A Myopic Citizen's Take on the Islamic State

I wanted to leave some space between the amplified regurgitation of emotion displayed after the attacks on Paris last weekend and my contribution to the ongoing discussion of religions extremism. Paris is not any closer to my heart than other cities that have fallen victim to religious terrorism, but the intensity of the opinion produced by this latest attack on the free world has prompted me to weigh in with a strong and lengthy opinion. The members of ISIS that seek to terrorize us are cowardly fucks promoting bigotry, and the broken institutions that inadvertently empower them are flex-happy idiots for taking their bait.

ISIS sucks, there’s no doubt about it. It’s a bunch of arrogant bastards with across held high in front of a desperate people, attempting to bring “true order” and “stability” to those unsatisfied with their place in the current world hegemony. They promise an definitive end, an establishment of world-wide Islamic State, a utopia free of blasphemous usurpers of God’s kingdom and all the rest of that Faithful Crusader bullshit, while unjustly committing grotesque acts of violence against innocent bystanders to illustrate their religious resolve. Basically, if you’ve got nothing better to do than hate on some folk for not being “righteous and true,” to Islam and you subscribe to the “With Us or Against Us” rhetoric, this is your cup of tea, no sugar. Like something out of a fantasy novel, this adventure for religious dominance has less elves and magic, and more pirate banners flowing behind a caravan of Toyota Tundras.

To be critical of capitalism, consumerism, and western liberalism and also tenaciously religious makes you either an admirer of the Amish lifestyle or a likely candidate for an extremist revolutionary military group. I don’t see kids signing up to till land on the Pennsylvania countryside, so there’s no guess as to where these disillusioned youth of modernity are going.

In a world that is increasingly secular, and also being exposed as driven by greed, the message ISIS sends of relief from the disenfranchised pseudo-anarchists youths whose ideologies have, for too long, been on the fringes of the norm, whose race has derisively mocked, and whose religious faith has been repeatedly labeled as delinquent. On top of that, these young people see the world through a narrow lens, fearful of cultural differences and taught to reject those who may reject them. By definition, they are drawn to others who feel the same. And ISIS offers them a sense of belonging, while giving them a “bigger-picture” reason to expend their frustrated energies.

To be honest, ISIS doesn’t do much to make it easy to hate the West. I think the superpowers involved have that covered on their own. For one, it doesn’t help that Wahhabi’s number one enemy, the United States, has been unapologetically blowing up anyone remotely affiliated with Islamic terrorism, without concern to civilian casualties. It doesn’t help that this same country promotes its own brand of religious intolerance by promoting an aggressively proactive foreign policy under the paranoid guise of personal security. It doesn’t help that the corruption ISIS fights against so closely resembles the imperfect models of Western government. It doesn’t help that there is a gross entanglement of the rise and fall of Arab governments with the sticky “life-giving” economic interests of the West. It doesn’t help that since the advent of monarchies, material success always seems to get tied in with the evils of oppression. It doesn’t help that for the last few thousand years, humanity’s catch-all prescription to suffering is religion and violence. It’s fucking complicated.

But if the developed nations of the world are opportunistic parents exploiting their children for their unblemished credit scores, ISIS and their philosophical ilk are the spoiled and self-righteous teenagers who think a spunky attitude and shocking vandalism will change the world.

There is no easy solution to this problem of religious extremism. No amount of espionage, bombs, bullets, tweets, blog posts, hashtags, or prayers will alleviate the dissatisfaction felt by these warriors of faith. Ideologies that blind their followers with the shiny side of religious conviction will never disappear from society entirely, because faith-in anything–is what keeps people going after they feel like they have nothing left.

Faith is an attractive package, it’s the gallon of ice cream after a break up, a lotion lined Kleenex, a milligram of heroin, and a shot of 5-Hour Energy rolled into one, all for the low price of reasonableness. Even if you fail your driver’ test twenty times, faith in probability will get you in the car again. When faced with a challenge, faith is what motivates us to overcome. Faith will always have an appeal, and a place in the human condition. We cannot combat faith, because faith is deeply personal.

But we can change culture. We’ve been doing it for years. The value of gender, race and religious egalitarianism has become so strong in Western societies that political correctness has actually overreached its good intentions. Social tolerance is no longer a privilege but a right demanded by citizens. The internet has provided the large and heterogeneous cultures of the world with so many opportunities for self-reflection and self-correction that to deny blatant offenses to ethical reason and scientific progress on this large a scale is absurd and even self-destructive. By striving towards a successful mainstream culture that epitomizes the pious human–good-willed, peaceful, generous, forgiving–the utopia that idealists fantasize about, overzealous discrimination of cultural differences will come into an obvious and glaring light.

And yet, contemporary cultures, in their elevated positions, owing so much to reason and science, seem to undermine their forward movement by grasping onto the overcooked dish of religious intolerance. Religious persecution is still prevalent in Western societies. It’s visible in the argument over sexual education, gender definition, criminal punishment, and it’s hiding behind reason, and letting science take the bullets for its unreasonable demands.

Look, faith is personal and important, but it’s true power ends at home. Every time we open the doors for faith, it’s associated religion spills into the streets, washing everything it touches with the polarizing labels of “Reverent” and “Blasphemous.” We live in a society that’s should be able to exercise religious freedom. But that will never be possible with the dogmas of these outdated institutions fighting tooth and nail to become the dictator of cultural progress.

ISIS’s brand plays on the fact that faith is a powerful tool to keep the demons of reality at bay, that shrouding oneself in a systematic application of logic to make sense of worldly phenomena is a programmed human trait. It gives an uncomplicated and readily acceptable perspective of the world. One unfettered by the complexities of politics, free from the difficulties of an ethical morality.

To fight this ideology, we have to reestablish a faith in mankind’s ability to reason in its own interests, without having to err on the side of illogical dogma. A system of reason would prevent zealots from playing the fear-of-God card when arguing their political beliefs. So when the Western world stops curb-stomping its moral image with the boot of hypocritical policy and beating its own head in with an irrelevant theological discrimination, we can finally throw religious extremism into the basket of crazy ideas with slavery, nuclear weapons, penis-enlargement supplements, and start thinking about better ways to integrate with the environment, or figure out an affordable medicine to promote longevity, or even how to hook up religious extremists to the Matrix and let them blow each other up until there’s no one left to maintain the servers.

What happened in France last week was an unforgivable tragedy. And so too were the events in Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Spain, Egypt and so many other countries. The lives of these victims can never be replaced, and their families can never be consoled.

However, it would be a disservice to these victims to simplify ISIS as barbarians without recognizing the political motivations behind their ideologies. It should be considered that these citizens enjoyed freedoms secured by excessively violent and voyeuristic governments, overreaching in the protection of their principles.

As citizens of what is purportedly the free world, understanding the consequences of foreign policy, and demanding more accountability from these governments will shed light on just how unfair it is to be punished for the transgressions of your government, and all for the sake of political expression. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say we were being used as pawns in a battle of religious ideologies.

It’s not wrong to question your parents when they receive hate mail for being bigots, but it’s wrong to be punished by other bigots for what our parents have said and done. How we let others conduct our lives has more to do with this “senseless” violence than we care to think. Use your brains to stand up to anyone that fucks with you.


Fuck with that.