Category Archives: Terrorism

Building trust: The high road for America

Once again in the news there’s another “peaceful protest” organized by various black activist organizations that’s turned violent.  This time it’s Baltimore, MD.  The Last Refuge blog extensively chronicles what they term the “black grievance industry” and noted the alarming ISIS hand signs being flashed by some protestors at the latest rally.  To really understand the spreading mayhem, I recommend reading:  STORM Handbook: “Reclaiming The Revolution (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement)”  – Published in Spring 2004.   Van Jones, one time Obama nominee to be the Special Advisor on green jobs and avowed Marxist, was one of the key architects of this STORM movement.    Valerie Jarrett, sitting right in the White House, has been a long-time Van Jones supporter.

With escalating racial tensions and ramped up attacks against the police and white people in general, don’t believe that the protests are in reaction to specific incidents.  In my opinion, what’s going on is black activist organizations, quite effectively, are using the STORM playbook to fundamentally transform America.  Along the road, many less radical groups and Americans will be duped into believing the rhetoric, but these will be just more useful idiots, who will be discarded when the “resistance” boils over to the “revolution” stage .  The press will be fed a diet of misinformation to keep them in line too.

To me, the most heartbreaking sight in this ongoing attempt to overthrow the system was seeing a photo of a little girl holding a sign: “Police, Public Enemy #1”  Rest assured, fomenting distrust and racial hatred are, part and parcel, at the heart of the Van Jones and his Marxist friends’ plan.  Most of America will be on the sidelines, because they are deliberately instigating their revolution within America’s failed inner-cities. This general plan of destroying America by creating a race war isn’t anything new, it’s been around decades and used by both white supremacist groups and black activists, using the same old divide and conquer strategy, that’s been around for millennia.  Spreading hate and distrust is the name of the game.  Sadly, we don’t see many Americans trying to bridge the racial divides by doing what it takes to defeat hate.  You’ve got to reach out a hand, refuse to hate and talk to each other.   Yep, we need leaders who will rise above the political posturing and work to build trust between all Americans.

I suggest reading the entire STORM handbook, but here’s where I think they’re at in their plan (pages 53-54):

Moving from Resistance to Revolution

Our commitment to communist politics didn’t give us any easy answers
about what we should be doing to advance a revolutionary movement
in this country. Other organizations with a Marxist analysis seemed to lack a practical program for building the kind of power needed to win
our people’s liberation.

Several of these communist groups emphasized the immediate building of the revolutionary vanguard party. They thought the party should
prepare to seize power when the people “spontaneously” rise up
during imperialism’s inevitable crises. We believed that these groups
had badly misassessed the real state of imperialism and of social
movements. They prematurely anticipated a peoples’ uprising (which
we didn’t see on the immediate horizon) while underestimating the
importance and difficulty of building power in oppressed communities
to lay the groundwork for future uprisings.

Other communist organizations – and many individual activists – were
questioning the possibility of a revolutionary movement ever succeed
-ing. They emphasized immersion in unions and mass struggles to the
exclusion of intentional work to develop a revolutionary movement.

We wanted an approach that resolved the contradiction between the
need for building immediate (and inevitably reform-based) power in
disorganized oppressed communities on the one hand and the need to
lay the ground work for the long-term development of a revolutionary
movement on the other.

To resolve this tension, STORM developed an innovative analysis about
the role of revolutionaries in a non-revolutionary historical period. We
called it “Moving from Resistance to Revolution.”

We concluded that the current period is one of “resistance,” not one
of “revolution.” We thought that the main work of revolutionaries at
such times should be to build resistance fights. These fights would build
power and consciousness in oppressed communities. But revolutionar
-ies must design and craft this “resistance work” so as to help lay the
foundation for the long-term development of a revolutionary move
-ment. As “conscious forces,” we thought that revolutionaries should
work intentionally to help the resistance movement mature into a
revolutionary one.

