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Islamic
State Atrocities: Products of 'Grievances'?
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your friends to like this.
While many have rightfully
criticized U.S. President Obama's recent assertion that the Islamic
State "is not Islamic," some of his other equally curious but
more subtle comments pronounced in the same speech have been largely
ignored.
Consider the president's invocation of the "grievances" meme
to explain the Islamic State's success: "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."
Obama's logic, of course, is fortified by an entire apparatus of
professional apologists who make the same claim. Thus Georgetown
professor John Esposito—whose apologetics
sometimes morph into boldfaced lies—also recently declared that
"The "primary drivers [for the Islamic State's violence] are to
be found elsewhere," that is, not in Islam but in a "long list
of grievances."
In other words and once again, it's apparently somehow "our
fault" that Islamic State Muslims are behaving savagely—crucifying,
beheading, enslaving, and massacring people only on the basis that
they are "infidels": thus when IS herds
and slaughters "infidel" and/or Shia men (citing
the example of the prophet)—that's because they're angry at something
America did; when IS captures
"infidel" Yazidi and Christian women and children, and sells
them on the sex-slave market (citing Islamic teachings)—that's
because they're angry at something America did; when IS bombs churches,
breaks their crosses, and tells Christians to convert or die (citing
Islamic scriptures)—that's because they're angry at something America
did.
Although the "grievance" meme has always flown in the face
of logic, it became especially popular after the 9/11 al-Qaeda strikes on
America. The mainstream media, following the Islamist propaganda network
Al Jazeera's lead, uncritically picked up and disseminated Osama bin
Laden's videotapes to the West where he claimed that al-Qaeda's terror
campaign was motivated by grievances against the West—grievances that
ranged from U.S. support for Israel to U.S. failure to sign the Kyoto
Agreement concerning climate change.
Of course, that was all rubbish, and I have
written
more
times
than
I care to remember about how in their internal Arabic-language
communiques to fellow Muslims that never get translated to English,
al-Qaeda and virtually every Islamist organization make it a point to
insist that jihad is an Islamic obligation that has nothing to do
with grievances.
Consider Osama's own words in an internal 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)
Conversion,
submission, or the sword is, of course, the mission of the Islamic
State—not alleviating "grievances."
Worst of all, unlike al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, from day one of its
existence, has made it very clear—in Osama's words, "with power and
determination, with one voice"—that its massacres, enslavements,
crucifixions, and beheadings of "infidels" are all based on
Islamic law or Sharia—not silly "grievances" against the West.
Unlike al-Qaeda, the Islamic State is confident enough to avoid the grievances/taqiyya
game and forthrightly asserts its hostility for humans based on their
religious identity.
Yet by slipping the word "grievances" to explain the Islamic
State's Sharia-based savageries, Obama apparently hopes America has been
thoroughly conditioned like Pavlov's dog to automatically associate
Islamic world violence with the word "grievance."
What Obama fails to understand—or fails to mention—is that, yes, the
Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and countless angry Muslims around the world are
indeed often prompted to acts of violence by "grievances." But
as fully
explained here, these "grievances" are not predicated on
any universal standards of equality or justice, only a supremacist
worldview.
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).
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