The Enemy: A Humans-First Look at an Apocalyptic Agenda

I have no interest in being blown to bits by a radical Islamic terrorist. Like any self-respecting American, I would much prefer to live well into my eighties and then die fitfully in a hospital bed from heart disease or adult-onset diabetes, leaving my family members with crippling financial burdens.

But we keep hearing these stories and seeing this footage, and some group called “ISIS” seems to be taking responsibility for a lot of it. What am I supposed to do? Not go to concerts? Not walk down the sidewalk in broad daylight?

Step One: Do not succumb to fear.

Step Two: Identify who the enemy is, how it acts, and what I should do about it.

(Executive Summary provided at the end of this essay.)

Should We Be Worried About ISIS?

Harleen Gambhir, a former counter-terrorist analyst at the non-partisan, non-profit, research group Institute for the Study of War (ISW), has devoted the last three years to answering that question. I highly recommend listening to her 2016 podcast, “ISIS’s Global Strategy and Operation,” or reading some of the Institute’s publications to gain a research-based, objective understanding of who ISIS is and what they are up to.

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Out of the ashes of al Qaeda, the Islamic extremist group responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, has grown ISIS. Its origins can be traced back to 2006, when it began as a terrorist group to undermine the new government that had been put in place following the United States’ intervention and the Iraq War. ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. It is also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL), or simply, the Islamic State (IS).

These names themselves highlight the thieving nature of the group: they have coopted both religious (“Islamic”) and political (“State”) identity without actually having the authority to do so from either the greater Muslim world or the governments of the countries in which they function. Some have proposed that simply by referring to the group as the Islamic State (IS, ISIS, or ISIL), we are conceding their illegitimate authority, and instead we should call them Daesh, which is a pejorative rather than respectful title. This has not caught on in most of the research I’ve looked at, however, so for the sake of clarity, I will be referring to the group as ISIS in this article.

Their overarching goals are twofold:

1. to expand their caliphate (political rule) to include all historically Muslim lands, and

2. to provoke and win an apocalyptic war with the West.

To expand their caliphate, they are attempting to defend and expand the areas in which they already have control in Iraq and Syria and working with affiliate jihadist groups in other middle eastern, north African, and Asian countries to seize terrain and advance disorder. On the Western front, their strategy is to terrorize and polarize the West by encouraging, inspiring, directing, and resourcing attacks so frequently that Western society is pulled apart at the seams.

Scary stuff.

Pulling Western Society Apart at the Seams

The good news is that ISIS has suffered significant military losses in the past year and has lost, rather than gained, territory in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. They have also experienced financial setbacks. My friend with contacts in the Air Force who are regularly deploying to the area reports that the number of ISIS fighters is probably down to the hundreds now.

The bad news is ISIS is continuing their work on the ideological front by continuing to inspire global attacks. As they experience setbacks in the expansion of their caliphate, they are preying upon the already existing fears, grudges, dissatisfaction, and hatred of people throughout the world, including the U.S. and Europe, to accomplish their strategy of polarization. ISIS desires to “destroy the gray zone” so that the world divides into two camps: radicalized Islamist Salafi jihadists and everyone else.

Riccardo Dugulin, writing for Global Risk Insights in October 2017, says that as ISIS falls back and regroups, we can expect to see more amateur attacks carried out by single individuals in areas with little recent history of terror attacks such as Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. He explains, “With a high volume of operations in Europe, the Islamic State would achieve its goals of remaining at the forefront of the news cycle and instilling fear in European societies.” Dugulin also points out how ISIS partners with existing terror groups and criminal networks.

ISIS is actively recruiting members from all countries, cultures, and religions while simultaneously working to turn people, especially in the U.S. and Europe, against each other. Gambhir says, “It’s not what they can do physically to us, but what they can compel us to do to ourselves that is the real danger.” Given the partisan nature of politics, combined with our own individual fears and biases, this has proven to be all too easy.

ISIS is only one manifestation of a much bigger problem. In their comprehensive 2016 report, ISW identifies jihadist groups like ISIS and al Qaeda as a great threat to the U.S. and Europe because, “they accelerate the collapse of world order, provoke domestic and global trends that endanger American values and way of life, and plan direct attacks against the U.S. and its partners.”

