RFP Staff
♦ What attracted American Don Morgan, founder of the Islamic Center of Salisbury, N.C., holy warrior, and disciple of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to travel to Lebanon in an attempt to join the Jihadist Islamic State forming in Syria and Iraq? Why would an American go on Twitter as “Abu Omar al-Amreeki” and proclaim: “Mujahid pledging allegiance to al-Baghdadi and Islamic state commanding good and forbidding evil. To brothers in Iraq, be patient. Many of us trying to come.”
ISIS or the Islamic State is not a rarity in history. Our planet gets plagued every so often by fanatical religious/political cults that terrorize the world. Today its ISIS/the Islamic State–nearly 70 years ago in World War II America and its allies faced extremist and brutal religious/political cults: Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Nazi Germany demonstrated unbounded fanaticism in their adoration of Hitler, racial purity, mass genocide initiatives, a desire for world conquest, human medical experimentation and unbounded atrocities.
Shinto-based Imperial Japan brutalized occupied nations, raped Nanking, practiced wide-scale genocide on the Chinese, enslaved thousands of “Comfort Women”, undertook horrific human experimentation, starved and tortured allied POWs, trampled every country in their path, flew kamikaze missions, and practiced battlefield suicide with regularity. These religious/political cults were no less extreme than ISIS. Eventually Germany got bombed and incinerated into an ash heap and Japan got nuked to its knees.
ISIS/the Islamic State is not isolated in its determination to self-destruct.
What draws persons like Donald Morgan to become Western “Jihad Joes? Is it the utter certainty that religious/political cults provide? The obsessive/compulsive rituals and anti-human laws? Having the only way? The turning of oneself over to a cause, no matter how irrational, with the promise of a future in a magical land of virgins and all answers coming from a single source? No longer a need to decide or choose–no need for troublesome thought. It’s all handled. There’s always some divinely inspired “cleric” to dispense wisdom from alien universe.
Fanatical religious/political cults with a taste for extreme terrorism have a history of being annihilated by their more civilized foes. Humans desire to survive and live peaceful and happy existences. There is a certain threshold.
Do not expect to take on the world and get very far. That’s been history’s lesson for thousands of years.
Here is an informative video done by a group of independent English video-journalists calling themselves VICE. The video is about the fanatical ISIS/Islamic State cult overwhelming Iraq and Syria and attracting thousands of “Jihad Joes” from Western world–people ready to die for a cause.
