beheading Iraqi children who refuse to deny Christ in Qaroqosh and Western journalists elsewhere—gain greater notoriety.

Those who have stayed behind are risking their lives, if caught.  Pray God for their safety–and for the safety of those who, like the thief at Golgotha, seek eternal life amidst death and destruction.   

“I think of workers who stayed behind in Mosul and the surrounding areas because there are so many who are receptive to the Gospel,” he said. “They are willing to risk being in an area under the rule of ISIS for the privilege of more and more fruit for Christ.”  Forced to trust God more than they ever have before, these Christians are growing in their relationship with God in ways they had never imagined, he said.

“I respected them before the Arab Spring because they were serving in Islamic areas, but now they are serving more and maturing even more,” he said. “We need to intercede for these workers. They are all always in danger. They need God’s power to show His love to the thousands of helpless people.”  When Iraqi ministry workers assisted by Christian Aid Mission obtain more funds for food, water, medicine and other supplies, they have the opportunity to demonstrate Christ’s love in a tangible way, he added.  “God has put within the hearts of thousands of Muslims a desire to read His Word,” he said. “We can be the instruments of providing them with New Testaments and audio Bibles.”

When all other lights go out, it pleases God to enable His people to shine like stars amidst a crooked and dark world.  When God stretches forth His hand to save, people will run to the day of Christ’s rising.  

Clear and Present Danger It Ain’t

 Degrade and Destroy–But Whom?

Is anyone getting a sense of deja-vu over what is unfolding in the Caliphate?  We have a vague memory of the sixties as President Kennedy was mulling over what to do with a tiny “country” in South East Asia called Vietnam.  Initial attempts to neutralise communist armed forces were failing dismally.  Should the US commit ground troops?  Yes, it should.  Thus began the Vietnam war in earnest.  Disaster for the US beckoned–and eventually came to pass.

Fast forward to 2014.  Isis proclaims a Caliphate.  It captures some civilians and turns them into gruesome political theatre.  How dare they!  Ever a “can do” people, the United States demand action of their ineffectual President.  He admits that he does not have a strategy for ISIS.  But he needs something.  Nation-building is so overrated–and in any event that was the last term’s policy.  He decides upon air-strikes–the preferred weapon of armchair, left-wing Commanders-in-Chief.  (The preferred option of Republican Presidents tends to be “boots-on-the-ground” but only because they usually have more respect for the Joint-Chiefs of Staff, who know what it takes to win wars.  But that, too, has its pitfalls and beckoning disasters for a war-weary nation–like body bags.)

Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

So, air-strikes it is.  How is it going?  Here is an assessment from Patrick Cockburn:

America’s plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group’s fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad. The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.

Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town’s remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

Did you get that last bit?  Apparently ISIS commanders and fighters believe their own religious ideology.   Who would have thought?  What a total surprise.  And when folk believe there is a divine wind at their back they can often achieve remarkable military victories.  Muhammad and his immediate successors demonstrated that way back in the seventh century AD. Some things never change. 

But ISIS has also been making gains against the rest of “sunni Iraq”:

Unfortunately for the US, Kobani isn’t the only place air strikes are failing to stop Isis. In an offensive in Iraq launched on 2 October but little reported in the outside world, Isis has captured almost all the cities and towns it did not already hold in Anbar province, a vast area in western Iraq that makes up a quarter of the country. It has captured Hit, Kubaisa and Ramadi, the provincial capital, which it had long fought for. Other cities, towns and bases on or close to the Euphrates River west of Baghdad fell in a few days, often after little resistance by the Iraqi Army which showed itself to be as dysfunctional as in the past, even when backed by US air strikes.

It does not look good.  It’s “degrade and destroy” all right, but not as we knew it.

What should the West do?  Western countries should respectively focus upon what, if any, clear and present danger exists for them.  It is lamentable that citizens of Western countries have been captured by ISIS and turned into political theatre by means of public executions.  But such does not represent a clear and present danger to the UK or the US or France, etc.  An appropriate response would be to issue an advisory warning to all citizens travelling or intending to travel in that part of the world.

It is equally lamentable that citizens are becoming seduced by Islamic millennialism and are travelling to sign-up as jihadis for ISIS.  Western government should respond with measured urbanity: if citizens wish to die a martyr’s death in holy jihad to get their seventy-two virgins, if they wish to subject themselves to Islamic rape or forced marriage, and if they wish to swear allegiance to the armies of Allah, then it is their choice.  By so acting, the government ought to revoke citizenship and passports.  In fact, in these days of state funding for everything, Western governments could do a lot worse than making a travel subsidy available for those so inclined.  But thus far, no clear and present danger.

Not that one won’t emerge some time in the future.  But it is an old foe–terrorist acts perpetrated by Islamic jihadis on home soil is a familiar threat.  It does represent a clear and present danger in general, requiring appropriate intelligence and vigilance.  But in this there is nothing new. And it certainly does not require bombing runs in Anbar province, or missile strikes on Kobani.

Armageddon?

Portents of Prophecy

Whenever geo-political tensions arise in Arabia and the Middle East some streams making up the great river of the Christian Church get excited.  These folk subscribe to the idea of an Israel-centric final conflagration, just prior to the final advent of our Lord.  With the rise of Islamism, of Al Qaeda, and of ISIS, with civil war in Iraq and Syria, and the on-going, simmering hostilities between Hamas and Israel, many of these Christians are seeing portents of the end of the world. 

