HuffPo recounts the tale of Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German journalist who, at great risk to his life, negotiated a ten-day stint traveling with members of ISIS. Todenhöfer’s record of criticizing Western incursions in the Middle East didn’t offer him much protection (the same sentiments were held by other journalists who were beheaded by ISIS), and what was worse is that he also had a record of criticizing the Islamic State. There’s no doubt that this is a brave man, a journalist taking the utmost risks to get his story.
And what story did he get? Well, he underscores what many of us already think: ISIS is a severe danger to the Middle East, possibly the tinder that could start a devastating conflagration. But, as per his politics, Todenhöfer blames it on George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq:
On his return, [Todenhöfer] issued a stark warning. “From my point of view this is the biggest threat to world peace since the cold war,” he wrote in a detailed Facebook post. “We now pay the price for the inconceivable folly of George W Bush’s attack on Iraq. The West has no concept of the threat it faces.”
. . . In a separate post, he called the terror group “a child of George W. Bush’s illegal Iraq war.. [bombings] always are terrorist-breeding programs in the Middle East.”
Yes, Bush made a mistake, and therefore we must forever refrain from all bombing, even as ISIS massacres thousands of innocent civilians who have never lifted a finger against Muslims. As ISIS besieged the Yazidis, forcing them into a small, starving enclave, our best strategy would be to do nothing, for bombing would simply breed more terrorists. This is a recipe for capitulating to evil.
One might conclude from Todenhöfer’s words that ISIS is simply reacting to colonialist incursions by the West. But his further reportage shows that he is either ill-informed about ISIS’s motives or that ISIS itself is behaving irrationally if its actions are merely a reaction to Western invasion. For what he found was genuine jihad: a crusade to spread the “true” version of Islam, if necessary by exterminating anyone—even Muslims—who don’t share ISIS’s brand of faith:
The Islamic State, Todenhöfer said, have plans for mass genocide, and the deaths of all atheists, polytheists and religions that are not “people of the book” or Muslims who do not subscribe to their brand of Islam.
“The IS want to kill… all non-believers and apostates and enslave their women and children. All Shiites, Yazidi, Hindus, atheists and polytheists should be killed,” Todenhöfer wrote. “Hundreds of millions of people are to be eliminated in the course of this religious ‘cleansing’.
“All moderate Muslims who promote democracy, should be killed. Because, from the IS perspective, they promote human laws over the laws of God. This also applies to – after a successful conquest – the democratically-minded Muslims in the Western world.
“The only chance of this ‘infidels’, to escape the death, is voluntary repentance and voluntary conversion to ‘True Islam’. IS is supposedly the only representative of this. And only before their countries have been conquered.
Did Hindus or the Yazidi invade Iraq or colonize the Middle East for oil? And what’s ISIS’s beef with the Shiites? How could it be anything other than religion, since Shiites and the Sunnis are both Muslim, share ethnicity and geographic origin, but differ profoundly in who they see as the true inheritors of Muhammad’s message? And remember, Todenhöfer tends to see the whole thing as a reaction to Bush’s belligerence. Once again we see someone forced to defend an increasingly thin narrative in spite of the facts. Todenhöfer’s own words convict ISIS of waging a war motivated largely by religious beliefs.
Even at the end, Todenhöfer sticks to his narrative by claiming that ISIS doesn’t represent “real” Islam:
. . . [Todenhöfer] also called the version of Islam practiced by IS one that is “rejected by 99% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims”.
“As a Christian who has read the Quran several times, it does not make sense to me, I do not know what any of the teachings of IS have to do with Islam,” he said. “I got to know, above all, a merciful Islam from reading the Koran. 113 of 114 Suras begin with the words: “In the name of Allah, the most gracious and most merciful”. I saw none of this mercy from IS.”
Umm. . . can one get more naive than that? (Try Karen Armstrong.) Has he read the verses calling Jews apes and swine, or calling for the death of apostates? Has he even read his own Old Testament in which Yahweh, sometimes described as loving and merciful, wreaks the worst vengeance on people, often ordering his adherents to commit genocide.
Have a look at those supposedly beneficent Suras at Project Reason’s “annotated Qur’an,” where verses are labeled with symbols when their words promote injustice, cruelty, violence, intolerance, and other not-so-peaceful emotions. I’m not sure what planet Todenhöfer is living on, or how he reads texts, but what I see is a scriptural recipe for hatred that begins with a few lame words to propitiate a murderous god.
