Making Sense with Sam Harris - #154 — What Do Jihadists Really Want? (2019)

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

Sam Harris reads from an issue of Dabiq, the magazine of ISIS, and discusses the beliefs and goals of jihadists worldwide. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, I have a town hall event in Los Angeles coming up in May, May 9th, at a currently undisclosed location. This is going to be at a small club, I think it seats 200, a more intimate venue than normal, and we're going to broadcast this town hall online, and I'm hopeful the video experience is going to be good. It's going to be an Ask Me Anything episode of the podcast, but rather than take questions merely from you all online, I'm expecting attendees to bring their questions, though I will take some online questions,

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account for you. Okay, so today I am re-releasing an old episode, which unfortunately is highly relevant this week. The episode was originally 43 of the podcast, titled What Do Jihadists Really Want? And the original release date was August 17th, 2016, so a little more than two and a half years ago. And in the aftermath of the recent bombings in Sri Lanka, I decided to listen to it just to see if there was something more I needed to say to make sense of the current situation. And I find that there isn't. I did about as good a job as I can in trying to get you, the listener, to see jihadism the way I do, and the way I believe jihadists see themselves. I must say I'm also given further motivation having just been at TED and having had the usual collisions with the wokeness there. It was a great conference. I had a lot of fun, but I had one meeting with a Muslim apologist, I would call her, who I won't name. It was a private

meeting organized by Chris Anderson, and he had some hopes that we would have a meeting in the mines, I think. We didn't have much of one. It wasn't a waste of time, but it was also an experience where I confronted all of the usual denials and non-sequiturs one encounters when one tries to say something rational about Islam at this moment in history. So it was a frustrating experience and now punctuated by an enormous atrocity. I think the current count is 350 have died in Sri Lanka. And the details we have so far prove yet again that the problem is not a matter of economics or politics. It's belief. These suicide bombers were middle class and mostly well-educated. They had other opportunities. The problem was that they were convinced of the truth of specific religious ideas. Ideas that are not in the Anglican Communion, or in Mormonism, or in Scientology.

All I ever argue for on this topic is that we acknowledge the power of ideas, and Islam has more than its fair share of bad ones. So if you want to confront the problem of jihadism and Islamism, as we really all must, and as moderate Muslims the world over must, you have to be honest about these things. And what I encounter among apologists and among all too woke leftists is, to some degree, self-deception, no doubt, but it is with disconcerting frequency a commitment to actually lying about the problem and to defaming anyone who won't lie about it. So I'm re-upping this podcast because if I had to say this all again, I don't think I would change a word. And all of these observations are once again relevant. So, what do jihadists really want?

Well, as I said in my last podcast, ISIS just released a remarkable document in the latest issue of their magazine Dabiq, which is named after a city in Syria where they believe they will wage a final battle against a crusader army and usher in the end times. So I promised to discuss that in a separate podcast, which I'll do now. The whole magazine is fairly astonishing.

I'll provide a link to a PDF on my blog, but I warn you that some of the pictures are disturbing. There's a photograph of a man getting his head cut off, which leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. But I'm going to read some relevant parts of the magazine on this podcast. And one thing that should alarm you is how well written it is. The writing in this magazine is actually better than you'll find in your average Salon article or on The Intercept. In fact, it's as well written as Fawaz Gergi's new book on ISIS, published by Princeton University Press. And the copy editing in this magazine is actually better than in that book. I'm not exaggerating. I spotted a

typo in the Gurgis book in the first few pages. I haven't seen any typos in this copy of Dabiq. And it may sound like a strange thing to say, but good writing and good copy editing is a very bad sign. It tells you something about the caliber of people they've managed to recruit. The article I'm going to focus on and read in its entirety is entitled, Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You. And I think it will inevitably be said that there's something self-serving about my reading this to you, because it confirms more or less everything I've been saying about jihadism for the last 15 years. And perhaps there is something a little self-serving about it, because as you know, I've been pilloried for my views on this topic for about as long. But this really isn't a matter of my just saying, I told you so.

