Hypothesis: The violence may be an offshoot of license, pandering, and provocation produced within circles of the society of the religion. Denials of culpability; preference for a loyal lie — telling or receiving — over an uncomfortable truth; and promotion of exclusivity and supremacist thought obviously reach a certain crowd and a certain kind of person within it who will then act on so many evil and false premises.
While sensitivity to anti-Semitic acts works some like litmus — if the Jews are being attacked, who is next? — the chief victims in the path of this behavior are Muslims. From Gaza to Quetta, if you look, you will see the same violence scaled up to frequent acts of intimidation, murder, and mass murder.
“Shimmer” continues to apply, as may “The Long War” (which suits perfectly the journal that follows it), and the themes built up around authenticity vs invention, medieval vs modern, Islamic Supremacist vs Islamic Democratic Compatibility.
Despite Shadi Hamid’s arguments for a democratic but illiberal Islamicism, that project would seem to have failed in the Muslim-majority states in which autocratic leadership prevails either as expressive of Islamic idealization, as in Saudi Arabia, or as the secular response to the same, as in Egypt and Syria where Islamism has been rejected without successfully attenuating the political absolutism that binds both.
Championing the middle and moderate ranks, which may need a Harris organization to map out the intellectual terrain in its totality, Qanta Ahmed, whom I follow via Facebook, consistently stands up for Islam as essentially graced in the west by liberal multiculturalism and secular tolerance. Indeed, in the western ethos, one’s deepest beliefs about God, nature, and the universe (and one’s self) are owned and sustained persons — free agents in their own lives — not their religious organizations (who may serve only at the pleasure of their subscribers), and not states.
In essence, I would cite Qanta Ahmed as the one (modern) “scholar more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”.
The problem is that not only to “BadDaddy and His Islamic Hate” but to others less obviously stuffed full of themselves and evil, Qanta Ahmed may draw also the moderate to plain nasty “takfiri”, those who accuse others of heresy or treason in relation to their idea of themselves within Islam.
Even in America, leading Muslim organizations and clerics bully with threats of ostracism those Muslims who dare to dissent. Old-guard ideologues, too, used to monopoly control, make it crystal clear to their Muslim critics: Take us on and we will make an example of you as a traitor to the Muslim community (the ummah).
Little more than a month ago, Arizona physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, who years ago embarked on a mission to keep separate “mosque and state”, found himself the target of a fellow of his own mosque, a chiding resembling, in my opinion, the hand-pat-to-cheek known to mafia worldwide.
A little leaning, I call that, a bit of “straighten up, boychick, and get with our program (or else)”.
Whatever it may be called, the incident was aggressive, uncalled for, and, for Dr. Jasser, discomfiting, and, indeed, he placed the best chosen plain word “bullying” in the title of his article.
Is there or is there not “no compulsion in religion”.
A grammatic switch in Islamic culture pits loyalty against integrity, validates lying for gain or power (look through this lens when you visit or revisit the screeds associated with the middle east conflict), and the good who by definition possess integrity find themselves on the outs in their own community of legacy.
We’ll get around to differentiating between the pleasing — and pandering — notes of a language and bedrock human universal wisdom, but for now, while “BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate” burn, rape, murder, and plunder their way around the Iraq-Syria back of beyond, it may bear suggesting that one was the real Islam, emulated in anachronist attitude, dress, language, and ritual, and the other a nascent up-to-speed, modern and progressive Islamic Humanism.
It’s not that one shouldn’t have to choose between Ahmed’s way and Baghdaddi’s blood and horror-filled statement, but that the choice, much less the encouragement to retrogress, should not be available at all.
However, today, that choice is available and “Syriamania” and “Prison Islam” and “Islamic Jihad”, which is just not about good medicine or much good anything else but the jihadist’s immense and unbridled ego and penchant for sadism — see this blog’s pages on “malignant narcissism” and “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” — are all real and but a handful of leaders have risen to turn the dismal tide.
