FEAR OF SNAKES – The ISIS Factor

Painting by Tahir Fatah, Flying headless vines, broken Socrates, California, 2015. Photo credit: Sheri Laizer

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

A pale snake lies coiled on the black tiled living room floor. Is it sleeping, dead or just inert? It uncoils suddenly and squirms, reminding me of the white calligraphy of IS (the Islamic State organisation) writhing across the black flag as they drive in their convoys to overwhelm and slaughter their targets.

The visual metaphor pleases me and I sandwich the snake carefully between a pair of heavy gardening gloves and remove it to the fields where it belongs. The next morning it has gone. IS is not going away as quickly or as easily. Touch neither viper the serpent or the ‘homo erectus’ form.

A percentage of the Islamic State organisation’s killers plausibly derive from that body of disaffected, nihilistic ‘citizens’ that rioted, destroying businesses, setting fire to any object in their path, looting, rampaging and kicking in the windows of shops and banks during the bank bailouts of the summer of 2011. Jihad has come to replace ‘rioting at home’ for those whose violent propensities are fulfilled in the lawless theatre of war in Syria, Iraq and beyond.[1]

According to one former protestor, “Rising inequality still scars a land where the poor are left cleaning the corridors of power instead of walking them. Unbridled market forces have cleared great swaths of our cities of the low-paid, breaking up families and communities in the process, leaving youngsters bereft of homes and jobs. Corruption in the police, the media, and in politics simply rubs salt into their wounds…”[2]

In a recent book, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals, French activist philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, wrote of these anti-social individuals: ‘The loss of motives of hope then expands, encompassing all of us like a contagious illness. But this ‘all’ is no longer a ‘we’: it is a panic…’ [3] Stiegler, interestingly, was a former convicted armed robber that became interested in philosophy while in prison from where he carried out a correspondence course while serving his sentence between 1978-1983.[4]

Few commentators, however, predicted that so many ‘hopeless’ individuals would one day be flying off to Iraq, Syria and elsewhere to join Jihad. Faith and spirituality were not pre-requisites, just anti-social tendencies and a zeal for brutality.

Dr. Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski (tagged the ‘Unabomber’) in a much earlier manifesto Industrial Society and its Future (which I acquired from an underground LA bookstore in 1996) set out his arguments against the unchecked power of technology ‘for its own sake’ and the damage industrialisation has done to the human social order. Kaczynski justified the use of violence to promote his philosophy carried out alongside well-reasoned essays sent to major US newspapers and despatching explosive devices by post to targets in universities and airports.

Far from being the work of a madman, the manifesto is the product of a highly organised mind and profound social conscience. A Doctor of mathematics – Kaczynski graduated from Harvard in 1962, retreated to the woods of Montana and began to send out ‘explosive devices’ between 1978 and 1995 before being exposed by his brother, arrested and sentenced to life without parole for murder in 1998.

A fellow graduate that began a correspondence with Kaczynski after his imprisonment remembers him as extremely bright, and one of a body of students that consented to submit to extreme psychological experiments at Harvard known as the Murray experiment.[5]

I wondered if currently from prison Kaczynski communicates with fellow thinkers who perceive how socio-economic conditions akin to those he condemned have produced such dehumanised phenomena as ISIS/IS. (Ironically, IS is said to have used the former’s name in a threatened campaign, Operation Kaczynski Christmas, to mail the Ebola virus to targets in letters. (Scientists have responded to this threat that the virus could not live outside the body and the recipients would, in any case, be unlikely to accept such missives).

“Operation Kaczynski Christmas will bring a reign of terror and illness to the Americans!” exclaimed a biohazard suit-wearing ISIS spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Be sure to check your mailboxes for death!”[6]

“We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society,” Kaczynski had written nearly twenty years earlier. “Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society.” But this movement does have a further goal. It is to protect “wild nature,” which is the opposite of technology. Admittedly, “eliminating industrial society” may have some “negative consequences,” but “well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too.”[7]

IS: contrary to Nature

Unlike the Unabomber’s respect for “wild nature” IS plainly has no such reverence. Nor do its disaffected individuals enjoy respect for antiquity or art whether or not it pre-dates Islam if the creation sits at odds with its narrow interpretation of the Koran.

Painter, Tahir Fatah, originally from Sulaimani in Kurdistan of Iraq, lives and works from the California desert where he opined that when religion is contrary to nature it no longer serves either ‘god’ or humanity. Some of his recent canvases depict the toppled heads of ancient thinkers like Socrates and heroic forms set against the black spots of a blighted, unnatural religion that deceives ‘True Believers’ into mute acquiescence in their fate, crouched down in primitive foetal forms and hostile to the natural order.

I am reminded of Muslim women burdened by layers of heavy clothes beneath chadors that also don black tights, socks, gloves and facemasks in countries during summer where temperatures attain 50 degrees. This is against nature and certainly against hygiene. More terrifying still is how these women may frequently be seen in the company of husbands and male relatives that go bareheaded, wearing T-shirts, shorts and open shoes.

In the wilderness, the snake adapts its colours to its surroundings: in the house it pretends to be invisible or lifeless. Is it afraid of what human beings have become?

Authorised slaughter in Islamic texts

What happened to the Ten Commandments, I wondered, and duly consulted an Iranian atheist and scholar of religion. How did such a roadmap for social relations get shelved in the Quran? How did Issa (Jesus) of Nazareth’s New Testament “Turn the other cheek” degenerate into “Cut off your neighbour’s head”?

For reasons of security, should she return to Iran, my colleague must remain anonymous here and be cited simply as BM. She observed to me: “ The Quran clearly orders an individual not to be good to family, friends or even your parents if they are not Muslim. At Surah 9, Verse 23: O you who have believed, do not take your fathers or your brothers as allies if they have preferred disbelief over belief. And whoever does so among you – then it is those who are the wrongdoers.

“I have also read somewhere that the Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with non-believers for the sake of Islamic rule. Also at Surah 2:191-193 the Quran says: ‘And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah [disbelief or unrest] is worse than killing… but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah [disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah] and worship is for Allah alone. But if they cease, let there be no transgression except against Az-Zalimun (the polytheists, and wrong-doers, etc.)’

“Quran, Surah 3:56: “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”

BM concluded by saying the list was not exhaustive and that she personally believed that the “Arab Muslim prophet and Arab ‘kings’ after him who composed the Quran used these violent messages as a weapon to deter others from leaving their new religion. That’s why nowadays only one in a million Muslims leaves Islam because they are so frightened of the circumstances. As I have mentioned in one of my articles, a Muslim father can easily kill his atheist child because he/she is a Kafar (infidel).”

Strong words and true in deeds.

Fear the snakes before they strike for they have no compassion.

Note: Painting by Tahir Fatah, Flying headless vines, broken Socrates, California, 2015

[1] http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/from-the-london-riots-to-the-islamic-state/16220#.Vjx8o2SrRGM
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/london-rioters-2011-anger-inequality-distrust-police
[3] Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals by Bernard Stiegler translated by Daniel Ross (Polity Books, Cambridge, 2012).
[4] http://arsindustrialis.org/bibliographiebiographie
[5] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-and-the-making-of-the-unabomber/378239/
[6] https://flatlinegov.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/isis-going-postal-over-ebola/
[7] The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and its Future by “FC”, Jolly Roger Press, Berkley, CA, USA, 1995

Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a contributing writer for iKurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.