Contrary to the story presented by most political figures in the U.S. (on both sides), there is no simple answer to this problem. The ISW report goes on to say,

“The challenge of understanding the threats posed by ISIS and al Qaeda is immense. It requires grappling with the psychology of individual fighters and suicide-bombers, Islamic theology, revolutionary ideology, military organization, insurgent cellular networks, and the technology of terror. It demands examining in detail complex and inter-related conflicts in many countries with different histories, ethnicities, confessions, dialects, and traditions. This challenge scorns simplifications and the analysis of this problem into more manageable component parts…We cannot afford to fail at it, however.”

What Does a Terrorist Look Like?

In the movie London Has Fallen, a group of jihadists captures the U.S. president and plans to execute him on a livestream video. The hero of the movie, Mike Banning (played by Gerard Butler) manages to burst into the room just as the Islamic extremist villains, Aamir Barkawi and his son, are preparing to cut off the president’s head with a sword. Through cunning and brute force, Banning manages to get the best of the terrorists, and in an impassioned, patriotic speech right before killing them, he says, “People like you have been trying to kill us for a long time.” (Not a direct quote because this is a PG essay.)

What does Banning mean by this? Presumably, within the context of the movie, by “people like you” he means radical Islamic terrorists. The problem, of course, is that the average non-Arab, non-Muslim American is incapable of distinguishing terrorist Arabs from non-terrorist Arabs. In fact, the man who plays Aamir Barkawi in the movie is a Jew, born in Israel—the very antithesis of an Arab Muslim.

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But did the primarily non-Arab American viewers of the movie notice? Nope! Barkawi sure looked like a terrorist to us. Apparently, all you need to be identified as a terrorist is dark features, medium-tone skin, and eerie Arabic chants playing in the background. The problem is not only Americans’ inability to distinguish between different Arab-looking people and identify the terrorists among them. As mentioned above regarding ISIS’s global strategy, we are likely to see an increasing number of non-Arab people committing violent jihadists acts, which muddies the water even further.

Nonetheless, Banning’s declaration feels good to us. It feels just. It feels like the good guys are finally winning. But that pronouncement—indeed, that entire movie—plays right into ISIS’s strategy of polarizing and dividing all those who are against them. It reduces an incredibly complex, checkered history of conflict between Muslims and Westerners to two overly simplified, almost cartoonish characters.

This binary representation forgets about the nerve gas and microbes the U.S. and several European countries sold to Iraq in the 1970s. It forgets about the great numbers of Kurds who were gassed and slaughtered by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, with the military and monetary support of the U.S. (Conrad, 87). It forgets about the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan since 2001.

Any conversation about U.S. foreign policy must include an informed history and transparent disclosure of current happenings. Even as we Americans acknowledge and appreciate that military action by the U.S. and others has pushed back the expansion of ISIS, we are keeping track of the price of these victories in human lives and calling on our leaders to do the same.

It may have been enough for previous generations (who lived in a less globalized world and held a unilaterally American perspective on war) to feel like a war was just, but I think I speak for many Americans of my generation when I say it is not enough for us. We want our wars to meet all the requirements of a just war laid out by Thomas Aquinas 800 years ago and then some. We are not willing to take action on faulty information just because it’s easier to understand that way.

When Banning’s pronouncement is stripped of its prejudices, misinformation, and fearmongering, we find the root of what feels so good to us about it: that a cruel, dangerous person is being stopped from hurting anyone else. Let’s move forward with that much more intelligent, more useful conversation.

The Most Dangerous People in America

Shortly after Donald Trump became president and Americans lost their minds, I came across an article entitled, “Husbands Are Deadlier Than Terrorists,” a fabulous title from a rhetorical perspective because you can’t not read something so inflammatory. The article actually turned out to be focused primarily on guns and death in America, but it sparked my interest in the numbers regarding husbands and violence.

In the United States, men are over three times more likely to commit an act of violence than women. An average of 1,095 American women are violently murdered by their husbands or boyfriends each year. So, since 2001 in the U.S., approximately 16,425 women have been killed by their intimate partners.

You probably don’t think of yourself as a violent person just because you’re a man, and rightly so. There are far more men who don’t kill their wives than there are who do. If you’re a male and you’re reading this, you are most likely thinking, “Those men don’t abuse and murder women because they’re men; they do it because they’re bad men.”

