Quote of the day—Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims.

Graeme Wood
February 2015
What ISIS Really Wants: The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
[H/T to Sebastian.

Everything I read in this article is consistent with what I have read elsewhere about Islam. This includes but is not limited to the following books:

Read the Atlantic article this QOTD came from. It will take you less than an hour and you’ll know 100% of what you need to know to make good decisions about them and 80% of what you need to know to understand them.—Joe]

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5 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Graeme Wood

  1. So you’re saying then, that the jihadists are among those who wish to Fundamentally Transform America.

    And thus we come to my thesis, which is that there is an undeniable, natural affinity between the current American Left and the jihadists, in that both groups hate America as founded, and they both very much wish to transform Her.

    “America’s Chickens Coming Home to RoostTM”, and all, meaning Wright (Obama’s long-time pastor, personal friend, and if I’m not mistaken, Godfather to at least one of the Obamas’ children) and the jihadists both believe we deserve it, that if other people around the world hate America enough to kill random American civilians en masse it is because they have valid reasons.

    And if anyone has read this much without getting it; I’m saying that the enemy is not only among us, the enemy is currently in charge of much of our government at the highest levels.

    Meanwhile, the biggest challenge facing the Republican Party right now involves finding the best ways to marginalize, disavow, and work around their conservative voter base.

    American conservatives and libertarians are now being referred to by this administration and its American allies as would-be, or incipient, “terrorists”, and there are steps being taken to deal with that “threat”. The Republican Party, being the unprincipled, vacuous cowards that they are, have no interest in joining that targeted group, I’m thinking. One is left to wonder what they’ve been told behind closed doors, when no one is listening.

  2. The Left has always hated America. Whenever Western Civilization has an enemy, they apologize for it, appease it, justify it, propagandize in favor of it, and whitewash its behavior with an unending river of lies.

    Islam (you will note that I add no qualifiers to this warlike, barbaric religion that’s been at war with the rest of humanity for thirteen centuries) is only the latest. Prior to them, it was the USSR.

  3. Related note: Norway decided to deport Muslim immigrants with criminal convictions or ties to violent groups like ISIS. They deported less than six thousand, total, in a nation of several million. http://qpolitical.com/norway-just-deported-824-muslims-every-american-needs-to-see-what-happened-next/
    Their crime rate dropped by 30%.
    Be interesting to see if other nations start doing the same.
    Target the problems, and the problems go away, and the would-be problems start to keep their heads down. Funny how that works out.

  4. I’ll read the article in the morning, but I suspect I’ll feel it’s fundamentally flawed if it doesn’t come to the conclusion that the only way to stop them is to. kill. them. all.
    I am always willing to reconsider my opinions if a compelling argument is made for another viewpoint, but I’ll be surprised if the author can present a more effective solution.

    • Robert Avrech has his doubts, too. I think the author may have a point, though. His argument is that ISIS has a built-in self destruct mechanism because its ideology requires absolute purity of its leader. In that, it is different from your average dictatorship like Russia or North Korea or Saddam’s Iraq — there, all that was necessary was for the massed to be sufficiently cowed. There may be a pretense of ideology but that’s not the glue that holds things together; brute force is. The article mentions a bunch of things the leader can’t do because it’s outlawed by his ideology, and his followers are zealous enough that they’ll throw him out for that if he tries.
      So it’s quite plausible that the leader won’t live long. One risk is that, just as with Robespierre or the early Soviet union, the original ideologues may get killed and replaced by others who are even more ruthless but no longer ideological purists — people like Napoleon or Stalin. If that were to happen, the result would be just about as nasty as the current setup, but significantly more stable.

      Do read that article, in full, with care. There’s a lot of meat there and most of it is stuff I’ve never heard before. I have no idea what the author’s political leanings are; he does an excellent job of telling the story without showing any signs of having his politics affect what he says or how he says it.

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