Paris attacks: Islamic State sees its attacks as sacred strategy

As the expressions of shock and solidarity subside after the Paris killings, the challenge to understand will remain. Much commentary of the past week has situated these atrocities in opposition to values familiar to western people. Seen in this light the attacks appear senseless and even insane. US Secretary of State John Kerry called the killers ‘psychopathic monsters’. However the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own is to describe it in its own terms. 

We can and must love our neighbour, as Walid Aly urged this week on The Project, but this need not prevent us from understanding our enemy, and to do this we need to grasp that this latest slaughter was shaped by religious beliefs...

For Europe, the challenge within will be more enduring and intractable than the challenge without.  A 2014 opinion poll found that among all French 18-24 year olds, the Islamic State had an approval rating of 27%.  While many of the millions of war-weary Muslims now seeking asylum in the west will have had enough of jihad, it seems likely that Muslim communities already established in the west may be the last to challenge Islam’s supremacist take on history, because they have not had to suffer first-hand the harsh realities of life under Islamist dystopias such as ISIS and the Iranian Revolution.

Nevertheless, European states could still do much in their own backyard. They could ban Saudi and other Middle Eastern funding to Islamic organisations, including mosques. They could stop appeasing Islamists in their midst. They could, even at this late hour, insist that the large and rapidly growing Muslim communities now well-established across Europe engage in constructive self-criticism of their religion, for the sake of peace.  If this fails then according to ISIS’s jihadi mindset the alternatives are conversion, surrender, or death.


http://blog.markdurie.com/2015/11/paris-attacks-islamic-state-sees-its.html