You don’t attribute this negative characteristic (violence) to something inherent to your in-group (men). You attribute it to external factors, most likely factors you can safely distance yourself from: those men weren’t raised right, they’re not Christians, they live on the bad side of town, they do drugs, and so on. Many of those claims are valid. Family patterns, socioeconomic status, and drug abuse certainly have demonstrable links to crime, although the relationship between religion and violence is debatable.

Nonetheless, gender itself is a more consistent correlative of violent crime than almost any other factor, besides an individual history of violent crime.

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A productive way to address this issue of gender and crime is NOT to begin hating and distrusting all men. Rather, it is first to examine why it is that there are more violent men than there are violent women and then to make efforts to change those factors that lead men toward violence. A different topic for a different day.

Meanwhile, each man has an individual responsibility to rise above the biological characteristics and/or societal influences that cause him to tend toward violence.

Muslims don’t commit terrorist acts because they’re Muslims. They commit terrorist acts because they’re bad Muslims. And this isn’t really even a close comparison to the men vs. women situation. The number of violent crimes committed by men relative to the male population is much higher than the number of violent crimes committed by Muslims relative to the Muslim population. That is, being male has a much, much stronger tie to an individual’s likelihood of hurting or killing someone than being Muslim does.

(Don’t even get me started on men between the ages of 15 and 24. Or drunk drivers.)

According to a detailed 2017 government report, the number of people killed by violent Islamic extremists between September 12, 2001, and December 31, 2016, is 119, in 23 separate incidents. We must add to that the eight people who were killed in New York on October 31, 2017, for a total of 127 people killed by radical Islamic terrorists since 9/11, or an average of about eight people per year.

Each of these 127 lives was valuable, each loss was painful, and we should do everything we can to keep more lives from being taken by radical Islamic terrorists. However, this number—tiny in the grand scheme of American lives lost—contradicts the belief held by many Americans that Islamic extremists pose great danger to them personally. Measures already in place long before Trump signed his immigration ban have been very effective at keeping terrorists out of our country.

For the sake of comparison, the number of people killed by violent far-right extremists during that 2001-2016 period is 105, in 62 separate incidents. That is significant. Far-right extremists (white supremacists and others) are more likely to carry out a terror attack than Islamic extremists, and only slightly less likely to kill people in such an attack. In fact, Americans are six times more likely to be killed for being Muslim than they are to be killed by a Islamic extremist.

So as much as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would like to claim credit for every violent incident in America, we can’t let him. We have a whole host of problems in which he plays no role. We need to face these problems squarely, shouldering responsibility for systemic evils entirely independent from radical Islamic terrorism that may contribute to incidents like the Vegas shooting. A different topic for a different day.

But there have been enough violent attacks in recent years in which the perpetrators have cited ISIS as their inspiration that we cannot ignore the problem and hope it will go away. As explained earlier, ISIS and groups like them feed off of fear, unrest, division, and confusion.

Let’s shine some light on what it is that motivates radical Islamic terrorists.

“God Told Me to Kill You”

Much of the conversation surrounding ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups focuses on whether or not flying planes into buildings, opening fire on large crowds in public places, beheading people, and detonating suicide bombs are truly Islamic acts. I naively thought I could find the answer to the question, “Do true Muslims believe in radical Islamic terrorism?” with a quick Google search. I didn’t realize it might be as flawed of a question with as convoluted of an answer as, “Do true Christians believe in killing innocent people?” We’ll circle back to that later.

For now, let’s take a look at the religious beliefs of radical Islamic terrorists. More accurately put, they are Islamist Salafi-jihadists.

They are Islamists. Being Islamist is different from being Islamic (Muslim). I should have been saying "Islamist" rather than "Islamic" this whole time. Being Islamist means you believe that the structures and laws of Islam should apply to everyone, not just Muslims. That the tenets of Islam, by nature, cannot be isolated to certain religious practices, but inform every area of life and politics. Even within Islamism, there are mainstream Islamists, whose goal is to “reconcile pre-modern Islamic law with the modern nation-state” through peaceful political means, and there are extreme Islamists, who believe violence is necessary to bring about a comprehensive, governmental rule of Islam.

