It's striking how they seem to be really going out of their way to make sure that their perception in the West is as extreme as possible. It's like they hired the most alarmist Islam-haters in the West as image consultants.
I guess that in addition to whatever truly held fundamentalist motivations they have, their strategic logic is that they want to destabilize the relationships between the U.S. and its Sunni Arab Gulf client states, and they think that provoking the U.S. to bomb them together with its Sunni Arab allies will do this. It's not a totally implausible story. Clearly, some of the Sunni Arab Gulf states are quite nervous about potential domestic blowback from the confrontation with ISIS. When ISIS says to the government of Saudi Arabia, "we're just like you, only we are actually acting out and sacrificing for the principles that you claim to espouse," they have a point, and a lot of Saudis know it. It's not implausible that such a dynamic could destabilize the Saudi regime. There's a fundamental contradiction in the Saudi regime's ruling ideology. The Saudi regime's line is: "we're totally committed to this extremist official Saudi version of Islam, unless applying it happens to conflict with self-perceived U.S. interests, in which case, nevermind." So one could say that the ISIS strategy - like Al Qaeda before it - is to intensify this contradiction. Maybe this would be a great time for one of those civil disobedience actions where Saudi women take their cars for a spin. Might be politically awkward for the Empire, eh? :) Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] (202) 448-2898 x1 On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Joseph Catron <[email protected]> wrote: > "In the newest issue of *Dabiq*, the English-language magazine published > by ISIS, the extremist group for the first time confirmed and justified the > capturing, enslaving, and selling of Yazidi women and children." > > > http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/isis-confirms-and-justifies-enslaving-yazidis-in-new-magazine-article/381394 > > I think it says multiple important things about ISIS that they publish *Dabiq > *in English. > > > https://www.scribd.com/doc/242722468/Dabiq-the-magazine-of-ISIS-justifies-Slavery-Rape-of-Non-Muslim-female-POWs > > -- > "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen > lytlað." > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > >
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
