reflectivepundit

ISIS Is Not Coming to Take Over America

By Brigitte L. Nacos

During this year’s campaign, Donald Trump said repeatedly that he knows more about ISIS than the generals and, therefore, as president will defeat the organization very quickly. Recently, in Florida, he warned his supporters, if Hillary Clinton wins, ISIS will take over this country.

No, ISIS is not coming to take over our country.  

Actually, ISIS is in trouble and forced to adjust its strategies and tactics. The military pressure reduced significantly the number of its leaders, rank and file jihadists, ISIS-held territory, and resources. 

There are several indications of the group’s predicament and its consequences.

First, ISIS’s strategy includes now the recruitment of female jihadists, mostly, because they are less suspect than their male counterparts. The switch resulted in a remarkable increase in females involved in actual or planned attacks. Thus, in early October, police in Morocco arrested 10 female ISIS recruits for allegedly planning suicide bombings. Earlier, French police arrested members of a female ISIS cell for allegedly planning two bombing attacks in Paris. One member of the group stabbed and injured a policeman outside of Paris. Investigators found also two women linked to the perpetrator of the lethal July attack in Nice.

According to an ISIS manifesto, taking care of house, husband, and children are the fundamental functions of devout Muslim women. However, in extraordinary circumstances, when there are not enough men to fight the enemy or “if the men are absent even they are present,” women are called upon to participate, to fight in the jihad. ISIS’s green light for female jihadist might also suggest that there is a shortage of male jihadists--that in the manifesto’s words, the men are absent even though they are present.

Second, according to a recent study at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the media output of ISIS declined measurably “in response to the increasing amount of counterterrorism pressure brought to bear against the organization.” A case in point was the folding of ISIS’s glossy and comprehensive online magazine Dabiq after 15 issues. The name Dabiq was chosen to highlight the importance of the town Dabiq in Northern Syria, where ISIS was going to fight the apocalyptic last battle between faithful Muslims and infidels. Obviously foreseeing the loss of Dabiq that ISIS conquered in the summer of 2014, the magazine of the same name was discontinued and was replaced by the less ambitious Rumiyah. The first two issues of the new e-magazine contain about half the number of pages than those of its predecessor.

For the Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists Trump is the New Hitler

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The ideas of the Alt-Right, once at the extreme fringe of the political right, are now part and parcel of the Trump-led movement and thus moved into the political mainstream. As a jubilant post on one of the leading Neo-Nazi/White Supremacy sites noted following the Republican nominee’s speech in Florida this week, “Trump is combining NS [National Socialist or Nazi] narratives about international financial capitalism with the modern language of Nigel Farage and UKIP [United Kingdom Independence Party that was instrumental in the Brexit vote].

Anyone familiar with Nazi ideology and propaganda who listened to Trump’s latest rhetorical outbursts recognized his strong move into Alt-Right territory.

This is from a 1928 speech of Hitler’s propagandist-in-chief Joseph Goebbels:

“International high finance has taken command of the sovereign rights of the German people and is now making itself at home in our former realms of power. They now own our currency and control by far the greatest part of German production, our transportation system, and as a result of their military and diplomatic capacities, Germany’s borders.

The press is almost entirely in their hands; they thus control public opinion and determine the parliament and government.

Our life is in danger. Any means is appropriate to stop the enemy.”

Compare the above with the following excerpt from Trump’s speech:

“This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged…

Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers…

The establishment and their media enablers will control over this nation through means that are very well known

This is our moment of reckoning as a society and as a civilization itself.”

No, I am not suggesting that Mr. Trump himself drew from a Goebbels’ speech but rather that the Alt-Right people in his campaign circle finally got their candidate to embrace the same conspiracy theories that were central to the anti-Semitism of the first half of the 20^th century in Germany—and elsewhere as well.

Unlike Hitler and Goebbels whose primary targets were Jews, Mr. Trump did not mention Jewish interests. But by claiming that “international banks,”  “the establishment” and “their media enablers” are plotting to take away this country’s sovereignty, he played, wittingly or not, into the dark convictions of white supremacists, nativists, Neo-Nazis. Perhaps, Mr. Trump thought of Muslims, his main targets. But does he think they are plotting with international Banks, the media, the establishment, and Hillary Clinton to undermine the country’s sovereignty?

Perhaps, after all he has also warned that in case of Hillary’s victory, ISIS would take over this country.