They are Salafis. Salafism is a strain of Sunni Islam that says the religion has wrongly strayed from its origins and calls for “restoration of authentic Islam as expressed by an adherence to its original teachings and texts.” Essentially, Salafis believe that the purest form of Islam was practiced by those closest to the Prophet Muhammed physically and historically, and they seek to model their beliefs and behaviors as closely as possible on those early Muslims, right down to drinking water in three pauses.

They are jihadists. One sub-group of Salafis, Salafi-jihadists, believe that true Muslims are obligated to reinstate this early, “pure” form of Islam through military force. This obligation extends to practicing jihadism against fellow Muslims who are considered “apostates.”

This three-paragraph assessment by a white girl who has never read a word of Arabic in her life is egregiously insufficient at communicating a comprehensive, accurate representation of the beliefs of these terrorists. But we have to try, and we have to learn about Islam from Islamic experts.

Consider how nervous you would be, as a Christian, if you knew that a Pakistani Muslim who had never studied Greek or Hebrew was trying to explain Christianity to his friends and family in response to the actions of the Lord’s Resistance Army under Joseph Kony in Uganda, who claims inspiration from the Christian God and places a Bible on his table in preparation for his episodes of spirit possession. That Pakistani Muslim is unlikely to have the scholarly tools, historic understanding, spiritual sensitivity, or network of other Biblical experts to be able to understand and explain how Kony’s actions do (or do not) fit into the broader Christian consensus.

All that being said, it is absolutely true that ISIS, al Qaeda, and other Islamic terrorist groups are motivated in their actions by their understanding of Islam and the Quran. Knowing we might be in the dark about their exact religious motivation, ISIS graciously took the time to spell it out for us in one of their propaganda tools, the newsletter Dabiq. In an article entitled “Why We Hate You & Why We Fight You,” they list six specific reasons they hate and fight infidels (non-Muslims) and apostates (unfaithful Muslims):

1. Because they reject the oneness of Allah.

2. Because they separate religion and state, permitting things Allah has prohibited and banning things he has permitted (such as homosexuality).

3. Because they (specifically atheists) reject the existence of the Lord and Creator.

4. Because of their crimes against Islam, such as burning the Quran and speaking ill of Sharia law.

5. Because of their crimes against Muslim people, such as bombing, killing, maiming, oppressing, and torturing them.

6. Because they have invaded Muslim lands.

To remove all doubt about the relentlessness of their agenda, they follow this list up by saying, “The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.”

Don’t worry though; it’s all in our best interest. They go on to say,

“What’s equally if not more important to understand is that we fight you, not simply to punish and deter you, but to bring you true freedom in this life and salvation in the Hereafter, freedom from being enslaved to your whims and desires as well as those of your clergy and legislatures, and salvation by worshiping your Creator alone and following His messenger. We fight you in order to bring you out from the darkness of disbelief and into the light of Islam, and to liberate you from the constraints of living for the sake of the worldly life alone so that you may enjoy both the blessings of the worldly life and the bliss of the Hereafter.”

This Has Happened Before

On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II made a speech at the Council of Clermont in France that is recognized as the official catalyst for the Crusades—the movement of the Christian church to take back by force the Christian holy lands that Turkish Muslims had conquered. We don’t have a singular, bona fide transcript of the speech that day. The Pope actually carried out a months-long tour, stopping in many towns and making many speeches. What we do have is a collection of records that together show a fairly clear representation of the rationale he used to persuade between 60,000 and 100,000 Christians to embark on a mission of violent political conquest in the name of obedience to God.

In one record of the speech, after a dizzying cascade of injunctions intended to guide his listeners toward righteousness by making them aware of their severe neglect of God’s commands, Urban turns to the real topic at hand. He, very strategically, in the most spiritually charged of terms, presents the plan hatched between himself and Byzantine Emperor Alexius to take back Byzantine lands by giving Christians across many different regions a singular purpose in fighting.

"Oh, race of Franks, race from across the mountains, race chosen and beloved by God as shines forth in very many of your works set apart from all nations…From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion.”

The Pope goes on to describe in graphic detail the offenses committed against Christians and Christian churches by the Muslims, many of which were entirely unverified both at the time and to this day. He asks his papal subjects,

“On whom therefore is the labor of avenging these wrongs and of recovering this territory incumbent, if not upon you? You, upon whom above other nations God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great courage, bodily activity, and strength to humble the hairy scalp of those who resist you.”