I actually think it's important that if you have any lingering doubts about whether or not that if you have any lingering doubts about whether or not ISIS and jihadism generally is a religious phenomenon, that you clarify those doubts and just listen to what members of ISIS have to say for themselves. But before I get into that article in particular, here is what I think any honest reader will get from this magazine as a whole. think any honest reader will get from this magazine as a whole. The fundamental concerns of these people are theological. The claim they want to press and substantiate in nearly every paragraph, and which motivates everything they do, is a claim about the exclusive legitimacy of their religion. Every other way of life leads to hell. They really believe this. Now, most of you, I would wager, have no idea what it's like to believe that either paradise or an eternity in fire awaits you after death.

And because you haven't ever believed this, you probably waste a lot of fuel wondering whether anyone actually does. I want to recommend that you stop doing that and simply accept that jihadists believe what they say they believe. Just accept it as a working assumption. If you do that, you will suddenly find that everything they do, including suicide bombing, makes perfect sense. So I recommend that you simply listen to what these people have to say for themselves, as you would any other people who are making extreme sacrifices towards some end. The disposition not to do this is really strange. Let's say you went to a medical school and you asked students why they were pursuing careers in medicine.

How disposed would you be to second-guess their answers? I mean, what they're doing is fairly difficult. They're spending all this time in school. They're incurring massive student debt. They're spending their days indoors dissecting cadavers when they could be at the beach. What on earth are they up to? Well, if you ask them, they will tell you.

And you won't waste any time wondering whether they have some other motive that bears no resemblance to what they say. I mean, there might be some diversity of reasons, they will tell you. And you won't waste any time wondering whether they have some other motive that bears no resemblance to what they say. I mean, there might be some diversity of reasons, but 90% of medical students will give you more or less the same story. They'll say that they want to help people, that they want a meaningful career where they know they're doing good in the world. They want a high prestige career. They want to be paid well. And they might have scientific interests in biology and medical research.

You'll hear answers like this. And these answers make sense of their behavior. You won't hear someone say, I wanted to be a professional football player and found that I just wasn't quite good enough to turn pro. And so I decided to find the thing that was closest to the thrill of sacking a quarterback. And so I became a dermatologist, right? That wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't make sense to imagine that was the underlying motive.

So why do jihadists do what they do? Well, they are telling us ad nauseum. They're telling us even when we don't ask. And a magazine like Dabiq advertises their concerns and aspirations with utter clarity. And you might want to say it's just propaganda. And it is propaganda. But it only works as propaganda because many Muslims share these aspirations and concerns and believe the same doctrines. To call it propaganda doesn't mean that it's dishonest. For these ideas to successfully recruit people means that they find these ideas compelling. So whether Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi believes every word in this magazine isn't the point. The point is that this material is a highly successful means of recruiting foreign-born jihadis. The point is that many people

find these ideas persuasive, and that's not an accident. Now, recruiting and inspiring jihadis overseas is obviously different from getting Iraqis and Syrians to fight for ISIS at home. And there's no question that many locals have been recruited out of fear. Fear of Shiites with whom they've been locked in a sectarian civil war, and fear of what ISIS will do to them if they don't support the caliphate. So who knows what percentage of local Sunnis really support the extreme Salafi jihadism of ISIS. It's probably a terrifying percentage, but it's not everyone. But here we're talking about the spread of Islamism and jihadism globally.

So we're talking about persuasion. We're talking about the power of ideas. We're talking about a worldview that must be argued for and which some percentage of Muslims in any society will find compelling. And when you read this magazine, you find that above all, jihadis are concerned about religious error. They really are concerned about the deviance of Christianity, which they consider a form of paganism, and about rival interpretations of Islam. And needless to say, they're horrified by secularism and atheism and homosexual Islam. And needless to say, they're horrified by

secularism and atheism and homosexuality. They're concerned about the worship of anything beyond the single reality of Allah, whether it's the worship of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, or more metaphorically, things like money and pleasure and the arts and science. And the writers of this magazine go on at great length about how irrational it is to believe that a world as orderly as ours could have arisen from chaos. They give a long argument from design that is at least as lucid, or as silly, depending on your view, as any offered by the Discovery Institute. They consider every sign of order in our world, including the beauty of nature and the cuteness of babies and the neurobiology of vision and the details of energy metabolism in the body

