Hillary Clinton's Plan To Take On ISIS | Watch Nov. 19 Council of Foreign Relations Speech
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Hillary Clinton's Plan To Take On ISIS | Watch Nov. 19 Council of Foreign Relations Speech
For friends trying to understand fundamentally what's going on with ISIS, VOX shares an overview of the history of ISIS: a 15-20 minute read that is highly informative. AOC calls out three key paragraphs that are relevant to our understanding of the world and content strategy.
9 Questions about ISIS You Were Too Embarrassed To Ask VOX
The Apocalypse
ISIS's first obsession, though, is not the caliphate but the apocalypse. The group's leaders, by every indication, earnestly believe that their role is to help usher in the final days and the end of the world. McCants explained, in his interview with Williams, how this belief developed into ISIS's focus on building a state:
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Rape of Women
ISIS also promotes what the New York Times's Rukmini Callimachi called a "theology of rape": a vast infrastructure of sexual violence and slavery, with ISIS encouraging rape as not just a tool of war but a matter of daily life in the caliphate. Yes, this is its own awful recruiting tool, but it's even more than that: It's a way for both the group and its individual members to demonstrate power by associating sexual violence with victory.
Original Caliphates Centered on Religious Expression
For jihadists, the caliphates are the height of Islam's glory, the banner of a sort of Islamic nationalism. Framing your jihadist movement as the rebirth or continuation of the caliphate is a way of asserting the idea that all Muslims should be joined in one state, that they should be ruled by Islam (or more specifically, the jihadists' version of Islam), and that all other Islamic authorities and states are apostates.
The jihadists also promote the idea that because the caliphates existed a long time ago and were politically organized around Islam, they must have therefore been ultra-conservative theocracies. But that is quite simply false: At their height, the caliphates were centers of artistic expression and scientific development.
