The Guardian: Let’s deny Isis its binary struggle – and celebrate the grey zone

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/20/isis-binary-struggle-grey-zone-jihadism

--- snip


The Guardian: Let’s deny Isis its binary struggle – and celebrate the grey zone

-- snip
Many headed to Syria in 2013, for example, before Isis had established its caliphate or made the descent into outlandish barbarism, having come to the disgusted conclusion that the west was not going to bomb the Assad regime and that, if they wanted to defend Syrians from Assad’s barrel bombs, they would have to do it themselves. Similarly, the 1990s generation was radicalised by the west’s failure to intervene earlier to save Muslim lives in Bosnia.

In other words, attributing Isis terror – or even Isis recruitment – to western action is a temptingly neat explanation, but it fails to account for the fury at western inaction. In the violent jihadist worldview, western intervention has been a provocation – but so has western non-intervention.

What’s more, it’s not just military action that triggers a fierce Isis response. Recall the beheading of the US journalist James Foley. It came after US planes had been circling over the Sinjar mountains of Iraq. Except those aircraft dropped not bombs but food parcels, water supplies and blankets to the desperate Yazidi people then threatened with starvation, the murder of their men and the sexual enslavement of their women.

It seems Isis regards any nation that gets in the way of its caliphate restoration project as a legitimate target – and that’s almost everyone. On this logic, the only way to be safe from its grasp is to do nothing, to repress even our humanitarian impulse to help people dying of cold on a mountainside.