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[ by Charles Cameron — gathering these things the way an obsessed squirrel gathers nuts ]
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I’d say there’s nothing more thought-provocative than running across an unexpected parallelism or opposition — and the closer the parallel the better. Once thought has been provoked, though that’s just the starting point — it needs to run its course with the appropriate caution and rigor. Here, then, are some parallelisms I’ve run into recently, for your provocation.

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The Dilletante’s Winterings, Michael McFaul’s easy, broken parallel:

Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, has a blog on the site of Ekho Moskvy, the independent radio station based in Moscow. Commenting on the appointment of Steve Bannon to the National Security Council, he wrote:

It’s the equivalent of Putin appointing Alexander Dugin to the [Russian] Security Council and telling generals Bortnikov [head of the FSB] and Gerasimov [head of the general staff] to only attend when they are needed.

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Craig Whiteside (2016) The Islamic State and the Return of RevolutionaryWarfare, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 27:5, 743-776, DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2016.1208287:

This paper starts by comparing the Islamic State to the Vietnamese communists in a revolutionary warfare framework..

I didn’t find a single-sentence assertion of this parallelism, not am I expert in revolutionary warfare — but manynof our readers here on Zenpundit are, so I’ll leave the critical appraisal of this proposition to you-all..

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Defense One, So, American Mass Shooters and Islamic Terrorists Do Have Something in Common:

Like radical Islamic groups, white supremacist and other right-wing terrorist groups offer people (especially men) who feel isolated and disempowered a chance to feel important and welcome. It’s the same psychological phenomenon, different culture war. And thus the KKK gains new recruits along with ISIL.

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And for good measure… not, you understand, that I understand it —

Metod Saniga, Algebraic Geometry: a Tool for Resolving the Enigma of Time?

An illustrative example of such a temporal dimension is provided by a specific linear, single-parametric set (so-called pencil) of conics in the projective plane. This set of conics is found to nicely reproduce the experienced arrow of time when the projective plane is affinized; it simply suffices to postulate that each proper conic of the pencil stands for a single temporal event, and relate three distinct kinds of (proper) affine conic, viz. a hyperbola, a parabola and an ellipse, with the three different kinds of temporal event, viz. the past, present and future, respectively..

Time, as St Augustine noted, makes sense — until you try to figure out what sense it makes.

[ by Charles Cameron — still recovering from heart surgery, still a couple days slow on current affairs ]
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Holocaust Memorial Day might have passed me by completely had President Trump not decided to sign his executive order putting an initial ban on refugees — and green card holders — from seven Muslim-majority countries entering the US.

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The parallelism speaks for itself. In a single tweet:

"Anne Frank could be a 77-year-old woman living in Boston today." But was denied a US visa. https://t.co/BeZ2ZpqLhl #HolocaustMemorialDay

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) January 27, 2017

Read all about it: Anne Frank and her family were also denied entry as refugees to the U.S.:

“The story seems to unfold in slow motion as the painstaking exchange of letters journey across continents and from state to state, their information often outdated by the time they arrive,” the New York Times wrote … “Each page adds a layer of sorrow as the tortuous process for gaining entry to the United States — involving sponsors, large sums of money, affidavits and proof of how their entry would benefit America — is laid out. The moment the Franks and their American supporters overcame one administrative or logistical obstacle, another arose.”

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See also the St. Louis Manifest Twitter feed.

.@Stl_Manifest shares the fates of the St. Louis refugees #HolocaustMemorialDay https://t.co/4MzcqDqePo via @SmithsonianMag

— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) January 28, 2017

The Smithsonian magazine describes it as “like a slow dirge, steadily announcing the names of the St. Louis passengers who were killed..”

A sample:

My name is Walter Velman. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Golleschau

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 28, 2017

My name is Bertha Unger. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Sobibor

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 28, 2017

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Yet despite all..

“What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again” – Anne Frank#HolocaustMemorialDay pic.twitter.com/KHE7jkqfGA

— Lost In History (@HistoryToLearn) January 27, 2017

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And that’s before we begin to consider the constitutionality, in a nation dedicated to having “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, of executive orders that ban Muslims while showing preference for Christians, nor the likelihood that such orders will blow back on us, increasing IS and AQ recruitment.

Consider, for instance, this quote from an article subheaded ISIS aims to exploit Trump’s controversial rhetoric about Muslims to reinforce its propaganda, five current and former members told BuzzFeed News. “Trump will shorten the time it takes for us to achieve our goals,” one said.