This “Moving from Resistance to Revolution” framework was STORM’s
attempt to negotiate the contradiction between reformism and ultra-

STORM’s Points of Unity
STORM’s primary unity was around the need for the “liberation and
solidarity for all oppressed people.” For us, this meant that our vision
had to draw on different progressive and revolutionary traditions in
order to address the different forms of oppression facing our people.
As we crafted our second Points of Unity document, six ideas formed
the core of a new, more robust political unity in the group:

  • Revolutionary Democracy:
    the belief that our movement
    will have to replace the falsely-democratic capitalist state with
    a truly democratic people’s government.
  • Revolutionary Feminism:
    the belief that women’s oppression is fundamental to this society and that we have to place
    “Sisters at the Center” of our struggle.
  • Revolutionary Internationalism:
    “the belief that white supremacy is a critical force impacting world politics, and tha
    Third World communities – inside and outside of the United
    States – along with white anti-racist allies need to work in
    solidarity build the power we need to overthrow the global
    system of white supremacy.
  • Central Role of the Working Class:
    the belief that, in order to defeat capitalism and other forms of oppression, the
    working class will have to play the central role in the revolutionary struggle.
  • Urban Marxism:
    the belief that the urban space was now
    the central site of revolutionary struggle, just as the factory
    and the point of production were in the days of Karl Marx.
  • Third World Communism:drawing on the revolutionary communist traditions from Asia, Africa and Latin America, including the recognition of the need for a disciplined revolutionary party rooted among oppressed people.

STORM believed that there were three main strategic tasks facing
revolutionaries in this non-revolutionary period: building an advance-
guard organization, promoting revolutionary ideas and building revolutionary people’s power.

We believed that we needed to help lay the groundwork for an
advance-guard organization to emerge as a future, more powerful form
of revolutionary political organization. Such an organization could help
promising militants to develop as revolutionaries. It could help mass
organizations develop practically and ideologically. And it could develop
and promote lessons and theories from the movement’s experience.

We also believed that it was the task of revolutionaries to promote
revolutionary ideas among oppressed and exploited people. As we did
this, we thought four methods of work would provide the best results:
“observation and participation” (gleaned from our study of the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense); “the mass line” (as described by Mao
Tse-tung); structured “political education”; and consistent “criticism/
self criticism” to help us constructively evaluate our individual and
group work (this we drew from both Mao and Amilcar Cabral).

Finally, we believed that revolutionaries had to build revolutionary people’s
power. We saw “mass organizations” – fighting organizations made
up of members of the oppressed and exploited sectors of society – as
the key to building this power. We believed that these organizations
would be the main instruments of change in the survival struggles of
this reform period. And, if revolutionaries could successfully use and
develop a revolutionary organizing model, these organizations would
become the main engines of the revolutionary peoples’ struggle.

We believed that these three areas of work would lay the foundation
for a transition from the current reform period into a more intense
stage of the revolutionary struggle

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Suggested Reading

Here’s a timely, helpful short primer on your road to strategic-thinking :

“Thucydides Was Right: Defining the Future Threat” by Dr. Colin S. Gray

Another LB post from September 2014:

“Let’s not keep shooting elephants to avoid looking a fool”

Here’s an excellent read (it’s a book available for purchase) on America’s role in the world from the late General William E. Odom, which offers some wise counsel on our present convoluted foreign policy:

“America’s Inadvertent Empire”

Here’s a short thought-provoking piece from Cora Sol Goldstein that appeared in the 2012 Autumn Strategic Studies Institute edition:

“The Afghanistan Experience: Democratization By Force”

What you might ask am I going to read to be prepared – well, I’m going to get back to finishing reading General John J. Pershing’s two-volume, Pulitzer-prize winning,  autobiography on his experiences in World War I – like building a modern fighting force from pretty much the bottom up (might be timely as our military is being dismantled by social engineering from President Obama, feckless leadership at the top, and over a decade of futile missions in the ME):

“My Experiences in the World War”

Of course, Dr. Gray recommends reading Thucydides, so I’ve bookmarked that too:

“The History of the Peloponnesian War”

For a daily rundown and analysis of the world’s hotspots, I recommend John McCreary:

“Nightwatch”

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Calling for a time-out to regroup

You want to see revisionist history, just watch this 5:43 minute FOX News video of Senator John McCain bloviating on what we should do to “defeat” ISIS.  For every foreign crisis, McCain’s answer is to send arms or American troops/trainers.  McCain bashed the Obama administration for walking away from Libya after Qaddafi was executed, leaving a gaping power vacuum.  But the “coalition” air campaign in Libya was sold by McCain and Madame Secretary Clinton based on a pack of lies and half-truths – there was no imminent humanitarian crisis.  There also was no democratic political opposition waiting in the wings to turn Libya into some oasis of democracy.  What was in Libya were violent Al Qaeda affiliates, many of whom traveled to Iraq to fight Americans and whom Qaddafi was cooperating with America on fighting.  McCain met with Gadaffi ,a partner in the war on terror in 2009, but as soon as Secretary Clinton beat the war drums in 2011, he did an about face.

