Originally Posted by
Neville_Davitt
This article is well worth a read.
Mehdi Hasan - Reactions to Manchester Bombing Show How Anti-Muslim Bigots Are “Useful Idiots” for ISIS (May 24 2017)
“IF YOU WANT to defeat ISIS, listen to former ISIS hostage Nicolas Henin. The group is “heartened by every sign of overreaction, of division, of fear, of racism, of xenophobia … [and] drawn to any examples of ugliness on social media,” the French journalist wrote in November 2015 in the wake of the Paris attacks. “Central to their world view is the belief that communities cannot live together with Muslims, and every day their antennae will be tuned towards finding supporting evidence.”
Get that? Islamophobia plays right into the hands of ISIS. Wittingly or unwittingly, anti-Muslim bigots have become recruiting sergeants for a group they profess to hate and claim to want to destroy. The Islamophobes, to borrow a line from Lenin, are ISIS’s useful idiots.
This ISIS grand plan has always required the (perhaps unwitting) support of the group’s useful idiots in the West, the Islamophobes, whose harsh rhetoric and actions help drive marginalized and alienated Muslims into the wide open arms of the jihadists.
The purveyors of anti-Muslim hatred are, of course, unwilling to admit to the central role that they play in the radicalization process. “The terrorists couldn’t give a stuff what I tweet or write or say,” insisted Hopkins in her MailOnline column the day after the Manchester bombing. “They couldn’t care less if we stand divided or pretend to be united.”If only that were true. Forget Dabiq. Consider instead what Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland who studies radicalization, said after the Paris attacks in November 2015. A growing climate of Islamophobia is what ISIS is “aiming for — to provoke communities to commit actions against Muslims,” he told the Washington Post. “Then ISIS will be able to say, ‘I told you so. These are your enemies, and the enemies of Islam.’”
Another psychology professor who studies Muslim extremists, Jocelyn Bélanger of the University of Quebec in Montreal, agrees. “When people feel a loss of significance — when they are humiliated — that propels them to join a radical group,” he told the Post.
The Islamophobes see themselves as politically incorrect truth-tellers; as bold and blunt opponents of the radicals and the extremists. The reality is that they are the accomplices, the unpaid agents, of those very same radicals and extremists. Every terrorist needs a Katie Hopkins. It is one of the great ironies of our time — those who shout loudest about the threat posed by ISIS are often the biggest propagandists for ISIS.
As my colleague Murtaza Hussain has observed, it is “perverse and counterproductive to lump [the West’s Muslims] together with ISIS and blame them for the group’s actions.” To do so is to “grant the Islamic State a propaganda coup, implicitly endorsing the group’s narrative of Muslims and Westerners collectively at war with one another.”
The fact of the matter is that ISIS wants to sow division and discord in Western societies, and its useful idiots in the West are only too happy to help it do so. “Cohesion, tolerance — it is not what [ISIS members] want to see,” pointed out former hostage Henin back in 2015. “What they fear,” he concluded, “is unity.”
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