It has long been so.  Ever since Napoleon, then Kaiser Wilhelm II were identified as “the Beast”, these mistaken Christians have put forward a lengthy list of candidates for the position–including Hitler and Henry Kissinger.  All have subsequently proven to be false accusations–but the underlying theology on which their apocalyptic vision rests has remained.  Once more, given events in the Middle East, the febrile speculations have burst forth again.  The quasi-liturgical chant, “We are in the end times”, is being heard again.  The search for the Beast has recommenced.  Is it the new Caliph?  Maybe.  Who knows?  After all, Osama Bin Laden has relinquished the position.

This peculiar eschatological view rests upon principles and doctrines that are not well-grounded in Scripture at all.  But the popularity of the view remains amongst some, doubtless due in part to the dramatic nature of the woven narrative.  The belief that one is living in portentous, scary times has the same kind of appeal that horror movies do.  We like being scared.  We like living amidst drama.  It relieves the boredom of a hum drum life.

At Contra Celsum we hold to the doctrine of Christendom–which, simply put, espouses the growth and extension of Christian teaching to where all cultures of earth are accepting of the Lord Jesus Christ and submissive to Him.  “Christendom” refers to the earthly reign of Christ.  The first Christendom, emerging gradually in Europe, then officially with the crowning of Charlemagne in 800AD, has fallen apart.  Its sons decided that the gospel of the French Revolution and materialistic rationalism were more compelling.  They apostatized from the Lord Jesus Christ.  But, we hold to the view that the first Christendom was a foretaste of what will gradually emerge in human history.  It is possible that the second Christendom will be initially based in Asia or Africa or South America.  But eventually Christendom–growing in strength through the conversion and mass discipling of peoples–will emerge again. 

What is the biblical evidence for such a view?  Whilst there are many evidences and proofs, but we will give just three lines of argument.

Firstly, the Great Commission itself–in Matthew 28: 18-20:

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

The clear and obvious reference is to the discipling of nations, not just a smattering of individuals from within nations.  The nations are to be taught to observe all the commands of Christ.  This command, in order to be observed and fulfilled, requires the emergence of a global Christendom through the preaching, teaching, baptizing, and Christianising of all nations.  As we have observed before, when eighty percent of a nation’s population consists of faithful, observant, believing Christians, so many of ills of modern society which rely on lawlessness and unbelief will just fade away.  General trade on Sunday will attenuate, for example, because there will be no customers to be found.  The vast majority of folk will be enjoying a Sabbath rest.  

Secondly, the Bible speaks repeatedly of the love of God for His people extending down to a thousand generations, which roughly approximates to around 30,000 years, or thirty millennia. For example, Deuteronomy 7:9:

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.

If the length of God’s covenant faithfulness unto a thousand generations be granted, we must conclude that we have only made the very smallest beginning.  Christendom is still in its infancy–historically speaking. Therefore, the idea that human history is about to come to an end in a fiery battle of Armageddon is somewhat premature.  In the year 30,000AD maybe.

Thirdly, the repeated testimony of the Book of Daniel is that from the time of Daniel to the coming of the Kingdom of God there would be four kingdoms (the first of which was the Babylonian kingdom of Daniel’s day) all based upon human power and authority.  During the time of the fourth kingdom, God would set up a kingdom which would expand to take over all other kingdoms and encompass the entire world.  Daniel 2:44

And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever, just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold.

Daniel 7:27 speaks of the all the kingdoms of the earth being given to the saints of the Most High at that time.

And the kingdom and the dominion
    and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven
    shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High;
his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom,
    and all dominions shall serve and obey him.’

What is not clear in Daniel’s prophecies is how this kingdom shall come to pass.   What our Lord makes definitive in Matthew 28 is that the kingdom of the saints of the Most High comes into suzerainty not by force of arms or compulsion, but by the preaching of the Gospel and the teaching of the nations.  That is why it is genuinely the Kingdom of God, not of man–as were the kingdoms of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome, which were replaced when the King of kings entered into our human history. 

Central to the certain hope of Christendom and the Kingdom of God is that the peoples of Syria, and Iraq, Israel and the Levant will all eventually come to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, the King of the whole earth.  The rise of ISIS, the war between Israel and Gaza, and the beheading of captives are truly signs and portents–but not of the Last Days.  Rather, they signal that the Church has much work to do–in prayer, missionary endeavour, teaching, and labours for Christ in those regions. 

The blood of Christian martyrs in the Middle East and the Levant calls to us.

Those Who Refuse to See

Myopia Like a Mosaic-Inflicted Darkness

We have been arguing that Western politicians are failing on every front to understand Islamic militancy.  They are wearing glasses which thoroughly distort their view.  Western secularism and materialism and soft-Marxism are hardly reliable aids to understanding one’s enemy, when the enemy is motivated by religion.  Ironically, it is the West’s secular religion which leads Western leaders to dismiss Islamism as irrelevant to what is taking place in the Middle East on a grand scale, and in their own countries, on a minor one.

The Marxist narrative that the thousands upon thousands of Muslims signing up to bear the weapons of Allah under the banner of ISIS are really disaffected youths, alienated by Western exploitation and oppression is risible, not only because it is a canard, but also because it represents Western self-deception on a grand scale. 

Anyone who does not take the living ideology of Islam seriously in their analysis of what is unfolding in Arabia and Persia and the Middle East is blind at the starting gate.  Patrick Sookhdeo is arguably one of the leading scholars of Islam in the West today.  He was raised in an Islamic family, but in later life rejected that religion.  He takes Islamic doctrine seriously, however, because he knows that ideas and doctrines govern behaviour, regardless of how false or untrue the doctrines may be.  He traces some of the beliefs dominating ISIS leaders, and inspiring the multitude of foot soldiers rushing to join them from around the world.