and the functioning of our immune systems, as well as the faculty of reason itself, to be evidence of a benevolent creator. On their account, the harmony between man and nature cannot help but attest to the reality of a just God. And this is spelled out in great detail in a magazine that prominently celebrates the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people. To read this magazine is to discover that the oft-mocked line that was delivered by George Bush in his Texas drawl, The Haters for Our Freedom, is actually true. It is especially true if you include freedom of speech and belief. And those among you who think that they must have some other motive, that they must hate us for our foreign policy, as any rational people would in the aftermath of colonialism, well, you're simply wrong, and dangerously so, as they make absolutely clear. So everything that has been said and

written by people like Noam Chomsky and Robert Pape and Glenn Greenwald and the dozens of prominent Muslim apologists about the motivations of jihadists, this whole pornography of self-doubt that they've been peddling for more than a decade. All of this is pure delusion. The people who are attracted to the jihadist cause are actually concerned about the work of Darwin and Marx and Nietzsche and Durkheim and Weber and Freud, who they call, quote, the engineers of Western decadence. They are revolted by the, quote, quote, the engineers of Western decadence. They are revolted by the, quote, sodomite pride they see on display in the West. There's a testimonial from a European convert to Islam that's worth pondering. A woman, actually. And she talks about what it was like to convert in

Finland and about how Christianity never made any sense to her. Because, of course, it doesn't make any sense. Jesus is both a man and the Son of God and God himself. He's divine and all-powerful, and yet he gets crucified and humiliated. This is ridiculous. Christians haven't been able to make sense of the Trinity for 2,000 years. Islam actually is more straightforward than this, which is a real advantage. There's just God, and you are his slave. Get with the program or burn in hell. The magazine actually contains a long article on biblical criticism that does a very good job of dismantling Christian doctrine. The level of theological concern these people have, the absolute primacy of their claim to

being metaphysically correct, is really impossible to exaggerate. They care about nothing else. There's only one question that makes any sense. How can you avoid hell and get into paradise after you die? That question is the black hole at the center of their worldview that sucks everything into it. So this Finnish woman who was born Christian writes, what struck me most as I was reading the Quran were the verses about hellfire and the punishment in the hereafter, end quote. Which isn't a surprise, obviously, because the whole point of the Quran is to admonish you to submit to Allah or else go to hell. And she talks about how she converted to Islam and how her parents disapproved. And then she married a Muslim man and had a child. And then the happy family decamped

to the caliphate. And then she writes, quote, I can't even describe the feeling when you finally cross that border and enter the lands of the caliphate. It is such a blessing from Allah to Quote, That's migration. to be tested. You're going to see hardships and trials. But every day you're thankful to Allah for allowing you to perform hijrah, that's migration, and to live under the sharia. Life in the Islamic State is such a blessing. You face difficulties and hardship. You're not used to the food or the change of life. You may not know the local language. You hear bombings and the children may get scared. But none of that takes away from the gratitude you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here. Also, unless you're living here, you don't realize what kind of life you had before. The life here is so much more pure.

When you're in Dar al-Kufar, the lands of disbelief, you're exposing yourself and your children to so much filth and corruption. You make it easy for Satan to lead you astray. Here you're living a pure life, and your children are being raised with plenty of good influence around them. They don't need to be ashamed of their religion. They are free to be proud of it, and are given the proper creed right from the start. After four months of being here, my son was martyred, and this was yet another blessing. Every time I think about it, I wonder to myself, if I stayed in Dar al-Kufar, what kind of end would he have had? What would have happened to him? Alhamdulillah, praise be to God. He was saved from all that. And what could

be better than him being killed for the cause of Allah? Obviously, it's not easy, but I ask Allah to allow us to join him. End quote. Well, that's a fairly chilling passage. I'm going to read it again because you weren't ready for it. As you listen again, assume that this is a psychologically normal person who simply believes in the reality of martyrdom and paradise, which is to say she believes that this life is fundamentally unimportant. It's merely a test of faith. Believe the wrong thing and you will go to hell for eternity. Believe the right thing and you'll go to paradise. Eternity is all

that matters. I'll read the relevant part again. You face difficulties and hardship. You're not used to the food or the change of life. You may not know the local language. You hear bombings and the children make it scared. But none of that takes away from the gratitude you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here. Also, unless you're living here, you don't realize what kind of life you had before. The life here is so much more pure. When you're in Dar al-Kufar, the lands of disbelief, you're exposing yourself and your children to so much filth and corruption. You make it easy for Satan to lead you astray.

