The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (21 page)
Read The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Online
Authors: Robert Spencer
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #History, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #Non-Fiction
The authorities of the Islamic State clearly believe that devout Muslims want to see these gruesome videos because they’re documentations of how
ISIS is obeying Islamic law to the letter. Islamic State supporter Abu Bakr al-Janabi explains: “The beheading, execution in public are messages to ISIS enemies, but also part of Sharia law and shows that they implement it fully.”
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PREACHING TO THE CHOIR
Maybe it’s easier for our media to think the Islamic State media are clever because ISIS takes care to echo their own biases. In late 2014, the Islamic State’s slick propaganda included a multi-episode “news” program hosted by British hostage John Cantlie, a photographer and a friend of Prince William and Prince Harry, who articulated (willingly or not) the Islamic State’s view of the contemporary global situation. Cantlie’s analysis coincided perfectly with the Left’s preoccupation with the wrongheadedness of American military interventions, and with the lack of good sense and prudence in carrying them out—as the many Westerners now working for ISIS had to have known it would.
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Cantlie mocked “Obama’s under-construction army” against the Islamic State, pointing out (quite correctly) that the “moderate” Free Syrian Army that Obama had hoped would lead the charge on the ground against the Islamic State was an “undisciplined, corrupt and largely ineffective fighting force.” The British hostage called Obama’s response to the Islamic State “disappointingly predictable” (his colleagues in the Western media might have phrased it as “lacking in nuance”), caricaturing the American administration’s position as “America is good, the Islamic State is bad” and ridiculing Obama’s apparent belief that the Islamic State would be defeated and eradicated “using aircraft and a motley collection of fighters on the ground.”
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Al-Janabi added that the common perception that the Islamic State was made up of grim, humorless, bloodthirsty fanatics was false: “We are friendly! Unless you are an enemy, of course, I mean, just because people are in ISIS doesn’t mean that they go around on a killing rampage. They are humans, they laugh they joke, they goof with each other.”
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Not Just Media Savvy, but Technically Skilled
In January 2015, at the precise time when Barack Obama was speaking to the nation about cyber security, Islamic State hackers took over the Pentagon’s Middle East Twitter account. The hackers also took over the United States Central Command’s YouTube page, posting jihad videos there, and they added links on the United States Central Command’s Twitter page to “confidential data from your mobile devices,” and boasted, “ISIS is already here, we are in your PCs, in each military base. With Allah’s permission we are in CENTCOM now.”
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Two months later, as we have seen, the “Islamic State Hacking Division” (ISHD) published the names, photographs, and home addresses of a hundred members of the U.S. military, gleefully boasting:
O Kuffar in America, O You who worship the cross, O You Crusaders that fight the Islamic State, we say to you, “DIE IN YOUR RAGE!”, die in your rage because with the grace of Allah, The Islamic State Hacking Division (ISHD) has hacked several military servers, databases and emails and with all this access we have successfully obtained personal information related to military personnel in the United States Air Force, NAVY & Army . . . With the huge amount of data we have from various different servers and databases, we have decided to leak 100 addresses so that our brothers residing in America can deal with you.
Then came the obligatory Qur’an quotes:
O you who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you harshness, and know that Allah is with the righteous . . . (9:123).
Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them and satisfy the breasts of a believing people . . . (9:14).
And then the direct call to murder:
O Brothers in America, know that the jihad against the crusaders is not limited to the lands of the Khilafah, it is a world-wide jihad and their war is not just a war against the Islamic State, it is a war against Islam. These Kuffar that drop bombs over Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Khurasan and Somalia are from the same lands that you reside in, so when will you take action? Know that it is wajib [a religious duty] for you to kill these kuffar! and now we have made it easy for you by giving you addresses, all you need to do is take the final step, so what are you waiting for? kill them in their own lands, behead them in their own homes, stab them to death as they walk their streets thinking that they are safe, and remember that the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) said: “A disbeliever and a believer who killed him will never be gathered together in hell.” – Sahih Muslim – Hadith No: 4661
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Apparently the ISHD’s claim to have obtained the addresses from hacking “several military servers, databases and emails” was just propaganda. In actuality the information seems to have been garnered from publicly available sources online.
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But the fact that ISIS was able to hack into accounts owned by the U.S. military—and that someone claiming to be from ISIS also managed to break into the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the wife of a Marine who had served five deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan—was a disturbing indicator of Americans’ vulnerability to ISIS cyber attacks. The Marine wife, Liz Snell, whose social media accounts were
hacked in February 2015, seems to have been targeted because she had been interviewed for a story about the January hacks into the Pentagon and CENTCOM accounts. The hacker warned Snell—from her own Twitter account—“You think you’re safe but the IS is already here, #CyberCaliphate got into your PC and smartphone.”