The War of the Cross

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, International Director of Barnabas Fund

When ISIS changed its name in June from “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL, or the Arabic acronym ISIS) to simply “the Islamic State”, this was a shift of enormous theological and eschatological significance.

The Caliphate and the Caliph

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

The Islamic State, or Caliphate (khilafa in Arabic) as the group has proclaimed, denotes the early Islamic state under Muhammad’s first successors, the Caliphs. It is considered by Muslims to be the God-ordained ideal form of Islamic government under which a pious head of state rules the whole Muslim community (umma) under Islamic law (sharia). This is viewed as the golden age of Islam, to be re-created whenever possible.

The term is sometimes extended to all Islamic states with caliphs at their heads (the last being the Ottoman Caliphate abolished in 1924). It symbolises the unity of the Muslim umma, even when this does not match reality. All contemporary Islamist movements are dedicated to restoring the Caliphate.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, declared himself Caliph on 29 June 2014, claiming therefore to be the leader of all Muslims on earth. He says he is a sayyid, that is, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, thereby fulfilling one of the original Sunni requirements for the Caliph to be from Muhammad’s tribe.  

One of the reasons Islamic believers are flocking to the banner of ISIS is because they believe in the Caliphate; they believe that  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the Allah-appointed leader of all Muslims on earth.  They believe that not to join up to wage jihad is an act of unbelief and apostasy from Islam and Allah. 

Religious motives and theological justification

Much of Islamic theology is derived not from the Quran but from traditions (hadith) recording the words and deeds of Muhammad (his sunna), which are seen as a pattern for all Muslims to follow.

A helpful letter by British imams and Muslim leaders appeared in The Independent newspaper yesterday, in which they urged ISIS to release British aid worker Alan Henning and expressed horror and revulsion at the recent murder of another British aid worker, David Haines. They wrote that “the senseless kidnapping, murder and now the despicable threats to Mr Henning at the hands of so-called “Muslims” cannot be justified anywhere in the Quran and the Sunnah (Prophetic traditions).” The Islamic State, however, can quote selected Islamic source texts from the Quran and hadith or sunna to justify what it is doing.

As we have seen, the Islamic State’s main immediate purpose is to establish a radical Islamist Sunni Caliphate across the Middle East. After that its stated targets are Rome and Spain. Rome is apparently used as a symbolic centre of Christianity, while Spain has been “unfinished business” for Muslims ever since they finally lost control of it in the late 15th century. As one hadith says:

 Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.’ And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally and their reckoning will be with Allah. – Sahih al-Bukhari (Vol. 1, Book 8, No. 387)

Another hadith states:

. . . the Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah (Sahih Muslim Book 1, No. 30)

The Islamic State takes these hadiths as meaning that it should wage jihad until everyone on earth makes the Islamic declaration of faith, the shahada: “There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

The Islamic State has gained worldwide attention for carrying out executions, amputations, crucifixions and lashings in public squares. The bodies are left on display for several days as a warning. The group finds a theological justification for these acts in the Quran. For example:

The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land. – Q 5:36 (A. Yusuf Ali’s translation)

On Friday 18 July 2014 the Islamic State gave Christians in Mosul an ultimatum: convert to Islam, pay the jizya tax (the traditional Islamic tax payable by non-Muslims, indicative of their subjugated and inferior status in an Islamic state), leave Mosul, or be killed. To concentrate the Christians’ minds, Islamic State fighters sprayed the Arabic letter “Noon” (ﻦ) on the believers’ homes to mark them out as targets. This is the first letter of the Arabic word for “Nazarenes” i.e. Christians.

On their way out of the town 1,500 families of Mosul’s Christian population were robbed at the Islamic State checkpoints. This also followed a Quranic command.

Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth (even if they are) of the People of the Book [i.e. Jews and Christians] until they pay the Jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. – Q: 9:29 (A. Yusuf Ali’s translation)

The fact that other Muslim sects–Shia, Sufi, Alawite, and so forth–do not recognize  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his Caliphate as authentic is beside the point.  For Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers believe all Islamic professors who do not join up and declare their allegiance to the “Black Flag” disclose themselves thereby to be apostates and heretics.  They will be dealt with accordingly–more brutally than the infidels (unbelievers).  Moreover, we need reckon with the reality that the Sunni denominations are by far the most numerous within the Islamic tent.  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi cannot be dismissed as part of a lunatic fringe.

The End Times and the Final Battle

The Islamic State’s flag is black with the shahada written upon it in white. The colour of the flag is in line with an End-Times prophecy in Islam. One hadith says:

 When you see that black flags have appeared from Khorasan then join them. Because Allah’s Khalifa Mahdi will be among them. (Musnad Ahmed, vol. 8, No. 2427)

The hadiths speak of a black-flagged army that will rise out of Khorasan (which is modern-day Afghanistan) and that will be led by the Mahdi (an Islamic End-Times messiah figure) who brings with him the restored Caliphate. By using the black banner and proclaiming a Caliphate, the Islamic State is making itself the fulfilment of these End-Times prophecies.

