A recent cover [of a British satirical magazine] proclaimed, “Cameron to bomb ISIS heartland,” with a fighter pilot saying, “Belgium, here we come! Private Eye magazine, 2016

“A ghost town, a mummy of a town, it smells of death, the Middle Ages, and tombs.” Charles Baudelaire’s description of Brussels, circa 1860

Small Belgium, located in the heart of Western Europe and home to the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, has more Islamic State (IS) foreign fighters per capita than any other Western country. It is home to many symbols of Western military, cultural, political, and social power. It also has more Muslims per capita than any other country in Europe. Half of the country’s Muslims live in Brussels. Islam mobilizes more people in Brussels than the Roman Catholic Church. Most of Brussels’s Muslims are from Morocco (70 percent).

As in other European countries, the Muslim population in Belgium is young. Nearly 35 percent of Moroccans and Turks in the country are under eighteen, compared with 18 percent of native Belgians. Since 2008, the most popular name for baby boys in Brussels has been Mohammed. It is also the most popular name for baby boys in Belgium’s second-largest city, Antwerp, where an estimated 40 percent of elementary school children are Muslim. If there is any Western country that exemplifies the Great Replacement, the transition from a secular to a Muslim Europe, it is Belgium. By early 2016, Belgium’s intelligence services had identified 451 Jihadists. They were, largely, not poor. Only one in six Jihadists came from an impoverished background.

Muslim–Non-Muslim Relations

Belgium was never an imperial power, except for its holdings in the Congo, nor was it associated with militarism. Nonetheless, Brussels was targeted because, in the words of the State, “Crusader Belgium “has not ceased to wage war on Islam.” Most Belgians were unaware of this image, and many Europeans asked how a country known for its beer, chocolate, and bureaucracy could become a European hotbed of radicalization and extremism. In many ways, Muslims and non-Muslims live very separate lives in the country.

To tourists, the Molenbeek area of Brussels feels like a South Asian or modern North African city. It spans 6 square kilometers and, with a population of nearly 100,000, is nearly twice as dense as the average Brussels neighborhood. The Bataclan murders in Paris were planned there, and approximately a hundred men and women from Molenbeek left to fight in the Middle East.

Belgium has been a hotbed of radical Islam for more than a decade, breeding organizations like Sharia4Belgium, which want, as their name proclaims, to have Sharia introduced in Belgium. They are loud, intimidating, and belligerent. When the Bataclan murders occurred, one leader of the group said, “We couldn’t hold our joy.” That November 2015 attack in neighboring France panicked Belgium as well. The metro was closed down. Prime Minister Charles Michel said authorities feared a “Paris-style” attack with explosives and weapons at several locations despite the hundreds of soldiers patrolling the city, home to the EU and NATO.

But Belgians are concerned about the many attacks that receive little or no media attention. For example, youths threw a petrol bomb under a Christmas tree, setting it aflame. As they ran away, the teens could be heard yelling “Allahu Akbar.” “Today they will set fire to a Christmas tree, tomorrow they will behead a Christian,” wrote one man.

The Caliphate

The Caliphate used Brussels as its center of planning and operations for two mass murders—the Paris killing of November 2015 and the Brussels attack of March 2016. In the Brussels attack, one of the three chief perpetrators, known as the “man in the hat,” was born in Syria and came to Europe as a refugee in 2015. The Islamic State bragged that it was sending cadres disguised as refugees to Europe to conduct operations.

Belgian security officials are worried that the State is planning a primitive biological attack. Security officials found rotting animal testicles in a terror suspect’s backpack. Such material can be used to poison food supplies or to create a deadly concoction aimed at spreading fatal diseases. The Brussels prosecutor issued a statement saying, “The rucksack contents . . . could at no time have been used to make a biological weapon.”

