Luke Ford

It’s silly to talk about Islamo-fascism and radical Islam. ISIS is Islam. Liberal easy-going Islam is not Islam. Islam is about conquering the world, by the sword if necessary.

From Edge.org: Scott Atran: Anthropologist, Directeur de recherche, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford. Author of Talking to the Enemy.

The latest round of ISIS-inspired attacks in Paris, “The First of the Storm” proclaimed by ISIS, the chaotic scenes on the streets, and the angry reactions provoked among the public are, are unfortunately, precisely what ISIS plans and prays for. For the greater the reaction against Muslims in Europe, the deeper the West becomes involved in military action in the Middle East, the happier ISIS. Its key strategy is finding, creating and managing chaos, as outlined in the manifesto Idharat at-Tawahoush (The Management of Savagery/Chaos, “tawahoush”, from “Wahsh = Beast, so an animal-like state).

Some principal axioms:

“Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the Crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.

So, hit soft targets that cannot possibly be defended to any appreciable degree:

Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach “moderation” (wasatiyyah) and avoidance of risk:

“[The] media plan… its specific target [is] to motivate crowds drawn from the masses to fly to the regions which we manage, particularly the youth… [For] the youth of the nation are closer to the innate nature [of humans] on account of the rebelliousness within them, which… the inert Islamic groups [only try to suppress].”

And draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire:

“Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.”

Ditto for France, the UK and other allies.

In “The Gray Zone,” a 10 page editorial in ISIS’s online magazine Dabiq, in early 2015, the anonymous author describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil, the Caliphate and the Infidel, which the “blessed operations of September 11” brought into relief. Quoting Bin Laden: “The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” with the actual “terrorist” being the Western Crusaders. Now, “the time had come for another event to . . . bring division to the world and destroy the Gray Zone,” of which the Paris attacks are in reality just the latest, ever more effective, installment.

Simply treating the Islamic State as a form of “terrorism” or “violent extremism” masks the menace. Merely dismissing it as “nihilistic” reflects a willful and dangerous avoidance of trying to comprehend, and deal with, its profoundly alluring moral mission to change and save the world. And the constant refrain that the Islamic State seeks to turn back history to the Middle Ages is no more compelling than a claim that the Tea Party wants everything the way it was in 1776. As Abu Mousa, the Islamic State’s press officer in Raqqa put it:” “We are not sending people back to the time of the carrier pigeon. On the contrary, we will benefit from development.”

Meanwhile, the Islamic State is reaching out wherever a state of “chaos” or “savagery” exists, to fill the void (over 700 hundred Saudi fighters alone in recent months according to evidence Saudi leaders presented to me in August). Where there is insufficient chaos it seeks to create it, as in Europe. It conscientiously exploits disheartening dynamic between the rise of radical Islamism and the revival of the xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that are beginning to seriously undermine the middle class—the mainstay of stability and democracy—in Europe in ways reminiscent of the hatchet job that the communists and fascists did on European democracy in the 1920s and 30s. The fact that Europe’s reproductive rate is 1.4 children per couple and so needs considerable immigration to maintain a productive workforce that can sustain the middle class standard of living—at a time where there has never been less tolerance for immigration, and which is another situation of chaos that the Islamic State is well-positioned to exploit—is a godsend for the movement.