Here you're living a pure life, and your children are being raised with plenty of good influence around them. They don't need to be ashamed of their religion. They are free to be proud of it, and are given the proper creed right from the start. After four months of us being here, my son was martyred, and this was yet another blessing. Every time I think about it, I wonder to myself, if I stayed in Dar al-Kufar, what kind of end would he have had? What would

have happened to him? Alhamdulillah. Praise be to God. He was saved from all that. And what could be better than him being killed for the cause of Allah? Obviously, it's not easy, but I ask Allah to allow us to join him. So picture what happened here. She had a young child who, four months after her sojourn in the caliphate, got what, blown up? Crushed by falling concrete? Who knows? But she thinks it's the best thing that could have happened to him. She's from Finland, which incidentally has one of the best school systems and social safety nets on earth. And rather than raise him there to become a doctor or a novelist or an entrepreneur, or to become one of those things herself, she moves to the hellhole of Iraq as the wife of some religious maniac and decides to live in a

cloth bag and now celebrates the fact that her son, who could have been anybody, is now dead. son, who could have been anybody, is now dead. And his death doesn't even rise to the level of some of the other inconveniences she lists. You're not used to the food, the change of life, the local language, the sounds of bombs. Oh, and my son got killed after four months. But that was actually a good thing. This is the world these people are committed to building. A fantasy world of gratuitous religious bullshit that strips all the value out of life. Where the death of a child who was intentionally deprived by his parents of every real opportunity in life is a cause for celebration. This is the enemy. Not some psychopath who would be killing people anyway, and who's now merely doing these things, quote, in the name of Islam. No, the enemy is any ordinary person who becomes infected by these extraordinarily stupid ideas. The enemy is someone just like you,

who simply got convinced that the only things that matter in this life are martyrdom or victory for the one true faith. They want to conquer the world for Islam or die trying. So they can't lose. Really, they can't lose. Can you imagine how good it must feel to know that you can't lose? Think of all your concerns in life. Think of everything you want. Think of everything you don't want and everything you want to avoid. You probably care about your career or your children's education. You don't want too many pesticides in your food.

You want political stability in your society. You'd like your favorite museums or movie theaters or restaurants not to close for lack of funds. You probably want to get in shape or stay in shape. You certainly don't want to get cancer from something that a nearby chemical plant has released into your groundwater. Think of all the ways you can lose. And now imagine that you have a belief system that nullifies all of that. Oh, my son died? Good. What a relief. Now he's safely in paradise, and I hope to be there soon myself.

If you don't understand the power of that, you have no idea what we're dealing with. And you lack empathy. You haven't been able to get into these people's heads because you are stuck in your own. And they have made it so easy for you to get into their heads. In fact, you have to make every effort to stay out. You have to imagine that they are lying, endlessly lying, for some inexplicable reason. When taking their claims at face value makes perfect sense of their behavior, and when imputing other motives to them makes their behavior entirely mysterious. So just listen.

Do your best for the next few minutes to see the world through their eyes. Why we hate you and why we fight you. Shortly following the blessed attack on a sodomite crusader nightclub by the Mujahid Omar Mateen, American politicians were quick to jump into the spotlight and denounce the shooting, declaring it a hate crime, an act of terrorism, and an act of senseless violence. A hate crime?

Yes. Muslims undoubtedly hate liberalist sodomites, as does anyone else with any shred of their fitra. Fitra is human nature that recognizes good and evil. As does anyone else with any shred of their fitra still intact. An act of terrorism? Most definitely. Muslims have been commanded to terrorize the disbelieving enemies of Allah. But an act of senseless violence? One would think that the average Westerner by now would have abandoned the tired claim that the actions of the Mujahideen, who have repeatedly stated their goals, intentions, and motivations don't make any sense. Unless you truly and naively believe that the crimes of the West against Islam and the Muslims, whether insulting the Prophet, burning the Quran, or waging war against the Caliphate, won't prompt brutal