As motivation, he calls on the strength and achievements of their ancestors and the great spiritual significance the Christian lands. Last but not least, he offers forgiveness of sins for those who participate in this holy mission: “Accordingly undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the kingdom of heaven.”

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To most modern American ears, this conflation of church and state, along with its shameless endorsement of violence in the name of God, is almost inconceivable. But it made perfect sense at the time. The Pope was the greatest spiritual authority his listeners had, and he was confidently telling them that righteousness before God depended on their willingness to fight those deemed by him as enemies of God. He deployed more Scripture references in his Clermont speech than most pastors use in a weekend marriage conference. Couple that with humans’ innate tendency to view themselves as the right side (in-group) and those who offend them as the wrong side (out-group), and the Pope was able to take a violent, cruel, misguided undertaking that violated God’s greatest command and present it as God’s greatest command.

The Crusades, which lasted nearly 200 years and killed around 1.7 million people (both Crusaders and those they fought; about half a percent of the world’s total population at the time), were quasi-successful in recapturing some of the Holy Lands. With time, though, alliances shifted and crumbled, lands were lost and gained, and, not surprisingly in retrospect, a physical war was unsuccessful in gaining spiritual ground.

Christians often get offended when people bring up the Crusades, and rightly so. They are an ugly blot on Christian history that does not represent the beliefs of most present-day Christians. We’ve gotten better since then. We’ve refined and redefined Christianity, we’ve reformed and are still reforming. We’ve minimized disturbing Old Testament passages where God commands genocide to, at best, a specific injunction for a specific people in a specific time that does not apply to us today, or, at worst, a grave misunderstanding of God’s will by a tribal society not altogether different from others around them.

We’ve distanced ourselves from rhetoric that suggests that God would ask us to kill in His name or that His spiritual kingdom is advanced by physical wars.

Or have we?

The New Race of the Franks

Erick Stackelback, author of ISIS Exposed and The Terrorist Next Door, in a 2016 article by Charles Chandler for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association's Decision Magazine, says, “We’re all created equal as people by God, but not all cultures are created equal. Western culture, for all of our flaws in this wicked, fallen world, is still the best thing going. It was traditionally based on the Ten Commandments and the Bible and Judeo-Christian values and ethics. As they disappear, you’re leaving a vacuum that’s going to be filled by bad actors.”

“Still the best thing going” is not exactly the same thing as “race chosen and beloved by God as shines forth in very many of your works set apart from all nations,” but it’s pretty damn close. Stackelback, like our friend Urban II, is conflating spiritual identity with political identity; playing up the righteousness of Christian, Western identity; exaggerating the wickedness of Muslim, Eastern identity; and walking us right into the obvious next step.

In the same article, Jerry Boykin, former Army Lt. General and currently executive vice president of the Family Research Council, tells Christians how we should respond:

“‘The believer in Christ needs to recognize that while there is a reference in the Bible to loving your enemies, there is also a reference in Psalm 94 (verse 16) that tells us to stand up against evil,’ Boykin said. ‘What is happening within ISIS and this Islamic world of jihad is evil. Believers have to stand against it.’

No.

Not to jihad being evil, but to giving Psalm 94:16 the same weight as Jesus’s command to love our enemy.

The verse Boykin quotes, Psalm 94:16, reads, “Who will stand up for me against evildoers? Who will take his stand for me against those who do wickedness?” Upon examination of the entire chapter, we see that the psalmist’s conclusion is that God will take a stand against the evildoers and bring back their evil upon them; the Psalmist needs do nothing more than take refuge in God.

“But the Lord has been my stronghold,

And my God the rock of my refuge.

He has brought back their wickedness upon them

And will destroy them in their evil;

The Lord our God will destroy them.”

Compare that with the “reference” in Scripture to loving your enemies. Some such references include Matthew 5:43-48, Luke 6:27-33, Luke 23:34, Acts 7:60, and Romans 12:20-21. All those are in addition to THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF JESUS’S LIFE AND WORK: dying for his greatest enemies, both spiritual and political.

