When ISIS (ISEL or Islamic State) began its military
campaign in Iraq, they took almost half the country and I was very impressed.
That is not to say I would like them to win. Islamic oriented governments
almost never get along with Maoists or Marxists of any kind. They usually don’t
treat atheists very well. So I can’t really find myself supporting them at all.
Still I started to admire their clever military tactics. But
then came the beheadings. I can’t approve of executing a person who isn’t in
some way directly responsible for the problems of that rebel army. But such
killings aren’t rare in the Middle-east. The reaction of the US public to those
Americans being beheaded has not been helpful to anyone—especially ISIS. Before
the beheadings most Americans were uninterested in the ISIS problem. US
politicians who have invested so much into the Iraqi puppet regime knew they
had to do something. They ran their own propaganda campaign trying to convince
Americans that ISIS was about to send terrorists to the US and conduct 9/11
style attacks. If most people seemed skeptical, ISIS changed that. The
beheadings have infuriated many Americans and they now seem to support Prez.
Barack Obama’s war on ISIS.
As said by the characters in the movie Easy Rider, ‘they don’t get running scared’….’they get dangerous.’ After
9/11 some Americans got crazy and attacked Arabs and Moslems randomly without
finding actual connections between those people and what one group in the
Middle-east was doing. As the hype gets worse, I’m sure Arabs and Moslems are
bracing for similar attacks. I personally heard a man in a bar claiming (as if
he were some kind of expert) that Moslems here will not criticize or comment on
what such groups as al Qaeda and ISIS do. That is far from true.
So ISIS commits more beheadings and then plans actual
attacks in the US, Briton and now in Australia to shock people and make it
clear they see themselves as at war with those countries. But attacking
citizens only invites the contempt of the citizens of those countries. They end
up supporting their government’s war against ISIS. Most of us on the left
realize that it is really important to drive a wedge between a government and
its citizens. If people don’t realize our anger is at the government and their
imperialist policies and not the common people—we know that we are doomed to
failure.
So why doesn’t ISIS realize this? This is the failure of a
religious theocracy and its ideology. It is US against THEM—the Religious
against the infidels. Those who don’t immediately change their religions are
simply to be eradicated from the world around them.
A recent act of ISIS stupidity was their attacks
on the Kurds in almost every Middle-east country. That includes the
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The PKK is listed by the US as a terrorist group.
The Kurds in Syria have been working with Bashar al-Assad. So can ISIS do what
the PKK and Assad have not been able to do—get the blessings of the west. In
the next few weeks we will see if ISIS’s ridiculous campaign against the Kurds
back fires and reunite old enemies or if the US and its allies will stick to
outdated dogma that works against them just as bad as ISIS’s foul tactics and
policies.
-សតិវ អតុ
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