IN TODAY’S OPEN-SOURCE HEADLINES . . .
Last month, Christopher Dickey’s blunt piece, “Nice Attack: Has a Bisexual Muslim Hustler Put France on the Path to Civil War?” in The Daily Beast started to de-mystify what many of us have been at pains to understand as a complex, perhaps indecipherable phenomenon: the radical Islamic jihadist. Dickey argued simply that Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was “part of a new genre of terrorist, the instant jihadist who decides more or less suddenly to turn his shitty little life into a world-famous spectacle of death.” I’m thinking Dickey’s right. I think we can safely go even further in de-mystifying the “radical jihadists” of ISIS and any of its ilk.
Who are they? Not much. Growing evidence demonstrates that ISIS recruits aren’t the devout Muslims ISIS would have us believe. I’m not even sure they’re really even radicals—not in the political sense, or even the religious sense. I’m more and more convinced that they’re little more than seriously, seriously and deeply, deeply disturbed and damaged individuals who simply enjoy without remorse wholesale slaughter. Could it really be that ISIS is nothing more than a Siren song for psychopaths?
ISLAM FOR DUMMIES
In “Islam for Dummies: IS recruits have poor grasp of faith,” AP’s Aya Batrawy, Paisley Dodds, and Lori Hinnant report on analysis of “thousands of leaked Islamic State documents.” The conclusion: “Islamic State group applicants, herded into a hangar somewhere at the Syria-Turkey border, turned out to be overwhelmingly deemed ignorant. The extremist group could hardly have hoped for better.” According to information the AP gathered, “70 percent of recruits were listed as having just ‘basic’ knowledge of Shariah—the lowest possible choice. Around 24 percent were categorized as having an ‘intermediate’ knowledge, and just 5 percent were considered advanced students of Islam.”
These people aren’t moved by some deep spiritual conviction. The AP reports that “typical followers included the group of Frenchmen who went bar-hopping with their recruiter back home, the recent European convert who now hesitantly describes himself as gay, and two Britons who ordered ‘The Koran for Dummies’ from Amazon to prepare for jihad in Syria.”
I’ve never really believed that it was about religion. Religion is only a convenient vehicle that can serve to justify their brutality (although it doesn’t, really). So if it’s not spiritual, then something else must drive them towards the opportunity to murder and rape indiscriminately. Indeed, the AP reports that “Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer with experience with Mideast extremist organizations, said most who claim allegiance to IS are ‘reaching for a sense of belonging, a sense of notoriety, a sense of excitement.’” Or, as Dickey more artfully termed them, instant jihadists.
I’m not suggesting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and ISIS leaders aren’t smart. They may very well have pretty high IQs. What I’m reading suggests that they are really nothing more than very successful, power hungry demagogues and psychopaths. I’d really be surprised if most of their life experiences differed much from the likes of Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Andrei Chikatilo, John Wayne Gacy, the Son of Sam, and other notables. As the AP report explains, “The group . . . allows extremists to impose an interpretation of Islam constructed to suit its goal of maximum territorial expansion and carnage as soon as recruits come under its sway.”
Skinner’s interpretation—and Dickey’s, too—puts Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and ISIS in the company of Charlie Manson and the Manson Family. ISIS would be Manson’s Helter Skelter run amok, taken to its logical conclusion. They’re 21st century outcasts who’ve found a savior to follow for the sake of a sense of belonging, or an idiom on which to hang their spontaneous slaughter.