The multitudes listening to the Sermon on the Mount were living under pagan Roman rule; the “enemies” that likely popped into their mind while Jesus was speaking were political enemies who did not follow Jewish law or submit to the divine revelation expressed in Jewish scriptures.

By giving the command to love those enemies, Jesus is giving all those who would follow Him an entirely new way of thinking about what it means to be on God’s team. I especially love the Matthew 5 passage:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

Jesus knows our hearts. He knows alllll the ideologies, the methods we use to make enemies out of one another. He knows how badly we are wrong about each other, and how often. He knows that we cannot be trusted with situational justifications for behaviors, so he gives us a blanket approach, an approach that will never steer us wrong but will always steer us closer to His heart, His will, and His kingdom.

“Love your enemies.”

He tried to tell us a long time ago when He said, “Love God more than anything else and love your neighbor as yourself,” and “Do not kill,” but we took too many liberties with all the categories excluded by the term “neighbor,” so He clarified that in the story of the Good Samaritan. Your neighbor is literally anyone that happens across your path, including and especially those whom you view as social, political, or spiritual outsiders.

To his credit, Boyken goes on to say that an important way Christians can fight ISIS is to “have some concept of how they’re going to bring the Gospel to them.” Absolutely. Jesus is the answer and always has been. But Boyken’s posture toward Muslims in general, at least in this article, is one of fear and loathing.

“I hate, fear, and despise you and everyone like you, but let me tell you about my God and how you should worship Him.” That’s the message ISIS is communicating. Ours has to be radically different.

Spiritual Warfare on Twitter

ISIS is actively, purposefully, and skillfully recruiting new members. The physical territory that Iraqi and coalition forces have regained from them is a blow, certainly, but that blow is softened for ISIS by the ideological ground they’re gaining with people all over the world through the internet. Even if opposition forces were able to capture al-Baghdadi, he would become a martyr and their mission would be strengthened. For ISIS, the only defeat would be “losing the will and the desire to fight.”

In a March 2017 article from CNN.com, Tim Lister examines “ISIS 2.0.” He explains that “perhaps the least predictable among those who make up ISIS 2.0 are the virtual adherents, those radicalized online and nursing a range of grievances who turn to random acts of violence.”

Abdullah-X is a comic created by a former Islamic extremist who now rejects extremist philosophy and spends his time creating comics with the goal of convincing young people not to become violent extremists. He says, “Extremist groups have beaten mainstream society in access to the internet, they have beaten mainstream society in content, in the ability to justify what they stand for and what they believe in, when I started this project I felt that unless we take a proactive step to take some of that ground back online, it will never embed itself in the off-line reality of young people."

Jihadist mentality may sound crazy from the outside looking in, but it preys on all the same deep-seated feelings and fears anyone seeking power preys on. A limited list of what motivates fighters includes

• a sense of justice, of getting revenge for wrongs done

• protecting women and children (from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and from outside invading forces)

• valor

• purpose (many fighters are recruited out of refugee camps where they have no worthwhile future to envision)

• vindication on all those who have misunderstood or maltreated them

• greed/survival (fighters get paid).

Because, while the masterminds of these extremist groups have comprehensive, religiously motivated reasons, their recruits don’t need to have those same reasons. Anyone who is truly willing to take up the mission is welcomed.

In a very thorough paper examining the strategies and impacts of ISIS propaganda, Alberto M. Fernandez explains how ISIS’s propaganda has expanded with its mission, which started as a much smaller, more localized object and has grown wildly to encompass literally the whole world.

He says, “The international community allowed the Syrian civil war to grow and fester, assuming that it could have no real impact on the region. The United States, after invading Iraq in 2003 and destroying the status quo, essentially walked away eight years later. This allowed for a corrupt and increasingly sectarian regime to take over Iraq and create the optimal conditions for the resurgence of ISIS.”

And then, “In two years, ISIS went from releasing Arabic-language propaganda about corruption and human rights abuses by the Iraqi government to English and German-language propaganda focused on changing the hearts of men.” Western media unknowingly advances ISIS’s agenda by its obsession with “clickworthy” materials, because ISIS propaganda is designed to fascinate, to provoke, to inflame passions.

• Urgency: you must act now.

• Agency: You can do something about this problem.

• Authenticity: This is the real deal. We’re not blindly following some religious charade. This is the answer to life.

