Daesh aka ISIL aka ISIS is the enemy of the United States,
of Canada, and of every Indian nation that occupies the same real estate. They believe they have been deputized by God to convert us or kill us and so our choices are converted or die. Most of us approach a disagreement threatening war as a different choice: Do we fight or do we talk?
Sympathetic Indians refer to persons in my profession as “briefcase warriors;” unsympathetic Indians offer less complimentary descriptions. I’ll plead guilty to having a predilection for talking over fighting. Even if my instincts didn’t swing that way, I’m too old for fighting.
But we cannot talk to Daesh.
This is not a slander. This is a straightforward description of their theology, to which we had better pay more attention than has been the case so far.
The colonists like to claim they came to North America seeking religious freedom, a load of bull that is taught as fact to the children in K-12. In fact, they came to North America seeking the “freedom” to oppress others for their religious beliefs. The oppression was visited not only-–or even primarily — on American Indians.
The poet John Greenleaf Whittier described religious freedom as understood in the colonies in How the Women Went from Dover:
The tossing spray of Cocheco’s fall
Hardened to ice on its rocky wall,
As through Dover town in the chill, gray dawn,
Three women passed, at the cart-tail drawn!
Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip
And keener sting of the constable’s whip,
The blood that followed each hissing blow
Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.
Alice Ambrose, Mary Tompkins, and Ann Coleman were Quakers from England and the established Congregational Church did not agree with their teachings. The three young women were whipped at cart’s tail though 11 towns, pulled naked from the waist up over 80 miles in the winter, receiving 10 strokes in each town.
Praise the Lord, I guess.
Some of the earliest colonists were Puritans, who treated Christians who disagreed with them very badly. You may have heard of the Salem witch trials?
After Martin Luther started the great beef with Roman Catholic corruption we now call the Protestant Reformation, the non-Catholics divided into personality cults behind various newly freed theologians. When those theologians were able to convert a ruler, they harnessed the power of the government to oppress other cults.
None of these theologies were quite as outrageous as Henry VIII starting the Church of England to satisfy his libido, but the result was not greatly different from the other half of the Great Schism, except in the east the fragmentation was around nations rather than individuals.
The Patriarch at Constantinople gradually lost central authority just like the Pope at Rome did and today we have Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and several more Orthodox churches still recognizing the Patriarch of Constantinople (now Istanbul) as first among his (always his) equals in Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
All of these monotheistic patriarchal desert cults purport to represent the One True God, but they only let up on killing each other over theology in a 1994 Irish truce between Catholics and Protestants brokered by President Bill Clinton. That truce has been surprisingly durable.
Indians have generally been bystanders in religious wars, although at times they were an issue — that is, sects would battle for conversion rights to Indian souls. The rivalry remains, but the killing stopped long ago.
Praise the Lord, I guess.
Daesh is, in terms of our interests, much worse. Their theology is an open book and that book is the Holy Quran, read as literally as some Christians read whichever translation of the Holy Bible their chosen gurus adopted in response to long-gone political exigencies.
One political exigency of our times is that Daesh believes there will be only 12 legitimate Caliphs, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the eighth. Their theology dates from before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and therefore they do not, as a matter of faith, “believe in” national borders that they are bound to respect.
There is only one border, and that is the one between The Caliphate and kuffars — that’s us, infidels. It is the duty of the Caliph to expand the Caliphate by force and, should he shirk that duty, observant Muslims are required to overthrow him — a process usually fatal — and install a Caliph who will do his duty. Part of his duty is to wage jihad at least once a year.
Mainstream Islam holds that “jihad” refers to a personal struggle for purification, but Daesh is to mainstream Islam as snake cults are to mainstream Christianity. The Prophet expanded the Caliphate by force and the life of the Prophet is to be emulated without regard to almost 1400 years of intervening history.
A tactical truce is permitted but it may not last more than 10 years. According to Daesh theology, an observant Muslim may not be a delegate to an international organization or vote or recognize any authority but the Caliph. The Taliban lost Muslim authenticity, according to Daesh, when they exchanged ambassadors with a few Arab states. Al Qaeda lost Muslim authenticity for — understand this — insufficient brutality, leading to what Daesh adherents believe to be modernist perversions of sharia just as evil as the imams who teach that the U.S. Constitution is sharia-compliant.
Daesh called their propaganda magazine Dabiq, after a city they paid a high price on the battlefield to occupy. Their theology teaches that the army of “Rome” will engage them at Dabiq. It’s ironic that these “scholars” who claim to follow the “plain language” of the prophecies cannot do so with the matter of “Rome” because the Pope, as Joseph Stalin famously said in more salty language, has no army.
The Prophet said,
The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
This is a saying Daesh honors in the breach. Religious fundamentalists are just as susceptible to gleaning what they want from sacred texts as the people they ridicule for doing the same. I used to hope some U.S. judges would discover these nutcases who read the Holy Quran the same way most evangelicals claim to interpret the Constitution, but those hopes have pretty much winked out after years of video beheadings.
Dabiq the jihadi publication told us what was going to happen at Dabiq the strategically useless city. They used to crow about being in charge in Dabiq because that fulfilled their warped prophecy — until the Kurds cleaned their plow.
Daesh is not gone and neither is their crackpot Caliph. They have just been set back to the days of kidnapping non-combatants and cutting their heads off on video.
Allahu akbar, I guess.
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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