Another important eschatological point that frames the deeds of the Islamic State is the belief among some Muslims that the Islamic Age will only last for a little over 1,400 years. Some Islamic scholars have calculated 1,500 years or even 1,900 years, but for those who use the 1,400+ figure, the end of the world is likely to take place very soon. According to the Islamic Calendar (a lunar calendar of 354 days per year, starting in 622 AD), it is already the year 1435. One hadith says:

People will gather around the Mahdi in the fourteen hundreds, (Risalat Khuraj Al-Mahdi, p. 108)

and another:

Count two or three decades after 1400 Hijri. At that time, the Mahdi emerges… (Qalda bin Zayd bin Baraka, Asma Masalik Li Ayyam Al-Mahdi: Malik Li Kul Al-Dunya Bi Amr Allah El-Malik, p. 216)

The Islamic State sees itself in this light, playing a key role in the End Times in fulfilment of many prophecies, when all the enemies of Islam (particularly Christians) will be defeated. Even the name of its magazine, Dabiq, reflects this. The Islamic State is preparing for what it calls “the war of the cross”, an apocalyptic confrontation with the West.

The group’s priority is to defend the “Prince of the Faithful”, their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Its fighters are reported to be in a state of euphoria because they are finally going to get the opportunity to fight “the alliance of tyrants”. Their main aim is to “remain steadfast as long as possible” in the face of what they recognise to be superior Western weaponry. They are aiming for a “strategy of resistance that the Crusaders have no capacity for,” apparently meaning that simply to survive the assault of an alliance of 40 states without being utterly defeated would indicate the action of a divine power on their side. “If we survive, Muslims around the world will understand that the continuous stories and hadiths prophesied of us as masters of the end time Caliphate according to the prophetic methodology,” skyped one Syria-based Islamic State fighter.

The eschatological aspect–the belief by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his armies that they fighting in the “end-times”–makes them a reckless foe indeed.  It also helps explain why they brutally impose relentless Islamic dominance when they take control of any territory.  The “end times” call for no compromise, no truck with infidels, no deviation from Islamic orthodoxy or sharia law.  Moreover, they have convinced themselves that merely to survive a conflict with the West is victory.  It is proof they are of Allah himself. 

Worldwide support

ISIS militants

According to Al-Jazeera, the Islamic State now has over 50,000 fighters in Syria, with a further 30,000 in Iraq.  Many other militant Islamist organisations around the world have pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State. Boko Haram, the Islamist group in West Africa, has voiced its support for the Islamic State and its Caliph. When Boko Haram took control of the Nigerian town of Gwoza its leader declared, “Thanks be to Allah who gave victory to our brothers in Gwoza and made it part of the Islamic caliphate.” It has been noted that Boko Haram is working with the Somali Islamist group Al-Shabaab to unite with the Islamic State.

The terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiyah, which has cells in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, has also expressed its support for the Islamic State and its operations in Syria and Iraq. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which is believed to operate from Algeria through Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya and Chad, has pledged allegiance to the group, and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, has also declared its support. Philippines separatist Islamist groups in Mindanao, including the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters and Abu Sayyaf, have also pledged their loyalty to the Islamic State.

There have also been reports of Chinese Uyghur Muslim women and girls being used as sex slaves / wives of the Islamic State combatants. It is estimated that there may be as many as 100 Chinese Muslims fighting for the Islamic State.

Islamic State supporters in Spain have launched a social media campaign aimed at generating support for the group across the Iberian Peninsula. The campaign shows historic Muslim palaces across Spain with slogans such as “Long Live the Islamic State” and a video in which a jihadist says:

I say to the entire world as a warning: We are living under the Islamic flag, the Islamic caliphate. We will die for it until we liberate those occupied lands, from Jakarta to Andalusia. And I declare: Spain is the land of our forefathers and we are going to take it back with the power of Allah.

Support for the Islamic State is also spreading in the Balkans, which until the 19th century was still under Islamic control. Forty militants were arrested in Kosovo in August on suspicion of maintaining close links with the Islamic State. It has been noted that Albanian is one of the primary languages into which the Islamic State proclamations are translated, the others being English, French, Russian and Turkish.

In the UK leaflets have been handed out in London calling British Muslims to join the Islamic State and support its Caliph. The flag of the Islamic State has also been flown in at least one London council estate. In Vienna Islamic State supporters have started selling fan merchandise online. There have also been suggestions that the Islamic State may attack the United States of America from Mexico by crossing over the border.

The West’s narrative about “disaffected youths” is looking more bizarre by the day.

Expecting Christ to fight on their side

It is likely that all the Islamic State’s members and supporters around the world are united in seeing the group as the fulfilment of countless prophecies in the Quran and hadith. They will be anticipating that the whole complex drama of Islamic eschatology will shortly be played out, including the return of Isa (the Quranic word for Jesus). Although fighting against “Crusaders” and the cross, i.e. against Christians, is a key aspect of the Islamic State’s ideology, its militants will expect Christ to fight on their side. For Islam predicts that when Isa returns it will be as a Muslim, who will destroy all signs of Christianity and convert all Christians to Islam, so that there will be no more crosses or payment of jiyza. A hadith says:

Abu Huraira reported that the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: By Him in Whose hand is my life, the son of Mary (may peace be upon him) will soon descend among you as a just judge. He will break crosses, kill swine and abolish Jizya and the wealth will pour forth to such an extent that no one will accept it. (Sahih Muslim, Book 1, No. 287)

The reference to killing pigs (swine) in this hadith is often taken to be a reference to killing pagans. Other hadiths refer to the killing of Jews, who will be betrayed into the hand of Muslims by every inanimate object behind which they may have hidden. For example:

Abdullah b. ‘Umar reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him)  said: The Jews will fight against you and you will gain victory over them  until the stone would say: Muslim, here is a Jew behind me; kill him. (Sahih Muslim Book 41, No. 6984)

Having converted all the Christians and killed the Jews and pagans, there will be no-one but Muslims left in the world. The Islamic State expects to play a major part in accomplishing this End Times vision.

