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What ISIS Really Wants
The Atlantic By Graeme Wood What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors. The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing. Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million. We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership. Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.) We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medi religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamed Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut. Click HERE to continue reading.
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The Last Trial: A Great-Grandmother, Auschwitz, and the Arc of Justice
The New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert Oskar Gröning, who has become known as “the bookkeeper from Auschwitz,” was born on June 10, 1921, in Nienburg, a town about thirty miles south of…
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70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
On January 27, 2015 we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi German concentraction and extermination camp Auschwitz. On this day the whole world was listening to…
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It’s Disrespectful for the Shoah’s Victims If All We Teach is Death
Jewish News Online By Scott Saunders, Founder and Chair of March of the Living UK How do you understand the un-understandable, explain the inexplicable? Seventy years since the liberation of Auschwitz, we continue to grapple with the lessons of the Holocaust and how we should approach Holocaust education for our children. In recent years, the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Institute of Education, the Holocaust Education Centre and others have done a remarkable job in developing methodologies to enable non-Jews to learn about the Holocaust in ways that are relevant and meaningful today. Yet the challenge is no less great when we address our children. How can they be helped to understand the Holocaust within the context of their own identities? How can we address its significance for the Jewish people without making it the defining experience, which it must not be? And as the generation of survivors and first-hand witnesses to the events of the Holocaust pass on, how can we protect the authenticity of education or, more colloquially, “keep it real”? The answer for many Jewish organisations has been to replace people with places, so that over recent years we have seen an upsurge in the number of Holocaust education ‘experience’ trips to Poland and the death camps. Indeed, for many teenagers and young Jewish adults it has become as much a ‘rite of passage’ as Israel tour. But the increased dependence on such trips to teach about the Holocaust has rightly prompted much debate and concern among academics and educators. How do we give the experience meaning without it becoming self-indulgent? How do we make it not morbid, but life-affirming? How do we avoid it becoming agenda-led, even a cynical guilt trip to adopt a particular Jewish lifestyle in place of those many millions murdered? These were the questions we considered last weekend, at a gathering of three dozen of the leading practitioners in the field, at a seminar organised by March of the Living, which – over the past five years – has taken more than a thousand Jewish young adults to Poland. We have made it a mission at March of the Living UK to set the gold standard in Holocaust education for young Jews. So while it is tempting to simplify and manipulate young emotions to provide a narrative that presents Poland as the ‘Jewish graveyard’ and condemns the Poles as “worse than the Germans”, we will not do it. For while of course the death camps were in Poland, they were German death camps, not Polish ones. Similiarly, while many Poles were anti-Semitic, many were not. This is only part of the story. When we hear from Holocaust survivors in person – whatever the context – the experience is generally uplifting, simply because of the very fact of their survival. That they have rebuilt their lives, so often had new families and retained their Jewish identity is – in and of itself – a remarkable act of defiance. Replace their role in Holocaust education with Poland and the camps, and the danger is that we focus purely on death. Yet that need not be the case: the Jews of Poland had been a constant for almost a thousand years; their history was rich and diverse and we show a huge lack of respect to their memory if all we teach is about their death. This is a journey not only into the death camps, but also into Jewish heritage. So our responsibility is to ensure that young Jewish adults today understand not only the production line of death, but the world that was; how else can they begin to appreciate what was lost? By engaging with such narratives, we can give a broader education to the next generation, even without the personal experiences of the survivors. The re-emergence of a Jewish life in Poland today is important and they seek interaction with other Jews across the globe. The fact that too many of the groups that go to Poland insulate themselves from anything outside their bus – fly in and out without engaging with modern Poland and Polish society – is only a partial experience. We must open dialogue with the growing Polish Jewish population today and learn how Poles look at their own narrative. Only by engaging with all these strands can we create a full experience-based educational opportunity in Poland. And only then can young Jews determine their own informed response to the events of 70 years ago, and give meaning to their own, self-determined, Jewish journey.
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Parent of MOTL Alumni Talks About Being the Mom of an IDF Soldier
(Names have been deleted at the request of the family) Following are the remarks delivered at a community rally in support of Israel. I’m the mother of a Lone Soldier. The…
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March of the Living Budapest
March of the Living Budapest 30,000+ marching to train station where 600 participants will board train (of the…
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President Obama quotes Pinchas Gutter, Holocaust survivor who participated in the March of the Living, at USC Shoah Foundation Dinner
Remarks by the President at USC Shoah Foundation Dinner Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel Los Angeles, California – May 7, 2014 THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you…
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La Shoá contada a través de sombras (The Holocaust Told Through Shadows)
Lehakat Naguía of the Jewish Community of Uruguay (Kehilá) (2014 Yom Hashoah Program)
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March of the Living teens experience Shabbat in Poland
This past weekend has been one of the most inspirational weekends I have ever experienced. On Friday…
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