In Libya, as in every other American intervention since 9/11, we didn’t have any real follow-on plan, so John McCain is right there, but he skips the part that he was part and parcel of selling the air campaign to oust Gadaffi, which allowed these jihadists to capitalize on the power vacuum we  helped create.  He did not have any plan to offer for the aftermath – he never does!  He can be counted on to get on TV and do this saber-rattling routine, “arm them, send trainers,  we need boots on the ground, blah, blah, blah…”  You can expect Lindsey Graham to follow-up the charges of  President Obama doing nothing to defeat ISIS and angrily demand “action”.

Frankly, I’m sick of the misguided, reckless, foreign policy pontifications  coming from top leadership in both parties.  Secretary Clinton ratcheted up the Libya campaign based on a bunch of fear-mongering claptrap – not solid intelligence on the ground.  Senator McCain hired the lying piece of O’Bagy- age after she got sacked from the Institute for the Study of War.  Just who is Ms O’Bagy, former captain of the Egyptian women’s soccer team, self-professed Syrian expert, fake doctorate degree holder?  We don’t know her background, just like we don’t know the background of Clinton sidekick, Huma Abedin.  We now know Secretary Clinton had Sid Bluementhal providing her intelligence on her private email server, which raises question about the source of his intelligence, the vetting of that information and what role her private sources of intelligence played in her decisions.  Senator McCain has Elizabeth O’Bagy to decipher the forces on the ground in Syria for him (Lord, help us all).  In the White House, the President appears to have handed over the reins of power and the adult responsibility of making the tough decisions to Valerie Jarrett, while Ben Rhodes gets tossed talking points from which to concoct soap operatic “narratives”, which serve in the place of facts.

In Syria, Assad went from Hillary’s “reformer” and John Kerry’s  “friend” to some madman butcher in Damascus.  We’ve been regaled with demands to arm the “moderates” – ahem, in this brutal civil war, we’ve still got “experts” on that hunt for illusive moderates…  That said, shut-up already about sending more troops, training Iraqi troops (who would suggest this crap after we dismantled Saddam’s army and spent years unsuccessfully training Iraqi  security forces???), arming more rebel bands of who-the-hell knows whom they really are (let’s agree, it’s doubtful they’re moderates).

First let’s talk about what are the US interests in the region – make a list and explain why it’s a US interest – convince me, an average American citizen.  Next tell me who are America’s allies and adversaries in the region and then break down the remaining factions and players into some groups and define who they are.  Then give me a real intelligence assessment of the refugee crisis and how that will complicate security across the region for decades and be a destabilizing factor for the foreseeable future.  Tell me about the multitude of factions and who their enemies and allies are (be careful here, sides switch frequently, so by the time we arm and train a group, they might have switched sides, carting our weapons with them and willing to use those weapons against us).

What happens if we defeat ISIS – we’re back to the same thing – another power vacuum.  We need some end game plans before we aid, arm, bomb, “defeat” anymore “evil-doers” to help “freedom-fighters” .  A strategy based on reality, not pipe dreams and wishful thinking would be nice.

Senator McCain is right about President Obama “leading from behind”, but to lead from the front requires us to first define our American interests and our long term goals in the region.  To reach some consensus on our American interests, it would behoove our political leaders to pick up some books on the history of the region and get to understand the complex political dynamics there.  Then, America, as a wanna-be world leader, if I were in charge, well, I’d put on my big girl panties, and open direct, frank talks with the leaders in the region and with other world leaders – heck pick the 4 other permanent members of the UN security council for starters.  To date, we’ve seen John Kerry choking in his own swirling Syrian sandspout of overblown rhetoric and the Russians rescued him by intervening with Assad.  Lately Kerry’s been bowing to the mullahs in Iran so much he’ll need a top-notch chiropractor to straighten his spine, but perhaps growing some backbone is a futile effort.

