At present there are thousands of young men streaming in to fight for the caliphate of ISIS/ISIL. They are all fired up to defend the values of Islam against the influence of the West.
So what are the things that are things that are attracting them? Well, as with all wars, there is the excitement and comradeship of fighting for a cause. There is also the desire to be seen as a hero, a real brave man, to do heroic deeds and be respected. There is the added attraction of sex. They can take their Jihadi brides, rape infidel women, and sate their sexual appetites in a way that would be impossible within the constraints of their culture.
ISIS is attractive because it is the Rock ‘n’ Roll of religion. The young men have freedoms they never dreamed of. They can kill, rape and destroy to their heart’s content. They don’t have to be content with chucking TVs out of windows, driving Rolls Royce’s into swimming pools or dynamiting toilets. They can do it for real with no limits and god not only sanctions it but gives them backstage passes in the bargain!
The only downside is that it isn’t going to last too long. Having your legs and nuts blown off, getting burnt, maimed and blown to smithereens by American, Russian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Jewish or Jordanian forces can be a slight negative.
The further shock comes later still when you see that your mutilated comrades do not die with smiles on their faces as they are lifted up to paradise by Allah to spend eternity with their allotted virgins.
What attracts the women to such a fate is a different matter.
What do you think?
The trouble I have with religion was illustrated very clearly by an article I read in the Guardian Newspaper regarding the Yazidi girls. These are Christian, which in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists means they are infidel unbelievers. When ISIS captured the Yazidi people they were instructed very clearly from their scriptures what was required. Allah wanted them to behead non-believers or convert them to Islam. Allah wanted these grown men to bind the young girls of ten or eleven, gag them and rape them. They could be used as sex slaves.
Now in our civilised world we would consider any grown men who tied up a young terrified girl of ten, gagged her and gang-raped her as being a depraved animals. If they used the excuse in court that they were merely carrying out the wishes of Allah that would be inexcusable. They would be rightly locked up for a long time as disgusting paedophile rapists and their actions considered more vile than anything Jimmy Saville had done.
Yet according to the Koran these things are permissible. Allah sanctions the beheadings, the terrorism and maiming of innocent people, the rape of young girls, the torture, the horrendous deaths, the cutting off of limbs, the destruction of pre-Islamic artifacts and the persecution of all non-believers. These are not perversions of Islam. They are contained in the scriptures.
The Koran is not unique. The Bible has similar gruesome and barbaric practices – particularly the Old Testament. There are instructions and sanctions for dashing babies heads against rocks, taking an eye for an eye and worse. Throughout history fundamentalists have focussed on the parts they wish to emphasise to sanction inquisitions, pogroms, crusades and the torture and burning alive of innocent people who simple disagreed.
Of course in the modern age where it is not considered polite to smash your next door neighbours baby’s brains out because they follow a different faith there has been a tendency for religious instruction to follow the ‘nicer’ texts. We are taught to love our neighbour, share our fish and turn the other cheek.
The hypocrisy, contradiction, blood, fire and intolerance is glossed over. But it is there.
These religious texts come from primitive cultures where misogyny, violence and retribution were the order of the day. They are seeped in it. It permeates the doctrine. When ever an extreme fundamental cult comes along they unearth the texts that support their doctrine and apply the dogma.
In Europe we had to fight for the enlightenment. It brought an end to centuries of religious tyranny with all its viciousness and augured a new age of science. We threw off the shackles of theocracy and separated politics from religion. It enabled a flourishing of science that has created all the wonders of the modern world from electricity to space exploration.
Without the enlightenment we would still be in the Dark Ages. Our women would be walking around in veils and we’d likely be riding about on horses. Now perhaps there is something to be said for that kind of society we see vestiges of in America with the Amish culture. They live happily without electricity, cars and modern conveniences. They wear quaint medieval costume.
Personally I’d prefer the choice and like my car, electricity and music.
ISIS, and other religious fundamentalist groups of all religions, are merely feeding off the sections of their doctrine that sanction their actions and justify their desires. They really wish to take the whole world back to the time of Mohamed, Jesus or Krishna and force everyone to live in that medieval culture described in those texts.
The problem as I see it lies in the basis of those religions. They were devised by men in a culture that was primitive and unpleasant. I do not subscribe to those values. I consider them flawed.
I wish to live in a world that has equality, tolerance, peace, freedom, respect, responsibility, justice, love and friendliness as its core values. I place caring, compassion and empathy as higher values, not just for people but all life and the planet. I value debate, differences and argument and deplore violence, hatred and cruelty.
That is why, without entering into any esoteric discussion regarding god, I reject all religion. As far as I am concerned all religions are outmoded, flawed and supporting a culture I despise.
The world has moved on and human beings, while still showing a great propensity for hatred, violence and callous cruelty, are a lot more civilised than we used to be. I would hate to see religion undo that.
There is nothing new about the use of terror as a weapon of war.
Alexander the Great used the tactics in his war with the against the Persians, way back in 332 BC. He was so furious at the way the fortified island city of Tyre held out against him, forcing him to waste much time and energy to defeat them, (it took months and he had to construct a causeway out to the island in order to capture the city) that he made an example of them. His idea was that everyone else should see what happened to people who resisted him.
He destroyed the city. Sold 30,000 into slavery and massacred 8,000 civilians. He had them crucified on the beach for everyone to see.
The message soon got round. Many came over to his side to escape his wrath and people were terrified to stand against him.
