{"id":17228,"date":"2016-07-07T22:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T03:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=17228"},"modified":"2016-07-07T22:00:38","modified_gmt":"2016-07-08T03:00:38","slug":"examining-terrorist-tactics-the-machiavellian-method-of-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/07\/07\/examining-terrorist-tactics-the-machiavellian-method-of-isis\/","title":{"rendered":"Examining Terrorist Tactics: The Machiavellian Method of ISIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"disarm\"<\/p>\n

Like communists of yore, the soldiers of the caliphate are seeking to \u2018exacerbate the contradictions\u2019 of those ranged against them.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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PARIS \u2014 Saudi King Salman bin Abdelaziz sounded at once angry and plaintive as he marked the end of this blood-drenched month of Ramadan<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The so-called Islamic State, ISIS, had just staged attacks in three Saudi cities, hitting near the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, a Shia mosque in Qatif, and even a mosque in the holy city of Medina.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Two days before, a car bomb in Baghdad and the fire that followed had killed more than 250 people. Before that, attackers in Bangladesh slaughtered Western patrons and locals at a popular Dhaka caf\u00e9. Days earlier came the stunning attack on Istanbul\u2019s Ataturk Airport, and before that the murder of a husband and wife from the French police in front of their 3-year-old son in a Paris suburb. Still earlier: the horrific slaughter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0All that happened in one month on the Muslim calendar, all in the name of Allah.<\/div>\n
\n

Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the ISIS spokesman and second in command, had declared Ramadan a time of \u201cconquest and jihad.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cGet prepared, be ready\u2026 to make it a month of calamity everywhere for the non-believers,\u201d he said in a recording released in May<\/a>. But as usual, most of the slaughter targeted other Muslims.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

King Salman, \u201cCustodian of the Two Holy Mosques,\u201d vowed this week to meet these threats with \u201can iron fist,\u201d as of course he would. But his statement acknowledged the heart of the problem with a more original and more memorable phrase: the \u201cbiggest challenge,\u201d he said, is how to keep young people away from the \u201cmasterminds of misleading ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Salman also called for Muslim unity to face the ISIS menace. But given that the Saudis\u2019 proxy wars with Iran from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq, in Bahrain and in Yemen are waged with sectarian vehemence, the king\u2019s call for \u201cMuslim unity\u201d sounds oxymoronic, a true contradiction in terms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0And contradictions, in fact, are the foundation that ISIS is built on.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n
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The so-called Islamic State chooses its targets and tailors its terror to reach specific audiences. To do this, it tries, as communist revolutionaries once did, to \u201cexacerbate the contradictions\u201d among its rivals: build on suspicions, inflame resentments, inspire violence and repression that engenders more violence and rebellion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a global war of attrition, which is what we\u2019re looking at, the key to defeating ISIS\u2014aside from killing its operatives\u2014is to resist absolutely and unequivocally its strategy using terror to divide and demoralize.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But that\u2019s no easy feat. There are just so many contradictions in Arab and Western society, and ISIS understands them better, it seems, than many Arab and Western leaders do. Its \u201cmasterminds of misleading ideas\u201d employ what the French call la polique du pire,<\/i>a policy that provokes a society to turn on itself, aiming eventually to make the masses ungovernable, and daily life unbearable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the last few weeks, as ISIS has come under pressure on the ground in Iraq and Syria, its response has not <\/i>been a blind, senseless lashing out. It has been a carefully calculated campaign using a wide array of available human tools, some of them acting under direct orders, some of them loosely affiliated, and some merely inspired to carry out mass murder against a backdrop of psycho-sexual confusion\u2014but always serving the interest of the self-anointed \u201ccaliphate\u201d that ISIS claims to be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Let\u2019s go down the list from this gruesome month of fasting, prayer and slaughter:<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at The Daily Beast<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like communists of yore, the soldiers of the caliphate are seeking to \u2018exacerbate the contradictions\u2019 of those ranged against them. PARIS \u2014 Saudi King Salman bin Abdelaziz sounded at once angry and plaintive as he marked the end of this blood-drenched month of Ramadan. The so-called Islamic State, ISIS, had just staged attacks in three…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1704,5072,13,74,5699,4479,4333,1814,2413,2726,5539,2990,5705,272,1898],"tags":[545,1083,3707],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}