Fahs emphasized that he backed the so-called Arab Spring from the very beginning: “I am human, I am Muslim, I am Lebanese and Arab, and I want reformation because our call for reformation includes liberation from tyrants, our call includes a renaissance which is free and not extremist in accordance with the framework of Islam.”
One friend who has pursued her own course in conflict and Islamic studies suggests that al-Qaeda represents the authentic Islam and all else are trying to wriggle through it or reform and revolutionize its cultural technology. In that the Ummah is as broad and varied as one might expect a natural human system to be, Muslims on many paths have become the first victims of “those” Muslims, and, indeed, out of themselves must come the army that defeats the past.
While it surprises me that Baghdaddi has gotten as large as he has — he has the basics: an ample treasury and believing or compliant troops — what is coming for him and his followers may surprise him.
Regarding the psychological character of the tropes of Jew hate, I use the term “paranoid delusional narcissistic REFLECTION of motivation”. Their language is their sheet of music, and no attack on any physical body amounts to anything without effort to get in the way of that poetic programming.
One hopes the “radical” (conservative) mosque message finds repudiation among the believers of a more modern cast, but the conservative kafir-side endorses a rightfully cautious paranoia: the speech presages a well-known, well-witnessed fascist evil.
The political program works probably works about the same way for the modern political and religious authority as it may have for Muhammad himself: it deeply manipulates and exploits the believing. While Hamas, for example, places noncombatants as shields against Israeli strikes at its war making facilities, Khaled Mashaal works the levers from his billionaire’s safety in Doha, his wealth having come out of treating the residents of Gaza as a business enterprise.
One could travel from one Botherhood-promoting Muslim autocrat to another and find pretty much the same canards and abetting political and social structures in place.
Just when I think I’ve picked up enough material on ISIS for a while and this post should end . . . it doesn’t. Sadly, what’s reported seems but fragments from the surface of an infinitely dark and devouring machine.
To cruise the various hashtags that ISIS and its advocates frequent is to be appalled. There, in photograph after photograph and video after video, men, women, and children are herded into ditches and shot dead. Decapitated and impaled heads are ten a penny. One especially harrowing video shows a man screaming as his head is slowly severed. If the intention is to scare potential victims in the Middle East, it will undoubtedly be working. But these things have also found eyes in the Pentagon, in American newsrooms, and — crucially — among voters across the United States. One wonders if, by broadcasting its misdeeds so explicitly, ISIS is ultimately signing its own death warrant.
Much to the horror of the city’s adults, children and teens in masks, carrying guns, are becoming an increasingly common sight on Mosul’s streets. NIQASH meets ISIS’s youngest recruit – he’s ten years old – and asks the city’s youth why they think it’s so glamorous to fight for the Sunni extremist group.
Pope Francis has expressed his “disbelief” and outrage at the violence suffered by religious minorities in Iraq. Reports said Islamic militants, Isis, have resorted to beheading children and burying them alive including women for refusing to convert to Islam.
Women and children have been buried alive in mass graves by the fanatics terrorising Iraq, it was claimed last night.
Up to 500 members of the ancient Yazidi sect have suffered the appalling fate, according to an Iraqi minister.
Fighters from the Islamic State group are also accused of kidnapping 300 women to use for sex or as domestic slaves.
Some 150,000 Yazidis fled their homes after the militants overran their main town of Sinjar in northern Iraq last week.
The fresh claims of horrific atrocities will add to pressure on the West to take further action to halt Islamic State’s relentless expansion through Iraq.
“In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses,” he added. “This is a vicious atrocity.”
Given that Iraqi security forces still need time to ramp up and Iraqi politicians need space to form to form a more inclusive government to whittle Sunni support for ISIS, “this is going to be a long-term project,” Obama said from the White House South Lawn.
Analysts and U.S. officials estimate ISIS has as many as 10,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, including those who were freed from prisons by ISIS and Sunni loyalists who have joined the fight as the group advanced.
Kobanê Canton Health Minister Dr. Na’san Ahmed told KT in a telephone interview that seven local doctors carried out post-mortem examinations on the bodies of two Kurdish YPG fighters recently killed by ISIS and that they found traces indicating “they were killed by ISIS using chemical weapon.”