What we have not seen is America offer anything in the region that has improved regional stability since 9/11.   Our policies (well-meaning in intent) have resulted in catastrophic regional instability and everywhere we’ve added more fuel (military aid, both weapons and/or troops) is more unstable, more factionalized  than before we got involved.   Perhaps it’s time to take a deep breath and do some deep soul-searching on what it is we are really trying to do in this region, define what our American interests are, what we can feasibly do to help stabilize the region, and find ways to put a damper on this raging inferno rather than tossing more fuel onto it.

Here are some of my ideas on the big picture strategic objectives for America, maybe, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and other American leaders could start explaining how they see America’s role in the world:

https://libertybellediaries.com/2013/06/18/global-zero-another-nothing-burger-plan/

https://libertybellediaries.com/2013/05/29/the-mom-world-peace-solution/

https://libertybellediaries.com/2013/06/20/paving-the-path-to-peace/

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Hail to the chief….

More “hope and change” news:   “Army morale low despite 6-year, $287M optimism program”

About the optimism program:  Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness

Not enough cheery news,  how about  “Amid chaos, Al-Qaida consolidates hold of Yemen province” and “Dempsey: US Focusing Airstrikes to Protect Beiji Refinery”]

You can place about as much faith in the Obama not-quite-a-strategy as you did in his 2011 statement:

” Referring to the threat from al-Qaeda operatives, he said: “We have cut off their head and we will ultimately defeat them.””

or how about:

Sadly, some say, while others do and the JV team keeps demonstrating that when they say, “heads will roll”, ahem, they do….

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All in for “moderates”

Here’s a piece, “State Department Wanted to Engage ‘Moderate Jihadists’ in Libya“, by Patrick Poole over at PJMedia worth reading.  It’s from a few days ago – still timely though.  Poole always includes many links to back up his points, so check out those too.  The Obama administration far surpasses the Bush administration on willful ignorance about America’s enemies in the Muslim world, but this determined delusion persists that, “if” only we engage and recruit “moderates” among the rat nests of Islamist zealots, then this will provide the indigenous force multiplier we need to defeat the more violent practitioners of the religion of Peace.  Yep, our “experts” remain as indoctrinated as the enemy…

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US begins airstrikes against Islamic State in Tikrit, supports Shiite militias | The Long War Journal

US begins airstrikes against Islamic State in Tikrit, supports Shiite militias | The Long War Journal.

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A city-by-city Iraqi mirage

This morning JK sent a link to an article written by Craig Whiteside at War On The Rocks, “Mosul: A Bridge Too Far?”.  This article presents an excellent background history of the factions and dispels the mythological sudden appearance of IS/ISIL/ISIS with a very detailed chronology of how radical Islamist elements aligned in the region surrounding Mosul had local support going back much further than last year when ISIL broke into the western media’s consciousness.  Whiteside states:

“The narrative that Mosul was invaded from Syria by a small number of militants last summer who managed to drive out a corrupt security force supports the idea the ISIL has shallow roots in the area and can be pushed out with moderate effort. As I argued here at War on the Rocks last December, that narrative only tells half of a story. Mosul’s fall last year was less telling as an indicator of the collapse of an occupational army than a measure of ISIL’s true and longstanding strength in the area. It was a tipping point and a shift that better explains why thousands fled from mere hundreds of insurgents. ISIL has had a strong presence in Ninewa (Mosul’s province) ever since Fallujah’s clearance in late 2004 left Mosul as the unofficial capital of ISIL.”

Whiteside’s phrasing using “the narrative” descriptive as more magical myth than detailed, fact-based chronology explains much of the problem with our understanding of IS/ISIL/ISIS and the political lay of the land among Iraq’s many tribes and factions.  The city-by-city strategic plan of defeating the Islamic State seems poorly thought out and a very costly endeavor in not only materiel, but also in lives.  Our press does a terrible job at asking questions and the laziness at actually digging for answers leads to these lapses in understanding  not only  foreign affairs, but also domestic affairs too.  We live awash in reports, experts, and intelligence. Yet, it seems our intelligence agencies don’t communicate and they definitely don’t collate the information available, then carefully assess their working theories or analyses to incorporate the new information.  So, we have these Mike Brown gentle giant myths and this ISIL magically appearing type understanding of the situations.

