{"id":138723,"date":"2014-09-03T00:29:39","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T00:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=138723"},"modified":"2014-09-03T00:29:39","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T00:29:39","slug":"america-made-isis-videos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/america-made-isis-videos\/","title":{"rendered":"How America Made ISIS: Their Videos and Ours"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Engelhardt<\/em><\/p>\n

Whatever your politics, you\u2019re not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there\u2019s Ferguson (the\u00a0whole world<\/a>\u00a0was watching!), an\u00a0increasingly unpopular<\/a>\u00a0president, a Congress whoseapproval ratings<\/a>\u00a0make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list. Abroad, from\u00a0Libya<\/a>\u00a0and Ukraine to Iraq and the\u00a0South China Sea<\/a>, nothing has been coming up roses for the U.S. Polls reflect a general American\u00a0gloom<\/a>, with\u00a071%<\/a>\u00a0of the public claiming the country is \u201con the wrong track.\u201d We have the look of a superpower down on our luck.<\/p>\n

What Americans have needed is a little pick-me-up to make us feel better, to make us, in fact, feel distinctly\u00a0good<\/a>. Certainly, what official Washington has needed in tough times is a bona fide enemy so darn evil, so brutal, so barbaric, so inhuman that, by contrast, we might know just how exceptional, how truly necessary to this planet we really are.<\/p>\n

In the nick of time, riding to the rescue comes something new under the sun: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), recently renamed Islamic State (IS). It\u2019s a group so extreme that even al-Qaeda\u00a0rejected<\/a>\u00a0it, so brutal that it\u2019s brought back\u00a0crucifixion<\/a>,\u00a0beheading<\/a>,\u00a0waterboarding<\/a>, and amputation, so fanatical that it\u2019s ready to\u00a0persecute<\/a>\u00a0any religious group within range of its weapons, so grimly beyond morality that it\u2019s made the beheading of an innocent American a global propaganda phenomenon. If you\u2019ve got a label that\u2019s really, really bad like\u00a0genocide<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0ethnic cleansing<\/a>, you can probably apply it to ISIS’s actions.<\/p>\n

It has also proven so effective that its relatively modest band of warrior jihadis has routed the Syrian and Iraqi armies, as well as the Kurdish pesh merga militia, taking control of a territory larger than Great Britain in the heart of the Middle East. Today, it rules over at least\u00a0four million people<\/a>, controls its own functioning oil fields and refineries (and so their\u00a0revenues<\/a>\u00a0as well as infusions of money from looted banks, kidnapping ransoms, and Gulf state patrons). Despite opposition, it still seems to be\u00a0expanding<\/a>\u00a0and claims it has established a caliphate.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Engelhardt Whatever your politics, you\u2019re not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there\u2019s Ferguson (the\u00a0whole world\u00a0was watching!), an\u00a0increasingly unpopular\u00a0president, a Congress whoseapproval ratings\u00a0make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list. Abroad, from\u00a0Libya\u00a0and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":138724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-138723","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}