ISIS is the
unauthorised creation, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It is an expansion of
ISI (Islamic State in Iraq) and operates in both Iraq and Syria. Until last year
it was an Al-Qaeda affiliate but it has now evolved into an Al-Qaeda rival.
ISIS is a very radical Islamic organization whose stated objective is to use
force and military conquest to recreate the caliphate and to impose their idea
of strict Islamic rule in the Middle East. It uses an image of religious
wholesomeness to raise large amounts of money from donors and to recruit many
volunteers from around the world to engage in jihad or the 'fight for Islam'.
According to US intelligence sources ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic
State, can "muster between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria,
“It is also a mafia-like organization which raises a great deal of money
through extortion, and looting, selling what it has looted and kidnapping
westerners and collecting large ransoms
for their release.
Allan Henning, a Salford taxi driver From the
United Kingdom was delivering aid to Syria in December 2012 when he was
kidnapped and then held hostage by IS. IS threatened to kill him in footage released
last month on the internet which showed the gruesome beheading of another
British journalist David Haines, and in this video they also threatened to
behead US aid worker Peter Kassig. Alan Henning a taxi driver and
philanthropist had gone to Syria to help get aid to people of all faiths in
their hour of need but was brutally beheaded by IS and his death was
callously paraded on video across the
internet as revenge for British involvement in the American led war on IS. The
gruesome beheading sent shockwaves across the western word evoking rage and
deep sympathies internationally. Britain and the US maintain a policy of not
negotiating ransoms with terrorists while the French and the German governments
are more flexible on the matter. British Prime Minister David Cameron
assured Mr Henning’s family that Britain would do all it could "to hunt
down his murderers and bring them to justice". This act is especially
despicable to Western societies as it is not only barbaric but archaic and more
indicative of warring medieval civilisations.
Therefore,
it seems wholly appropriate for us to assume that we are experiencing ‘a clash
of civilisations. The Clash of Civilizations is a theory, proposed by political
scientist Samuel P. Huntington. He posited that people's cultural and religious
identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War era. Huntington was a former White House
Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council for
President Jimmy Carter. Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse
theories about the nature of global politics in the post-Cold War period. Some
theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy and
capitalist free market economy had become the only remaining ideological
alternative for nations in the post-Cold War world. Most notably among such
scholars is Francis Fukuyama who has argued that the world has reached the 'end
of history' in a Hegelian sense.
Huntington believed that while the age of
ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs
characterised by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the primary
axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural and religious lines. As
an extension, he posits that the concept of different civilisations, as the
highest rank of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analysing
the potential for conflict.
In the 1993
Foreign Affairs article, Huntington wrote:
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source
of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily
economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of
conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors
in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur
between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of
civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between
civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
Huntington
in his seminal thesis on the clash of civilizations explained that some of the
factors contributing to this conflict are that both Christianity (which has
influenced Western civilization) and Islam are missionary religions, which seek
the conversion of others. Islam posits that there is no God but Allah while
Christianity posits that there is no other name under heaven whereby salvation
can be gained except through Jesus. This
constitutes universal, "all-or-nothing" religions, in the sense that
it is believed by both sides that only their faith is the correct one. Both
religions are teleological who dogmatically posit that their values and beliefs
represent the goals of existence and purpose in human existence. Irreligious
people who violate the base principles of those religions are perceived to be
furthering their own pointless aim, which leads to violent interactions.
More recent
factors contributing to a Western-Islamic clash, Huntington wrote, are the
Islamic resurgence and demographic explosion in Islam, coupled with the values
of Western universalism—that is, the view that all civilizations should adopt
Western values. This has infuriated Islamic fundamentalists. The combination of
these historical and modern factors, Huntington wrote briefly in his Foreign
Affairs article and in much more detail in his 1996 book, would lead to a
bloody clash between the Islamic and Western civilizations.
The contemporary struggle against
international terrorism is different from any other war in our history. In the
case of IS the enemy is not a single political enemy but a group of Mujahedeen
thugs. It is a criminal mafia network operating between Syria and Iraq but also
having ties to Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram franchises. They have hijacked and
corrupted the religious ideas of Islam and distorted it for extracting evil
benefits and the exercise of conquests and power under the pretext of
establishing an Islamic caliphate. These mafia thugs also hold the misguided
belief that they should achieve their evil aim by slavery, kidnappings,
robberies, geo-political conquest, beheadings, crucifixions and the forceful
religious conversion of people who don’t share their seventh-century beliefs.
President
Obama and the west were right on this occasion to launch air strikes on IS
operations in Syria and Iraq as they pose a threat not only to the Middle East
but to western countries and even those with Islamic immigrant communities.
Their appeal is broad and their tentacles of recruitment have an extensive
reach into the west where they recruit young vulnerable Muslims in the UK, USA,
and Western Europe and as far afield place such as East Timor and Trinidad. The
world must send a message to these evil morons who will stop at nothing to
spread their evil brand of medieval mayhem upon us. In the same vein while we
hunt them down we have to be wary of the unintended consequence of the accidental
deaths of Iraqi and Syrian non-combatants so often insensitively fobbed off in
the West as collateral damage. While the western governments go ahead to
contain these hate mongers, it is imperative that they exercise caution and not
flaunt humanitarian laws nor ignore the plight of the refugees that emerge from
this conflict. It is of paramount importance that the Red Cross and other
humanitarian organisations are allowed free and unfettered access to provide
assistance and support to those in need as is befitting of their human dignity
as stipulated in International Humanitarian Law.
This article was written jointly by Donovan
Reynolds CEO and Kevton Foster Managing
Editor of Kingston-Mouth .com. Both are
Independent Bloggers and Human Rights Activists who are of Jamaican descent and
are legal academics who have an interest in Human Rights and International
Development issues. Viewers wishing to give feedback on this article may do so
in the space provided for commentary on this blog.
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