retaliation from the Mujahideen, you know full well that the likes of the attacks carried out by Omar Mateen, LaRosie Abala, and many others before and after them in revenge for Islam and the Muslims make complete sense. The only thing senseless would be for there to be no violent, fierce retaliation in the first place. Notice the order of their grievances. Insulting the Prophet, burning the Quran, or waging war against the Caliphate. These people don't have ordinary political concerns about the Palestinians or anyone else. This will become even clearer by the end of the article. Back to the text. Many Westerners, however, are already aware that claiming the attacks of the Mujahideen to be senseless

and questioning incessantly as to why we hate the West and why we fight them is nothing more than a political act and a propaganda tool. The politicians will say it regardless of how much it stands in opposition to facts and common sense, just to garner as many votes as they can for the next election cycle. The analysts and journalists will say it in order to keep themselves from becoming a target for saying something that the masses deem to be, quote, politically incorrect. The apostate imams in the West will adhere to the same tired cliche in order to avoid a backlash from the disbelieving societies in which they've chosen to reside. The point is, people know that it's foolish, but they keep repeating it regardless because

they're afraid of the consequences of deviating from the script. There are exceptions among the disbelievers, no doubt. People who will unabashedly declare that jihad and the laws of sharia, as well as everything else deemed taboo by the Islam is a peaceful religion crowd, are in fact completely Islamic. But they tend to be people with far less credibility who are painted as a social fringe, so their voices are dismissed and a large segment of the ignorant masses continues believing the false narrative. As such, it becomes important for us to clarify to the West, in unequivocal terms, yet again, why we hate you and why we fight you. again why we hate you and why we fight you. 1. We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers. You reject the oneness of Allah, whether you realize it or not, by making partners

for him in worship. You blaspheme against him, claiming that he has a son. You fabricate lies against his prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you. Quote, There has already been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, Indeed, we are disassociated from you, and from whatever you worship other than Allah, we have rejected you, and there has arisen between us and you enmity and hatred forever, until you believe in Allah alone. Furthermore, just as your disbelief is the primary reason we hate you,

your disbelief is the primary reason we fight you, as we have been commanded to fight the disbelievers until they submit to the authority of Islam, either by becoming Muslims or by paying the jizya for those afforded this option, and living in humiliation under the rule of the Muslims. And for those who don't know, the jizya is a protection tax that Jews and Christians, the people of the book, can pay to live as Jews or Christians under the boot of their Muslim overlords. Thus, even if you were to stop fighting us,

your best-case scenario in a state of war would be that we would suspend our attacks against you if we deemed it necessary in order to focus on the closer and more immediate threats before eventually resuming our campaigns against you. Apart from the option of a temporary truce, this is the only likely scenario that would bring you fleeting respite from our attacks. So in the end, you cannot bring an indefinite halt to our war against you. At most, you could only delay it temporarily. Quote,

And fight them until there is no fitna, paganism, and until the religion, all of it, is for Allah. End quote. Two, we hate you because your secular liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited, while banning many of the things he has permitted, a matter that doesn't concern you because you separate religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires

via the legislators you vote into power. In doing so, you desire to rob Allah of his right to be obeyed, and you wish to usurp that right for yourselves. Quote, legislation is not but for Allah, end quote. Your secular liberalism has led you to tolerate and even support, quote, gay rights, secular liberalism has led you to tolerate and even support, quote, gay rights, to allow alcohol, drugs, fornication, gambling, and usury to become widespread, and to encourage the people to mock those who denounce these filthy sins and vices. As such, we wage war against you to stop you from spreading your disbelief and debauchery, your secularism and nationalism,

your perverted liberal values, your Christianity and atheism, and all the depravity and corruption they entail. You've made it your mission to, quote, liberate Muslim societies. We've made it our mission to fight off your influence and protect mankind from your misguided concepts and your deviant way of life. 3. In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you

because you disbelieve in the existence of your Lord and Creator. You witness the extraordinarily complex makeup of created beings and the astonishing and inexplicably precise physical laws that govern the entire universe, but insists that they all came about through randomness and that one should be faulted, mocked, and ostracized for recognizing that the astonishing signs we witness day after day are the creation of the wise and all-knowing creator

and not the result of accidental occurrence. Quote, or were they created by nothing? Or were they creators of themselves? End quote. Your disbelief in your Creator further leads you to deny the day of judgment, claiming that, quote, you only live once. Quote, those who disbelieve have claimed that they will never be resurrected. Say, yes, by my Lord you will surely be resurrected, and then you will surely be informed of what you did, and that for Allah is easy. End quote.