Unless President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron, and other Western politicians understand these things, and factor them into their strategy and actions, they will remain blind men leading the blind.  They will likely lurch from repeated mistakes to recurrent disasters. 

There is none so blind, as those who will not see–says the proverb.

A Well-Fitting Cap

It’s Marx, Not Mahommad

We will be running several pieces over the next few days on Western ideological responses to ISIS.  The first, and most devastating, is the proposition that ISIS is a creature of Western creation.  This thesis has several  sub-theses which we will also explore.

The first explanation and ideological interpretation of ISIS is espoused by the current US President, Barack Obama.  But, Obama is just the mouthpiece–albeit the most dangerous.  The ideological root of the ideas comes from academics–the foremost of which is John Esposito.  An article in American Thinker by Andrew Harrod introduces us to Esposito’s Western-centric ideology:

John Esposito Takes ‘Islam’ Out of ISIS

September 14, 2014
American Thinker

Andrew Harrod

“He’s the head apologist,” read a note passed to this reporter from a liberal friend during Georgetown University professor John Esposito’s August 28 address on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club.  The Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) founding director reiterated his hackneyed arguments, long dominant in academia and government, that Islamic radicals’ depredations stem from societal ills, not Islamic doctrine. . . .

The “primary drivers are to be found elsewhere” outside Islam for groups like ISIS, Esposito asserted – namely, in a “long list of grievances,” the “main reason” cited in videos of ISIS beheadings.  This execution method had no particular Islamic basis, he claimed, Quran 8:12 and 47:4 notwithstanding, being merely a terror means for autocratic regimes and criminal groups like Mexican cartels.  Unmentioned by Esposito, “grievances” in Islamic doctrine justify “defensive” jihad.

Esposito condemned “[m]assive violations of human rights,” including Middle Eastern dictatorships such as Egypt and the recent Israeli “massive slaughter of Gazans,” a common canard belied by careful analysis.  “Not speaking out and condemning” the “things that are devastating” of “traditional allies” like Israel or Arab regimes “alienates … Muslim democrats” and creates “disaffected youth” who feel that they “must act.”

Complementing “moral outrage” over matters like “anti-imperialism,” Western Muslims also join groups like ISIS to attain a “sense of meaning, purpose and belonging” while “living in a hostile society.”  Although “Islamophobic groups” correlate Islamic piety with violence, Esposito claimed, evidence suggested that such jihadists were “religious novices.”  He failed to explain, though, why other marginal groups in modern societies such as Mexican or non-Muslim Indian immigrants do not abandon welfare states for orgies of violence abroad. . . .

Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a J.D. from George Washington University Law School.  He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project; follow him on twitter at @AEHarrod.  He wrote this essay for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Esposito’s ideology–together with that of his disciple, Barack Obama–is that the West is the primary cause of the grievances nursed by disaffected Islamic youth.  Their disaffection drives them into extremist actions.  It is alleged that most of the civil rights violations and the oppression faced by Islamic believers throughout the world are perpetrated by Western allies (Egypt, Israel): therefore the West is complicit in the creation of ISIS and its extreme violence.  [This view deliberately turns a blind eye to the perpetual violence Muslims perpetrate upon other Muslims–by far the most deadly and destructive source of Islamic suffering int he world today.]

This is a remarkably Western-centric view of the world.  It bespeaks arrogance.  But this ideology does not just draw upon Western-centric prejudices.  It also draws upon Western materialist assumptions.  In this peculiar world-view, religion and religious beliefs are a fiction, not really to be considered as a genuine cause of anything–for all of life and existence is the product of matter, property, capital and wealth and the struggle between the have’s and the have not’s.  This is Western political and social ideology 101.  It represents secularism on the grandest scale.

Thirdly, it fits with the Marxist ideological narrative.  Those who do not have capital, wealth, and money remain oppressed and disenfranchised by those who do.  Therefore the “have-nots” are understandably angry and justifiably bitter.  ISIS is the coalition of the poor and the powerless.  That’s why ISIS soldiers terrorise women and children.  That’s why they enslave, rape, torture, and kill.  They are raging against the machinery of oppression for which the West is ultimately responsible. 

Note how Obama reflects this Western materialist/Marxist ideology when he pontificated recently:

At this moment the greatest threats come from the Middle East and North Africa, where radical groups exploit grievances for their own gain. And one of those groups is ISIL—which calls itself the Islamic State.

The Islamic State is exploiting grievances (which are not pre-texts but genuine and legitimate, and Western caused, since the Islamic State is finding plenty of support in its anti-Western crusade amongst these so-called aggrieved).

Now, contrast this with the actual ideology of Islamism, as espoused by Osama bin Laden in a letter to fellow Saudis:

Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue — one that demands our total support, with power and determination, with one voice — and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually?

Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: [1] either willing submission [conversion]; [2] or payment of the jizya, through physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; [3] or the sword — for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die. (The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 42)

Bin Laden cites orthodox Islamic doctrine; Obama and Western-centric academics cite grievances perpetrated by the West.  The West thinks Bin Laden did not really reflect Islamic orthodoxy, but a perversion of Islam. The West knows Islam better than Islamics. We, the West, will tell Islamic believers what Islam is really about.  Such arrogance.  Such risibility.  Ironically, every Islamic believer on the planet has a right to feel aggrieved by such Western-centric arrogance.  It would be akin to the Indian Prime Minister presuming to declare what Jesus Christ’s doctrines truly were and how the Church has misrepresented and distorted the truth. The Hindu representation of what  Christian doctrine “really teaches” would be rightly regarded by Christians as irrelevant, if not ignorant arrogance.  In this matter, ignorant arrogance is a well-fitting cap on the respective heads of Bush, Blair, Obama and Cameron. 

