- FrontPage Magazine -
http://www.frontpagemag.com -
Authors of New Book: ISIS Beliefs Mainstream, Derive from Saddam
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 8, 2015 @ 8:38 pm In The Point | 7 Comments
According to Obama, Kerry and co. ISIS is a death cult, but not Islamic and is just a bunch of crazy nihilists unconnected to Islam. However according to the people who actually know what they’re talking about…
The authors of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror”, published this month in the US, spoke to dozens of fighters and members of the group to understand its allure and how it justifies its brutal tactics.
In a telephone interview with AFP, one of the authors, Syrian-born journalist Hassan Hassan, said it was vital to understand that some of the group’s core religious beliefs were widely shared.
“It presents itself as an apocalyptic movement, talking about the end of days, the return of the caliphate and its eventual domination of the world,” said Hassan, who lives in Abu Dhabi where he works as a researcher for a think tank.
“These beliefs are not on the margins — they are absolutely mainstream. They are preached by mosques across the world, particularly in the Middle East.
“ISIS takes these existing beliefs and makes them more appealing by offering a project that is happening right now,” he said, using an alternative name for IS.
But surely all we need is some Twitter hashtags and lectures on “real Islam” to talk them out of this?
“I keep hearing this argument that you can fight ISIS with propaganda, that this is an information war.
“But they have combined religion, geopolitics, economics and much more in their ideology. It’s not a fragile ideology — it has mass appeal.”
How could Obama possibly be wrong about this? If the left is wrong about ISIS, maybe it was also wrong about Saddam?
The authors also depict IS as the revenge of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime more than a decade after the late Iraqi dictator was thrown out of power.
Most of the top IS decision-makers served either in Saddam’s military or security services, the book says.
Although the Baathists were originally a secular movement, Saddam introduced a “Faith campaign” in the 1990s that sought to Islamise society.
“Very few people have focused on the impact of that campaign,” said Hassan.
“It radicalised many Baathists and they combined the violence of the regime with that of jihadism, making them even worse than Al-Qaeda.”
Of course Smart Power Liberals know that only stupid people think Saddam had anything to do with Islamic terrorism. Never mind the Baath bigwigs working together with ISIS.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine:
http://www.frontpagemag.comURL to article:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/authors-of-new-book-isis-beliefs-mainstream-derive-from-saddam-hussein/
