Joshua Sinai offers a review
of Robert Manne’s The Mind of the Islamic State: ISIS and the Ideology of the
Caliphate for the Washington Times.
Ideology plays an important
role in terrorists’ warfare. It provides them with a rationale, legitimacy and
motivation for attacking their adversaries and a prism through which they
perceive events affecting them, particularly the “illegitimate” actions of their
enemies whom they are justified in killing because they have transgressed the
tenets of their ideological framework.
Ideology is also an important
recruiting tool to radicalize new adherents with a narrative to join their
cause. It enables terrorists to justify their violence by displacing the
responsibility for their violence onto their adversary governments, including even
blaming the victims of their attacks.
Understanding the nature of
the ideologies adopted by a variety of terrorist groups helps explain the “why
and the how” of their warfare, which is one of the first steps required to
effectively counter them physically and to formulate counter-ideologies that
might weaken what are generally extremist ideologies and persuade their
adherents to cease supporting them.
With al Qaeda and ISIS, the
primary Islamist terrorist groups threatening Western countries (and their own
as well), it is crucial to understand the militant jihadi ideology that drives
them. In this regard, Robert Manne’s “The Mind of the Islamic State: ISIS and
the Ideology of the Caliphate” is an important and well-argued book.
“The Mind of the Islamic
State” traces the evolution of the jihadi ideology that drives such groups to
justify their engagement in terrorist violence in pursuit of their extremist
objectives. As the author points out, “Political ideologies take decades to
form. The mind of the Islamic state represents the most recent iteration of an
ideology that has been developing over the past 50 years.”
You can read the rest of the
review via the below link:
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