The West has become cocooned in its own spurious ideologies–to the point where it cannot see or hear except via its own bankrupt ideological filters.  This is remarkably similar to the kind of blindness which afflicted communist and Nazi regimes–and their apologists–in the mid-twentieth century. 

It has been said, repeatedly, that the first step to success in war is to know your enemy.  Obama and academics like Esposito think they are smarter than the average bear.  They think they know Islamic militants better than they themselves do–for they have the benefit of gnostic insight–a knowledge that comes from the deep wells of truth, namely Western materialism and Western Marxism. 

The result is one policy blunder after another.  In our next piece, we will provide just one example of how the Obama administration has become so blinded by spurious Western-centric ideology, that it has lost touch with reality. 

Another Military Misadventure Coming Up

How to Put Stars on the Banner of ISIS

There are few things more dangerous than when politicians get smitten with nationalistic hubris, replete with lumps in throats and tears on cheeks, whilst they are deciding or voting on military affairs.

In the US House of Representatives a recent vote was taken as to whether the Congress would approve the arming of “moderate” Syrian rebels.  Despite all the evidence and experience of disastrous outcomes of decisions to arm such groups in the past, the House duly voted to approve the action.  Can politicians really be this dumb?  Yes they can.

But not all.  Some of those who voted “no” explained their reasons.  Their justification for voting against the resolution to arm the “moderate” Syrian rebels shows up their yea-saying colleagues to be dumb, dumber and dumbest.  Here are the words of Justin Amash, a so-called Tea-partying congressman:

What have we learned from the last decade of war?

Those years should have taught us that when going to war, our government must:

(1) be careful when defining a military mission,
(2) speak forthrightly with the American people about the sacrifices they will be called to make,
(3) plan more than one satisfactory end to the conflict, and
(4) be humble about what we think we know.

These lessons should be at the front of our minds when Congress votes today on whether to arm groups in Syria.

Today’s amendment ostensibly is aimed at destroying ISIS—yet you’d hardly know it from reading the amendment’s text. The world has witnessed with horror the evil of ISIS: the public beheading of innocents, the killing of Christians, Muslims, and others.  The amendment’s focus—arming groups fighting the Assad government in Syria—has little to do with defeating ISIS. The mission that the amendment advances plainly isn’t the defeat of ISIS; it’s the defeat of Assad.

Americans stood overwhelmingly against entangling our Armed Forces in the Syrian civil war a year ago. If Congress chooses to arm groups in Syria, it must explain to the American people not only why that mission is necessary but also the sacrifices that that mission entails.

The Obama administration has tried to rally support for U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war by implying that our help would be at arm’s length. The amendment Congress will vote on broadly authorizes “assistance” to groups in Syria. It does not specify what types of weapons our government will give the groups. It does not prohibit boots on the ground. (The amendment is silent on the president’s power to order our troops to fight in the civil war; it states only that Congress doesn’t provide “specific statutory authorization” for such escalation.) It does not state the financial cost of the war.

As we should have learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must plan for multiple satisfactory ends to military conflicts before we commence them.

If the Syrian groups that are “appropriately vetted” (the amendment’s language) succeed and oust Assad, what would result? Would the groups assemble a coalition government of anti-Assad fighters, and would that coalition include ISIS? What would happen to the Alawites and Christians who stood with Assad? To what extent would the U.S. government be obligated to occupy Syria to rebuild the government? If each of the groups went its own way, would Syria’s territory be broken apart, and if so, would ISIS control one of the resulting countries?

If the Syrian groups that we support begin to lose, would we let them be defeated? If not, is there any limit to American involvement in the war?

Perhaps some in the administration or Congress have answers to these questions. But the amendment we’ll vote on today contains none of them. [Emphasis, ours.]

Above all, when Congress considers serious actions—especially war—we must be humble about what we think we know. We don’t know very much about the groups we propose to support or even how we intend to vet those groups. Reports in the last week suggest that some of the “appropriately vetted” groups have struck deals with ISIS, although the groups dispute the claim. The amendment requires the administration to report on its efforts to prevent our arms and resources from ending up in the wrong hands, but we know little about those precautions or their effectiveness.

Today, I will vote against the amendment to arm groups in Syria. There is a wide misalignment between the rhetoric of defeating ISIS and the amendment’s actual mission of arming certain groups in the Syrian civil war. The amendment provides few limits on the type of assistance that our government may commit, and the exit out of the civil war is undefined. And given what’s happened in our country’s most recent wars, our leaders seem to have unjustified confidence in their own ability to execute a plan with so many unknowns.

Some of my colleagues no doubt will come to different judgments on these questions. But it’s essential that they consider the questions carefully. That the president wants the authority to intervene in the Syrian civil war is not a sufficient reason to give him that power. Under the Constitution, it is Congress’s independent responsibility to commence war.

We are the representatives of the American people. The government is proposing to take their resources and to put their children’s lives at risk. I encourage all my colleagues to give the decision the weight it is due.

