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Take a look — even if it’s just a quick glance –at Graeme Wood’s article on “What Isis really wants.” Not so much difference between Isis and Christian fundamentalists there within.
Ages ago, before blogs and at a time when many of us hung out with fellow commenters in chat rooms, I’d read the earnest efforts of fundies to justify their beliefs and found I’d formed a picture in my mind of what their “heaven” (that place all us carping secularists would never experience) looked like. In the foreground, a remarkably uniform green lawn on a sunny slope. Not a weed in sight. Up at the top is a Ford Explorer, clean and and shiny, parked in front of a storybook white house, halfway between McMansion and Cute Cape. Large trees all around.
Clearly everything was going to be okay in heaven. Be obedient to your Bible group and never worry about having to pay to replace your TV when it wears out. TV’s Biblical Bob the preacher would not expect you to go without his guidance coming at you from a suitably large screen. In other words, in heaven “faith” is all you need.
Of course, chat room heathens that so many of us are, we will be excluded, left behind, punished for our… our what? Well, our snobbery, our money, our apparent ease with power, our corruption, our liberalism, our tolerance of the foreign, maybe also our snide comments about snake-handlers and our dismissal of a weedless lawn as a sign of being saved.
ISIS appears to suffer from some of the same confusions. The paradise their extremists offer may not resemble our even slightly except for the way in which is constructed of one big negative: the people they get to exclude from its perks. That includes all the people chosen to have their heads sawed off.
The Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running), but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. Bin Laden rarely mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to presume that he would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine comeuppance finally arrived. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni families who look down on this kind of speculation and think it’s something the masses engage in,” says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who is writing a book about the Islamic State’s apocalyptic thought. During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the world. ...Wood,Atlantic
I think we helped to create ISIS. We would almost certainly be responsible for making things worse, not better, if we were to rush in there and start sawing on their necks. We’d surely be setting up a situation in which a new generation of young Muslims, radicalized, would aim their wrath and resentment at our grandchildren. Already they know more about us than we know about them.
This is all about bigotry and racism on both sides. Let’s not kid ourselves about that.
