Islamic State takes region back to the Middle Ages
By Claude Salhani
Senior editor of the English service of Trend Agency
The group known as the Islamic State that is fighting to install
an Islamic Caliphate in Syria and Iraq - as a first step to
expanding that caliphate - has made time travel a possibility.
Indeed, through their worse-than medieval manners of beheadings and
crucifixions, torture and mass executions and the selling of
captured women as slaves, they have managed to transport the areas
under their dominance from a modern era of satellite imagery and
stellar communications into a dark, bottomless abyss of savagery
and orgies of evil probably not seen since the days when barbarians
were at the gates of Rome.
Today similar bloodthirsty barbarians are knocking at the gates of
modern civilization, threatening the very concept of the fragile
world we live in.
Had the Internet and video recording existed in the days of the
Goths, Vizigoths and the Ostrogoths they probably would have
behaved similarly to the IS; video recording their monstrous acts
and proudly displaying it on the Internet.
The Islamic State's latest abominable act of brutality comes in the
beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, who has been held
captive in Syria since 2012, a deed that was recorded on video.
The IS claims that the killing of James Foley is in retaliation for
the U.S. bombing of several of their positions in Iraq. It must
also mean that these bombings have hurt them. In their utter
ignorance the group fails to realize that individual Americans,
like James Foley, have no say in U.S. foreign policy.
These "knights" of a hijacked faith are poisoning a decent religion
with their interpretation of Islam.
Forcing a captive to "denounce" his country requires no bravery on
the part of the captors. Rather it reveals the low level of their
understanding of reality.
The result of this hideous act will not prevent future bombings of
IS positions by the U.S. military.
Indeed, it may very well have the opposite effect as the Obama
Administration understands that there can be no mid-way solution to
the plague that this new stigma represents, not only for decent
followers of Islam, but for the whole civilized world.