The desperation to be doing something usually results in the worst unintended outcomes.  The bellicose United States goes to war at the drop of a hat.  It is “led” by a pacifist-orientated Commander-in-Chief whose liberal world-view sees all wars as unnecessary and preventable because all human beings are really creatures of enlightened good-will.  When this has not not worked out, he has lurched from one military misadventure to another with both his eyes firmly fixated on his own polling numbers.  He has no strategy, no doctrines, no guiding principles.  It’s all about him. 

Congress is no better.  It has not grown up and matured to the point where it understands that when it comes to sending the military to war, overwhelmingly, far more often than not, the best and right decision is to do nothing.  The phrase “clear and present danger” has been inflated to where it is a meaningless concept.  An ant walking upon a sidewalk in Outer Mongolia would constitute a “clear and present danger” to the United States in the minds of most of the current crop of Congressmen.

Evil exists.  People die at the hands of unimaginably evil predators.  But need does not constitute a duty–or a right–to intervene so that “good guys” get to kill “bad guys”.  The world is just not that simple.  It is not a narrative of cowboys and Indians. 

We make a prediction which doubtless many will consider so extreme and unlikely they will write us off as complete idiots: as a result of arming “moderate” groups in Syria, the civil war will intensify, more people will be killed than otherwise, and US armaments and military weapons will end up in the hands of the most brutal and ruthless of the fighting cliques.  Our critics will have conveniently forgotten  that it is the US which has indirectly armed ISIS, thereby enabling it to expand rapidly into Iraq and western Syria.  Will such things happen again?  Inevitably.  But the militaristic heart which beats throughout the land in the United States runs on the high octane fuel of patriotism, nationalism, and exceptionalist hubris.  This time . . . this time it will be different.  We swear.

Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? 

The star spangled banner of ISIS, that is.  Enabled and facilitated by the unintended consequences of foolish US military misadventure. 

The world would be a very much safer and saner place, if the US Congress were populated throughout by more Congressmen like Justin Amash. 

Following An Inglorious Example

Not a Slow Learner

We confess we could not resist the belly-laughter when we came across a piece in the NZ Herald about Australia’s version of the Gunpowder Plot.  Islamic cadres have apparently been plotting to attack the heart of Australia, which, as every Australian knows, is Canberra, the home of the federal gummint. 

Congratulations and thanks need to go to the Australian authorities, the espionage agencies, and the police for sniffing out the plots in advance and being able to take preventative action.  It must be a relief to every Aussie–Australian Islamists excepted.

Security at Parliament House in Canberra is being ramped up amid reports of a planned terrorist attack.  Senior intelligence sources confirmed to News Corp Australia that spy, police and counter-terrorism agencies had intercepted information regarding a possible attack on Parliament House, and there are concerns the prime minister and other senior officials could be targeted.  The news report said there were fears the building had been “scoped out” for a “Mumbai-style” attack using automatic weapons.

But the article went on to consider more general issues.  Apparently, Western governments are perplexed that they can no-longer effectively curtail the ability of ISIS to raise money to fund its operations.  Al Qaeda relied upon donations.  Once donors had been identified, it was relatively easy for Western governments to target them and neutralise them.  But ISIS represents a very different fund-raising strategy.

Western governments are facing an uphill battle trying to squeeze the finances of Islamic State jihadists, as the extremists operate like a “mafia” in territory under their control in Syria and Iraq, experts say.  Unlike the al-Qaeda network, which has relied almost exclusively on private donations, Isis holds a large area in Syria and Iraq that allows it to generate cash from extortion, kidnapping and smuggling of both oil and antiquities, analysts say. As a result, the group’s funding presents a much more difficult target for Western sanctions compared to al-Qaeda’s finances, said Evan Jendruck, an analyst at IHS Jane’s consultancy.

Even conservative estimates portray Isis as the world’s richest extremist organisation, raking in at least a million dollars a day.  The group is “merciless in shaking down local businesses for cash and routinely forces drivers on roads under its control to pay a tax”, a US intelligence official said. “Its cash-raising activities resemble those of a mafia-like organisation.”

Sounds remarkably like the activities of a modern, rapacious Western government, taxing the life-blood out of its citizens to fund its nefarious predatory activities.  Whatever ISIS might be, it is certainly not a slow learner.  Doubtless many in the West will see the more sophisticated fiscal activities of ISIS as a sign it is becoming more Westernised in its ideology and outlook.

Idiocies and Inanities

Sorry Mr. President, ISIS Is 100 Percent Islamic

 

By Daniel Pipes

September 10, 2014

National Review Online

In a televised address on how to address the Islamic State this evening, President Barack Obama declared the organization variously known as ISIS or ISIL to be “not Islamic.” 

In making this preposterous claim, Obama joins his two immediate predecessors in pronouncing on what is not Islamic. Bill Clinton called the Taliban treatment of women and children “a terrible perversion of Islam.” George W. Bush deemed that 9/11 and other acts of violence against innocents “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.”

None of the three has any basis for such assertions. To state the obvious: As non-Muslims and politicians, rather than Muslims and scholars, they are in no position to declare what is Islamic and what is not. As Bernard Lewis, a leading American authority of Islam, notes: “It is surely presumptuous for those who are not Muslims to say what is orthodox and what is heretical in Islam.”

Indeed, Obama compounds his predecessors’ errors and goes further: Clinton and Bush merely described certain actions (treatment of women and children, acts of violence against innocents) as un-Islamic, but Obama has dared to declare an entire organization (and quasi-state) to be “not Islamic.”