Profile Thirty-Seven: Brussels Is on Fire

“I will tell you, I’ve been talking about this a long time, and look at Brussels. Brussels was a beautiful city, a beautiful place with zero crime. And now it’s a disaster city. It’s a total disaster, and we have to be very careful in the United States.” Donald Trump, in reference to the Brussels attack of 2016

It was an apocalyptic scene with blood and dismembered body parts scattered. Witnesses heard some men yelling in Arabic before the nail-filled bombs rocked the Brussels airport and the subway system, killing dozens. Witnesses described the ceiling caving in and blood everywhere after two explosions in the departure hall at Brussels Airport. The Islamic State struck with suicide bombers, and the entire country went into lockdown. All flights were canceled, arriving planes and trains were diverted, and Belgium’s terror alert level was raised to maximum. Authorities advised people in Brussels to remain in place, bringing the city to a standstill. Security was also tightened at all Paris airports.

“Brussels is on fire” is a hashtag used to express Islamist triumph. The most common remark under the hashtag was “You declared war against us and bombed us, and we attack you inside your homeland.” After each additional attack, ISIS supporters celebrated by writing “Allahu Akbar.” The popular hashtag was inspired by a similar one created by Caliphate supporters after the November 13 Paris terror attacks: “Paris is on fire.”

In a British prison, terrorist convicts shouted “Allahu Akbar” after learning of the attack. Some burst into song and dance to celebrate the slaughter. According to one source, the Council of Belgian Imams rejected a recent initiative to pray for the souls of the victims of the Brussels terror attacks on the grounds that praying for non-Muslims ran counter to Islamic law. Several days after the attack, Belgians organized a “March against Fear.” However, it was canceled due to security concerns.

Summary

For the French, 2015 and 2016 were years of terror. There were shootings, bombings, beheadings, stabbings, and a spectacular vehicular murder. After the murder of Father Hamel, one of his parishioners, a middle-aged woman, expressed the anxiety of many of her country: “Nowhere in France is safe anymore.”

In April 2016, Belgian security services conceded that there were probably dozens more Caliphate supporters in the country. European intellectuals asked themselves and their audiences what the small Central European country had done to deserve the attacks and the hatred of their Muslim countrymen. When the killings came, Belgium went into shock. But some Muslim leaders refused to offer a prayer for the dead because it was counter to Islamic law. Others celebrated the slaughter. According to Belgian interior minister Jan Jambon, “a significant section of the Muslim community danced” when attacks took place. Belgians who were fighting for the Caliphate in the Middle East tweeted their joy to former neighbors. From Syria, one said, “We will drink your blood to the last drop.”

Foreign Fighters

French foreign fighters, along with other Westerners, are reeling from a series of military setbacks in Syria and Iraq and have been battered by multiple airstrikes. The Caliphate is hemorrhaging foreign volunteer fighters, keeping intelligence services on edge. By June 2016, at least 248 French Jihadis had returned to France, while 666 were still in the Middle East. Other seasoned, dedicated fighters have also returned.

The proportion of French women in the State has increased to 35 percent of French members. Observers speculate that women in the Caliphate are being groomed for more violent activities in the Middle East and in France. Already active in domestic operations, logistics, and recruiting, they are likely to become more violent.

French counterterrorism leaders anticipate further attacks by individuals who detonate powerful bombs concealed in vests. Individuals would attend crowded events and shopping areas and detonate the explosives. The goal is to immobilize France. Islamic State is likely to use car bombs and other explosive devices as it seeks to carry out more atrocities in France.

Profile Thirty-Six: French-Speaking Political Leaders

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen—“Either We Kill Islamism or It Will Kill Us”

She has been described as a combination of Joan of Arc and Brigitte Bardot. French Member of Parliament Marion Maréchal-Le Pen assumed office at age 22, becoming the youngest parliamentarian since 1791. Four years later, she is one of the NF’s most promising politicians. Heir to a two-generation conservative family tradition, she is the niece of NF leader Marine Le Pen and shares many of her aunt’s views—respect for Western, particularly French, civilization; a strong Catholic identity; and a conviction that France is in a life-and-death struggle with political Islam. “Either we kill Islamism or it will kill us again and again. You are with us and against Islamism, or you are against us and for Islamism.” Her fan base is largely composed of young, traditional Catholic men, who compare Le Pen alternately to Joan of Arc and Brigitte Bardot.

