http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2015/02/22/isis-and-the-missing-christ/ISIS and the Missing Christ
February 22nd, 2015 - 2:32 pm
by Andrew Klavan
Like everyone else who cares more about the facts than his own opinions, I’ve recently read Graeme Wood’s excellent Atlantic article “What Isis Really Wants.” Those of you making do with excerpts and pull quotes, stop, and go read the whole thing. That it renders the president’s statements about ISIS absurd is the least of the article’s accomplishments. No one but a small coterie of leftist knuckleheads believes what Obama says on this subject anyway — though it’s unfortunate that the president himself is part of that coterie.
Among the many things in the piece that inspire thought is Wood’s reflection on the attractions of the ISIS ideology. The mass executions, the crucifixions, the enslavements, the oppressive religiosity and the war cry to a worldly disaster that will initiate the apocalypse — they are all drawing believers to the Islamic State from around the world. Wood himself felt the attraction, he says, while talking to ISIS supporters. He ends the article by quoting Orwell on the allure of Nazism:
Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
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