First aired on The Final Straw

I’ve given a lot of thought to the issue of the Islamic State militants. Everyone in the world seems to have an opinion on this. The general consensus is that the Islamic State is violent, brutal, oppressive, patriarchal and sectarian. The general consensus is that they need to be stopped. Having an opinion on this seems to be the thing to do, so let me open my big mouth.
Anonymous issued a statement opposed to the Islamic State back in June. They pointed out that these militants have highjacked the idea of what Islam is, excluding all who disagree with them. Anonymous deferred to a cleric who issued a fatwah against the Islamic State.
I’ve got an issue with that. By deferring to a fatwah issued by a cleric, Anonymous is saying it’s okay for Muslims to kill Muslims who kill Muslims. This approach is exactly the problem. For decades, outside interests cheer on “good” Muslims to exterminate “bad” Muslims and, of course, these various outside interests always find a cleric’s fatwah to justify the bloodbath. I would suggest to Anonymous that we need to stop participating in that.
And please don’t melt down my website.
Look, the emergence of the Islamic State is our collective sins of the past making up for lost time. They didn’t pop up out of nowhere. These are people who grew up crawling through the rubble of U.S. extermination policy. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, told them that the murder of half a million of their children under the age of six was a small price to pay for toppling some minor despot. This is a generation that lost loved ones, autonomy, and dignity to an imperial colonizer. The group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, spent time in U.S. custody and was released. One can only assume that his experience of Abu Ghraib ass-pyramids provoked his current resolve.
Yeah, these folks are brutal, oppressive and patriarchal. They desperately assume the same structufe as their enemy in an effort to defeat that enemy. They think that to liberate themselves from the coalition of the United States and its puppets, they have to form a “state” to stand up to it. Everyone else is “stating up,” so why shouldn’t they? In this regard, their only crime is being unimaginative.
News flash: All states are brutal, oppressive, and patriarchal. Ferguson. Hong Kong. Everywhere.
As for the sectarian violence, killing other Muslims, they don’t really have a choice. Given that other Muslims are duped into serving the occupier and colonizer, militants have no other option but to eliminate the “enemy within.” That’s one of the difficult choices they feel they have to make if they ever want a strong Islamic State that will keep their children out of the evil clutches of the Madeleine Albrights. History, it seems, is screaming at the militants to be brutal, oppressive, patriarchal and sectarian if they want to stop he slow murder of their children by the colonizer.
Given this context, while I personally deplore the death and destruction, I have a hard time denouncing others who are resisting a powerful oppressor. For me to oppose the Islamic State for its tactics would be as hypocritical as Jesse Jackson sermonizing in Ferguson, urging folks to sing Cumbayah while their kids get slaughtered by militarized, racist pigs. So long as I’ve got my hands in my pockets, who am I to tell others how to wield their rifles?
So, I get it. The Islamic State militants are bad. So, when they’ve murdered even a tenth of the number of children the U.S. has exterminated, give me a call. The sad reality is, if the Islamic State is defeated, U.S. domination will throw millions out of the frying pan and into the fire.
As an anarchist, I would much prefer an Islamic non-State, as proposed by anarchist Muslims in Kobani. Unfortunately, in this imperfect world, we’re stuck with hierarch militants who lack imagination. If you don’t like that, well, then help dismantle the United States and eliminate aspiring statists’ reasons to exist.
Are you down with that?
Yeah. That’s what I thought.
This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from Ohio’s supermax facility. If you’re down with that, you ARE the resistance…
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