Ignoring The Islamic State

We can make the collective choice to turn our backs on what the Islamic State represents, but that decision must be a deliberate one made with full knowledge of the trade we are making.

The somewhat limp and always disappointing-to-me backlash against American involvement in a military action against theocratic fascists in Mesopotamia seems to me, looking at it in a generous light, to be solely driven by the desire to not continue sending our countrymen to die in the desert at the hands of people we probably wouldn't collectively be thinking or talking about if our soldiers weren't there. This is drawing an affirmative conclusion from a negative or unproved premise, namely that our soldiers being there is guaranteed to result in their death and that non-involvement will somehow insulate us from the developments in the region. It is inaccurately described as “war weariness” by our media, as if any civilian opining on military action from the comfort of 6,000 or more miles removed has the right to claim to be weary of combat. This is more of the same petulant and smug complaining from the comfortable set, weary of nothing but the intrusion of other people into their self-serving cocoons. Instead of choosing action based on well-reasoned and logical argument for non-involvement, it is a complacent and conciliatory trade we are engaged in with this growing horrorshow, just as a lifelong laborer trades wage for cartilage.

The ignorant and self-defeating proposition from the more fuzzy-minded among us would have you believe that groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda are somehow extremists, that their incredibly barbarous and backwards ideas and actions are a perversion or corruption of the horrific relic referred to unironically as a religion of peace instead of a fundamental command from their holy texts. The latter is obviously true, and denial of that fact in the name of tolerance is one of the more odious symptoms of the virus running unchecked through otherwise intelligent people who would like very much to allow for religious pluralism while simultaneously not being at war with those same religions. This proposition necessarily requires peaceful co-existence with groups of people who are told they have divine warrant for the wholesale slaughter of anyone from any other group. As you can see, this is an incredibly difficult endeavor to simply imagine, let alone achieve with the rapidity we require to avoid the worst outcomes imaginable.

I'm actually referring to a nuclear war, but this is still somehow horrifying.

The population of a group of true believers relative to the rest of us, especially when they are committed to getting what they want through violence, has never created an obstacle to one crackpot religion after another shaping us through force both culturally and politically. It must be unthinkable to us to forget what all religions of the world have done – the damage inflicted and civilizations lost forever – when they thought they could get away with it due to no secular resistance. Dismissals of the Islamic State as being a non-threat to America due to their geographic distance and perceived logistical shortcomings may be technically true for the immediate future, however those dismissals ignore the fact that diseased beliefs like religion spread very quickly in both a benign vacuum as well as under threat of death. The converts flocking in currently small numbers to the pretender caliphate are not only people with no futures from the region, they are people from tolerant and pluralist countries like the US, Australia, and Great Britain, where publicly speaking out against the threat Islam poses us is not yet recognized as common sense. Whether their group grows by the dozens or thousands by year's end, there is no amount of them small enough or geographic region isolated enough to be tolerable or judged to pose no threat to the rest of us. I argue that if left unchecked they will grow and expand outside Mesopotamia to pose a constant and credible threat to all nations, and they will do so waving their holy texts.

Just like these extras from "Conan" and their ghost horses.

Either the writings of the Qur’an and hadith are the divine delivery of mandate from the creator of everything through the Archangel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed or they are not. Within those writings are the mandates for the oppression of other peoples, the subjugation of women, the destruction of modernized civilizations, and the death penalty for apostates. If these instructions are the creator's divine word then these “extremists” are the only true believers getting it right, as it were, and our decision to pretend they're not Muslim is not only suicidally ignorant but incredibly disrespectful to their religious beliefs, which we claim to respect. On the other hand, if these mandates are nonsense dictated by an illiterate epileptic, which they are, what does that say about the parsing of real Muslims from false ones? And why, with the inability of influential mullahs and imams to issue a blanket fatwa against any kind of false crusade due to their religion, do we continue to pretend these actions are not recognized, promoted, and praised by the leaders of this sick and dangerous cult? I do not propose a false choice, and I do not see how any other conclusion could be reached.

Those other conclusions have an inordinate amount of 'splaining to do.

In anticipation of the immediately obvious rebuttal, that of the vast majority of people who profess the Muslim faith are peaceful and contributing members of society, perfectly wonderful human beings to all they meet, loved by puppy dogs and goldfish, let me offer this explanation. Every person I have personally met who claimed to be Muslim has been a genuinely warm and sweet individual, not including those whom I have met tangentially through debate. They do not want to kill me or anyone else, they are as furious at the actions of the Islamic State as I am with the added seasoning of shame and revulsion at what they feel is being done to their religion's reputation. Their wives and girlfriends speak openly, and I can see their face when they do so, and no one is missing any body parts. I can scarcely believe they're being honest with me about their faith. I again argue that if you are not adhering to the mandates handed down by the being you believe created you and will punish you for disobedience, on what authority can it be argued you are an adherent of that cult? If Allah told Gabriel to tell Mohammed to tell Muslims to kill apostates, and you're smarter than that, what need have you to still tie the noose of religion around your own neck? It should be cast off, as all the needs people fulfill with religion can be satisfied just as easily without it.

As illustrated here, in this poorly photoshopped metaphor.

On material costs. By postponing the extirpation of the Islamic State, we are actively delaying the reconstruction of a tragically and needlessly destroyed modern civilization that made irreplaceable contributions to the advancement of knowledge and humanity. This is a consequence that should cause any thinking person discomfort. We prevent the reconstruction of education and trade infrastructure, which the area is muddling through but can obviously use as much help and time as possible without ignorant savages blowing everything up. Postponing the stabilization of development of Mesopotamian oil supplies, which is approaching amounts unseen since the Hussein crime family controlled the region, strangles the financial benefits to both Iraqi and Kurdish people.

