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[ by Charles Cameron — minor correction to a USG CVE tweet ]
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pic.twitter.com/ofmYeFGNsx

— Think AgainTurn Away (@ThinkAgain_DOS) February 18, 2016

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I don’t think there’s any room for doubt about the Islamic State enslaving captured women and selling them. The IS magazine Dabiq, issue 4, under the heading The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour, recounts:

After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shar?’ah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority to be divided as khums.

This large-scale enslavement of mushrik families is probably the first since the abandonment of this Shar?’ah law. The only other known case – albeit much smaller – is that of the enslavement of Christian women and children in the Philippines and Nigeria by the mujahidin there. The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as the mushrik?n were sold by the Companions (radiyallahu ‘anhum) before them. Many well-known rulings are observed, including the prohibition of separating a mother from her young children.

There’s even a theological justification offered – the avoidance of sin. Discussing the long period in which slavery was no longer practiced in Islam, the writer says:

Finally, a number of contemporary scholars have mentioned that the desertion of slavery had led to an increase in fahishah (adultery, fornication, etc.), because the shar’i alternative to marriage is not available, so a man who cannot afford marriage to a free woman finds himself surrounded by temptation towards sin.

Furthermore, Dabiq issue 9 contains an article titled Slave Girls or Prostitutes by one Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajirah in which the writer, poresumably a woman, writes:

I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home. Yes, we thanked our Lord for having let us live to the day we saw kufr humiliated and its banner destroyed. Here we are today, and after centuries, reviving a prophetic Sunnah, which both the Arab and non-Arab enemies of Allah had buried. By Allah, we brought it back by the edge of the sword, and we did not do so through pacifism, negotiations, democracy, or elections. We established it according to the prophetic way, with blood-red swords, not with fingers for voting or tweeting.

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However, the image used by USG in the tweet above appears to be a photo taken for Reuters by photographer Ali Hashisho, with the legend:

Shiite Muslim women chained to one another march During a reenactment of the Battle of Karbala During a mourning process, two days before the day of Ashura, in Saksakieh village, southern Lebanon. December 4, 2011

As I say, this doesn’t in any way disprove the Islamic State’s use of slavery as a religiously sanctioned practice.

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I’m not the first to notice this misattribution — but I do think it’s worth getting these things right, and this is not the first time an Ashura photograph has been misattributed in this way. For an earlier mistaken use of an image from an Ashura procession to illustrate IS treatment of captured women, see this piece.

[ by Charles Cameron — plus a quick followup to my post on Political candidates and religion ]
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“No one remembers who came in second.” – Walter Hagen

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2013

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Also of interest:

@sarahposner Look at results from Sioux County – the most evangelical place in USA maybe. Trump only gets 11%. #iacaucus #IAcaucus2016

— Christopher Jones (@JonesChrisA) February 2, 2016

to which Sarah Posner responded:

Cruz 33.2 %, Rubio 32%, Carson 14.9%, Trump 10.9% https://t.co/HktWhdvAMM

— Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) February 2, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — a brief comic digression about them and us ]
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Generally, we’re stuck with this:

Best political cartoon I've seen in a long time. pic.twitter.com/LEjK1URjpk

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) March 1, 2015

It is a good one, I’ll admit.

I’m inclined, however, to agree with this analysis on occasion:

Could be the Best Cartoon Ever pic.twitter.com/UPTVTPMhCJ

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) December 6, 2014

What I hadn’t realized, though, is that the theriomorphic rabbit and duck divinities in question are orthogonally related:

Proper labeling of axes is absolutely crucial. pic.twitter.com/rngFg9PAXK

— Pascal Wallisch (@Pascallisch) June 25, 2014

Very clever!

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Two sides to every coin, two hands for every koan?

[ by Charles Cameron — on juxtaposition as a force-multiplier in the war of ideas ]
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Two potent examples of what I term DoubleQuotes in the Wild:

‘Call of Jihad’: ISIS Turns to Video Games, Hollywood to Reach Recruits https://t.co/gYSjUceJBj pic.twitter.com/YVDDxkbLft

— Defense One (@DefenseOne) December 25, 2015

DefenseOne‘s ‘Call of Jihad’: ISIS Turns to Video Games, Hollywood to Reach Recruits is worth reading as a side-bar to Thomas Hegghammer‘s highly significant (and contested) Wilkinson Memorial Lecture, Why Terrorists Weep: The Socio-Cultural Practices of Jihadi Militants.

As Saudi Arabia threatens to sue anyone who Tweets this, my message is: See you in court. https://t.co/9Jg5BOb913 pic.twitter.com/Pj5zU79TqJ

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) November 29, 2015

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There’s a glib phrase about a picture being worth a thousand words, which given the quality of writing these days on the web may not be saying much about pictures — my point here is that two pictures can be worth a whole lot more than (twice) one — and the same goes for appositely juxtaposed verbal quotes.

Apposite juxtaposition, IOW, is a force-multiplier in the war of ideas.

