All Politics Is Local, II What is wrong with the Republicans in the US? And what is wrong with Barack Obama? Republican governors and the GOP nominees for the 2016 Presidential election are seeking to stop accepting refugees from Syria – refugees from a conflict essentially grown up from the failed and illegal war George W. Bush initiated in Iraq, where Daesh was born – and to go back to another ground war in the Middle East. Even the Republican candidates who have been on the record as relatively moderate have now swung into full-on xenophobic hate. It seems to have started with Trump, the most ludicrous of the candidates, and one of the least qualified on any subject (other than himself, and even that’s questionable), forcing each one after the next to attempt to match or exceed Trump’s vitriol. Meanwhile, Obama, who, as President, has the executive authority to ignore or override the governors now actively rejecting the settlement of refugees – women, children, and infants – has commenced only a campaign of rhetoric, strongly worded as it may be. Time for more Executive Orders, Mr. President. This is Federal, not State’s Rights. I see too many people I once thought reasonable bowing to fear and embracing hate, conflating all Muslims as terrorists (“it only takes one!”) and refusing to listen. Don’t you know anyone from the Middle East, any Muslims? I do. They are just as appalled by Daesh and the actions of terrorists abroad as anyone else. Have you never met a Christian extremist or seen them in the news? I have: Atlanta Olympics bombings, anti-abortion assassins of doctors, Westboro Baptist Church. But the vast, vast majority of people identifying as Christian are just as appalled as anyone else at the actions of these hateful loons. We need to get a sense of proportion. The survivors and family of those killed by the terrorist Dylann Roof, at Emmanuel African Methodist Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, could each stand up in court and offer their forgiveness to that criminal, from their faith, but also their knowledge that he isn’t the whole of whatever social segment he might have been chosen to represent – whites, Southern whites – and we, too know better than to say those fleeing Syria are the same as those from whom they flee. We know better and need to act accordingly, or we give up the same humanity we otherwise deny to them.

All Politics Is Local As Tip O’Neill famously said, and it’s no less true when we consider Daesh, despite Paris, Beirut, Libya, Egypt, etc. The Daesh leadership are politically motivated: they seek to establish themselves as a state. They cloak their ambition in religious justifications, millenarianist claims that their “caliphate” will bring about Armageddon and the return of the Mahdi, the Islamic “second coming” and the kingdom of heaven on earth. There are indications that this philosophical justification is increasingly central to their ambitions, which must be seen, as it is in all apocalyptic cults, as evidence of insanity. Madmen with tanks, guns, bombs, and internet outreach. It’s still political, and they use political tools to promote their claims to legitimacy and to recruit new members. Even the terrible acts of violence they commit are political messages. So, too, are the West’s acts of violence and oppression, especially when we turn on those Daesh’s recruitment pool and those in fear or in opposition to them. The Grand Mufti of Australia, for example, has repeatedly condemned the Paris attacks, as he has other Daesh atrocities, yet the right-wing Murdoch media continually misrepresent or ignore his statements, so as to characterise Australian Muslims as “sleeper cells” waiting to strike. That we have had three violent incidents and can point to a not-insignificant number of young men who have sought to or accomplished travel to Syria to join the criminals there hasn’t helped the moderate Muslims get their viewpoint out or accepted by a large part of Australian society (but there are at least a few of us listening). The Abbott government’s demonization of refugees has also been highly effective among the ignorant and cowardly: all asylum-seekers now appear as potential terrorists, infiltrators and invaders. Labor’s me-too policies on immigration just entrench the problem. Tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Syria, as well as the various conflicts in North Africa, in Afghanistan, continuing in Iraq, along with all the rest of the world’s oppressed who seek a better, peaceful life, are affected by the hateful, political, rhetoric of both Daesh and our own politicians, whether in Australia, Europe, or the US. Daesh would kill or convert them, but succeed in co-opting them as proxies with the complicity of Western populations and politicians willing to let fear trump sense, or doing so in their own pursuit of power. We give too much legitimacy to Daesh by giving them too much air. While Daesh need to be stopped in Syria and Iraq, where they seek to establish their state, they also need to be stopped elsewhere, but that won’t be as easily accomplished with guns and bombs. We need to show that we are not cowards, not fascistic power-hungry ideologues willing to sacrifice a minority to our fears and desires. We can do that by reaching out to our Muslim neighbors, accepting difference, offering tolerance, and by making an honest effort to take in the refugees. We can do more to end terrorism by requiring more from ourselves, and from those we do business with or treat as allies and equals, but it starts at home. If we hold ourselves to a higher standard, we have the right to hold others to the same standard.

Nous Sommes Parisian Paris is one of those cities that people all over the world feel like the “own”. There are only a few of these, I think. We don’t even ever have to have been there. Cities like Paris are, of course, part of and often central to the character of the nation they belong to, but also entirely separate. New York’s like that, and London. So when something like 13 November 2015 happens, we are all of us shocked and outraged. The murderers in Paris have shown just how far Daesh is willing to go in their program: kill and be killed. They never expected to or even tried to get away with the slaughter they inflicted. They sought only death. This isn’t “terrorism”. It’s simply horror. The perpetrators and those who sent them are monsters. How do we respond? Do we, like the torch- and pitchfork-wielding villagers, enraged by the creating of Victor Frankenstein, chase down these monsters and destroy them? The calls for NATO to engage in full against Daesh certainly says so, as does the reaction of the French in immediately stepping up its bombing campaign in Syria. And there is no reason to say we shouldn’t continue to seek the end of Daesh any more than we should seek to stop and punish its predecessor, al Qaeda. But bombs and tanks and massive retaliatory warfare won’t stop criminals from perpetrating acts of violence. We need to know what these monsters want, and we need to keep in mind what’s at stake. In The Atlantic Monthly, in March, Graeme Wood wrote of his research and analysis into the motivations behind the so-called Islamic State. It is, in a word, politics. They call themselves a state, they claim territory, and they administer that territory according to what they consider codified laws. They even have currency. But, like we sometimes see among extremist Christians, who seem to predict the end of the world fairly regularly, and whom we refer to as “millenarian”, Daesh have cloaked their political goals in religious mysticism to accord themselves justification for their actions. They say they believe that in establishing the new caliphate they can bring about Armageddon and the ultimate triumph of Islam. Part of this belief is the expectation of disastrous failure. The forces of the “West” are expected to engage them in battle in the area they claim as their territory and to defeat them. Like the killers in Paris, they expect to die, even relish the prospect, because the battle against them and their deaths is proof of their legitimacy. They are, in a word, insane. It would be equally insane to leave them alone or to engage them in all-out war. Air raids aren’t going to cut it, but to send in the troops of the “West” accords Daesh more legitimacy than their crimes deserve. While a negotiated end to the Assad regime in Syria is undertaken, a coalition of Muslim nations in the region should coalesce and engage in rooting out this band of criminals from amongst them. Either Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc. are themselves legitimate states, or ISIL is, and they’ll have to decide which. The selfish sectarian feuding used by these states is no less political than the millenarian nonsense of Daesh, and it must be set aside. If they can do this, they can also then decide to engage with and join the modern world.