August 17, 2015

"The Islamic State has proved adept at appealing to different female profiles, using girl-to-girl recruitment strategies, gendered imagery and iconic memes."

"As Muslims, the girls would be treated very differently from women and girls of the Yazidi minority, who are taken by the Islamic State as slaves and raped with the justification that they are unbelievers. The group runs a 'marriage bureau' for single Western women. This year, the media wing of Al Khanssaa Brigade, an all-female morality militia, published a manifesto stipulating that women complete their formal education at age 15 and that they can be married as young as 9, but also praising their existence in the Islamic State as 'hallowed.'... Social media has allowed the group’s followers to directly target young women, reaching them in the privacy of their bedrooms with propaganda that borrows from Western pop culture — images of jihadists in the sunset and messages of empowerment. A recent post linked to an Islamic State account paraphrased a popular L’OrĂ©al makeup ad next to the image of a girl in a head scarf: 'COVERed GIRL. Because I’m worth it.'"

From  "Jihad and Girl Power: How ISIS Lured 3 London Teenagers" (in the NYT).

64 comments:

Nichevo said...

Ann, did you post already on the recent news that Kayla Mueller was indeed the special rape-toy of that al-Baghdadi fellow, or whatever his name is?

rhhardin said...

Women's vote was a bad idea.

Emil Blatz said...

How about an all-girl big band?

tim in vermont said...

I think it was great to abandon Iraq to ISIS, to further destabilize Syria, and to destabilize Libya.

For a president who claimed to have no interest in replicating the mistakes of Iraq, Hillary and Barack sure seem to have been beavering away.

Michael K said...

The younger generation of several countries in the west are living in a fantasy world. The Islamists have figured this out. Richard Fernandez, with his usual insight, describes this well.

He tells of a lonely girl in New York who was recruited by ISIS.

The West is filled with millions of people like Alex, all of them waiting for Someone. They are the product of a multi-decade campaign to deliberately empty people of their culture; to actually make them ashamed of it. They were purposely drained of God, country, family like chickens so they could be stuffed with the latest narrative of the progressive meme machine. The Gramscian idea was to produce a blank slate upon which the Marxist narrative could be written.

Too bad for the Gramscians that the Islamists are beating them to the empty sheets of paper. And they are better at it too. Maybe the old Bolsheviks could have given ISIS a run for its money, but today’s liberals have declined from their sires. George Orwell observed the takeover of hardcore Bolshevism by the periphery in the 1930s.


Gramsci is the one who described our modern world. Empty of all but fantasy. Gay marriage and LGBT and transsexual and imaginary rape crises. He thought he was preparing the young for Marxism but ISIS got there first.

damikesc said...

Remember, "rape culture" is a bigger problem for modern feminists than, you know, actual rape.

While feminists are determined to ignore the concept of due process on campuses, they are frequently quite silent on issues like this.

Clyde said...

Nazism also used appealing imagery for its adherents. Just saying. Evil often wears a pretty face.

William said...

I didn't read the article, but the headline says ISIS attracted three recruits. I don't see that as much of a mass movement. Scientology and the Rev. Moon have had far greater success. Look at all the people who line up to have their picture taken with Hillary.

Hagar said...

These girls should read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's accounts of what life for women really is like in the Middle East - and that is just "normal" life, never mind these ISIS crackpots in a war zone.

David said...

That's a long article but it explains nothing.

My guess is that their life in England with their families provided no believable or understandable picture of what their future would be like. So they decided to take control of their own futures, but chose a means of doing this that will instead really deprive them of control of their own lives.

Or maybe the opposite. Perhaps the idea of control of their own lives was too confusing for them, and they chose something that would control their lives for them.

Kind of impossible to know, isn't it. Which is why the article, for all its detail, is not explanatory.

David said...

Hagar said...
These girls should read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's accounts


Too late for that. They will have to write their own books, if they survive.

Freeman Hunt said...
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Nichevo said...

Did they come from Rotherham?

Hagar said...

At that, it is a unfair to single out the ISIS crowd for their cruelties. That is how they do warfare in the Middle East. Has been, all the way through recorded history.