I’m adverse to escalating military intervention in Iraq (or anywhere in the ME) until there is a complete rethinking of our big picture foreign policy objectives in the region, a careful analysis of the situations on the ground in the various countries (especially the collapsing and failed states).  Then, the U.S. should carry out intense, serious diplomatic discussions with the players in that region and beyond, to include sitting down and talking to Putin and the Chinese about the ME chaos.  This pushing to make retaking Iraqi cities, the metric by which  “defeating ISIS” is judged, is totally idiotic!

That massive hyping by politicians and the press on the battle for Kobani set the stage for this myopic strategy.  By the time Kobani was “won”, what the hell did it matter – the “city” was mostly abandoned, demolished and a pile of rubble.  It made me think of that Vietnam era quote: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”, Peter Arnett reported as a quote from an unnamed U.S. officer.  Sun Tzu, my favorite military strategy book, mentions both avoiding battles in cities and also avoiding so much destruction:

“1. Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.”

The War On The Rocks article includes informative links worth reading, which explain the strategic issues more clearly.  One link, “Stop Looking For The Center Of Gravity”, by Lawrence Freedman, highlights a serious problem in American military strategic planning, where we look for points to attack (center of gravity) and deliver a blow that will topple the enemy.  What we miss in this way of approaching our strategic planning is the most basic big picture strategy, which Freedman explains:

“So the wrong question to ask at the start of a campaign is “What is the enemy’s center of gravity?” The term should henceforth be banned. What should be put in its place? My suggestion may appear anticlimactic and banal. I would pose a simpler, more straightforward question: “What is the position you wish to reach?””

Fighting the Islamic State in cities, where the civilians are forced to flee, the city is reduced to rubble and the combatants, as in Kobani, are two brutal terrorist entities, while western reporters watch and cheer the Kurdish PKK liberators left me wondering what they were cheering about.  The alarming refugee numbers in Syria, Iraq and in many other Islamist battleground locations add up to failed states and ruined lives.  Too often men get so entrenched in fighting and winning that they lose sight of the bigger picture of “at what cost to the people who live there?”  That is an important question that our leaders need to consider.  Yes, defeating IS/ISIL/ISIS is important, but that band of loons is just one component to this whole big Islamic Ascendency civilizational crisis.  Without a big picture understanding and then a comprehensive strategy to address the larger Islamic civilizational crisis, we are wasting lives, money, and time chasing windmills. 

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GMD breaks down the Islamic threat (a must read)

Policy is a worldview. Intelligence is the real world, a wilderness of untidy facts that may or may not influence policy. When Intelligence fails to provide a true and defensible estimate, a clear picture of threat, policy becomes a rat’s nest ….

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More answers to why jihad

Two articles worth reading on the religion of Peace and violent extremism are at the American Thinker today.  First up, “Please Read the Koran” by Edward Thal offers up a short analysis of what he learned by reading through the Koran twice.  Then, Shoshana Bryen wrote, “NYPD had  it Right a Long Time Ago”,  countering the Marie Harf/John Kerry argument that what jihadis need is more job opportunities and for us to address their greivances.

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#Nothing-burger Plan

JK posted a must-read link on my last post: “Why the Iraq Offensive Will Fail” by Michael T. Flynn, retired US Army  Lieutenant General/former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  Flynn clearly articulates the threat and steps to take to defeat the enemy, but first let me quote him from this politico.com article:

“Yet to defeat an enemy, you first must admit they exist, and this we have not done. I believe there continues to be confusion at the highest level of our government about what it is we’re facing, and the American public want clarity as well as moral and intellectual courage, which they are not now getting

 There are some who argue that violent Islamists are not an existential threat and therefore can simply be managed as criminals, or as a local issue in Iraq and Syria. I respectfully and strongly disagree.”
Flynn continues:

“We, as a nation, must accept and face the reality that we and other contributing nations of the world are at war, and not just in Iraq. We are in a global war with a radical and violent form of the Islamic religion, and it is irresponsible and dangerous to deny it. This enemy is far broader than the 40,000 or so fighters in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. There also exists a large segment of this radical version of Islam in over 90 nations abroad as well as here at home. Just ask those countries from which foreign fighters are flowing into the Levant to support this “jihad.””

