Comments One Year after the Proclamation in Mosul

"The first thing they told me was that I wasn't allowed to listen to music. The second thing they told me was how to pray."
Thus spoke another victim-elect for Islamic State recruiters, age twenty-three, raised and flowered in Washington State and to nobody's concern a prospective mujahid until the day they knew she was. Silence, prostration, abject surrender; more appealing than the prime qualities that have impregnated the Islamic faith is the fainter quality of its Platonic dogma, here overtly stressed. You are naught, but only through letting go of your foothold, through pressing your knees down hard enough, you can become. Reason, I have ofttimes thought, may be a treacherous servant, but blind obedience is - far beyond blinding - the very death of the mind, lingering and gruesome as it can be. As elusive, but frightful numbers keep climbing and volunteers boast offer stores in bragging terms of their bloody deeds and preceding course of self-indoctrinating liberation from the Jahiliyya - an ever-present element among those who choose to speak to the distrustful and divinely obstructed ear canals of Kafir media - that same media keep insisting that it has little to do with a quest for psychological and ideological self-fulfillment, much less a willing struggle by faithful soldiers of the Caliphate reawakened. These are pawns, unwilling to face hard realities, brainwashed by equally elusive recruiters seemingly endowed with super-human mental capabilities, able to turn the very ordinary into an army of mindless brutes. But the advances made in spite of massive resistance, most recently in Kobane, and the unspeakable crimes committed at its heels and within its rotten, twisted hearts - another price for its stability and safety promised, even when peace is won - would neither exist if this was an army of pawns. The grossly questionable and inherently sexist notion that women cannot, by definition, fight this war on own account or as a personal choice makes equally poor digestion for those of us who share the notions of personal responsibility, common rationality and intellectual deliberation between a multitude of souls.

"Dispossessed, bullied, unemployed... as I lift my arms, you will begin your journey south to fight my war... your minds will be redirected to killing and maiming without reflection, but you will do it as if you were me, of my creed, or my malice, and shed your last drop of blood at my whim." 

What a great way to trade away responsibility and ideological discourse. But the Islamic State knows neither Others nor Wights, only a horde of acolytes. (Or, were it not an insult to a species I love festering on my skin second only to one other, Sparrows.)

The offensives of the allegedly Islamic State, its intellectual origins are elaborated in a very elaborate and critical manner by Graeme Wood, have spelled once more that a voluntarist movement of tens of thousands - few of which have firsthand experience of combat before opting to join this claimant to be the true Ummah and incarnate its Black Militants of the Faith - seems quite capable to stand against the might of old Persia, a fellow claimant to a resurgence of Islamic renewal and rebirth, Ibn Sauds kingdom, holder of the two sacred Mosques, the Syrian Ba'athist dictatorship which for half a century clung to unquestioned power with wanton brutality comparable or exceeding that of its most dangerous foe, but without its taste for bloodletting advertisement, and all the former masters of the globe now colloquially known as the Western World. All of which can alone rival the Islamic State many times in firepower, and each put up well-trained armies far above its nigh fifty thousand.

"I think they brought stability to the region. I think it is the safest place to live in the Middle East."
Call-me-Alex, 23

The Swedish Christian Democrat leader's proposal to indict former IS fighters for not war crimes or murder, but treason against the Swedish state, may seem near-laughable vote-baiting at first, chiding a minority which is not only vulnerable and shunned but by its core principles refuses to participate in, much less acknowledge political parties, elections or female leadership in the public sense, but may theoretically pass the legal thresholds without too much accommodation. Anyone swallowing the claim of this new Jihad to conquer the landmasses of the world for Allah and their quasi-charismatic, mysteriously secluded bowsprit Call-me-Abu Bahkr and spitting it out has preached in favour of the "subjugation of the realm (or part thereof) under a foreign power", though such a definition in the widest sense would force the indictment of open Communists and Nazis, and anyone proposing the transferal of Tornedalen to neighbouring Finland on similar account. Those who actively don the black to partake in such strife under the new, harrowing banner so akin to the exoticly nihilistic Jolly Roger of the seas, openly professing their wish to extend brutality, dictatorship without even a rubber-stamp fake Parliament (until last year a rarity with no counterpart of considerable size or political power) and slaughter to Swedish soil, never had or claimed by the original Caliphate but implicitly subjected to the Endlösung of the current one have, if yet in the smallest sense, partaken in such a crime. Such citizens or residents may indeed, in some qualified sense, be considered authors of treachery, even if the vagueness of the threat corresponds only too badly with the measures deployed against it.

JAS Gripen - named from a mythological animal of a breed older than, and despised by Christian dogma, the equally Christian notion of dispatching airplanes to deal with the old enemy of the faith ought long ago have been discussed by the major players of the Swedish political paradigm.

The Islamic State cannot be reformed - even if it sported men such as Pieter Willem Botha implied by echoing Prime Minister Palme's famous words - but must be eliminated, and can only be so through the use of military force and superior firepower. The deployment of Swedish, and European Union aircraft in the area to assist Kurdish forces through offensive aerial bombardment, would hence mark a most desirable line in proceeding events. But just as this Caliphate must be bled at home, the source of its unquestionable military prowess must face a bloodletting as soaking as civilised law and its underlying constitutional principles can justify. These measures will, I fear, all prove as insufficient as the bloodletting of the true Jahiliyya, but must serve with forceful action the conjoined purpose of strengthening a resolve against this year-old Caliphate. By any reasonable estimates, it ought not have survived its early infancy, and must by no means proceed to the maturity on which it is so decisively bent.

One year past his eventually historic, and only public speech, the man claiming Abu Bahkr's name and Muhammed's authority still lives and commands the fates of millions, including Iraq's fifth most populated city. The Romans may have asked similar questions with regards to Hannibal for much longer, but the resolve which has failed to unite the many enemies of this last to claimant the right of succession to the polygamous merchant has been nothing if not laggardly.

Update; this yesterday, as I wrote these very words. Enough no more; Tis not so sweet now as it was before. "Before", in the case of Ba'athist-ridden Iraq and Syria, whose void and shatters have been the foundation for this new Caliphate, is a mark that can only hardly be defined.

The soldiers of black and white before the ruins of Palmyra - adding up everything that is wrong with, and everything I despise regarding the onset of this Caliphate of Charlatanism, to which Swedish contributions have proved more valuable than (in terms of the current government's efforts to fight it) against it.