Drago said...

Uh oh. This is bound to spur many comments from our resident lefties on just how bad Christians have been, are and will be.

Double-plus emphasis on the Crusades.

Drago said...

Hagar: "These girls should read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's accounts of what life for women really is like in the Middle East..."

Oh, perish the thought. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of those folks who is simply not welcome in polite leftist society.

I'm afraid the truth she speaks simply destroys the western lefts "War on Women" meme used against white, western, heterosexual males.

And that will simply not be countenanced.

Bay Area Guy said...

Solzhenitsyn said "to destroy a people you must first sever their roots." As Michael K said above, there's a lot of young, stupid people in college, voluntarily severing their own roots (Western Civilization, family, country), but rarely ask, What's left?

It doesn't surprise me that ISIS can recruit some of these folks.

Sebastian said...

I'd want to see the numbers before generalizing, but what the heck:

Apart from youthful ignorance and stupidity, ISIS is banking on two things: that some Western women want male control and that some Western women are fine with their men raping other women.

To expand on Fernandez' fill-the-void explanation, Progs aim to destroy bourgeois culture that valued family, faith, and civil society in part as independent bulwarks against the state. The transvaluation of values leaves single women particularly vulnerable. They need Big Brother but he can't give them all they need.

J. Farmer said...

@tim in vermont:

"I think it was great to abandon Iraq to ISIS, to further destabilize Syria, and to destabilize Libya.

For a president who claimed to have no interest in replicating the mistakes of Iraq, Hillary and Barack sure seem to have been beavering away."

To this day, Obama has not gotten enough grief for Libya and the resulting chaos that has ensued. It'd be nice if Hillary were forced to answer for her cheerleading for that war, but I doubt we'll get much of that.

As for Syria, the criticism from Obama's right was that he was not doing more to help the rebels destroy the Assad regime (and with it the Syrian state). Remember McCain's covert trip to Syria to pose in a photo op with Syrian "freedom fighters." They have called for everything from airstrikes against Assad's forces to supplying heavy arms to the "moderate" rebels. (I guess we line all the rebels up and ask the moderates to take one step forward). The interventionist critique of Obama has been that he has not done more to destabilize Syria.

Lastly, on Iraq, it is an urban myth of a certain mindset to say that that war was ever "won." The surge strategy was able to make use of a different tactic and the facts on the ground (e.g. Anbar Awakening) to achieve a tactical reduction in insurgent violence. Tactical because that was not the goal. The goal was political reconciliation, and the argument was that there could not be political reconciliation without getting the violence under the control. However, that feature of the surge was a failure.

The reason a force like ISIS could crop up in a place like Western Iraq is precisely the same as why it is active in Syria and Libya. All of these areas operate under the sort of anarchism that is associated with the concept of a "failed state." This is not something a few thousand US troops can effectively counter. We have pursued regime change in three countries since 9/11--Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya--and all three have been strategic failures.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Time 2011: Why Women Are Better at Everything

HoodlumDoodlum said...

It's reductionist, sure, but it really seems correct to say that most young people want to be a part of a strong or vibrant culture. The West isn't interested in promoting its culture (and devotes an awful lot of time to attacking it), and that void leaves a place for even relatively backwards/barbaric social ideas to gain traction.

YoungHegelian said...
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YoungHegelian said...

Why is it so difficult to understand that, while many a young man in the West dreams of being Conan the Barbarian, many a young woman dreams of boinking Conan the Barbarian?

ISIS is working on setting up a caliphate. Under that caliphate, there will not only be the caliph, but there will be his trusted lieutenants, the emirs, the pashas, the beys, etc. Why, an enterprising young lady could end up married to one of those, as opposed to staying in Luton and getting hitched to some "office boy" twerp that Mummy & Daddy chose for her.

Phrased that way, it doesn't sound so bad, does it? Now, the fact that this young lady's future position is built on the massive suffering of millions of innocent people, well, Allah works in strange ways, doesn't He?

Titus said...

The Times investigating reporting on ISIS has been amazing.