We can see the same tactics being used by ISIL. Nowadays they use social media to show mass beheadings, people locked in cars and blown up with rocket launchers, underwater film of people being drowned as they are slowly lowered into the water, people have their heads blown off with plastic explosive, being buried alive, thrown off high building, slowly crushed and people being burnt alive in cages. It is barbaric and gruesome, cruel, heartless and callous (and all in the supposed name of religion!) but, in the short term it is highly effective.
As with Alexander the Great it sends terror into the hearts of the enemy. Despite the fact that the Iraqi troops far outnumbered the ISIL troops ISIL have been able to take places like Palmira. The Iraqi troops were so terrified at the thought of what would happen to them if they were caught that they ran away.
In the long term it will lead to the utter annihilation of ISIL. The revulsion for their tactics will unite civilised people in opposing them. Even pacifist like myself are so repulsed by their primitive inhumanity that they want them, and their intolerant savage doctrine, eradicated. People will soon recognise that ISIL is not driven by religious conviction so much as megalomania and animalistic blood-lust. Their Jihadists are in it for the sex and excitement, the religious fervour is a sham.
Terror gives short-term advantage and a long-term heavy reckoning. ISIL’s days are numbered. The whole world has had enough of their evil.
Following David Cameron’s speech regarding the reason so many of our Muslim youth are turning to extreme, barbaric, violent ideology it is wise to look at the ways of solving the problem.
One of the main reasons identified for the turning to extremism was the lack of integration into British society and culture. Many Muslims felt excluded, threatened and marginalised. They did not know, accept or value the British values of tolerance, freedom and democracy. They felt themselves to be outsiders.
There is also the problem of indoctrination at a young age. Once an ideology is introduced at an age prior to the mind being able to assess its validity it is assimilated without being processed. This evil of indoctrination is pernicious.
Part of the answer is simple: shut the Faith Schools and Madrassas. We need our children growing up together with respect, tolerance and empathy. We need a shared set of values that goes across all faiths, races and creeds. We all need to buy in to the shared culture and contribute to its enrichment. We need inclusivity.
What we do not need is separation, isolation, differing values, and indoctrination.
If people are British they should be integrated. If they reject British values perhaps they should not be here. For Muslim children to be taken off after school to be indoctrinated is wrong. For Faith schools, including Hindu, Catholic and Protestant, to preach their ‘brand’ of religion to children too young to think is child abuse. It is as bad as the Creationists peddling their propaganda and distorted views to children.
Religion in schools is simply wrong!
Indoctrinating children is child abuse!
Education is a big part in the creation of shared values, integration, self-esteem, empathy, respect, thinking, civilised behaviour and a wider perspective. The evil suppression, misogyny, violence and barbaric intolerance of ISIS needs countering with a superior view of a harmonious, tolerant world.
Education builds a better zeitgeist.
I simply do not agree with the ridiculous idea that religion is somehow related to morally. I think ISIL, the Crusades, Inquisition, Pogroms and witch burning, to name a few of the atrocities carried out in the name of religion, put pay to any attempt to equate religion with morality.
Aldous Huxley – Time Must Have a Stop – 1944 – extract 2
This is another short extract from the novel ‘Time Must Have a Stop’ which Aldous wrote in 1944. It is also extremely revealing and still as pertinent today as it was seventy years ago – if not more so!
I completed a reread of this novel on the way back from London yesterday. It made me think.
He could be describing the hatreds, vengeance and continuing cruelty and bloodshed of the Middle East. Violence and atrocity breeds violence and atrocity. The hatred resounds down the centuries. The injustices are piled up in never ending heaps to fester down the centuries. Each new outrage is stored away for use when the opportunity arises.
Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza, Palestine, Kuwait, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Islamic State, the USA, Britain and the rest. One after another in a plethora of inhumanity, bigotry and unending revenge.
Here’s what Aldous had to say way back in 1944:
‘And all those treasures of knowledge placed so unhesitatingly at the service of passion. All the genius and intelligence dedicated to the attempt to achieve ends either impossible or diabolic.’
‘All the problems inherited from from the last crusade and solved by methods that automatically created a hundred new problems. And each new problem would require a new crusade, would leave fresh problems for yet further crusades to solve and multiply in the same old way.’
Aldous Huxley – Time Must Have a Stop – 1944
This is a short extract from the novel ‘Time Must Have a Stop’ which Aldous wrote in 1944. It is extremely revealing and still as pertinent today as it was seventy years ago – if not more so!
It was as if Aldous was looking back through history, through all the wars, crusades, jihads, pogroms, revolutions and bloody massacres and then into the future.
We are that future and the picture has not changed. There are the same idealists, fanatics and idealists believing they can bring their own brand of utopia into being throught violence, cruelty and destruction.
Utopia never comes out of violence, hatred , power or greed; it comes from peace, love and happiness.
Strange isn’t it?
This is what Aldous had to say way back in 1944:
‘Silliness and murder, stupidity and destruction. And the motive was always idealism, the instruments were always courage and loyalty – the heroic courage and loyalty without which men and women would never be able to persevere in their long drawn suicides and assassinations.’
He might have been talking about the brainwashed armies of the Islamic State with their lust for war, revenge and wish to impose their views. He might have been referring to the suicide bombers, and the cruelty, greed and hatred that fuel their vicious campaign. He might have been referring to the intolerance, bigotry and perverted dogma deployed as the power seekers manipulate the fanatics.
The dirty work is always carried out by idealistic believers duped by the evil powerful. It was always thus.