Saturday, November 21, 2015

What Does ISIS Want?

Interesting Article in Cracked:

7 Things I Learned Reading Every Issue Of ISIS's Magazine

Among other things calling them Daesh as Obama and his lackeys now do does not upset them:
On top of being OK with the "terrorist" label, there are many, many pictures in the magazine of captives they've beheaded, mass graves filled with massacred civilians, and tons of explosion porn. This stark honesty about the physical realities of the war they are waging surprised me for a while. Eventually, after dozens of articles, I started to understand: Every story of some terrorist attack or execution started with "thanks be to Allah for this" or some comment about how the tragedy was part of the "perfect will" of Allah. It's the same thing as the Westboro Baptist Church praising hurricanes and IEDs because, if God is all-powerful, then even awful and ugly things are God's will and, thus, to be celebrated. That's why every picture of jihadis at the site of some battle or terrorist attack has them pointing up at the sky:...

The warriors of ISIS are proud to be terrorists and proud to be brutal. And learning this has made the Internet crusade to convince people to call them "Daesh" seem extra dumb.
Daesh is an acronym for the original name ISIS fought under before declaring their "caliphate" (a formal religious-led Islamic state) and, so the argument goes, they just hate it when you call them that. But from what I can tell, ISIS doesn't seem to care much about that themselves. On Page 38 of Issue 4, they note that some Westerners call them Daesh matter-of-factly, without seeming to care much about it either way. It's never brought up again and barely comes off as an annoyance within the context of the article.

"They even imitated the nusayriyyah and secularist opposition by labelling the Islamic State as 'Daesh' and 'Tandhim ad-Dawlah,' in a manner precisely mimicking the satellite channels and palace scholars of Al Salul and Qat ..."

Attention Internet: People who celebrate pictures of civilians they've killed as well as pictures of their own friend's murdered corpses don't give a shit what you call them. I've heard it said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter. But the folks at ISIS don't consider "freedom" a good thing (they refer to themselves as "slaves of Allah" on virtually every page), and they are happy calling themselves "Soldiers of Terror" ...
As for what they want:
Dabiq is an area in Northern Syria where, according to prophecy, Allah will do the whole "pillar of salt" thing on the armies of the West. For that to happen, we need to actually put our armies in Dabiq first. One thing reading 11 issues of Dabiq makes very clear is that ISIS considers a future U.S.-led invasion to be inevitable. They view the regional powers around them as destined to fall and, when that happens, in rides Uncle Sam and out pops the apocalypse.

I am inclined to think that instead on boots on the ground, glass on the ground makes more sense.  Pretty much every civilian in the area is going to be raped, beheaded, or sold into slavery anyway.

3 comments:

  1. As I've said in other places, your faith in nuclear weapons is well founded.

    They are nasty, leave persistent environmental problems and just don't clear all that much land for their cost--both political and economic.

    OTOH things like Thermobaric weapons or the MOAB/GBU-43 are much less expensive (relatively) and can ruin even large cities if carefully deployed.

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  2. If they want some canned sunshine, I say give them canned sunshine.

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  3. http://www.amazon.com/Caliphate-Tom-Kratman/dp/1439133425

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