What Should Be Done About ISIS? And Who Should Do It?

[Igel]

29. (3) and (4) are really the same.

And that's my choice at the present. Suck it up and take the blame (or scapegoat whoever we need to to be able to continue our claims to messiah-hood) and let the pathology burn itself out.

I'd note that the first IS threat came *after* the US formally became a belligerent against IS.

Otherwise, it's mostly homegrown. It's the unreconstructed somewhat educated poor versus the more educated reconstructed not-poor, with a lot of the slacker educated seeking "authenticity" and a "return to their roots" to find a way of resisting assimilation to a reconstucted culture, one that rejects their "authentic" and "unique" past and adopts many Western ways of being and thinking. While the fight is about the present failings of their society, it takes the form of vengeance and compensation over perceived grievances, sometimes completely biased and one-sided in presentation, over slights from decades or hundreds of years ago.

"The reason I had to go to Germany for my engineering degree and can't get a job is because Westerners oppressed my great-great-great uncle in 1860" or "because Andalusia". To find absolution from such vicariously relished and lamented humiliation and the sin of not being true to 715's style Islam, they have to fight and restore their past glory, much of which *is* entirely constructed out of whole cloth. It's those feeling powerless assigning blame through history and seeking to claim power that, really, they don't have a claim to and would misuse if they got it. Not that they couldn't do better than those in power, but, seriously, that's not the way the data are piling up.

There's a lot of that going on.