Like many other groups throughout history the leadership of ISIS is using religious fervor - think of the Crusades and how the Catholic Church and European monarchs preyed on the religiosity of their respective subjects as but one example - and extremism to further totally secular goals of seizing power and controlling territory. Yes, some may actually believe the poison they spew, but most likely use the guise of religion to recruit followers who can be used as canon fodder and/or recruited for suicide missions. Normal, sane individuals are generally not inclined to blow themselves up with bombs, but religious zealots and those they have brainwashed are another matter. A piece in The Nation looks at this horrible cynicism and the secular goals ISIS is pursuing under the smoke screen of religion. Here are highlights:
Terrorist
groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their
radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the
University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and
Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his
colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980,
evaluating over 4,600 in all.
He
says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a
tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their
fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide
attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to
overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in
an appearance on my radio show, Politics and
Reality Radio, last week.
According to
Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s
goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly:
What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military
This
view differs from that of Hillary
Clinton and others who believe that ISIS “has nothing whatsoever to do”
with Islam, as well as the more common belief, articulated by Graeme
Wood in The Atlantic, that ISIS can be reduced to “a religious
group with carefully considered beliefs.” It’s a group whose outward
expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling
resources and territory. Virtually all of the group’s leaders were once
high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.
Pape’s
analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured
ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have
difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the
caliphate,” she
recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even
superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of
fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam
for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”
Pape says that
it’s important to distinguish between ISIS’s long-term goals and its
shorter-term strategies to achieve them:
It’s about the
timing. How are you going to get the United States, France and other major
powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf when they have such
a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to do it. Bin Laden did
9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground army into Afghanistan,
which would help recruit a large number of suicide attackers to punish America
for intervening. We didn’t do that – we used very limited military force in
Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on was that we would send a large
ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out. And that turned out to be the most
potent recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so
than Bin Laden had ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.
Another theory
holds that ISIS—and Al Qaeda—set their sights on France in order to polarize
mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As University of
Michigan historian Juan
Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “The problem for a terrorist group
like Al Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not
interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much
less political Islam.” In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic
fundamentalists “can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on
the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political
identity around grievance against discrimination.” Pape says this analysis is also consistent
with his research.
In
Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want to
achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of the
West’s response to terrorism.
While far more horrible and violent, what ISIS is doing is but a variation of what the GOP has done for years now: using religious extremism and zealotry to rally ignorant voters - especially in the Bible Belt - to support Republican candidates who profess to honor "Christian values." Like the captured ISIS fighters mentioned in the article, most right wing Christians are woefully ignorant about the Bible and church history. Like their Muslim counterparts, they are played as fools and manipulated and encouraged to define themselves by hate and bigotry - and sometimes violence.