Four, we hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion. As long as your subjects continue to mock our faith, insult the prophets of Allah, including Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, burn the Quran, and openly vilify the laws of the Sharia, we will continue to retaliate, not with slogans and placards, but with bullets and knives. 5. We hate you for your crimes against the Muslims, your drones and fighter jets bomb, kill, and maim our people around the world, and your puppets in the usurped lands of the Muslims oppress, torture, and wage war against anyone who calls to the truth. As such, we fight you to stop

you from killing our men, women, and children, to liberate those of them who you imprison and torture, and to take revenge for the countless Muslims who have suffered as a result of your deeds. Six, we hate you for invading our lands and fight you to repel you and drive you out. As long as there is an inch of territory left for us to reclaim, jihad will continue to be a personal obligation on every single Muslim. Now, lest wishful thinking obscurantists and the usual pseudo-journalist masochists mistake those last two reasons for rational political objectives. The authors of this essay quickly close that door.

So listen closely to this. What's important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you. Because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.

primary reason for hating you, will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay the jizya and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt we would stop fighting you then, as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who entered into a covenant with us. But we would not stop hating you. What's equally, if not more important to understand, is that we fight you not simply to punish and deter you, but to bring you true freedom in this life and salvation in the hereafter. Freedom from being enslaved to your whims and desires, as well as those of your clergy and legislatures, and salvation by worshiping your Creator alone and following His messenger, we fight you in order to bring you out of the darkness of disbelief and into the light of Islam, and to liberate you from the constraints of living for the sake of worldly life alone,

so that you may enjoy both the blessings of worldly life and the bliss of the hereafter. The gist of the matter is that there is indeed a rhyme to our terrorism, warfare, ruthlessness, and brutality. As much as some liberal journalists would like you to believe that we do what we do because we're simply monsters with no logic behind our course of action, the fact is that we continue to wage and escalate a calculated war that the West thought it had ended several years ago. We continue dragging you further and further into a swamp you thought you'd already escaped, only to realize that you're stuck even deeper within its murky waters. And we do so while offering you a way out on our terms.

So you can continue to believe that those, quote, despicable terrorists hate you because of your lattes and your timberlands and continue spending ridiculous amounts of money to try to prevail in your unwinnable war. Or you can accept reality and recognize that we will never stop hating you until you embrace Islam and we'll never stop fighting you, until you're ready to leave the swamp of warfare and terrorism through the exits we provide, the very exits put forth by our Lord for the people of the Scripture, Islam, jizya, or as a last means of fleeting respite, a temporary truce. End quote.

a temporary truce. End quote. Now, I think it really is difficult for many of you to appreciate how attractive this message is for those who are susceptible to it. It really is the total package, especially for men. As we've seen, even women can be recruited to this cause. But the attraction for men, or a certain type of man, is much easier to see. This worldview has everything. From the pleasure of contemplating the beauty of the universe, to the brotherhood of fighting alongside one's fellow soldiers for a just cause, to the illicit thrill of being in the mob and not having to take shit from anyone, to the joy of being able to endlessly split hairs with your fellow amateur theologians, it's like you're a spiritual James Bond. It's like you get to be a Navy SEAL

and a priest. You get to worry, really worry, about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And you get to carry an AK-47 and use it to your heart's content, fully convinced that the creator of the universe wants you to do it. So you get to be a total badass and feel spiritually pure at the same time. Did you ever know anyone who got really into yoga? They just got obsessed with it, like it was the answer to all their problems. They got into the subtleties of it. They were really thinking about their chakras opening, the energy centers in the body. They spent a lot of time adjusting their diets, eating only pure foods, because their bodies were now these instruments of spiritual realization, and they just had to be tuned perfectly.

