“the greater the hostility toward Muslims in Europe and the deeper the West becomes involved in military action in the Middle East, the closer ISIS comes to its goal of creating and managing chaos.”
“This is a strategy that has enabled it to confound far superior international forces, while enhancing its legitimacy in the eyes of its followers. The complexity of the French plot also suggests how successful ISIS has been at cultivating sources of support within the native populations of secular Western countries. Attacking ISIS in Syria will not contain this global movement, which now includes more than two thousand French citizens.”
“Indeed, ISIS’s theatrical brutality—whether in the Middle East or now in Europe—is part of a conscious plan designed to instill among believers a sense of meaning that is sacred and sublime, while scaring the hell out of fence-sitters and enemies. This strategy was outlined in the 2004 manifesto Idharat at Tawahoush (The Management of Savagery, tawahoush, from wahsh or beast, so an animal-like state), a tract written for ISIS’s precursor, the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda.”
“Here are some of its main axioms: Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the Crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.”
“To be effective, attacks should be launched against soft targets that cannot possibly be defended to any appreciable degree, leading to a debilitating security state: If a tourist resort that the Crusaders patronize…is hit, all of the tourist resorts in all of the states of the world will have to be secured by the work of additional forces, which are double the ordinary amount, and a huge increase in spending.”
“Crucially, these tactics are also designed to appeal to disaffected young who tend to rebel against authority, are eager for for self-sacrifice, and are filled with energy and idealism that calls for “moderation” (wasatiyyah) only seek to suppress. The aim is to motivate crowds drawn from the masses to fly to the regions which we manage, particularly the youth… [For] the youth of the nation are closer to the innate nature [of humans] on account of the rebelliousness within them.”
“Finally, these violent attacks should be used to draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into military conflict: Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and war by proxy until it fights directly.”
“Eleven years later, ISIS is using this approach against America’s most important allies in Europe. For ISIS, causing chaos in France has special impetus. The first major military push by the Islamic State Caliphate in the summer of 2014 was to obliterate the international border between Syria and Iraq—a symbol of the arbitrary division of the Arab and Muslim world imposed by France and Great Britain after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, seat of the last Muslim Caliphate.”
“And because the lights of Paris epitomize cultural secularism for the world and thus “ignorance of divine guidance” (jahiliyyah), they must be extinguished until rekindled by God’s divine radiance (an-Noor).”
“As with the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the 2005 London Underground bombings, what seems to be emerging from the fragmentary reports so far is that the Paris attacks were carried out by a loose network of family, friends, and fellow travelers who may have each followed their own, somewhat independent paths to radical Islam before joining up with ISIS.”
“But their closely coordinated actions at multiple sites in Paris indicate a significant degree of training, collective planning, and command and control by the Islamic State (including via encrypted messages), under the likely direction of Abdelhamid Abaooud (known as Abu Omar), “The Belgian,” a twenty-seven-year-old of Moroccan origin from Molenbeek, who is now in Syria.”
“most Europeans who are drawn into jihad are “born again” into radical religion by their social peers.”
“Yet the desire these young people in France express is not to be a “devout Muslim” but to become a mujahid (“holy warrior”): to take the radical step, immediately satisfying and life-changing, to obtain meaning through self-sacrifice.”
“Although feelings of marginalization and outrage may build over a long time, the transition from struggling identity to mujahid is often fast and furious. The death of six of the eight Paris attackers by suicide bombs and one in a hail of police bullets testifies to the sincerity of this commitment, as do the hundreds of French volunteer deaths in Syria and Iraq.”
“In Amman last month, a former imam from the Islamic State told us: The young who came to us were not to be lectured at like witless children; they are for the most part understanding and compassionate, but misguided. We have to give them a better message, but a positive one to compete. Otherwise, they will be lost to Daesh.”
“Some officials speaking for Western governments at the East Asia summit in Singapore last April argued that the Caliphate is traditional power politics masquerading as mythology. Research on those drawn to the cause show that this is a dangerous misconception.”
“The Caliphate has re-emerged as a seductive mobilizing cause in the minds of many Muslims, from the Levant to Western Europe. As one imam in Barcelona involved in interfaith dialogue with Christians and Jews told us: “I am against the violence of al-Qaeda and ISIS, but they have put our predicament in Europe and elsewhere on the map. Before, we were just ignored. And the Caliphate…. We dream of it like the Jews long dreamed of Zion. Maybe it can be a federation, like the European Union, of Muslim peoples. The Caliphate is here, in our hearts, even if we don’t know what real form it will finally take.””