ISIL AND US
September 12, 2014
In the current wave of news of
beheadings, I found myself wondering: Just what is ISIL’s appeal to donors, let
alone to recruits? This morning I looked
back at Al Jazeera America’s reports, going back to June, on the rise of ISIL,
and on the news ISIL broadcasts worldwide, with the assistance of many
re-broadcasters.
ISIL has its Iraqi roots in the
banning by the US representative of Baath Party members from holding any post
in the Iraqi government, creating a de facto Shia government, in a country with
a Shia majority and Sunni minority.
Former Baath members joined ISI, the Islamic State in Iraq, in retaking
Faluja and other cities of Anbar Province, the first seat of ISIL government.
This reversed Saddam’s Baath Party oppression of Shia at home, and war
against Shia in Iran, corollary to a Sunni government with a bad human rights
record, disenfranchising a Shia majority in Bahrain, where the US stations its
Persian Gulf Navy. Conversely, a Shia
minority formally governs Syria, formally an enemy of the US, in fact allied
with the US against ISIS. To add to the
confusion of US alliances and involvement, the US began its involvement by
installing a puppet Shah in 1953, and later retaliated by helping arm Saddam
Hussein to launch a war against Iran that left two thousand dead. And now Iran is backing up the Iraqi army alongside
the US. If there is one thing the US
lacks in the area, it is authority for moral, even fraternal, consistency.
In one sense, ISIL English-language news is impressive. The appear committed to public health, to
providing quality goods and social services honestly, and nothing I have seen
in Western news media has accused them of corruption.
What bothers the US the most is the brutality of the ISIL version of
justice. (Let’s stop calling it Sharia
law; sharia is simply the word for
law, roughly equivalent to common law in most of the US.) It fits Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 portrayal of
European, retributive justice as “spectacle.”
The spectacle of offenders receiving their legally literal just deserts
is intended to be a general deterrent to others.
The Achilles heel of ISIL is that they confound punishment of wrongdoing
with punishment just for being whomever they believe to be devils
incarnate. Punishment works no better
for others than it does for the US when it creates enemies with its drone
strikes. In remarkable coalition, those
at ISIL’s front lines will eventually take it apart. In that sense, for the time being, enmity has
become an ecumenical force in the region.
As President Obama has said, there’s no telling where, when, or how long
ISIL will remain a governing presence.
In the moment, I am struck once again by how forces in the US mobilize to
demonize overt violence, while they so readily embrace, in this case, “collateral
damage” in criminal justice and killing “terrorists” abroad. Are we more humane because we hold so many
prisoners on death rows for decades, and instead of cutting off their heads in
public admit journalists to describe death by lethal injection? Are we more humane when as an alternative to
the death penalty, we instead embrace the expedient of sentencing young people
to life in prison without parole? Are we
more humane when we effectively sentence someone to life in a locked mental
institution instead of to prison or the death chamber? Doesn’t this humanity/civility of ours only
make it easier to take out wrongdoers in world-record proportion?
In one sense, ISIL justice is more honest, more morally responsible, than
the pretense that US governments are a world-leading model of goodness and
decency. The fact that I don’t condone
justice as punishment, period, is beside the point. I note the discrepancy between our
willingness to bomb those who have killed two US journalists in our faces, and
the restraint with which we respond to witnessing police officers killing those
they wrongly judge deserve it.
Collectively and individually, as Sigmund Freud pointed out, when we
demonize ISIL, we build further defenses against assuming responsibility for
the supposedly kinder, gentler yet more far-reaching violence we tolerate among
ourselves. I’m glad that the US is
consulting and coordinating with those Immediately threatened by ISIL cultural
genocide. I’m saddened to see the
occasion for the US to assert moral superiority. Love and peace, hal
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