[ by Charles Cameron — CJ Chivers, nuclear nonsense, faux chemistry, and the alchemical imagination, with hat-tip to Cheryl Rofer ]
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CJ Chivers, conflict journalist extraordinaire and author of a book about the Kalashnikov assault rifle, The Gun, today posted a remarkable account of what he terms The Doomsday Scam, with the subtitle “For decades, aspiring bomb makers — including ISIS — have desperately tried to get their hands on a lethal substance called red mercury. There’s a reason that they never have.”

A taste:

The Islamic State, he said, was shopping for red mercury.

Abu Omar knew what this meant. Red mercury — precious and rare, exceptionally dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, its properties unmatched by any compound known to science — was the stuff of doomsday daydreams. According to well-traveled tales of its potency, when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives, red mercury could create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb. In another application, a famous nuclear scientist once suggested it could be used as a component in a neutron bomb small enough to fit in a sandwich-size paper bag.

and:

To approach the subject of red mercury is to journey into a comic-book universe, a zone where the stubborn facts of science give way to unverifiable claims, fantasy and outright magic, and where villains pursuing the dark promise of a mysterious weapon could be rushing headlong to the end of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the broad agreement among nonproliferation specialists that red mercury, at least as a chemical compound with explosive pop, does not exist.

Indeed, there’s a sidebar in Chivers’ post which sums the topic up nicely:

The shadowy weaponeer’s little helper, red mercury was the unobtainium of the post-Soviet world.

There’s much more, of course — with red mercury rumored to be found in old Singer sewing machines, which briefly raised the price of such machines in Saudi Arabia a thousandfold to $50,000 — and the whole extraordinary piece is more than worthy of your attention. It is also about a concrete, if counter-factual, reading of the term “red mercury.”

Cinnabar, aka mercury sulphide, anyone?

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A centuries-old debate concerning alchemy has concerned the literal and metaphorical interpretations of alchemical texts.

Scholars up to and including Isaac Newton theorized about and practiced alchemy in their aptly named lab-oratories, at a time when literal and metaphorical “readings” were much less easily considered separately than is the case today. Alchemy was then for a while widely ridiculed as proto- and indeed pseudo-science — a tendency still prevalent in many circles today. And more recently, alchemy has been explored by Carl Jung and followers (and his predecessor, Silberer) as a field of imaginative, metaphorical inquiry illuminating spirituality, psychology and literature.

BJT Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy

BJT Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius

Herbert Silberer, Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism

CG Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

CG Jung, Alchemical Studies

CG Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

Marie-Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens

Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy

Jung’s reading of alchemical texts is a symbolic reading — in accordance with the principle “the stone which the builders rejected Has become the chief corner stone” (Psalm 118.22, cf Acts 411), he has taken precisely those materials in the alchemical tradition which modern chemistry rejected as ridiculous, and reclaimed them as symbolic, richly metaphorical expressions of psychological truth.

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It is in that spirit that I turned from Chivers’ fascinating treatment of “red mercury” as an allegedly physical, albeit spurious, substance, with its intriguing narratives of scams from the Cold War to the present day and IS, to take a look at what I might find via a brief search in the Jungian literature. I say “quick” because I have neither the appropriate library nor the time for a more intensive search, but here’s what little I found:

There’s a “red mercury” reference in Stanton Marlan, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, on p. 22:

The idea is that the raw solar energy must darken and undergo a mortificatio process that reduces it to its prime matter. Only then can the creative energies produce a purified product. In this image the sperm of gold refers not to the ordinary seminal fluid of man but rather to “a semi-material principle,” or aura seminales, the fertile potentiality that prepares the Sun for the sacred marriage with his counterpart, darkness, which is thought to produce a philosophical child or stone and is nourished by the mercurial blood that flows from the wounding encounter of the Lion and the Sun. The blood — called red mercury — is considered a great solvent.

Marlan then gives us what is effectively a translation of the paragraph above into contemporary therapeutic language:

Psychologically, there is nourishment in wounding. When psychological blood flows, it can dissolve hardened defenses. This then can be the beginning of true productivity. In dreams the imagery of blood often connotes moments when real feeling and change are possible. The theme of the wound can also suggest a hidden innocence, which is also a subject of mortification. The green color of the lion, which is referred to as “green gold,” suggests something that is immature, unripe, or innocent, as well as growth and fertility. The alchemist imagined this innocence, sometimes called virgin’s milk, as a primary condition, something without Earth and not yet blackened. Typical virgin-milk fantasies are often maintained emotionally in otherwise intellectually sophisticated and developed people.

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And then there’s what Jung would term synchronicity..

CG Jung & Wolfgang Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche

In my twitter stream within 3 minutes of my posting my first tweet re Chivers’ piece, & before I’d tweeted my follow up, I ran across this tweet containing the phrase “Drawing Blood will eat the sun”:

In 11 days, Drawing Blood will eat the sun. Preorder here (honestly preorders help so much) https://t.co/RyuR3mfoV8

— Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) November 19, 2015

Drawing Blood will eat the sun — just how synchronistically alchemical can Molly Crabapple and Twitter get?