The Advancing Caliphate

"How did I feel when I saw those guys play football with the heads of Shiite Iraqi soldiers and policemen? I felt that finally justice was done."
"The [Shiite] militia came to kick us out and the police were outside, laughing. We had to leave everything behind, our furniture, our clothes, the children's toys. We were allowed to take only what we could carry."
Syrian Sunni civilian refugee

"In the Syrian town of Manbij, for example, ISIS officials cut off the hands of four robbers ... whipped individuals for insulting their neighbours, confiscated and destroyed counterfeit medicine, and on multiple occasions summarily executed and crucified individuals for apostasy or murder."
Loretta Napoleoni, The Islamist Phoenix

"You look only at the executions. But every war has its executions, its traitors, its spies. We set up soup kitchens, we rebuilt schools, hospitals, we restored water and electricity, we paid for food and fuel. While the UN wasn't even able to deliver humanitarian aid, we were vaccinating children against polio. It's just that some actions are more visible than others."
"For every thief we punish, you punish a hundred children with your indifference."
ISIS official

"One  of ISIS's more successful ventures is an Arabic-language Twitter app called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, or just Dawn. The app, an official ISIS product, promoted by its top users, is advertised as a way to keep up on the latest news about the jihadi group."
J.M. Berger, The Atlantic

A resident from Gharib said they took around 90 people from that village, and that the fighters said they were searching for 15 men who burned their flag there. (File photo: AFP)

The Pakistani Taliban murder health workers and the guards tasked with protecting them, as they attempt to inoculate children against polio living in the tribal areas of Pakistan, but the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham are humanitarian-devoted people of social enlightenment anxious to protect and prolong life. How could they have been so misjudged by an unfair and clearly biased Western media portraying them as cruel and violent brutes when they are so clearly compassionate and kind?

It's due time that a corrected version of Islamic State's activities appear in the Western press. The Caliphate is as civil as Serbia was in the 1990s in Kosovo where children's heads were cut off to enable them to be used as footballs in front of their grieving parents. The video of the beheading of James Foley struck those who saw it as the first time anything so wretchedly brutal had been televised, while in fact Daniel Pearl's beheading loomed large on television screens not all that long ago.

Islamic State is merely producing for shock effect and to tantalize the fascination that is held by bored Muslims for a more exciting, useful future in jihad, a replay of a venerable tradition in Islam where in fact beheading is still practised in places like Saudi Arabia in some areas of their legal code when capital punishment of that particular calibre is carried out quietly, but frequently enough as just due for what is construed as criminal offences in an Islamist state.

In Somalia an American Black Hawk pilot's corpse was desecrated and dragged through the streets among howling, approving crowds. In Gaza, Hamas slaughtered those whom they identified as traitors they accused of working for Israel, dragging their lifeless corpses through the streets behind cars. In the streets of Fallujah, tortured Blackwater employees' corpses were also dragged through the streets. A feel-good strategy for venting hatred.

In the Islamic State publication Al Naba ["The News"], the 2013 annual business report "claimed nearly 10,000 operations in Iraq: 1,000 assassinations, 4,000 improvised explosive deices planted and hundreds of radical prisoners freed". In 2014, according to the Islamic State, hundreds of "apostates" had been convinced to surrender to Islam; those Western journalists and humanitarians who were persuaded to convert to Islam discovered that their conversion did not preclude their beheadings.

Brutality does appear to have its admirers; the more bestial, the more attractive, it would appear, given the rising numbers of recruits from sources West and from within the world of Islam. The ummah is responding as it is destined to, since Islam decrees that its purity of vision and its advancing conquest of the Globe is unstoppable, with the faithful lured to the siren song of jihad, incumbent upon them as faithful Muslims.

Rest assured, however, that we have it on good authority that the Islamic State, though terrifying to its global audience viewing it with unqualified distaste, protects the local population it is in charge of. In its tender protection of that population under its canopy of care, Sunni Iraqis and Syrians who have for too long been victimized by the Shiites in power, no revenge or punishment can be viewed as sufficiently extreme.

This is not sadism at play, the inventive and playful manoeuvres to demonstrate how undaunted by bloodshed the jihadists of the Islam State are, it is a demonstration of their resolve and their power, the power vested in them by fundamentalist, Islamofascism. Chaos, war, destruction, this is the living atmosphere of Islam revealing itself unbridled by any form of civilized restraint. Not that many of the Islamic State leadership has not been availed of exposure to Western-style education.

They have thoughtfully selected those portions that appear useful, and discarded those that are clearly not useful to them; the Western sensibilities for example, the idea of fairness and justice and human value, in favour of advanced technologies in military armaments, in web-based communication; both invaluable to the situation at hand; the advancing caliphate.