“ISIS now controls a volume of resources and territory unmatched in the history of extremist organizations.”

ISIS – an Incomprehensible Enemy

by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

James Foley was kidnapped first. He was just grabbed off the street by Muslim fanatics.

Then he was kept as a prisoner and tortured.

Finally he was be-headed publicly.

Why could that not be the fate of any American traveling abroad?

You’re a tourist in a Middle Eastern country with an American passport?

Maybe they’ll just pick you up off the street.

Peggy Noonan writes very clearly here about the new threat that is ISIS.

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham is not just a grandiose army of freelancers and fanatics. They’re something different in kind from the al Qaeda of old—more vicious, more organized and professional. George Packer in the New Yorker estimates ISIS controls 35,000 square miles of land. “The self-proclaimed Caliphate stretches from the newly conquered towns along the Syrian-Turkish border,” through northern Syria, across the Iraqi border, “down to the farming towns south of Baghdad.” ISIS funds its operations not like primitives but sophisticates: They sell oil and electricity and empty banks in the areas they seize. (A CNN report put their haul from the oil fields alone at $2 million a day.) They also make money from kidnappings and what they call taxation. Mr. Packer quotes a former Pentagon official: “ISIS now controls a volume of resources and territory unmatched in the history of extremist organizations.” 

They are something new and different in the Mideast drama. They ably take left-behind American and Russian armored vehicles and weapons. They are savage: Al Qaeda once threw them out for brutality and bloodlust. “Extreme Violence Lies in Isis DNA,” is how the Financial Times pithily put it. They have a talent for war and draw fighters from throughout the world, particularly young men from the culturally fractured and materialist West. Those young men, desperate to belong to something, to be among men on a mission, to believe in something bigger and higher than their sad selves, are ripe for jihadist recruitment. Many hundreds of ISIS fighters are said to hold U.S., British or German passports, which will make it easier for ISIS to come here, as they have promised to do.

What is so different about this enemy and so terrifying is that it is trans-national. When Nazism arose in Germany it was identifiable as a nationalist movement. The Nazis were German and Germany was the enemy. When communism was the enemy it was Soviet Russia. Russia was Communist so Russia was the enemy.

With new technologies and global travel, the enemy is no longer a nationally recognized and identifiable entity.

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