I love The Times-it is my bible!

Quaestor said...
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Quaestor said...

Something like this has been happening a long time in America, a complete rejection of the norms of feminism by young women and girls who have been indoctrinated since pre-school with feminist dogma, either explicitly in social studies or "family living" classes or implicitly by the ever-pervasive Title IX provisos and restrictions. And not just in Muslim or heretical half-baked Muslim forks. There are Amish and Mennonite colonies across the country than are expanding steadily, growing LDS congregations, and Hasidic communities that are recruiting converts from among America's secular Jews. And there are new Protestant groups springing up here and there that reject feminism and embrace traditional sex roles; these too are growing at the expense of Presbyterian and Episcopal congregations whose ministers have been busy for the past forty years diluting religion. (Speaking as a non-believer I think I'm on firm ground when I surmise that attending a hymn-singing pop psychology lecture once a week must be incredibly boring.) The same goes for Catholics. There are "heretical" priests leading renegade congregations who reject all official teaching since Vatican II, and hold all prelates since Pius XII to be apostate anti-popes.

A culture than embraces feminism is doomed to be overwhelmed sooner or later by cultures that do not negate human nature, if not by military conquest then by sheer demographics.

Etienne said...

Reminds me of "Seven brides for seven brothers". An early terrorist musical.

As a newly responsible father, he has become aware of how worried the townspeople would be about what has happened to the women. Adam realizes he was wrong to tell his brothers to kidnap the women. He tells his brothers they need to take the women back to their homes in the town, but his brothers are unwilling.

YoungHegelian said...

@Coupe,

Reminds me of "Seven brides for seven brothers". An early terrorist musical.

It's just "Rape of the Sabine Women" with show tunes & choreography, is all.

Then again, maybe the original had show tunes & dancin', too! Those early Romans sure knew how to put on a show!

tim in vermont said...

The interventionist critique of Obama has been that he has not done more to destabilize Syria.

So that's the defense? LOL That there existed critics who thought he should have gone further? I will tell you what I thought, that Assad was one more Saddam, and if it was wrong to overthrow the one, it is wrong to overthrow the other. A judgement that Obama did not, in fact make.

Lastly, on Iraq, it is an urban myth of a certain mindset to say that that war was ever "won."

ISIS was moving around Iraq in columns taking huge swaths of territory in a kind of Blitzkrieg, adding to their prestige with every mile and every captured village. We certainly could have prevented that, but Obama chose to turn tail and run and leave our in-country allies to be machine gunned in trenches, or burned alive in cages in the public square, or whatever tortures they could dream up. I am thinking that with US forces to stiffen their spine, the Iraqi Army would not have fled before a force they greatly outnumbered.

You guys just make up new rationalizations to avoid responsibility every time one of yours fucks up. Obama and Hillary have been the Arson Squad (In the California Angels sense of the term) of the ME when they promised to bring peace.



tim in vermont said...

Titus, your stuff is better when you try to be a little less obvious in your trolling. Has your lover gotten hold of your computer?

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

In case Althouse becomes bored a new life awaits her abroad!

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
CWJ said...

Doing nothing more than connecting post title to link title: "adept" = "three." Well alright then. Case made!

Gahrie said...

Lastly, on Iraq, it is an urban myth of a certain mindset to say that that war was ever "won."

So Obama, Biden and Hillary were all lying when they went on TV and told us that Iraq was won?

CWJ said...

Quaester wrote -

"There are "heretical" priests leading renegade congregations who reject all official teaching since Vatican II, and hold all prelates since Pius XII to be apostate anti-popes."

Really? Specific evidence please. I'm open to evidence. Your pedantic posts are well, pedantic, but nearly always informative. It's when you stray away from what you've just googled into what appears to be your own opinions that you tend to lose me.

Virgil Hilts said...

I don't think that a few crazy girls (or guys) attracted to lunatic movements is very instructive of anything. Charles Manson attracted them. Jim Jones attracted them. David Koresh attracted them. Aum Shinrikyo attracted them. The Russian Black Widow cult attracts them. There are always going to be a certain percentage of crazy young people attracted to insane and stupid movements. As long as the movements are overseas (rather than say in Texas), I would be happy to pitch in for the one-way airfares.

