Vacuums Inviting Chaos
"The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing."The confidence of representing the Almighty himself who has instructed his faithful how they must act, and in so doing there is no action they will engage in that will not reflect his divine message of ultimate conquest to capture the world in the tentacle of obedience and submission to Islam, motivates and emboldens and entitles the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to their enterprise. In the process horrifying the civilized world by their fearsome lack of moral inhibitions of humane constraints.
The Atlantic
Intelligence experts point to the vacuum created when Middle East and North African states fell into disarray with the brief and aborted advent of secular, socialist and moderate Muslims attempting to bring some civil accountability to the governments that ruled them and misruled them, oppressing and disentitling them. The reaction to these mass appeals was uniform, immediate and violent, leading to the breakdown of any agreement between oppressed and oppressor.
Resentment, anger and violence created greater divisions between Islamic sects. What was left was tribal and clan imperatives. Endemic poverty gave opportunity to Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic State to make inroads in popular Muslim opinion when they delivered basic civic necessities of life, giving them a springboard to authority and a support from the base. The dysfunction of non-state militias creating their own legitimacy followed.
What the civilized world tends to forget, to overlook, to purposefully not notice is that actual states, totalitarian in nature and expressing their full dedication to the same kind of Islamist ideals formally enact very similar acts of grotesque punishment toward those who dare to question their authority. If there is one positive aspect in the upheaval within Islam of factions and sects and tribal wretchedness it is that while Islam is at war with the world, it is also at war within itself, seeing apostates and assaults to its legitimacy as the voice of Islam on the part of deviants and heretics.
ISIL came to vibrant, malign life in the swamp of the Middle East's corrupt, tyranny-laden nations ruled by uncompromising tyrants. It has branded itself as the new Islam, the Islam reborn in the image of the original introduced by the Prophet Mohammad whose battlefield exploits, conquests, mass slaughters and sermons to the faithful through direct command from Allah, give legitimacy to the Caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It is not that ISIL came into being as an antidote to the desolation of oppressed and debased Muslims.
ISIL exists to force its own reflection of the purity of Islam upon an unprepared world. The dissolution of Syria, a quasi-functioning dictatorship that oppressed the majority of its population and when that majority implored they be viewed more favourably, spurring the regime to favour arrests, torture, rape, and slaughter represented a full demonstration of Muslim dysfunction, the sects raging in hatred toward one another, each declaring the other invalid, assaulting Islam's principles.
If Islam ever did truly exist as a civilization in its golden glory years of European occupation when the arts and sciences were explored and Muslims were capable of creative leaps into the future, they collided with the reality of the immutability of a religion whose rigid immobility resisted enlightened mutations in step with the future. That Islam was and remains hostile to the very concept of human rights since only Allah is entitled to any rights; mere mortals must serve unquestioningly at the whim of a 7th Century progenitor.
It is that Islam that Islamic State exemplifies and glories, and attracts to its side honour- and martyrdom-seeking Muslims bored with life as a convention reflected by the normalcy of civilizational ideals.
Labels: Barbarity, Civilization, Islam, Islamic State, Jihad
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, April 23, 2016
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