DAASH: An “Islamic State?”

Interview with Shadi Hamidi,  Brookings Institute Fellow

By Geoffrey Cook, TMO

Editor’s note:  Geoffrey Cook is a TMO columnist.  His opinions are his own.

Washington–(As your journalist continues narrating this segment of the day-long questioning of the “Radicalization and the Politics of Alienation” in the current Middle East from here in the American Capital, the United States — along with its Arab allies — finally strike the pitiless “Caliphate” with their overwhelming airpower — near that “Medieval” [Syrian] capital of Raqqa.)

Your newspaperman would like to extend his current project on the seminar held in the District of Columbia at the office of the think tank, the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) on the ”Islamic State.” 

Your reporter will begin by relating the words of Shadi Hamidi, a Fellow at the Brookings’ Institute for Middle East Policy, and, then, relate his presentation to the activity of the hostilities of the previous week.

The State of Islamic can be grating, but constructive.  It should be accepting of multifarious dogmas.  Thus, ISIS (acronym DAASH in Arabic) is no more than pure Evil.  Strangely, ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has devolved heretically out of the construction that is Islam. 

The ascent of the Caliphate was predicted and predictable.  Dr. Hamid, who was born in Doha and is an expert on Islamism, felt the United States should have intervened in the Syrian Civil War during 2012.

In this War with ISIL (Islamic State in Syria and the Levant), has taken its civic duty to govern seriously.  Yet, there are “religious” police which has been less than acceptable to the governed.  IS (the “Islamic State”) have run their “nation” through a brutal but effective reign of terror.  As long as they enforce their malevolence, their decrees work, and this is the secret of the radical Salafi realm.  (Not all Salafis are guilty of the excesses of the “Caliphate,” though, but the misunderstanding of Salafi beliefs by individuals have led to this type of Extremism.)

Their “territory” encompasses about four million civilians over the square mileage of the geographical mass of Britain as of this at writing.

As can be perceived, a grossly different mode of Islam are being expressed from the norm.  Unfortunately, because they are using the word “Islamic” to describe their “State,” this leads non-Muslims to mistake the heretical for the true Islamic norm(s).

In governance, ISIS is more brutal but less arbitrary in their administration of Sharia.  In the autocratic nations within the Arab lands, law is enforced less arbitrary but more autocratically.  This makes it to defeat them, for, like he Taliban in the 1990s, they were to get a degree of loyalty from the “public” by bringing “order” to the landscape provided you were the right ethnicity who believe as they do.  Eventually, though, their viciousness alienated them from the populace.

One of the gravest disasters for the evolvement of Arab democracy was the coup in Egypt.  The (Islamist) Muslim Brotherhood had played by all the rules of an opposition party, but when it was able to claim the government on their own, they were overthrown.  If anything Islamist Democracy was (temporarily) destroyed; leaving the option of a Jihadic State attractive.  The option became Caliphate, and it became attractive to many young Muslim who were already alienated.  To those, the Islamic State had resonance.  Yet, through this modernized Caliphate, Islam, itself fell unjustly from the world’s grace.  Convocation of American Muslim scholars has declared this War violates the principle for Islamic War!

Previously, Hamidi felt this “State” was predicted and predictable this. (Today [the 24th]; a Frenchman was beheaded in Algeria.   Further below the Sahara, Boko Haram in Nigeria has declared itself to be part of the Caliphate.  How it differs from al-Qaeda which did not claim territory, it does.  This makes the battle from it much different.  As a State IS, it is bound by the Laws of War and human rights.  At the moment, it is no State because it has no humanity as President Obama said Wednesday.  Yet, as a State they can be attacked under those laws, and held up to those laws.)

Regrettably, ISIL – or a form of it will be with us in one form or another for a long time as the chief American target – who were not well known — because that small group was about ready to attack the Homeland.  Yet, are “we doing enough to stop them?”

The U.S. has been sprouting our anti-terrorism rhetoric for some time.  (At the same this country has been denouncing Assad, but this battle cannot be won without his government, yet he has been made into Satan itself, going back to the assertion of Arab Nationalism in the propaganda of Israeli national interests.  Recently, the fact underplayed, the United States has announced to Damascus their attacks beforehand.

(The other is Iran — whose demonization here, again, is due to the propaganda from Israel – we must make rapporchment together.  Sotto voce, Tehran and Washington have been coordinating with each other in this struggle already.  Australia will be deploying soon, and Westminster is declaring war formally on the 25th.

(The Americans and the French – along with the Iraqi and Syrian air forces have already established attacks.

(Most remarkable was the United /states and the Sunni powers –Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia  Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) divided in tandem against ISIS.

(The Shia and Sunni must unite to defeat this horror — much like Russia with America and Europe during the Second World War…

Dr. Shadi Hamid, remarking on his former allusion to a “Rhetoric of Terrorism,” We have to have a deeper diction.

Then, he concludes, with the American Right and Center, ask who the moderate Syrian rebels are?  (One such group is accused of selling an American prisoner to ISIS for their own financial benefits. 

That was the first one to be beheaded on video tape.

(It is true that the United States was fooled in training the moderate opposition, who, in turn, have turned up in the ranks of the IS “Islamic State.”

(More on this discussion next week.)

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