• Victory: We will be victorious, and if you join us, you will be victorious. If you live, great. If you die, great. Either way, you win.

For this reason, Fernandez argues, the way, the very best way the average citizen concerned about ISIS can counteract them is to engage people—in real life and on the internet—who might be susceptible to extremist propaganda. Counter-messages are good, but, since ISIS is connecting with people on a deep, unmet-soul-need level, these engagements and counter-messages must be genuine. To put it another way, “Relationship building is even more important than propaganda.”

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Friends in Hijab

Back to everyone’s big question: Do true Muslims believe in radical Islamic terrorism?

Some Muslims do. A very, very small percentage (anywhere between 10,000 and 200,000, or 0.01 percent) of Muslims have actually participated in violent terrorist acts under ISIS and similar groups in the past decade. Radicalization of Islam as a movement is relatively new, so these numbers are likely higher than numbers of violent extremists from previous centuries.

A considerably larger number of Muslims are sympathetic to using violence in some cases—possibly between 60 and 100 million, depending on how you count it. The percentage sympathetic to violence under some circumstances is higher in regions with heated political struggle. My friend who grew up in Iraq shared that Islamism was taught to her as a young schoolchild by Muslim clergy. She also says that the message “We should fight everyone until they become Muslims or die” is certainly taught in many Muslim mosques in the Middle East. These numbers are matters of huge contention because, like in all religions, uniformity among adherents does not exist and how we define terms really matters.

Taking away these actively violent and open-to-violence Muslims, the vast majority of the 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide do not believe that violence in the name of their religion is acceptable. This is evidenced partly by the hatred expressed toward them by ISIS, who views their acceptance of non-Muslims as reprehensible.

As I’ve researched for this article, I’ve constantly come across sources that say one of two things. Either it’s a non-Muslim saying, “Look at these Muslims doing awful things and look at these sacred Islamic texts that support those awful things, so see? Islam is an inherently violent religion!”

Or, it’s a Muslim or Muslim ally saying, “Look at all these Muslims doing good things and look at these sacred Islamic texts condemning the awful things, so see? Islam is an inherently peaceful religion!”

Honestly, I’m not sure what either side hopes to gain from that tactic. Do non-Muslims think that 1.8 billion people are going to say, “Ohhhhh, you’re totally right! Let’s all reject our faith” and then the violence will go away?

Do Muslims and Muslim allies think that the rest of the world is going to say, “Ohhhhh, okay! There’s that verse where Allah commands his followers to live in peace,” and stop being concerned about terrorists?

In an article entitled “Religious Basis for Islamic Terrorism: The Quran and Its Interpretations,” Amrithi Venkatraman explains the principle of ijtihad, or effort: “According to ijtihad Muslims can interpret and determine the extent of their Islamic practices individually as long as these are directed toward ensuring the will of God in an Islamic community.” So Islam provides a plan, an allowance for Muslims to study and interpret the Quran as best they can in their individual, social, and political spheres.

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Muslims everywhere are digging deep into their scriptures and their souls, trying to decide what their religion has been in the past and what it should be in the future. Christians have done this more than once in the past 2,000 years and are still doing it. We must afford Muslims the space and grace to do it as well. It’s unwise to expend our energy trying to pigeonhole Muslims into this atrocious version of Islam that the overwhelming majority of them reject.

These 1.6 billion-plus people who do not support violence in the name of Islam are non-Muslims’ greatest allies in undermining the power of violent extremist groups like ISIS. Even if the percentage of non-violent Muslims was much smaller, say 5 percent or 10 percent, they would still be non-Muslims’ greatest allies.

So how do we ally with peace-loving Muslims?

First, meet some. I have a tiny smattering of Muslim friends, none of whom I interact with regularly. How can I expect to understand or be understood by people with whom I never speak? I can’t. To my Muslim friends and the ones I haven’t met yet: I am ready. I want to know you. I want to talk with you in the grocery store line. I want my kids to go to school with your kids. I want to hear about what it’s like being Muslim in America. I want to interact with you as easily as I interact with my friends who look, think, and talk like me.

Second, believe them when they tell us they are peace loving. We should be watching (or joining) their protests against ISIS and following their political efforts toward peace, not telling them they are violent when their words and actions prove otherwise. Top Muslims scholars from around the globe meticulously denounce terrorist ideology in this open letter to ISIS. This letter displays the evolution of Islam toward a future in which terrorism has no place whatsoever, and it deserves our full acceptance and support.

