Uh Oh, the Atlantic Says, "Islamic State Is Islamic, VERY Islamic"

What Will Obama, Josh Earnest Jen Psaki, and CAIR Have To Say About This?

Liberal brains are spontaneously combusting across the land.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs ... 

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. 

Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamd Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut. 

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. 

In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse. 

The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam. 

To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” 

To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”) 

But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away. 

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

GO READ THE WHOLE THING. 

Great stuff.

However, I have one immediate criticism. The article talks about ISIS as if it is different in kind from Al Qaeda, that ISIS wants a return to a set of 7th century precepts, while Al Qaeda is/was somehow modern.

Simply not true.

Al Qaeda was willing to use modern materials to wage Jihad. But Al Qaeda is/was sponsored by the Talliban, an organization which is every bit as backward as ISIS.

ISIS is more effective in taking over actual territory.

HOWEVER, that is mostly the fault of United States foreign policy.

Essentially, what we have done over the past 14 years is go into Islamic countries and soften them up for the taking.

ISIS is only seizing the opportunity we have provided.

If we would beat these people into absolute submission, and then outlaw Islam completely, staying behind and instituting a new set of laws, based upon a Constitution which absolutely forbade Islam, Jihad, or Sharia in any form whatsoever, then these territories would not be ripe for the picking.

But whatever.

At least the Atlantic, a liberal magazine, is acknowledging Obama is full of shit.

Oh yeah, and Fuck CAIR.

Fuck 'em in the ass.