Like communists of yore, the soldiers of the caliphate are seeking to ‘exacerbate the contradictions’ of those ranged against them.
PARIS — Saudi King Salman bin Abdelaziz sounded at once angry and plaintive as he marked the end of this blood-drenched month of Ramadan.
The so-called Islamic State, ISIS, had just staged attacks in three Saudi cities, hitting near the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, a Shia mosque in Qatif, and even a mosque in the holy city of Medina.
Two days before, a car bomb in Baghdad and the fire that followed had killed more than 250 people. Before that, attackers in Bangladesh slaughtered Western patrons and locals at a popular Dhaka café. Days earlier came the stunning attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, and before that the murder of a husband and wife from the French police in front of their 3-year-old son in a Paris suburb. Still earlier: the horrific slaughter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the ISIS spokesman and second in command, had declared Ramadan a time of “conquest and jihad.”
“Get prepared, be ready… to make it a month of calamity everywhere for the non-believers,” he said in a recording released in May. But as usual, most of the slaughter targeted other Muslims.
King Salman, “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” vowed this week to meet these threats with “an iron fist,” as of course he would. But his statement acknowledged the heart of the problem with a more original and more memorable phrase: the “biggest challenge,” he said, is how to keep young people away from the “masterminds of misleading ideas.”
Salman also called for Muslim unity to face the ISIS menace. But given that the Saudis’ proxy wars with Iran from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq, in Bahrain and in Yemen are waged with sectarian vehemence, the king’s call for “Muslim unity” sounds oxymoronic, a true contradiction in terms.
The so-called Islamic State chooses its targets and tailors its terror to reach specific audiences. To do this, it tries, as communist revolutionaries once did, to “exacerbate the contradictions” among its rivals: build on suspicions, inflame resentments, inspire violence and repression that engenders more violence and rebellion.
In a global war of attrition, which is what we’re looking at, the key to defeating ISIS—aside from killing its operatives—is to resist absolutely and unequivocally its strategy using terror to divide and demoralize.
But that’s no easy feat. There are just so many contradictions in Arab and Western society, and ISIS understands them better, it seems, than many Arab and Western leaders do. Its “masterminds of misleading ideas” employ what the French call la polique du pire,a policy that provokes a society to turn on itself, aiming eventually to make the masses ungovernable, and daily life unbearable.
In the last few weeks, as ISIS has come under pressure on the ground in Iraq and Syria, its response has not been a blind, senseless lashing out. It has been a carefully calculated campaign using a wide array of available human tools, some of them acting under direct orders, some of them loosely affiliated, and some merely inspired to carry out mass murder against a backdrop of psycho-sexual confusion—but always serving the interest of the self-anointed “caliphate” that ISIS claims to be.
Let’s go down the list from this gruesome month of fasting, prayer and slaughter:
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