The only good thing about this idiocy? At least it’s better than the formulation by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (known as CAIR) which has the nerve to call the Islamic State “anti-Islamic.”

In the end, though, neither U.S. presidents nor Islamist apologists fool people. Anyone with eyes and ears realizes that the Islamic State, like the Taliban and al-Qaeda before it, is 100 percent Islamic. And most Westerners, as indicated by detailed polling in Europe, do have eyes and ears. Over time, they are increasingly relying on common sense to conclude that the group is indeed profoundly Islamic.

Ships Passing In the Night

Secularism Does Not “Get It”

Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs. He wrote piece recently wondering why ISIS is so bent on provoking the United States.  In our view, the piece is not worth much consideration, at least on its own terms.  But, from another perspective, it provides powerful insight into the drone-like hive  mind of the West. 

Keating offers five reasons why ISIS appears deliberately to be provoking the US.  They are (in short)

1. They feel cornered.
2. They don’t think the US will act.
3. They think this is working.
4. They are “upping the price” (for ransom monies on remaining hostages)
5. This was the plan all along.

What this on display in his analysis, however, is the mindset of a Western secularist.
  What the writer seems unable to grasp is the mindset, the perspective, of a serious, committed Islamic jihadist.  So wedded is the Western mind to its established religion of secularism that it pre-interprets all of reality accordingly.  So brainwashed has the Western hive-mind become that it struggles to conceive of any other reality from any other perspective of its own–even at the level of simplistic comprehension–and this despite the scouring effects of post-modernism over the past one hundred years. 

Islam is a diabolically constructed doppel-ganger of the Christian faith.  It has its own internal logic, based upon its fundamental religious precepts.  Part of its body of doctrine is an Islamic eschatology–its doctrine of the end times.  The world to come, it is believed, is a world dominated and ruled over by Islam–by Allah and Muhammad, his prophet.  That world–which necessarily involves world conquest and the subjugation of all unbelief–will come to pass as Allah descends to fight on behalf of his servants.  His faithful, fighting without any hint of deviation from the Koran, the hadith and Sharia law, will be honoured.  The more they place themselves in harm’s way fighting a holy war, the more Allah will be provoked to come to help his faithful servants.

This is what ISIS adherents believe.  In this light, provocation of the USA or the Great Satan makes remarkably good sense.  The fact that in any full scale armed conflict with the United States would result in their utter defeat is not the point.  Because, by their lights, they are being faithful and holy jihadi warriors, to place themselves in such jeopardy will hasten the end times and the ultimate victory of Allah.  In this light, they are Islam’s equivalent of the Divine Wind suicide pilots of Japan in WWII.

But such things are incomprehensible to the Borg-like mind of the Western secularist.  To attribute such beliefs and doctrines to ISIS leadership would be seen in the West as mockery, or derision, or holding ISIS  up to ridicule in public. It would mean not taking them seriously.  It would be treating them with contempt.  It would mean betrayal of secularist multi-culturalism.  But let’s be clear–the only reason the Western mind would approach an analysis of ISIS tactics by excluding Islam from the outset is because the religion of secularism is so ingrained, so unquestioned, that to attribute any other perspective to another human being is tantamount to regarding them as superstitious, primitive idiots.  Which is about what the the average secularist thinks of Christian folk amongst them.  (Note well that the prevailing narrative about Christians in the West is that they are dumb and uneducated.)

Keating is trying to treat ISIS with respect.  His blindness to his own religious pre-commitments means he ends up treating them with contempt.  In warfare, the age-old maxim is “know your enemy”.  But the secularist mind is so ingrained, so thoughtlessly adherent its inane group-speak, that it fails miserably to understand what jihadis are all about. 

—————————-

Postscript:

Some source material on the influence of Islamic eschatology upon current events in Syria and Iraq (or, the Levant).

1. Aberfoyle:

Abu Hamza also referred to the apocalyptic predictions of Islamic eschatology that are set in al-Shams (the land of the Levant, including Syria) involving the arrival of the Mahdi (the expected one), the return of the Nabi Issa (Prophet Jesus) and their battle on the day of resurrection with al-Dajjal (“the false Messiah,” roughly in the role of the Anti-Christ of Christian eschatology):

Jihad will continue to the Day of Judgment. The development of events on the land of Sham will bring what no one expected because the land of Sham is guaranteed by Allah Almighty and the angels are spreading their wings over al-Sham. This is not Afghanistan or Bosnia or Chechnya, this is the land of al-Sham, Issa, peace be upon him, will come down here, and al-Dajjal will come out here, it is the land of epics and the land of resurrection… [4]

The Muhajirin recently completed Operation Fatih in the southwestern part of Aleppo governorate, claiming to have seized seven apartment towers and two villages as well as T-72 tanks and an anti-aircraft gun. The group claims their victory brings them closer to the road connecting Aleppo with the south. 

2. CNSNews.com ISIS Publication Aims to Lure Recruits; Justifies Atrocities by Citing Mohammed

Patrick Sookhdeo, international director of Barnabas Fund and an expert on radical Islam, notes that Dabiq is mentioned in a hadith that prophesies an end-time battle in which Muslims will conquer Christians, en route to conquering the entire world.

“In Islamic eschatology, Jesus, whom Muslims call Isa, will descend via a minaret of the Great Mosque in Damascus, and from there he will lead his armies to victory,” Sookhdeo says.

“‘Victory’ means destroying every cross, killing every Jew and pagan, and either converting every Christian to Islam or killing them. This apocalyptic dimension is now shaping ISIS as it sees itself fighting an End Time battle.”