A 2015 New Yorker review of jihadi poetry reminds us of crucial elements of ISIS ideology as the world begins to respond to thousands of applications for national repatriation from the defeated. Here’s the heart of the matter:
At the center of jihadist politics is a rejection of the nation-state. The map of much of the modern Middle East, established by Britain and France at the end of the First World War, is an enduring source of bitterness. One of ISIS’s most striking videos shows jihadis destroying the border crossing between Iraq and Syria, a line established by the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, in 1916. Other videos feature the burning of passports and national I.D.s. The “holy warriors” find a home only in failed states such as Afghanistan—or, now, eastern Syria—so the poetry of jihad promulgates a new political geography. This geography rejects the boundaries set by foreign powers and is, instead, organized around sites of militancy and Muslim suffering. … These moments of internationalist ecstasy are common in jihadi verse.
If suffering and ecstasy seem to you at odds, you haven’t been paying attention. It pleases Allah and emotionally transports you for you to burn up inside a three-layer cloth coffin (and your three year old daughter! Look at the footage coming out of Baghouz.), for your husbands to be martyred, and for your children to be reared as martyrs-to-be. (Meet Umm.) Radical Muslims weren’t the first to discover masochism-unto-death-as-religion but they’ve certainly taken the concept and run with it. What they call the ecstasy of internationalism the rest of us would call the curse of statelessness; but it’s important to take suicide bombers at their word.
In March, 2014, the kingdom of Bahrain declared that all subjects fighting in Syria had two weeks to return home or be stripped of their citizenship. Turki al-Bin‘ali, a prominent ISIS ideologue and a former Bahraini subject, responded with “A Denunciation of Nationality,” a short poem that thumbs its nose at the royals and ridicules the very idea of the nation-state. “Tell them we put their nationality under our heel, just like their royal decrees,” he writes. For the jihadis, new frontiers beckon: “Do you really think we would return, when we are here in Syria, land of epic battles and the outposts of war?” … Having renounced their nationalities, the militants must invent an identity of their own.
To ISIS women in particular has gone the task of promulgating and enforcing this ideology:
ISIS has made a point of putting women on the front lines of the propaganda war. It has also created a female morality police, a shadowy group called the al-Khansa’ Brigades, who insure proper deportment in ISIS-held towns. Although media accounts of ISIS’s female recruits typically cast them as naïfs signing up for sexual slavery, it is a fact that no other Islamist militant group has been as successful in attracting women.
In the most recent issue of Dabiq, ISIS’s English-language magazine, a female writer encourages women to emigrate to “the lands of the Islamic State” even if it means travelling without a male companion, a shocking breach of traditional Islamic law. This may be a cynical ploy—a lure for runaways. But it is in keeping with the jihadists’ attack on parental authority and its emphasis on individual empowerment, including the power of female believers to renounce families they do not view as authentically Muslim.
Having been crushed, militants now toss empowerment, internationalism, and family/nation-state renunciation aside with the same ease they tossed decapitated heads into baskets. (It’s the rare jihadi woman who displays Dorothée Maquere’s sense of principle: “I don’t want to return to France because the French state used its arms to kill my children and my husband and I know if I return I’ll be put in prison.” As queen bee nihilist – her husband famously killed over a hundred Parisians – Maquere will presumably live out her life in the camp, lording it over lesser nihilists.) They present themselves at our borders as gullible patriots and daddy’s girls — girls for whom daddy now bankrupts the family as he litigates to get Baby back in the pink bedroom they’ve been keeping for her.
Were they playing at their bloody sport? Apparently so, or they’d be packing their bags for New ISIS, Libya.
It might all have been Outward Bound with mucho procreative bouncy bouncy for the caliphate for them; but for us their game is and remains an existential threat. For again the real name of the game, as Hosham Dawod argues, gazing at the ruins of a mosque ISIS destroyed, is world destruction, nihilism sans frontieres: ISIS is “a model of cultural and civilizational nihilism.” Olivier Roy elaborates:
Though Isis proclaims its mission to restore the caliphate, its nihilism makes it impossible to reach a political solution, engage in any form of negotiation, or achieve any stable society within recognised borders.
… The systematic association with death is one of the keys to understanding today’s radicalisation: the nihilist dimension is central. What seduces and fascinates is the idea of pure revolt. Violence is not a means. It is an end in itself. [‘(I)nstead of fighting imperial “crusaders,” the group spent most of its time killing other Muslims and local minority communities …’] [(Isis is) not like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or even Al Qaeda under bin Laden, but akin to “the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.”]
… [T]hose who volunteer to die – the disturbed, the vulnerable, the rebel without a cause – have little to do with the movement,but are prepared to declare allegiance to Isis so that their suicidal acts become part of a global narrative.
… [L]iving in an Islamic society does not interest jihadis: they do not go to the Middle East to live, but to die. That is the paradox: these young radicals are not utopians, they are nihilists. [As in, you know, what the hell… When you run out of other people to kill…]
It is a huge fantasy, like all millenarian ideologies.
… Isis’s pretension to establish a global caliphate is a delusion – that is why it draws in violent youngsters who have delusions of grandeur.
“Ms. Muthana is an accomplished ISIS member in her own right, having joined one of the top terrorist organizations in the world at the age of only 20,” said FAIR spokesperson Keith Finneran, explaining how terms like “ISIS bride” and “wife of ISIS soldier,” routinely used to refer to Muthana in news headlines, are derogatory in that they credit the woman’s hard-won contributions to the war on infidels to her husband… [Y]ou shouldn’t refer to Muthana as a “female terrorist” either, because the countless hours she’s allegedly spent online calling for the death of Americans makes her just as much of a terrorist as anyone else.