Third, change our rhetoric. The articles we choose to repost, the offhand comments we make, the leaders whose teaching’s we share all convey a certain attitude toward Muslims. We must be informed enough and caring enough to discuss terrorism, religion, and foreign policy without making enemies out of friends. Any step taken against ISIS that makes enemies out of peace-loving Muslims is a step backwards.

Intro to Theology with Wonder Woman and Katniss Everdeen

My seven-year-old son does not believe that women can be superheroes. So I sent him to bed and cajoled my husband into watching Wonder Woman with me.

I’d like to focus on just one of the many spiritual insights I gained from that movie. Diana (aka Wonder Woman) enters into a World War II battle in hopes of finding and destroying Ares, the god of war. As she becomes embroiled in the battle, she sets her sights on a particular general of the opposing army, believing him to be Ares. Near the climax of the movie, she fights and kills the general.

Much to her surprise, the war is still waging. The true Ares then emerges, and Diana realizes that he is at work on both sides of the battle, compelling the humans to fight in hopes that they will destroy themselves and he will be left in peace with full authority over the world. It’s literally an apocalyptic agenda. Diana will have none of it and defeats him once and for all.

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Taking the spiritual imagery a step further, we see that Diana, together with her comrade in arms and love interest, Steve, represent a Christ figure. Steve dies in an act of ultimate sacrifice, and Diana’s power defeats the real enemy.

In Hunger Games, Haymitch tells Katniss right before she enters the games that she must remember who the real enemy is. If she had focused on defeating the other tributes—the purported enemy—then the agenda of the Capitol—the real enemy—would have been advanced. Instead, remembering Haymitch’s advice, she turns her attention to creating an opening in the arena that allows a hovercraft to come rescue her and the resistance to begin their work toppling the real enemy.

Fighting those under the influence of the enemy only serves the enemy’s purposes. We must diligently focus on the root of the evil rather than being distracted by its manifestations.

Who is the enemy in our world today?

It wasn’t Osama bin Laden. It’s not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It’s not Islam.

The enemy is Satan, the hater of humans who comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. He is the one who lies to us about God’s will, telling us God wants us to destroy each other. He is the one who lies to us about how to please God, tricking us into believing that we can be perfect and powerful, like God. He is the one who lies to us about everything—twisting the way we see things until the God most of us worship looks nothing like the God who put on a body and walked among us 2,000 years ago.

To the Jihadi Hopeful

There is no striving that will ever be enough. God is not waiting for us to reach Him. He has already reached us. Jesus came, and we saw who God is. God sees you. He knows you. He loves you. He forgives you. Jesus died, and did not kill. Jesus lived again, and defeated death.

He comes to us—all of us, regardless of our morality, evil, generosity, selfishness, brilliance, ignorance, love, or hate.

God says, “You are loved,” not just to innocent babies with those words painted over their cribs, but equally to those who have broken laws and committed unspeakable crimes. This unconditional love is not a sign of weakness, but of ultimate strength. It’s a deeper truth that will outlast all struggles, all conquests.

God’s love will be victorious, and He offers it to you.

Executive Summary

ISIS is very bad. They have lost much physical territory but are re-emerging with a strategy of convincing people everywhere (largely via the internet) to commit violent acts that will terrorize and polarize the world. The view that Muslims are bad and non-Muslims are good is wrong, as clearly evidenced by history and current events. Promoting this view only serves to further ISIS’s agenda by creating more unrest. To continue the defeat of ISIS and groups like them, average American citizens like me must

• understand that conflict between the Middle East and the West is incredibly complex and radical Islamic terrorism is not happening in a vacuum

• learn the facts about the risks of radical Islamic terrorism relative to other risks

• recognize and reject when a group—any group—uses God’s name to promote violence

• support peace-loving Muslims as they work to win their brothers and sisters over to a peaceful version of Islam that honors its origins but functions in the present day

• invalidate messages of hate with actions of overwhelming love

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(in order of appearance and not formatted correctly because, while it's still important to give credit where credit is due, no one is grading whether I italicized the right part or put everything in the right order)

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