Posted: 19 Aug 2014 08:05 AM PDT
Know your enemy. To
know what ISIS is, we have to clear away the media myths about ISIS.
ISIS is not a new phenomenon.
Wahhabi
armies have been attacking Iraq in order to wipe out Shiites for over two
hundred years. One of the more notably brutal attacks took place during the
administration of President Thomas Jefferson.
That same year the Marine Corps saw action against the Barbary Pirates and
West Point opened, but even Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Howard Zinn
chiming via Ouija board would have trouble blaming the Wahhabi assault on the
Iraqi city of Kerbala in 1802 on the United States or an oil pipeline.
Forget the media portrayals of ISIS as a new extreme group that even the
newly moderate Al Qaeda thinks is over the top, its armies are doing the same
things that Wahhabi armies have been doing for centuries. ISIS has Twitter
accounts, pickup trucks and other borrowed Western technology, but otherwise
it’s just a recurring phenomenon that has always been part of Islam. Sunnis
and Shiites have been killing each other for over a thousand years. Declaring
other Muslims to be infidels and killing them is also a lot older than the
suicide bomb vest.
Al Qaeda and ISIS are at odds because its Iraqi namesake had a different
agenda. Al Qaeda always had different factions with their own agendas. These
factions were not more extreme or less extreme. They just had different
nationalistic backgrounds and aims.
The Egyptian wing of Al Qaeda was obsessed with Egypt. Bin Laden was obsessed
with Saudi Arabia. Some in Al Qaeda wanted a total world war. Others wanted
to focus on taking over Muslim countries as bases. These differences
sometimes led to threats and even violence among Al Qaeda members.
Bin Laden prioritized Saudi Arabia and America. That made it possible for Al
Qaeda to pick up training from Hezbollah which helped make 9/11 possible.
This low level cooperation with Iran was endangered when Al Qaeda in Iraq
made fighting a religious war with Shiites into its priority.
That did not mean that Bin Laden liked Shiites and thought that AQIQ was
“extreme” for killing them. This was a tactical disagreement over means.
During the Iraq War, Bin Laden had endorsed Al Qaeda in Iraq’s goal of
fighting the Shiite “Rejectionists” by framing it as an attack on America.
AQIQ’s Zarqawi had privately made it clear that he would not pledge
allegiance to Osama bin Laden unless the terrorist leader endorsed his
campaign against Shiites.
Bin Laden and the Taliban had been equally comfortable with Sipahe Sahaba and
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi which provided manpower for the Taliban while massacring
Shiites in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year LEJ had killed over a hundred
Shiite Hazaras in one bombing.
The narrative that ISIS was more extreme than Al Qaeda because it killed
Shiites and other Muslims doesn’t hold up in even recent history.
The media finds it convenient to depict the rise of newly extremist groups
being radicalized by American foreign policy, Israeli blockades or Danish
cartoons. A closer look however shows us that these groups did not become
radicalized, rather they increased their capabilities.
ISIS understood from the very beginning that targeting Shiites and later
Kurds would give it more appeal to Sunni Arabs inside Iraq and around the
Persian Gulf. Bin Laden tried to rally Muslims by attacking America. ISIS has
rallied Muslims by killing Shiites, Kurds, Christians and anyone else it can
find.
Every news report insists that ISIS is an extreme outlier, but
if that were really true then it would not have been able to conquer sizable
chunks of Iraq and Syria. ISIS became huge and powerful because its ideology
drew the most fighters and the most financial support. ISIS is powerful
because it’s popular.
ISIS has become more popular and more powerful than Al Qaeda because Muslims
hate other Muslims even more than they hate America. Media reports treat ISIS
as an outside force that inexplicably rolls across Iraq and terrorizes
everyone in its path. In reality, it’s the public face of a Sunni coalition.
When ISIS massacres Yazidis, it’s not just following an ideology; it’s giving
Sunni Arabs what they want.
Jamal Jamir, a surviving Yazidi, told CNN that his Arab neighbors had joined
in the killing.
ISIS is dominating parts of Iraq and Syria because it draws on the support of
a sizable part of the Sunni Arab population. It has their support because it
is committed to killing or driving out Christians, Yazidis, Shiites and a
long list of peoples in Iraq who either aren’t Muslims or aren’t Arabs and
giving their land and possessions to the Sunni Arabs.
The media spent years denying that the Syrian Civil War was a sectarian
conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. It’s unable to deny the obvious in Iraq,
but it carefully avoids considering the implications.
Genocides are local. They are rarely carried out without the consent and
participation of the locals. An army alone will have trouble committing
genocide unless it has the cooperation of a local population that wants to
see another group exterminated. When we talk about ISIS, we are really
talking about Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria. Not all of them, but enough that
ISIS and its associated groups have become the standard bearers of the Sunni
civil wars in Syria and Iraq.
Hillary Clinton and John McCain can complain that we could have avoided the
rise of ISIS if we had only armed the right sort of Jihadists in Syria. But
if ISIS became dominant because its agenda had popular support, then it would
not have mattered whom we armed or didn’t arm.
We armed the Iraqi military to the teeth, but it didn’t do any good because
the military didn’t represent any larger consensus in an Iraq divided along
religious and ethnic lines.
To understand ISIS, we have to unlearn many of the bad ideas we picked up
since September 11. Terrorists, the media tell us, represent some extreme
edge of the population. If they have popular support, it’s only because the
civilian population has somehow become radicalized. (And usually it’s our
fault.)
And yet that model doesn’t hold up. It never did.
The
religious and ethnic strife in the Middle East out of which ISIS emerged and
which has become its brand, goes back over a thousand years. If support for
terrorism emerges from radicalization, then the armies of Islam were
radicalized in the time of Mohammed and have never been de-radicalized.
Terrorism is not reactive. As ISIS has shown us, it has a vision for the
future. The Caliphate, like the Reich, is a utopia which can only be created
through the mass murder and repression of all those who do not belong. This
isn’t a new vision. It’s the founding vision of Islam.
What is wrong with ISIS is what is wrong with Islam.
We can defeat ISIS, but we should remember that its roots are in the hearts
of the Sunni Muslims who have supported it. ISIS and Al Qaeda are only
symptoms of the larger problem.
We can see the larger problem flying Jihadist flags in London and New Jersey.
We can see it trooping through Australian and Canadian airports to join ISIS.
We can see it in the eyes of the Sunni Arabs murdering their Yazidi
neighbors. ISIS is an expression of the murderous hate within Islam. We are
not only at war with an acronym, but with the dark hatred in the hearts of
men, some of whom are in Iraq and Pakistan. And some of whom live next door.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment