The Enemy Within: A Few Things to Like About ISIL…

“Losers with keyboards?” Did Ash Carter really say that? Wow, such depth of understanding! Is that really his official ‘take’ on the ‘enemy’? Sounds like Trump.  And I suppose he prefers his losers with tanks and aircraft carriers and AK-47’s? He doesn’t have a clue. The American position is worse than I thought. We’re in denial. America doesn’t have a chance in a war with ISIL. And that may be just fine, because…

1) Gun Control: now that ‘terrorism’ has officially come home to the American nest, there is obviously a silver lining to the clouds on the horizon, i.e. the ease with which a terrorist in America can just walk in a store to buy weapons might just mean a tightening of gun-control measures. How’s that for some cosmic symmetry?

2) Action on Palestine: Another positive result of our inability to defeat ISIL, is that it might actually lead to some positive developments on the ground in Palestine. That’s where the healing starts. I repeat: there was no ‘Muslim problem’ before 1948, the year of Israel’s birth as a modern state, at least not since 1697, the year Muslims reached their maximum European penetration on the outskirts of Vienna. Since then, they’ve been our lapdogs and lackeys, like most of the rest of the world, reduced to selling their dignity for the Yankee dollar—until 1948. It’s time to cut a deal, Bibi.

3) Planetary Survival: But the best reason to like ISIL is that they just might save the planet, not directly through their own violent and convoluted rationales, of course, but indirectly through an imminent rollback, if not shutdown, of the rapacious capitalist system, for which the average American would die before dismantling, even to save his own life.

The only way to reduce global warming is to roll back this capitalist system of conspicuous consumption and consumerism.  I repeat: they’re not the ones destroying the planet–we are.  In all the hubbub within the last week, did you notice that nothing was accomplished at the Paris climate summit?

And the ‘enemy within’ is not the immigrant crossing our borders, the mole in the Pentagon, or the Syrian refugee seeking asylum in insane America, though. The enemy is within us, in our little minds, our mass subconscious culture of fear and loathing and aggression and self-aggrandizement and ego-tainment. That’s us. They’re us. Our aggression is their aggression. Their victimization is our victimization.

Simple labeling of ‘bad guys’ and ‘good guys’ is inaccurate, misleading and even racist.  This is all connected, of course: the war in Syria, the violence in America, American militarism abroad, police brutality, unlimited pumping of oil in the Mideast, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and lack of gun control in the USA. It’s just hard to establish strict cause/effect relationships. It’s all very real, though.

We’ve been caught in our own hypocrisy, lies, and deceit, empowering the massacre of Palestinians while condemning those who do the same to us and ours.  At least Obama is smarter than his Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.  He recognizes that ISIL is not like an infection that you kill with antibiotics.

It’s more like a virus that you contain, with anti-viral cocktails. The more we fight ISIL militarily, the more that they will win—mark my words. The only way to defeat them decisively is on the moral high ground, and we don’t have that, not yet, anyway. There will be a future; its details are just not certain. Persevere. “Black holes ain’t so black”—Stephen Hawking

Advertisement