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Why Join ISIS? To Win Friends and Massacre People
Western analysts differ on what makes ISIS so attractive to Muslims the world over, but one thing they’re sure about: whatever it is, it has nothing to do with Islam. Max Abrahms, a terrorism expert at Northeastern University, summed up the prevailing view when he said, “If you ask terrorists why they joined an organization after they have been in it, they will pair it with the official line of the group. But in reality they don’t join the group for that reason.” He said that Islamic State jihadis “would probably fail the most basic test on Islam.”
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So why do they join it? Here are some of the “anything but Islam” explanations Western “experts” have offered for why young Muslims join the Islamic State:
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Poor education:
the failure of “Arab education systems” in fostering an “us-versus-them mentality along ethnic, ideological, and sectarian lines, making youth vulnerable to external influence”;
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Joblessness and poverty:
“a lack of economic opportunities and weakened welfare systems”;
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Anger at oppression:
“bad governance” that “has created an entrenched feeling of injustice”; plus the “brutal clampdown” on the “Arab Awakenings”;
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Let down by Uncle Sam:
a lack of trust in the West.
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To redress injustice:
ISIS recruits feel “a sense of disparagement and discrimination, a not uncommon experience of many immigrants. And it can come from a sense that one’s brethren in faith are being humiliated and disgraced around the world.”
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The thrills, the chills:
ISIS recruits simply wanted to “belong to something special. They want to find something meaningful for their life. Some are thrill seeking, some are seeking redemption.”
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The Islamic State “provides these deluded young men and women with an adventurous trip.”
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To make friends:
“The general picture provided by foreign fighters of their lives in Syria suggests camaraderie, good morale and purposeful activity, all mixed in with a sense of understated heroism, designed to attract their friends as well as to boost their own self-esteem.”
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To help the downtrodden:
ISIS recruits “erroneously believe they are going out to help people. And they don’t think ISIS is doing anything wrong because they think ISIS is helping people in their sort of warped thinking.”
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Girls and guns:
“Sex is the most primitive assertion of one’s significance; it’s a means to perpetuate one’s name—and genes—into the future. Islamic State strategically uses it as a reward for aggression.”
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These were not mutually exclusive, and there was a measure of truth to many of them. Certainly it was thrilling to be caught up in the excitement of the formative days of the caliphate. Islamic State jihadi Abu Sumayyah said of life in the Islamic State, “Something is always going on—always bombings. By the time it gets to midday, you are in the midst of the fighting. Or totally peaceful day, shower, play some football, play with the lads,
football. So many Americans, so many Canadians, so many British guys—guys from all over the place, China, Indonesia.”
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Abu Sumayyah also offers some support for the idea that the Islamic State gained recruits because of Muslims’ grievances against the West: “Mainly my main inspiration to come to Syria was George Bush, Tony Blair, and the presidents of the West and their foreign policy towards Islam—Egypt, Kashmir, Sinai, Yemen, Afghanistan. Guantanamo Bay. Abu Ghraib.”
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When asked why they had joined the Islamic State, however, its recruits return again and again to the appeal of the caliphate.
Restoring the Glory Days
Abu Sumayyah also explained that a key element of what drew him to the Islamic State was the fact that it was a state: “ISIS was a state, not a group—it was an actual state. It runs the affairs of people, like any other state—American, British, French—ISIS is running as a state. It provides food for the poor—like shelter, clothing, charity, clean roads. It does everything a normal state does. Postal services. Everything the people need. This is what attracted me about ISIS. No other groups—al-Nusra, El-Aqsa Brigade, is doing that.”
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As far as Sumayyah and others who joined the Islamic State were concerned, Muslims had not had such a state since March 3, 1924. The Islamic State was a chance to restore the bygone glories of past caliphates and to reverse the catastrophe that the abolition of the caliphate had wrought upon the Muslim ummah.
“I was in a hotel, and I saw the declaration on television,” recounted Musa Cerantonio, an Australian convert to Islam who has frequently exhorted Muslims to work for the restoration of the caliphate. “And I was just amazed, and I’m like,
Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?
”
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He is still stuck: Australian authorities confiscated Cerantonio’s passport to prevent him from traveling to join the Islamic State.
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BUT THAT WAS WHEN THEY RULED THE WORLD
A year before the Islamic State declared its caliphate, in June 2013, Mohammed Malkawi of the pro-caliphate organization Hizb ut-Tahrir expressed common sentiments among jihadis when he blamed the abolition of the caliphate on a conspiracy of infidels: “After Islam had reached the peak of glory and the Muslims were masters of the world, there came a time when the infidels conspired against the Muslims, who were in a deep slumber. Britain conspired against them, along with Arab and Turkish collaborators and traitors, and ended the Islamic Caliphate and its glory.”
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But with ISIS’s proclamation of the caliphate on June 29, 2014, it was finally time to recover that glory.