BY ED FELIEN
The ancient Egyptian goddess Isis is the mother of the Greek and Christian religions. She begins the myths of the journey into the wilderness, the death and the resurrection.
The ISIS of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq is really a secessionist movement of Sunni Arabs who don’t enjoy being ruled by Shia and Persians. Conditions for the Sunni Arabs in Syria got worse when global warming made their subsistence farmland a desert. The farmers protested to the government. The Syrian government fired on them, killing some peaceful demonstrators. The CIA got involved getting guns to the insurgents. Using Saudi money and contacts, they flooded the rebels with the machinery of war. That war materiel and training ended up in ISIS.
The Saudi version of Islam was appealing to ISIS as well. Conservative and autocratic, it fit nicely into the military discipline needed to weld together a nation state and distinguish it from the more moderate Sufi Islam and Western materialism. Called Wahhabi, this variation on Islam developed as the Ottoman Empire collapsed under pressures from the West at the beginning of the19th century. It gained strength after World War I with the discovery of oil. The Saud family that rules the kingdom claims kinship with the original Abd al-Wahhab. It was a natural fit for ISIS.
Omar Mateen claimed he was acting on behalf of ISIS when he murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando. But we think now that he was probably confused and conflicted about his sexuality; his marriage had failed; he was going from dead-end job to dead-end job. His actions had as much to do with ISIS as James Holmes’s murder of 24 people in a movie theater in Aurora dressed as the Joker had to do with Batman. They were both desperate young men who could see no positive future for themselves. They fit the profile of the contemporary American mass murderer. Donald Trump would call them losers. In the aggressive and predatory world of soulless capitalism, there are very few winners and plenty of losers. The stakes are high. The odds are stacked against you (unless, like The Donald, you inherit a hundred million dollars). Finally, forced into a corner, they lash out in one suicidal and murderous burst to try to make sense of their lives. It’s tragic and pathetic, but in the high-risk poker game of capitalism, as long as America gives such great honors to winners like Donald Trump, it will also create losers like Omar Mateen and James Holmes.
What about the three young Somali men from Minneapolis who wanted to go to Syria and fight for ISIS? They have nothing in common with Omar Mateen. They were, according to their lights, patriotic Sunni Muslims. They were willing to volunteer to support their Sunni Muslim brothers and sisters under attack in Syria and Iraq. Like American Catholics who went to Northern Ireland and joined the IRA, or the thousand American Jews who have joined the Israeli Army, or the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War when American socialists went to Spain to fight Franco and fascism in the first battle of World War II, these Americans saw an injustice in the world where their brothers and sisters were being persecuted and they felt moved to join their cause.
They were prosecuted because they were attempting to join a terrorist organization—which is what Protestants call the IRA; which is what Palestinians call the IDF; and which is what the American Congress called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (later, they were called premature anti-fascists).
In order to understand the motives and reasoning of the three Somali young men, we have to have some sympathy and understanding of the plight of Sunni Arabs in Syria and Iraq. What we call terrorism, others call patriotism.