 Ignoring our pocketbooks for a moment, I want to explore what would result as the moral consequences of our decision. To begin with, we leave the peoples of the area who are powerless or ineffective at providing real resistance to the Islamic State at their mercy, which is a very grim thought if you mull it at all. The eschatology of Islam, along with all other religions, calls for the absolute end of all humanity. Total erasure of man from the face of the Earth at the time of (or to bring on) the second coming. Since these people proclaiming an Islamic State must have the primitive self-awareness necessary to understand how pitifully inept they would be at any kind of scientific or technological endeavor, they must outsource the brain power necessary to achieve their ends. Muslims educated at European and American institutions must go and help these savages with their work. The consequence of this, and no one can call it alarmist, is that every day we do not actively participate in the stabilization and reconstruction of the region we move one day closer to finding out what the religious will do with nuclear and biological weapons. This isn't news to anyone, but I bring it up to reiterate and reinforce that Islam calls for the extermination of all humanity to bring on the final judgement. 

Just in case you forgot what that will look like.

At that time, Mahdi the redeemer of Islam will come to Earth and team up with Jesus like some kind of post-modern Superfriends to do battle against the false messiah, whom they apparently have in common. Their inevitable victory will result in all of our deaths and the eradication of sin so that their ghosts may eat grapes and our ghosts may suffer eternally. As silly as all this sounds to anyone with half a reasoning mind, it barely begins to relate the sheer mindless nonsense the Muslim religion imparts to our enemies. The very real consequence of that nonsense, and our reward for trading in tolerance, is that as soon as these people get their hands on a way to carry out nuclear or biological attack on our civilization, they will.

Submission to Harpocrates

The self-imposed censorship when dealing with the murderous threats of our religious enemies is less a misguided attempt at retaining an imagined innocence and more our culture's inability to face a serious and fatal threat head on.

When the so-called "caliphate" that has imposed its noxious presence on Mesopotamia released a recording of the brutal slaughter of a non-combatant journalist, the immediate response of major media outlets was to omit access to the video entirely in their reporting, choosing instead to provide excuses that managed to be simultaneously groveling and self-aggrandizing. 

Their position argues that the dissemination of this recorded war crime (which they refer to as "propaganda") needlessly frightens Americans while providing encouragement and motivation to our enemies, thereby "helping the terrorists win." You will recall this dirge of a platitude from roughly 2004, the last time I can recall that level of childishly sniveling pseudo-psychology from our bastions of the fourth estate. Even if you choose to call the recorded slaughter of a civilian non-combatant sent to western civilization as a crowing threat propaganda, a descriptor which I find incredibly dismissive and diminutive in this case, we are swayed by that threat and not fulfilling our requirement as a civilized culture when we intentionally deny our citizens an opportunity to witness for themselves the horrific crushing force that nameless people half a world away face daily. Looking away, treating our sworn enemies as if they were schoolyard bullies that can be disarmed or dissuaded from hurting us by ignoring them, is an irretrievably fatal attitude.

The reactionary and mistaken argument that bearing witness to the vicious brutality of our religious enemies will bolster their credibility or respect ignores two simple points indicating the opposite to be true. No one thinks that these theocratic assholes are not serious actors in their region (not legitimate actors, mind you), nor does anyone think they lack the infrastructure and armament to accomplish their goals. The videos released by the "caliphate" therefore act as reminders and reinforcement, not as revelation. Consideration of what effect our reaction has on our enemies is entirely irrelevant in this case. Secondly, any kind of censorship ignores the irrepressible ability for people who want to see or hear something to seek it out, be they news addicts or the easily conned western jihadist, already planning on betraying both their community and their affiliation with humanity. Conversely, those of us who actively avoid graphic images from war zones are unaffected, as they would have no interest to begin with.

Regardless of the position taken by the major American media outlets, and independent of how many individuals choose to view the video in its entirety, our religious enemies are fervently slaughtering people from every subsection of humanity that isn't theirs. It may thrill them to hear that the spineless among us had our resolve crushed instead of steeled by this barbarism, but they're not sitting on their heels waiting for that news to arrive, nor would its arrival make them feel in any way understood or sated. 

Calls to censor and conceal the video represents a cowardly capitulation to our religious enemies on the part of the American media, as it shows we are willing to repeat the same reprehensible and indefensible mistakes engaged in during the Danish Mohammed cartoon incident. In that case, mindless and violent Imams cried without injury while threatening the rest of the world with violence if we should so much as look at a cartoon, which we spinelessly submitted to. Any kind of censorship is an assault on our first amendment, doubly so in the current case, when some external actor can cause us to voluntarily censor ourselves without so much as a request. Our culture's method of information gathering is now almost entirely visual. The idea of verbally relating an event when a video record of it exists is the kind of journalism better suited to a century ago. No interpretation of the first amendment requires or allows forcing people to watch anything they don't wish to, but any interpretation of it proscribes preventing or restricting the free flow of information.

Indeed, in our lifetime, the free flow of war zone information, images, and video have had huge impact. An increase in exposure to the engagement seems to herald its end, in my opinion. Following the cessation of conflicts, objective review of the timeline shows transparency and unfiltered images reaching the mass populace both beneficially increases our collective understanding of the location, consequences, and cost in lives while negatively affecting public support for the conflict.

We simply must know what we are up against. These people mean to kill us, one by one if they have to. And while they may not feel like the most proximate threat, our countrymen are defecting to their ranks in handfuls. The very real danger posed by the pretend "caliphate" is only going to grow until they are extirpated, and volunteering to cinch our own muzzle against them will be our collective future regret.