FRONT PAGE MAG
by Daniel Greenfield
August 14, 2014

Know your enemy. To know what ISIS is, we have to clear away the media myths about ISIS. ISIS is not a new phenomenon.

Wahhabi armies have been attacking Iraq in order to wipe out Shiites for over two hundred years. One of the more notably brutal attacks took place during the administration of President Thomas Jefferson. That same year the Marine Corps saw action against the Barbary Pirates and West Point opened, but even Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Howard Zinn chiming via Ouija board would have trouble blaming the Wahhabi assault on the Iraqi city of Kerbala in 1802 on the United States or an oil pipeline. Forget the media portrayals of ISIS as a new extreme group that even the newly moderate Al Qaeda thinks is over the top; its armies are doing the same things that Wahhabi armies have been doing for centuries. ISIS has Twitter accounts, pickup trucks and other borrowed Western technology, but its ideology and brutality have always been part of Islam. They are not a new phenomenon.

Sunnis and Shiites have been killing each other for over a thousand years. Declaring other Muslims to be infidels and killing them is also a lot older than the suicide bomb vest. Al Qaeda and ISIS are at odds because its Iraqi namesake had a different agenda. Al Qaeda always had different factions with their own agendas that were not more extreme or less extreme, but emerged from varying national backgrounds……

ISIS is dominating Iraq and Syria because it draws on support from the Sunni Arab population. It has their support because it is killing or driving out Christians, Yazidis, Shiites and a long list of peoples who either aren’t Muslims or aren’t Arabs while giving their land and possessions to the Sunni Arabs. The media spent years denying that the Syrian Civil War was a sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. It’s unable to deny the obvious in Iraq, but it carefully avoids considering the implications. An army alone will have trouble committing genocide unless it has the cooperation of a local population that wants to see another group exterminated. When we talk about ISIS, we are really talking about Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria. Not all of them, but enough that ISIS has become the standard bearer of the Sunni side in the civil wars in Syria and Iraq…..

……The Caliphate, like the Reich, is a utopia which can only be created through the mass murder and repression of all those who do not belong. This isn’t a new vision. It’s the founding vision of Islam. What is wrong with ISIS is what is wrong with Islam. We can defeat ISIS, but we should remember that its roots are in the hearts of the Sunni Muslims who support it. ISIS and Al Qaeda are only symptoms of the larger problem. We can see the larger problem flying Jihadist flags in London and New Jersey. We can see it trooping through Australian and Canadian airports to join ISIS. We can see it in the eyes of the Sunni Arabs murdering their Yazidi neighbors. ISIS is an expression of the murderous hate within Islam. We are not only at war with an acronym, but with the dark hatred in the hearts of Jihadists in Iraq and Pakistan… and next door.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/busting-the-medias-isis-myths/