Howard said...

tim in vermont: you are perfectly welcome to go invade and hold Iraq, Syria, Iran, Israel, Lybia, etc. I thought so.

Howard said...

What Virgil said.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

There are Amish and Mennonite colonies across the country than are expanding steadily, growing LDS congregations, and Hasidic communities that are recruiting converts from among America's secular Jews.

Lol. Quaestor identifies what he sees as the future of American demography and it looks like it might be called "America's Most Inbred."

Nichevo said...

Howard 7:47: I'm betting you think that constitutes a cogent argument. Am I right or are you just trolling? If so, well played!

Quaestor said...
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Quaestor said...
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Quaestor said...

@ CWJ

Read up on the Society of Pius X. Its founder, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, consecrated priests and bishops who themselves were excommunicated for their rejection of modernist doctrine. The SSPX is not formally heretical, which is why I put the word within quotes, however certain members of that society have been declared heretics as such.

Also read up on Sedevacantism, another traditionalist movement that rejects VCII.

There are worse things than being pedantic. In future I'd appreciate it you'd jus skip over my comments. I'm not here to educate you, nor do I consider you particularly educable (no evident appetite for learning).

Quaestor said...

More specific evidence.

Sincere apologies are in order, CWJ, your standing as a gentleman is at stake.

J. Farmer said...

tim in vermont:

"So that's the defense? LOL That there existed critics who thought he should have gone further?"

No, it is not a defense. I am agreeing with you that destabilizing Syria is a massively stupid thing to do. I was just pointing out that despite this, the critique that is most often made of Obama's actions via Syria is that he has not done enough, not that he has done too much (which is my critique and yours).

"ISIS was moving around Iraq in columns taking huge swaths of territory in a kind of Blitzkrieg, adding to their prestige with every mile and every captured village."

Your timeline seems very confused. US troops were withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011. The Iraqi government wanted US troops out, and the Iraqi people wanted troops out, so your notion of us having abandoned the Iraqis makes no sense. The principle catalyst for ISIS gains in the last two years has been the Syrian civil war and its resulting destabilization of the area. The Iraqi forces folded precisely because many of those guys figured they'd rather be alive than die trying to defend territory that they have little to no familial, tribal, or sectarian connection to. Effective fighting forces require a hell of a lot more than just a couple months training and shiny new equipment. If the US, as you believe, could so easily have countered ISIS, why has it been utterly incapable of doing the same against the Taliban in a decade-and-a-half?

@Gahrie:

"So Obama, Biden and Hillary were all lying when they went on TV and told us that Iraq was won?"

Of course they were. Let me give you a little tip, Gahrie. It will never be a useful retort of any critique I make to say that my critique applies to a Democrat. I have criticized Obama's foreign policy decisions from exactly the same point of view that I criticized Bush's. I thought Obama's Afghan surge was stupid and pointless, that any effort to assist the rebels in Syria would be an extremely bad idea, and that the Libyan war was a disaster. So I really have no idea why you think you are making some kind of point by telling me that Obama/Hillary/Biden disagree with me,

Gahrie said...

The most important reason I stopped being a Catholic was VCII. Tradition matters in a religion.

Nichevo said...

Farmer, you repeat the following often enough that I thought I'd try to help you:

"If the US, as you believe, could so easily have countered ISIS, why has it been utterly incapable of doing the same against the Taliban in a decade-and-a-half?"

If it's simple demagoguery, I commend you and you go ahead and use it as long as you think it will work. If you honestly don't understand, I'll explain. Afghanistan is impossible and is worthless. Helicopters can barely get over the mountains. We are at the literal end of the world for logistics. It's preposterous to fight a land war in Afghanistan. (You should just nuke the whole site from orbit. It would only improve it. ;-))

Iraq, however, is the cradle of human civilization and, not irrelevantly, is a useful place to have a footprint. We should have had a footprint there like the ROK/Japan/Germany basings for the next forty years or more (which requires bipartisan support). Of course, woulda coulda shoulda, next time no Bremer disbanding the Iraqi Army because it was ideologically imperfect or whatever.