Individuals suspected of violating Sharia law or opposing ISIS, including children as young as 8 years old, are abducted and transported to prisons, where they are flogged, tortured, and summarily executed. . . .
Things grew darker from there. As the first week bled into a second, new captors showed Lawand a list of YPG soldiers and officials who were members of his family, and asked him to confirm it. He pretended not to know the familiar faces on the list. That’s when the gentle attitude of his captors changed. Lawand was taken to a former regime prison with other kids who refused to cooperate.
“We are the generation that stays quiet about political corruption, favoring political correctness instead. We pride ourselves in sticking up for the underdog while throwing our friends and allies to the dogs.”
(8/8/2014)
However you get the news . . . you get it.
Hamas hasn’t a human program or a prayer to offer anyone. Its officers have made themselves millionaires (actually, Khaled Mashaal is a billionaire) on the way to dealing death to their own constituents, including 160 children recruited for the construction of their tunnels.
Of ISIS, one only finds worse things to mention — rape and rapine all the way to attempted genocide, Shiites, Christians, Yazidis, and anyone else just because and as it strikes BadDaddy’s fancy.
Talk about the “Hamaside” and “Muslim Botherhood” . . . .
WASHINGTON — U.S. warplanes made a second wave of airstrikes Friday in northern Iraq against the militants who have besieged a religious group and threatened the city of Irbil, a Pentagon official said.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, spokesman for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, said the second wave of strikes used a drone to attack a mortar position while four FA-18 fighter-attack planes hit a seven-vehicle convoy outside Irbil.
That fanaticism may be rooted in a decontextualized and literal reading of the Qur’an, the will to express power by definitively superseding other religions while obtaining absolute control over the lives of others and their assets and otherwise productive energies.
That the Islamic enterprise either contains or has enabled this political program should go without saying; the extent to which the main body either abets, enables, or impedes the progress of “Islamist” elements is arguable. Egypt, for example, reversed the course of the Brotherhood (in Egypt), which handily proved itself anti-democratic and unconcerned with practical and progressive governance; the appearance of the “Islamic State” in Iraq appears to have met either widespread Sunni cooperation or plainly insufficient resistance north of Baghdad despite the development of a military vastly outnumbering the fighters within the incursion.
The comment responded to Adnan Oktar’s latest deploring Islamist aggression in the middle east and Muslim failure to protect Christians and Christian assets in the region: http://www.weeklyblitz.net/2014/07/christian-church-middle-east/ – 7/15/2014.
In relation to my assertion about a “decontextualized and literal reading of the Qur’an”, fate would have me post the following prior to the above:
How ISIS thinks: ““We haven’t given orders to kill the Israelis and the Jews. The war against the nearer enemy, those who rebel against the faith, is more important. Allah commands us in the Koran to fight the hypocrites, because they are much more dangerous than those who are fundamentally heretics.” http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/.premium-1.605097 – 7/15/2014.
Is the Islamic State’s reading of the Qur’an valid or invalid?
If the interpretation is invalid, what are the proofs supporting that position?
While the world may be uncomfortable with the projection of the Islamic superhero who defends all that is “truth, justice, and the Islamic way”, to parody another well known trope, it may prefer a little bit of that to the mindless cruelty of the cookbook Islam whipped up by the host of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that have expressed their presence in the world through blooms of blood and horror.
What I attempt to address, in general, is a deeply feudal intellectual environment and system that subjugates and destroys humanity by promoting and sustaining in its place the ruthless force that is the will of tyrants.
There’s portal enough right here for covering the region from “narcissistic mortification” to “malignant narcissism” to “narcissistic supply”.
We may not fully understand how or why fascists develop their “popularity” through the subjugation and sadistic control of their minions, but they do, and while events on the ground play out, some will circle these processes in mind — and processes in political psychology — to continuously draw down the reach and scope of that deeply anti-human, anti-God, and anti-social but globally distributed behavior.
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