The Monstrous Ideology of Mass Destruction and Murder Lives On

"Do not be happy America."
"Don't you see, America, that the [Islamic] State is now on the threshold of Europe and Central Africa?"
Islamic State audio message post-Baghdadi's death

"Baghdadi built a brand that enables anyone to jump aboard the ISIS bandwagon, claim allegiance to it, and stage an attack, maybe not now, but next year."
"That powerful brand is still alive and well."
Michael Pregent, former intelligence adviser

Photo: How can Islamic State fighters be prosecuted for their crimes? (ABC TV)

The moral malignancy that emanates from Islam's injunction to the faithful to heed Koranic principles and accede with stern determination to the basic tenet of jihad as a sacred duty that must be embraced has contaminated huge swathes of the global community. Islam, after all, is a major religion second only to Christianity for the huge number of followers it commands. And among those followers there exists a large number who have every intention of obeying the sacred scriptures convincing them that mass murder represents a religious duty not to be avoided.

Which must lead to the question whether Islam in and of itself is a mass corrupter of the human soul, instructing those who claim the faith to believe that psychopathy, unreasoning, unsympathetic, dedicated to destruction, represents a duty of the highest order. Or that people suffering from dementia, those who are labelled psychopaths in any society who indulge in the psychotic violence of hatred and slaughter are drawn to Islam. Whichever is the truth must hold Islam to fault for inciting worldwide chaos, terror, and widespread atrocities.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, like Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat before him, along with lesser lights with more power and followers than either ever had, like Saddam Hussein and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, rose to the occasion through a mixture of personal charisma and the powerful allure of promising that there would be no penalties to follow in the wake of murder in the name of Islam, Allah and the Prophet Mohammad, but joy and celebration, and the status of martyrdom and a welcome in Paradise would await their success.

Like Mohammad, a 7th Century merchant in Mecca, who ingeniously co-opted an already-existing religion, Judaism and its offshoot Christianity, lifting major prophets and scriptures for his re-purposing process in the creation of Islam to become a world-wide religious devotion -- meant originally to unify Bedouin desert tribes under a single religious banner celebrated for its primacy, denying the legitimacy of all others -- Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi re-invented himself from a lowly Koranic teacher to the "caliph" of Islam.

Followers flocked to his message of hatred, jihad and persecution of area minority groups and those adhering to religions other than Islam. Baghdadi was simply reverting to a latter-day Mohammad and demanding of his followers the veneration of the memory of his predecessor invoked among the faithful. His incitement and encouragement of violent looting, unspeakable atrocities, vile depravity, slaughtering men, taking women and children as slaves to be raped and sold to finance the caliphate recalled the dark age of merciless Islamic conquest by the scimitar, assassination and terror.

His death, however, does not translate to victory and peace in the offing, because although he sold himself as a saviour of Islam and conqueror of the world community, the impetus of Islam as the world's only legitimate religious voice, calling people to surrender to the inevitable and loosing the darkness of evil destruction by any means conceivable on those refusing to be absorbed by the miasma of fear, hatred and death-deliverance exemplifying Islam will continue unless some unfathomable miracle strikes Islam from the panoply of global religious devotion.

Fleeing Iraqi civilians walked past the heavily damaged al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq   .Credit...Felipe Dana/Associated Press