So picture that level of infatuation. Imagine a man who's just totally into yoga, and he's convinced that he's found this ancient path to wellness and enlightenment. But then he discovers another aspect to it, just as true. In addition to all the purity and subtlety and the refinement of his understanding of the body, just the preciousness of that whole enterprise, he learns that he gets to kill the bad guys. He's not some pussy in a leotard. He's a yoga assassin. He gets to kick ass. He's in the mob. There's actually one testimonial in this issue of Dabiq from a convert from Trinidad

who said that his family back home, when they get any hostility from anyone, they say, you better watch out. We have a son in ISIS, right? And that gives them street cred. So he's a wise guy now, right? He's a made man and he protects his family from afar merely by the power of his reputation for violence. That's part of the attraction. And then there's the problem of women, right? So imagine being a guy who's grown up in isolation from women or never felt confident with them. So he's either in a traditional Muslim context where contact with the opposite sex is highly circumscribed, or he's just someone who felt isolated socially by a lack of confidence and a fear of rejection. Picture a young man who has spent his entire life being the

least confident guy in the bar, but now he's been recruited into a cult that gives him a new understanding. Okay, all those hot chicks who he was worried about rejecting him, well now they're his slaves. Whether they're his wife or wives, he actually can have more than one, or his actual sex slaves, he rules. He is to be feared and obeyed. So he might have been bored with his life before, and he might have seemed destined for a life of boredom. But now his life has suddenly become this massive first-person shooter game where he's been inducted into a fraternity of tough guys and given absolute dominion over women. Picture the emotional attraction of that to a certain type of man.

And then add the intellectual or pseudo-intellectual component to it. So whatever his actual intellectual accomplishments, at the level of his mind now, he's suddenly a philosopher and a scientist and a priest all rolled into one. Because God has simply given him the truth about the cosmos in the Quran. And this is a truth about which every infidel in history, including Einstein and Darwin and Richard Feynman, was ignorant. And they will pay for their ignorance in fire for eternity. But our hero has escaped their errors and their arrogance. So he's better than a genius without doing any real work.

His humility has made him better than everyone. This is the biggest humble brag in human history. I'm just a lowly worm, but I'm better than you. And I'm sure as hell better than an infidel like Stephen Hawking. So imagine a person's estimation of himself being exalted by all this. That's what we're dealing with. Now, ordinary Muslims and their apologists will recoil from these observations. They will point out that there are millions of devout men and women, even within

conservative Muslim societies, who do no harm to anyone, right? Most Muslims don't want sex slaves, even though they're sanctioned in the Quran. And then they'll flip this coin and insist that people in other religions and people at every point on the spectrum of belief and unbelief commit atrocities from time to time. This is all true, of course, and truly irrelevant. As I wrote somewhere, the groves of faith are now ringed by a forest of non-sequiturs. Here's the basic picture. Whatever else may be wrong with our world, it remains a fact that many of the most terrifying examples of human conflict and stupidity would be unthinkable without religion.

And some religions are worse than others. This Finnish woman's celebration of the, quote, martyrdom of her child, that's religion, and it's not every religion. That's what a belief in paradise gets you. A Hindu wouldn't believe that. A Buddhist wouldn't believe that. A Jew wouldn't believe that. And needless to say, an atheist wouldn't believe that. And this belief, and its horrific implications, is not the product of U.S. foreign policy. Or perhaps one of you wants to ask Noam Chomsky whether we've dropped too many bombs on Finland. And the other ideologies that inspire people to behave like monsters, whether it's Stalinism or fascism or the crazy cargo cult that we see in North Korea,

these political movements are dangerous precisely because they so resemble religions. The sacrifice for the dear leader, however secular he might be, is an act of cultic conformity and worship. Whenever human obsession gets channeled in these ways, we see the same ancient framework upon which many religions were built. In our ignorance and fear and craving for order, we created the gods, and ignorance and fear and craving keep them with us. Now what defenders of religion cannot say is that anyone has ever gone berserk or that any society ever failed because people became too reasonable or too intellectually honest or too unwilling to be duped by dogma and demagoguery. This skeptical attitude

is all that an atheist like myself recommends. And it's typical of nearly every intellectual pursuit apart from theology and bad politics. Only on the subject of God, or when indulging rank political tribalism, can smart people still imagine that they reap the fruits of human intelligence, even as they plow them under. Now, nearly 15 years have passed since a group of mostly educated and middle-class men decided to obliterate themselves, along with 3,000 innocents, to gain entrance to an imaginary paradise. And this problem has always been deeper than the threat of terrorism. And our waging an interminable, quote, war on terror is no answer to it.