Of course I don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes with you. If you regardless Bush's moves as mistakes then I have to say that by that or any standard Obama's have been much worse, maniacal, suicidal. If you see no difference then good luck to you.

J. Farmer said...
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J. Farmer said...
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J. Farmer said...

@Nichevo:

"We should have had a footprint there like the ROK/Japan/Germany basings for the next forty years or more (which requires bipartisan support)."

I think that is a massively bad idea. You hear this idea a lot. It worked out in 1940s Germany/Japan, so of course we should be able to do the exact same thing in Iraq and get the same result. That is a very American-centric understanding of the world, and it ignores a very important distinction: 1940's Germany/Japan were massively different than 2000's Iraq in significant. Germany and Japan were both countries with a very strong sense of national identity rooted in history, were relatively ethnically homogenous ethnic makeup, and were among the most industrialized, technologically advanced countries on the planet. They had both also happened to have been decisively defeated in wars they had tremendous culpability in starting. That is world's apart from the Iraqi pseudo-nation that was carved from the corpse of the Ottoman Empire 80 years earlier with all its resulting tribal/sectarian tensions. When you unleash self-determination on such a place, you invariably get ethnically-based conflict (see the former Yugoslavia or the million people that were killed dividing newly independent India between its Hindu and Muslim polity). Your paragraph also ignores the fact that neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi people wanted American bases or a long-term military presence.

Just think for a second what all of this stupid middle east intervention is supposed to do for for us: to prevent another 9/11 style attack. Now go back and read about how 9/11 actually occurred. It was planned in places like Malaysia and Germany. The perpetrators entered the country legally on international flights. It didn't require "training camps" or a "base of operations." The notion that we have to nation-build Iraq to protect ourselves from that kind of attack doesn't make any sense.

Gahrie said...

I have criticized Obama's foreign policy decisions from exactly the same point of view that I criticized Bush's.

Soooo...how do you feel about Putin's actions in Georgia and the Ukraine? How do you feel about China's actions in the South China Sea?

J. Farmer said...

Gahrie:

"Soooo...how do you feel about Putin's actions in Georgia and the Ukraine? How do you feel about China's actions in the South China Sea?"

That's easy. I oppose those, too. And we can even throw the Saudi war against Yemen on top of the pile, too. You're question makes no sense. If I said that I supported a simplification of the federal tax code, why choose a foreign country with a complex tax system and then ask me what I think about it?

The non-interventionist comes from a basic set of assumptions about the interventionist position. Namely, that it tends to (1) define American interests too broadly, (2) exaggerate threats, and (3) underestimate the costs and consequences of intervention. This position holds regardless of who happens to be the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Etienne said...

Gahrie said...The most important reason I stopped being a Catholic was VCII.

The most important reason I stopped being a Catholic, was our Archdiocese went bankrupt, and emptied its treasury by paying millions to infidels.

CWJ said...

Quaestor,

I don't normally reply after such an extended time, but I just woke up to your reactions to my comment. First, thank you for your evidence. Anyone else who is interested can research the groups and movements you mentioned and come to their own conclusions so I won't go into detail. But the major group you mentioned was the SSPX, I believe. I grant you they are bigger than I thought, but after 45 years of existence, they claim less than 600 priests worldwide. As for"hold[ing] all prelates since Pius XII to be apostate anti-popes.", even SSPX doesn't go that far, and the handful that do hold such beliefs splintered off from SSPX into their own splinter of a splinter group.

The gist of the comment in which you made your claim was not that such sects existed but that there was increasing rejection of feminism as evidenced by the growth of sects with traditional views of women. SSPX does not appear to be growing, much less specifically due to an anti-feminist appeal. You may as well claim with as much evidence that its latent anti-Semitism is its dominant appeal. There may be increasing rejection of feminism, but I wouldn't be holding up the Amish, Mormons, or the SSPX as major evidence.

