Posted: Nov 24, 2015 4:03 pm
Clive Durdle wrote:Article from Atlantic reminded me I was brought up in a similar group with end times beliefs but without scimitars.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... ts/384980/
It is not obvious to me that there is any actual strategy of response out there because I have never heard any senior politicians or news analysis for example on the BBC even beginning to think in these terms.
I remember reading this back in March, and it has coloured my view on the situation ever since.
Although, it is a big article and it is some time since I read it, so I'll re-acquaint myself with it. Thanks for posting
There was a shorter summary which I found interesting posted on the New Statesman website on Sunday here: Why ISIS seeks battle with Western Nations
I found the final third (or so) of the article particularly enlightening - as much as I'd felt previously that we should be helping refugees as much as reasonably possible, I'd always thought that the pithy response "it's exactly what ISIS wants!" to the prospect of hardening our hearts towards them in the aftermath of the Paris attacks to be somewhat of a platitude, or perhaps just a cliché.
However, the article suggests that refusing refuge to the people fleeing ISIS could actually be helping ISIS in a much more direct way than "merely" compromising our principles in the same way that curtailing our holiday plans might be. As easily as ISIS justifies the massacre of Shias, Christians, Kurds or the full-scale genocide of the Yazidis, they do seem dispirited by the continuing mass migration of Syrian refugees.
Smuggling fighters into France who had posed as refugees is likely to have been a deliberate and calculating move, designed to exploit fears among some about the potential security risk posed by accepting Syrian refugees. Islamic State likens refugees seeking a future in Europe to the fracturing of Islam into various encampments following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632AD. Most of these sects arose from divisions over who should succeed the Prophet in leadership of the Muslim community, but some went into open apostasy.
Viewing events in this way, Islamic State argues that any Muslim not backing its project is guilty of heresy. For refugees to be running from it in such large numbers is particularly humiliating: the group even ran an advert that juxtaposed an image of a camouflaged military jacket alongside that of a life vest. A caption read, “How would you rather meet Allah?”
An article published this year in Islamic State’s English-language magazine Dabiq made this very point. It noted that: “Now, with the presence of the Islamic State, the opportunity to perform hijrah [migration] from darul-kufr [the land of disbelief] to darul-Islam [the land of Islam] and wage jihad against the Crusaders . . . is available to every Muslim as well as the chance to live under the shade of the Shariah alone.”
Islamic State recognises that it cannot kill all of the refugees, but by exploiting European fears about their arrival and presence, they can at least make their lives more difficult and force them into rethinking their choice. All of this falls into a strategy where IS wants to eradicate what it calls the “grayzone” of coexistence...
Beyond the tendency of all totalitarian movements to move towards absolutism in their quest for dominance, Islamic State also believes that by polarising and dividing the world it will hasten the return of the messiah. Once again, eschatology reveals itself as an important motivating principle...