Daesh and The Dance With Death

Overlooked in the concern over the Parisian attacks are the attacks that occurred quite as recently, the Beirut suicide bombings, which claimed over 40 people, and a suicide attack that claimed 26 in Baghdad, and for the survivors and the family members of those attacks, I would also like to extend my sympathies, ineffectual as they are. We are basically stupid if we try to view the conflict with Daesh as being some idiotic "clash of civilizations": they don't represent all of Islamic civilization, and based on some of the foul shit they do, they don't represent any civilization at all. They've slaughtered many more Muslims than they have Westerners. There's reasonable theory behind the idea that they mean to aim at the "grey zone"-- the area of tolerance wherein Christians or Hindus and Muslims can get along in peace.

In February this year, in a chilling editorial in its propaganda magazine, Dabiq, Isis laid out its own strategy to eliminate what the writer, or writers, called “the grey zone”.

This was, Isis said, what lay between belief and unbelief, good and evil, the righteous and the damned. It was home, too, to all those who had yet to commit to the forces of either side.

The grey zone, Isis claimed, had been “critically endangered [since] the blessed operations of September 11th”, as “these operations showed the world” the two camps that mankind must choose between.

Over the years, since successive violent acts had narrowed the grey zone to the point where by the end of 2014 “the time had come for another event to ... bring division to the world and destroy the grey zone everywhere”.

They mean to divide. They want Westerners to reject Muslims among us. They want us to turn aside the refugees of Sudan and Syria and Afghanistan. They want us to commit war crimes against Islamic populations. They want us to fuck up and retaliate in some monstrous way to prove their point that we and they operate on gross moral equivalency,

Check this shit out--when Daesh took credit for the Paris attacks, they called Paris "the capital of prostitution and obscenity".  Really? Because there is a mass grave of women aged 40-80 of Yazidi women who were killed because their bodies were not valuable enough to be sold into sex slavery. That sort of thing is a true obscenity, and a far more grotesque example of the exploitation of women. And take a look at the happy face social media accounts try to make of Daesh women to recruit little sisters. Anyone want to lay bets about how much of this fronting of woman posters is a catfish?

Some of the attackers had passports on them--in a terrorist attack, revealing identities is mostly stupid, because it could betray your cell, but as a way of producing disinfo?  Sure, illicit persons might piggy-back onto the Syrian crisis to gain access to Europe--just because living in Europe is better. But the value to the ISIS ideology of destroying the possibility of coexistence and thereby radicalizing the hundreds of thousands of Syrian dispossessed by making it seem like Syrian refugees are toxic? Priceless.

Bending to radicals by showing our yellow asses and closing borders and rejecting genuine refugees plays into the divided future Daesh seeks. We can vet refugees. We have ways of knowing who they are. We can coexist and should. Fuck Daesh and their divisiveness. I reject their dance with death.