Warum der IS gewonnen hat, auch wenn er besiegt wurde

Seth. J. Frantzman erklärt in der Jpost, warum der Islamische Staat in gewisser Hinsicht gewonnen hat, auch wenn er militärisch besieht wurde:

The difference between the legacy of ISIS and that of the Nazis is that ISIS was allowed to achieve a form of victory not by winning the war but by the unwillingness of people to confront ISIS crimes. We can see this in the wall of silence in may countries, particularly Europe, about what intelligence services knew and when they knew it about the 5,000 citizens of EU countries who joined ISIS. In 2014, ISIS was open about its goals. It said, “We are going to kill the kuffar,” the word for “non-Muslims” or “infidels.”

In that sense, ISIS won. It won in Iraq and Syria by destroying minority communities.

On social media, hundreds of thousands of accounts shared ISIS videos of executions, beheadings, machine gunning people into mass graves. It looked like the Holocaust, as though you could have watched the Einsatzgruppen in real time. Yet almost nothing was done in 2014 to prevent thousands of people from joining ISIS. Instead, all that was done was a concerted media campaign to claim that ISIS was “violent extremists” and “militants” and “insurgents” – a whole conveyor belt of terms designed to make us think ISIS isn’t like the Nazis, it’s something else. 

Unlike how Western countries confronted the legacy of Nazism and groups like the KKK, by confronting racism and intolerance, almost no effort was put into confronting the intolerance and daily incitement that led to ISIS. We were told that people joined ISIS out of “alienation” or just because they are poor, but when we actually got to interview ISIS members when they were arrested or detained in Iraq and Syria, what media discovered was that these are not poor people suffering discrimination. These are often middle-class and college-educated, sometimes converts to Islamist extremism, who relished the idea of selling slaves and murdering people. They saw traveling to Iraq and Syria to be a kind of vacation where they would get a nice house, emptied of its inhabitants and confiscated from minorities, and they would get slaves and relax.

Unlike locals in Syria and Iraq who sometimes joined for different reasons, the 50,000 foreigners from all over the world who traveled to Iraq and Syria went there purely for the spoils. They bragged online about rape and genocide. These were the SS members of our era, if the SS members had Twitter and Facebook to talk about how much they couldn’t wait to get to Poland to create Lebensraum. 

In the Middle East, ISIS is understood in its own context, a jihadist movement that grew out of other movements. Middle Eastern states have found different ways to confront this “extremism,” as it’s termed in the sanitized Orwellian terminology. Extremism, like the Salem witch trials or Inquisition, was extremism. So some states now have state-managed sermons in mosques on a Friday to stop the extremist preachers. Some have sought to “re-educate” radicals. In Iraq they’ve also executed captured ISIS members. 

But what about the overall legacy? What if the legacy of the KKK had been to just say, “They aren’t real Christians” and “They are violent extremists” – but then to stop there and not make any effort to teach tolerance and make the ideology of the KKK appear toxic in public? In Washington this week, there was a small march by “white nationalists” and a huge protest against it. But there was never a protest against ISIS in Europe or the countries where thousands of ISIS members transited, like Turkey, to get to Iraq and Syria. If someone sees an ISIS flag today, do they protest it? Does it anger them? Or do they prefer the more easy target to confront, the swastika, because secretly we are still afraid to speak truth to the power of “violent extremism?”

In that sense, ISIS won. It won in Iraq and Syria by destroying minority communities.