Yes, we must destroy al-Qaeda and ISIS and similar groups. And given the significance that jihadists throughout the world now place on the caliphate, I think smashing ISIS decisively would be a very good thing to do. As things currently stand, jihadists still imagine that they're in the process of conquering the world. We should make that impossible to imagine. But humanity has a larger project, to become sane. If September 11th should have taught us anything, it's that we must outgrow our attachment to divisive mythology.

We must find our consolation in our capacity for love and creativity and a real understanding of ourselves and the world. This is possible. It's also necessary. And the alternatives are bleak. But in the meantime, we have to admit that we are at war with jihadism

and Islamist theocracy in a way that we're not at war with any other strand of religion. And Muslim moderates, wherever they are, are at war with jihadism and Islamist theocracy. And if they're not, they're not moderates. Finally, I'm going to give you the closing passage from this issue of Dabiq, just to give you a final sense of how clear these people have been about the kind of world they want to build. When you listen to statements of this kind and hear them, you will understand that seemingly crass statements like, you're either with us or with the terrorists, are true. There is no middle ground here.

Just listen. This is not only what they say they want. not only what they say they want, this is what they say so as to successfully recruit others to their cause, and it works. If ever you hear someone say this is just propaganda, you have to recognize what a meaningless rejoinder that is. It's propaganda that works. It's propaganda that is believed. These are honest confessions of a worldview, and they are attractive. Quote, the clear difference between Muslims and the corrupt and deviant Jews and Christians is that Muslims are not ashamed of abiding by the rules set down from their Lord regarding war and enforcement of divine law. So if it were the Muslims instead of the crusaders

who fought the Japanese and Vietnamese or invaded the lands of the Native Americans, there would have been no regrets in killing and enslaving those therein. And since those Mujahideen would have done so bound by the law, they would have been thorough and without some politically correct need to apologize years later. The Japanese, for example, would have been forcefully converted to Islam from their pagan ways, and if they stubbornly declined, perhaps

another nuke would have changed their mind. The Vietnamese would likewise be offered Islam or beds of napalm. As for the Native Americans, after the slaughter of their men, those who would favor smallpox to surrendering to the Lord, then the Muslims would have taken their surviving women and children as slaves, raising the children as model Muslims and impregnating their women to produce a new generation of Mujahideen. As for the treacherous Jews of Europe and elsewhere, those who would betray their covenant, then their post-pubescent males would face a slaughter

that would make the Holocaust sound like a bedtime story, as their women would be made to serve their husbands and fathers' killers. Furthermore, the lucrative African slave trade would have continued, supporting a strong economy. The Islamic leadership would not have bypassed Allah's permission to sell captured pagan humans, to teach them, and to convert them, as they worked hard for their masters in building a beautiful country. Notably, of course, those of them who converted, practiced their religion well, and were freed, would be treated no differently than any other free Muslim.

This is unlike when the Christian slaves were emancipated in America, as they were not afforded supposedly government-recognized equal rights for more than a century, and their descendants still live in a nation divided over those days. All of this would be done not for racism, nationalism, or political lies, but to make the word of Allah supreme. Jihad is the ultimate show of one's love for his creator, facing the clashing of swords and buzzing of bullets on the battlefield, seeking to slaughter his enemies, whom he hates for Allah's hatred of them.

A religion without these fundamentals is one that does not call its adherents to fully manifest and uphold the love of the Lord. End quote. This is followed by a picture of a man getting his head cut off. Well, I hope it's clear that these are not people we will ever be able to negotiate with. not people we will ever be able to negotiate with. And they have already told us that they would view any truce as an opportunity merely to just gather strength for further attacks against us. So there really are some circumstances where war is the answer. Now, the question of how to wage this war is a genuinely difficult one,

and it would be much, much better if Muslim armies, who did not share this ideology, were turning their guns on this death cult. But in the absence of that effort, non-Muslim armies are clearly going to have to do this. And until that's done, until the caliphate is no more, until the jihadists have suffered a defeat

so resounding that no one can even pretend their cause is still viable, we are going to continue to see the violent machinations of religious lunatics directed at us. They've told us as much, and we should take them at their word. And on that happy note, I will see you next time.