ISIS also sees Trump as an ideal enemy for propaganda purposes, the former and current members of the group said, believing that his campaign’s heated rhetoric about Muslims will help the extremist group with recruitment by reinforcing its central narrative that America and the West are at war with Islam. “Trump announced his hatred of Arabs and Muslims and did not hide it as presidents did before him,” an ISIS official based outside the city of Palmyra said, speaking via an encrypted chat service.

[ by Charles Cameron — turbulence (ie complexity) at the confluence of motives ]
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Shaping strategy — Constant turbulence and disruption

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Mental health and terrorism — a major article in today’s CTC Sentinel describes the nuances. From the conclusion:

What we see from the existing research is that lone-actor terrorism is usually the culmination of a complex mix of personal, political, and social drivers that crystalize at the same time to drive the
individual down the path of violent action. This should be no different for those inspired by the Islamic State. Whether the violence comes to fruition is usually a combination of the availability and vulnerability of suitable targets and the individual’s capability to engage in an attack from both a psychological and technical capability standpoint. Many individual cases share a mixture of personal life circumstances coupled with an intensification of beliefs that later developed into the idea to engage in violence. What difers is how these influences were sequenced. Sometimes personal problems led to a susceptibility to ideological influences. Sometimes long-held ideological influences became intensified after the experience of personal problems. This is why we should be wary of mono-causal ‘master narratives’ about how this process unfolds. Mental health problems are undoubtedly important in some cases. Intuitively, we might see how in some cases it can make carrying out violence easier. In other cases, it may make the adoption of the ideology easier because of delusional thinking or fixated behaviors. However, it will only ever be one of many drivers in an individual’s pathway to violence. In many cases, it may be present but completely unrelated. The development of radicalization and attack planning behaviors is usually far more labyrinthine and dynamic than one single factor can explain, be it mental disorders (today’s go-to silver-bullet explanation), online radicalization (another popular silver-bullet explanation), or root causes that encompass socio-demographic characteristics.

We must also bear in mind that the relationship between mental health problems and terrorist engagement is just one part of the story. Given the scale and types of violence being conducted by the Islamic State, many perpetrators will develop mental health problems as a byproduct of involvement as opposed to it being a driver of involvement.

[ by Charles Cameron — angels as force multipliers for ISIS, and the cross restored ]
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I used a tweet from Magnier in Prophetic dreams, Dabiq now, Mosul back then, and another in my comment on The map borders on the territory? Turkey, Palestine. Here are two more..

The first updates us on the Qur’anic concept of angels, rank on rank, supporting the Muslims at the Battle of Badr (Qur’an 8.9):

#ISIS fanboys asking reinforcemen2 #Mosul:"God send ur angels 2fight w/ Mujahideen, destroy Jets & cannons". #Iraq https://t.co/vt4Y9VD17s pic.twitter.com/ujmRSh6aGN

— Elijah J. Magnier (@EjmAlrai) October 17, 2016

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And before I show you the second, let me remind you of this, from November of last year:

Now the situation is blessedly reversed:

#Iraq Cross raised once again over Saint-Barbra church in #Kremless after defeating #ISIS in the city. pic.twitter.com/uoFKalfWuT

— Elijah J. Magnier (@EjmAlrai) October 24, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — two dreams of the Prophet attributed to al-Baghdadi, one just now, one a year and a half ago ]
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Another response to the failure of a prophecy is to claim the Prophet foretold it. That at least is the claim made recently about the ISIS retreat from Dabiq:

" #ISIS Baghdadi saw in his dream the prophet Mohamad asking him to pull out of #Dabiq". Hopefully from #Raqqah and his rat whole as well. pic.twitter.com/BDT2gm1RXR

— Elijah J. Magnier (@EjmAlrai) October 17, 2016

However, we should note that something very similar was reported back in March of 2015!

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Dreams were important to Muhammad and his Companions, gave guidance to both bin Laden and Mullah Omar, and are important to ISIS. They are among the “soft” aspects of jihad that we overlook at our peril (cf Thomas Hegghammer).

For a quick overview, see Iain R Edgar‘s pieces, Islamic State and Dream Warfare from September, or his earlier The Dreams of Islamic State. The second edition of his book, The Dream in Islam: From Qur’anic Tradition to Jihadist Inspiration includes material on ISIS.