At signings people are asking me whether we should be at war against ISIS. Here, exclusive to ANewDomain.net, is my response:
Drawing comparisons to the Nazi Holocaust, corporate media (i.e., “mainstream”) pundits like New York Times columnist Roger Cohen agrees with President Obama’s argument that ISIS represents an existential threat to what they euphemistically call “American strategic interests in the Middle East” — oil, gas, pipelines, Israel, our pet dictators and autocrats — and to humanity. And humanism.
“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, has created a cult of violence that makes the elimination of all nonbelievers the cornerstone of a movement whose avowed objective is a restored Islamic caliphate but whose raison d’être is the slaughter itself,” Cohen writes.
Citing Aushwitz survivor Primo Levi’s definition of the Germans’ behavior in the death camps as “counter-human,” Cohen concludes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: “Presented with the counter-human, the human must fight back.”
When someone claims that someone else acts violently without cause — “senselessly,” “cowardly,” as its own “raison d’être — my bullshit detector goes off.
Read more here.