As a member in good standing of ISIS Hoda Muthana quite likely had a personal Yazidi slave. Wherever she ends up, she’s unlikely to know the pleasures of owning another human being again. Though she might try applying for citizenship in one of these countries.
Very simple principle, simply stated. You can add that criminal schools in deeply corrupt states attract lots of, er, bad actors, and indeed accumulate long non-glorious histories of the corrupt and criminal.
You’re thinking of the U of Smell — Louisville — I know, cuz we spend a lot of time on that swamp on this blog; but don’t forget its smelliforous competitor, the University of New Mexico. Read through these posts for the narrative of that school’s greedy-dolt presidents, sticky-finger ADs, lazy-dolt trustees, and desperately enraged students and faculty. Short version – jest ’bout anybody who attains a position of responsibility at UNM (i.e. access to funds) steals.
What’s truly distinctive about New Mexico is the stupidity of their academic removalists. Former vastly paid AD Paul Krebs not only robbed the school blind; he wrote about it in university-account emails to his fellow-traveler and current UNM professor wife. He took what some chump thought was a donation to the athletic department and instructed his wife — again, in an email – to put the check where the sun don’t shine.
[The] $25,000 check … “should not be traceable …” Authorities say his wife received these instructions on her university email: “delete everything I sent when done so nothing discoverable in IPRA (public records) request. Including your delete file. Thanks.”
A Time magazine columnist agrees with UD that sadistic male cults should be restricted to heavily policed ‘ultras’ football arenas and trailer parks for bikers. Not a good fit with universities.
Becoming kinder, safer places would do such violence to their legacy that it would mean altering their organizations beyond recognition.
… featured a very exciting performance of Fille du Regiment at the Met, with Javier Camarena hitting all those high C’s, and even giving us an encore of the famous aria. The audience went absolutely wild.
To add to the thrill, our performance went out live to theaters . And this was a first for ol’ UD – at the end of the performance confetti machines up in the rafters rained the stuff down on us.
The air inside the arena was thick with smoke from cigarettes and flares, and the stands were packed with frothing fans. Almost none of them were women. There were even fewer children. In the front row, one man wearing white-and-green face paint shook a giant inflatable penis at the Olympiacos bench. Not far from him, another man, also in face paint, was shirtless and played a bongo he’d somehow smuggled into the arena. Basket teams in Greece have firms, just like European soccer clubs. Each part of the main fan area was divided into subsections with signs for identification: Victoria, Skyros, the Hooligans, Gate 13, Kavala, and, the hardest to miss, West Block, which unfurled a giant banner from the upper deck with a menacing gas mask emblem. When the Olympiacos players came out for warm-ups, the fans made the Greek fuck-you gesture and chanted in unison. I asked [my Greek companion] what they were saying, and he smiled: “Olympiacos, motherfuckers.”
Coach of Panathinaikos, the rival team? The University of Louisville’s most famous, most celebrated, most highly compensated (but not compensated enough: he’s currently suing the school for forty million dollars) personality: Rick Pitino. Read the whole article and you’ll see that Rick has finally found his level.
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And on the domestic front…
YEEHAW!!!! RIDE EM COWBOY!!!!
Report: Southern Miss Coach Who Wanted To Hire Art Briles Also Tried To Add A Player Accused Of Two Knifepoint Rapes
Whether it’s an inability to follow Medicare/Medicaid rules, landing him in court for this country’s largest healthcare fraud trial, or an inability to follow the rules of the court that’s trying him (behavior that angered the judge and got his mother and one of his lawyers banned from the room and indeed from the building), it’s amazing to watch the weird ways of incorrigibly sociopathic Philip Esformes. The man who bribed U Penn’s basketball coach (who goes to prison soon) to get his son on the team appears actually incapable of licit activity; whatever is it, it’s got to be illicit.
Doesn’t matter how petty it is, either. From Law 360:
Miami nursing home mogul Philip Esformes’ mother, who previously had been warned by the judge about communicating with her son during his $1 billion health care fraud trial, was thrown out of the courtroom Tuesday after she was caught receiving a note from her son.
Just after a mid-morning break in testimony and before the jurors were let back into the Florida federal courtroom, U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. said someone had seen an attorney pass along a note from Esformes to his mother despite a warning earlier in the trial that this would not be allowed.
“We’ve already had problems from this,” the judge said. “Mrs. Esformes is excluded from the courtroom and the courthouse.”
The stunned woman, who has sat in the audience for most of the trial, was then escorted by the bailiff out of the courtroom.
Stunned. You can see where Phil gets his ideas about rules.
As I mentioned, I’m giving the Committee today copies of a letter I sent at Mr. Trump’s direction threatening these schools with civil and criminal actions if Mr. Trump’s grades or SAT scores were ever disclosed without his permission.
The irony wasn’t lost on me at the time that Mr. Trump in 2011 had strongly criticized President Obama for not releasing his grades. As you can see in Exhibit 7, Mr. Trump declared “Let him show his records” after calling President Obama “a terrible student.”
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It’s fine to be embarrassed or just want to be private about your grades; other presidents have refused to release theirs. Our current president has threatened legal action.
Charles Swift, Muthana’s lawyer … [said the withdrawal of her citizenship is] “incredibly terrifying. .. If they can do this to Hoda, they can do it to anyone.”
Yes! Beware! For any of us could fall in love with these men and their cause:
Research centres such as the one I lead at King’s College London (the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation) archived millions of pieces of output from foreign fighters who cheered attacks in the West. When one occurred, they agitated for more. They celebrated the beheadings of Western hostages such as the American journalist James Foley. His death followed months of agonising torture, which included beatings and waterboarding. Foreign fighters mocked and belittled the sexual slavery of Yazidi women, the detention of their children, and murder of their menfolk.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