As for the sincere apology, I can only ask, for what? Calling your comments pedantic? They are. BTW, so are many of mine. Apologize for doubting you? Apologize for disagreeing with you? Please.

Nichevo said...

Gahrie, I don't know. Jews, parochially, welcome VCII as cutting down on pogroms and the Christ-killer talk. That said, it's not my faith and I don't know what else in it you would find objectionable.

Nichevo said...

Farmer, no, it would be quite different. Iraq would be a much less pleasant tour of duty even in a peaceful garrison and there would be a lot more work for the boys not necessarily in Iraq but tipping over to whatever other hot spot in the region-for which basing in Iraq is ideal.

However the work of turning animals into people is not swift. The only good solution for results favorable to the US, if you don't have any interest in humanity, is to overthrow Saddam, picking a new strong man, dealing with him to get what you want, replacing him as needed. To treat them like human beings who can govern themselves, you have to sit down to a long spell of hard work.

The genius insight of George W Bush was to see that the status quo could not continue in the region.

I don't think what is happening now would be if we had thirty thousand men there. You say how could we stop Isis? Because it could be, or earlier could have been, stopped in a day. Obama didn't want to. We could strike a crushing blow and knocked up the remnants later. Maybe you don't appreciate or you don't understand or care, but desert warfare is something that we can really really do. You put a thousand men, a thousand tanks, or a million, in one place in the open where we can see them and hopefully not worry about collateral damage, and you'll see the secular equivalent of the Wrath of God descend on them. You can't do that too easily in Central Asia. Do you want me to tell you the weapon systems you use for that kind of business?

Quaestor said...

As I wrote earlier, there are worse things than being pedantic, among them are ungraciousness. CWJ proves my point.

Nichevo said...

It's also amazing because on 95%of things there is probably no daylight between you two. Meanwhile R&B is slagging you with no response because you're busy with your little schism.

Gahrie said...

The interventionist comes from a basic set of assumptions about the non-interventionist position. Namely, that it tends to (1) define American interests too narrowly, (2) ignore and under-estimate threats, and (3) overstate the costs and consequences of intervention. This position holds regardless of who happens to be the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

J. Farmer said...

@Nichevo:

"I don't think what is happening now would be if we had thirty thousand men there."

There were over 100,000 US troops in Iraq during the height of the insurgency. Coalition forces were averaging about 900 fatalities per year from 2004 through 2007. The reduction in killings afterwards were do primarily to the fact that the ethnic cleaning around Baghdad had been mostly completely, and the Sunni forces in the west ostensibly aligned with Sunni insurgent forces switched sides in the form of the Anbar Awakening. One of the reasons this alliance of convenience was possible was because it was clear the US forces were leaving, and the anti-occupation sentiment that had united disparate forces could be neutralized. An insurgency that enjoys broad support and legitimacy from the population cannot be bombed out of existence.

You also ignore (for the second time now) that neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi people want a long-term US military presence.

@Gahrie:

Sure. And if you argue for some stupid interventionist policy, I'll argue against it without once having to mention Bush. Similarly, you can argue against my position without ever having to invoke Obama. Easy, right?

Nichevo said...

I dunno, Farmer, ask em now in Mosul. I bet the Kurds would be delighted to have us.

J. Farmer said...

@Nichevo:

I am sure any country would be delighted for another country's citizens to do their fighting and their dying for them. I am sure one side or another in one of the many internecine civil wars in Africa that's killed millions would love for American personnel to be standing between them and the guy on the other side. But it sure does sound like a really bad deal for the American kid who has to do the dying. I kind of prefer that the American military focus on protecting America and its citizenry and not trying to referee tribal skirmishes we have no interest in.

Nichevo said...

So you're playing moving target now that it suits you. I'm coming off this summer cold so I haven't the energy for games, but what you say doesn't matter, that's all.

J. Farmer said...

@Nichevo:

It isn't a moving target at all. Wanting someone to come in and save your ass from a crisis situation is not the same thing as wanting to host a long-term foreign military presence. The Kurds have always been amenable to US forces, precisely because they are a minority in Iraq.