In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead comments on the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi:
The Washington Post may have hastily changed its embarrassing headline for its obituary of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—“austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic Stateâ€â€”but that won’t be the end of the West’s difficulties in understanding and responding to the multifaceted crisis in the Middle East.
Movements like ISIS don’t spring from nowhere. It took centuries of decline, serial humiliations at the hands of arrogant European imperial powers, and decades of failed postcolonial governance to produce the toxic mixture of bigotry and hate out of which Baghdadi and his adherents emerged. That toxic brew won’t quickly disappear. Angry, alienated and profoundly confused people—many young and at best half-educated—will continue to find the message of ISIS and similar groups seductive. Baghdadi’s death isn’t the end of ISIS, and the collapse of the U.S.-backed order in northern Syria could provide conditions for its re-emergence as a serious military force.
Arabs of the Middle East should not be offered any solace on his passing. For nearly a millennium they were ruled by non-Arabs, first by Turks and then by European colonizers. They will not achieve what they presumably consider their rightful place in the world by nurturing vipers like Abu Bakr in their collective bosom but by dint of effort, industry, and practicing the virtues that Islam teaches rather than the hate spread by takfiri like Abu Bakr.
What virtues?
Islam has many virtues. It preaches forgiveness, tolerance, honesty, and kindness, just to name a few. Unfortunately, in many places in the world Islam has been conflated with traditional culture, “the way we do things here”, which is far from forgiving, tolerant, honest, or kind.
“Arabs of the Middle East should not be offered any solace on his passing”
Is there any evidence of that? I turned on al-Jazeera for a while and didnt hear any.
“They will not achieve what they presumably consider their rightful place in the world by nurturing vipers ”
I dont think Gandhi succeeds unless he was dealing with a fairly enlightened UK government. Solidarity fails, the whole Eastern bloc effort fails without Gorbachev who decided that the USSR needed to dissolve. (You can argue this, and I think you can make the case that the economic weakness of the USSR guaranteed eventual collapse, but in the short erm I think that if Gorbachev had fought it the collapse could have delayed, and bloody.) Will the rest of the world let the Islamic countries succeed or be partners to their success? It would certainly help if we stopped talking about taking their oil and stopped invading them.
Steve
It seems to me that a likely reason for the bizarre construction the editors decided on was to spare the feelings of anyone who saw Abu Bakr as a religious leader.
The virtues you mentioned are for the believers, not the infidel.
It’s hard to open the Koran to a page that doesn’t exhort Muslims to kill lnfidels wherever they find them.
Where are you getting that? Second-hand I presume?
Islam’s problem isn’t that it’s drenched in blood. It’s that there are a few passages that might be interpreted that way and no one with authority to say that’s not the way it should be interpreted.
If they wanted to spare the feelings of those who saw him as a religious leader they wouldn’t have noted that he was the head of the Islamic State, then written the stuff in the article about the awful stuff done under his leadership. You are stretching way too far here to fall into the right wing PC stuff.
Steve
And you are bending over backwards to ignore an own-goal.
I’m trying to be kind to the WaPo. Newspapers actually work in the opposite way from the way you suggested. Headlines and slugs are written by different people than the content is but the headline and slug writers are higher up in the food chain than the reporters and copywriters who write the stories themselves. It’s the headlines and slugs that are important. Maybe they think that most people don’t read the stories at all—just the headlines and slugs.
Unless whoever wrote the headline and slug’s sympathies reside with DAESH.
I can’t explain the headline. My understanding is that their first headline was a simple “Leader of ISIS Dead” (which I would have preferred) which they later expanded with the “austere scholar” nonsense, even later removing that when they realized that it was indeed, a dumb move.
Where are you getting that? Second-hand I presume
No, Dave, I have a Koran, what wasn’t lifted from the Torah and Old Testament, is simply a call to arms, and it’s so repetitive and dull, no I didn’t read it all.