The entire Flynn article is a must read, as he lays out steps he feels we must take to defeat. not only the Islamic State, but the broader fight against adherents of a violent and radical form of the Islamic religion.  In the Cold War we battled a virulent communist ideology and in WWII we fought virulent forms of totalitarianism.   Sadly, many, out of religious tolerance ingrained in our American psyche, tiptoe around the threat posed by radical Islam, perhaps better called Islamic Imperialism, where the stated goal is to annihilate all non-Muslim peoples and establish an Islamic Caliphate to rule the world.

Listening to “experts” analyze Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda for over a decade, well, I often thought certain opinions got cherry-picked as the definitive summation, while often, it seemed like many “experts” weren’t even really listening to what Al Qaeda spokesmen and Bin laden were saying in their numerous communiques.  When individuals or groups of individuals repeatedly declare war on your country and fellow countrymen, it’s wise to take them seriously, yet far too many of the “experts” consistently tried to whitewash the religious elements to these declared “holy war” edicts from Al Qaeda.  Likewise, the Obama administration spends more time trying to conjure up straw men (right-wing, domestic sovereign citizen hordes) threats to play cheap partisan one-up-manship games with a threat emanating from a large number of Muslims’ interpretation of Islam.

 Whitwall, a poster at Malcolm Pollack’s blog, offered this very fascinating article, “European Colonialism is the Only Thing That Modernized Islam”, by Daniel Greenfield.  Greenfield offers some thoughts to ponder as the West struggles to understand the “religion of Peace”:
“The problem isn’t that ISIS is ‘medieval’. The problem is that Islam is.

What progressives mistake for modern Islam, whether while touring Algeria or on the campus of their university, is really an Islam whose practice has been repressed by the West while its ideology remains untouched. Modern Islam is in a state of contradiction. It’s a schizophrenic religion whose doctrine calls for supremacism but whose capabilities prevent it from exercising the full measure of its doctrines.

Islam is the 90 lb. weakling that wants to be the school bully. It can’t punch you in the face, so it stabs you in the back and then blames someone else. When you punch it back, it plays the victim.

This split between ideas and power forced Islamists to resort to sneakier tactics, from terrorism to mass migration, to fulfill the spirit of their religion. The underlying imperative is to restore a conquering Islam capable of humiliating non-Muslims in Muslim lands and expanding into non-Muslim countries. That is why Saddam and Iran pursued weapons of mass destruction. Why Muslim armies tested themselves against Israel. Why Al Qaeda built a decentralized terrorist network with cells around the world.”

To add to our ISIL/ISIS/IS reading plan today, let me add one more article, not sure if JK or Malcolm posted this link, but I came across it somewhere in my internet travels: “What ISIS Really Wants”, by Graeme Wood at The Atlantic website.  Wood offers a meticuously detailed chronology of how ISIS developed and he offers this view on ISIS being truly Islamic:

“The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”

And now we have our own US State Department effort – a newly unified Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, under the directorship of Richard Stengel, whom you may listen to speaking to an NPR reporter about the new strategy here.  He stated they’re looking for “credible new voices” (like Muslim Imams opposed to ISIS, former Islamic terrorists, etc.).  In other words, our government once again is on a search for illusive “moderate Muslims” to aid our fight, so expect this effort to work out as well as the search for those illusive “moderate Syrian rebels”.  And for those who want to say the administration is on the ball, catch this part in a February 16, 2015 New York Times report, “U.S. Intensifies Efforts to Blunt ISIS’ Message”:

““We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,” Richard A. Stengel, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, said by telephone on Monday. Until now, he said, the efforts to counter ISIS could have been better coordinated.

Many of the plan’s details are still being worked out, but administration officials are expected to describe at least its broad outlines during three days of meetings, sponsored by the White House and beginning Tuesday, intended to showcase efforts underway in the United States and abroad to combat what the authorities call violent extremism.”

In case you missed it: :Many of the plan’s details are still being worked out” , in other words, President Obama once again announced another #nothingburger “plan”.  Want some fries and Heinz ketchup with yours John Kerry?  Never fear though, those cheerleaders at the US State Department have their hashtag signs and tweets ready to fight the Islamic State….  One, two, everyone #Yes, We Can….

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