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[ by Charles Cameron — compare, contrast, and consider ]
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Let’s do some remote comparative play-testing, okay?

You are an impressionable youth — imagine! — which game would entice you? This one, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “played” here without a soundtrack —

— reviewed with wider context, more detail and critique here:

— or, this one, from the Islamic State —

— with a hat-tip to Grand Theft Auto?

[ by Charles Cameron — I suppose you could call this a discrepancy between word and deed, talk and walk ]

No comment required, IMHO.

[ by Charles Cameron — slowed down by health issues, but getting there ]
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A quick announcement from Tim Furnish:

The second of my complementary volumes on Islam and Islamic world issues is finally up on Amazon, albeit at this point only in Kindle format. Sects, Lies, and the Caliphate: 10 Years of Observations on Islam is the follow-on to Ten Years’ Captivation with the Mahdi’s Camps, which came out in November 2015. The latter focused entirely on Islamic eschatology and apocalyptic movements (especially ISIS and Iran); the new one, on the other hand, deals with more mundane, but no less important, issues–such as the Islamic roots of ISIS and Muslim terrorism, how Christianity is indeed more peaceful and less problematic than Islam (not to mention being true), and, in the longest section (some 86 pages), on mostly failed US policies toward Islam and the Islamic world over the last decade.

I shall be reviewing both books when time permits, but wanted to let you know both are now available.

Tim’s previous book, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden (Praeger, 2005) is more scholarly — it’s Tim’s doctoral dissertation-turned-book. These two books bring us up to date on Tim’s thinking since then.

[ 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 — a couple of grace-notes while I’m working on my review of Will McCants‘ book, The ISIS Apocalypse ]
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One:

My first note concerns the elegant way in which McCants‘ view of the changing state of IS eschatology as it has developed in practice conforms to Max Weber‘s theory of the routinization of charisma:

Toth, Toward a Theory of the Routinizationnof Charisma
McCants, p 147

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Two:

There are four sentences that fall in series in Will McCants’s Conclusion — three of a kind followed by one with a different quality to it. Each one ends a section, and the last ends the Conclusion as a whole:

This is not Bin Laden’s apocalypse.

This is not Bin Laden’s insurgency.

This is not Bin Laden’s caliphate.

This may not be Bin Laden’s jihad, but it’s a formula future jihadists will find hard to resist.

The relevant pages respectively are pp. 147, 151, 153, and 159.