Tall, blonde, and attractive, she is more popular than ever and, like Aunt Marine, has distanced herself from her grandfather’s anti-Semitic barbs. After a French priest was murdered in his Norman church, she joined the army reserves in her constituency and invited her countrymen to join her. She enlisted to take the war to the Islamic State and intends to do so in a military uniform and, if need be, with arms.

Some Europeans are concerned about an emerging dynasty. One writer spoke of the “Poison le Pens.” “Maréchal-Le Pen, like many on the far right, slipped in under the radar. Would it be enough to hope the voters will swiftly push her back again at the next available opportunity?” She may be voted out, but that is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Too many of her countrymen look to the “golden girl of the right” for national leadership.

Belgium’s Yves Goldstein—No Chagalls, Dalis, Warhols, or Dreams

Yves Goldstein is a council member from the Belgian town of Schaerbeek and chief of staff to the minister-president of the Brussels Capital Region. He does not share Le Pen's political pedigree, but he faces similar challenges. Belgium and France face unprecedented and increasingly frequent outbursts of Islamic radicalism and violence. However, unlike Le Pen, he largely blames Europeans, not Muslims, for the tinderbox. If Marion Le Pen embodies an invigorated pushback against the mounting Islamic presence in Europe, Goldstein exemplifies the multicultural bridge builder.

The council member insists his country’s young Muslim rage is driven by ethnic alienation and poverty. The attacks have little to do with true Islam. Radicals cherry-pick violent verses to militarize the unemployed young. But, according to Goldstein, the real driver of radicalization is alienation. As for the terrorists, “religion for them is a pretext.”

The youth have no connection to the larger society because that society has excluded them and encouraged them to ghettoize. “We failed!” he said. “We failed in Molenbeek and Schaerbeek, too, to ensure the mixing of populations.” This failure, in turn, bred anger, crime, and radicalization. “We have neighborhoods where people only see the same people, go to school with the same people.” The youth of Molenbeek, he said, live “in a little box” that needs to be opened up.

This, he explains, is why there is such support for the Caliphate among Muslim communities in Belgian cities. According to his estimates, 90 percent of the high school seniors in Molenbeek and Schaerbeek described the Brussels attackers as “heroes.” Goldstein’s parents were Holocaust survivors who found refuge in Belgium, but all the Jews have now left Schaerbeek, and the last two synagogues are being sold and may be converted into mosques. In his 2012 election campaign to Schaerbeek, the Socialist Goldstein was accused of “stabbing Palestinians in the back.”

But Goldstein wants, above all, to integrate Muslims. For Goldstein, the most powerful antidote to narrowness and intolerance is liberalism. Western literature and art can draw alienated Muslims out of their cultural islands. He further argues that just as the West can draw inspiration from the classics of Islam’s Golden Age, so can Belgium’s Muslims find cultural enrichment in the West. Goldstein laments, “These young people will never go to museums until 18 or 20—they never saw Chagall, they never saw Dalí, they never saw Warhol, they don’t know what it is to dream.”  

The statistics are stomach-churning: almost 250 innocents have been murdered in France in the past eighteen months by terrorists—more than the total number of French nationals killed by them in the entire twentieth century.

While police, military, and paramilitary personnel are prepared and alert for attack, many French engaged in civil society are not. Many attacks come without warning and are directed against persons completely unconnected with national security. Some Islamist attacks are difficult to explain. A man-and-woman couple armed with a knife and an axe and shouting “Allahu Akbar” attacked a charity leader at a soup kitchen near Paris. The attackers allegedly called him an “infidel dog,” but the charity leader fed Muslims out of compassion.

The look of Paris changed after the 2015 attacks, with more dog patrols, random checks at gates and in terminals, video surveillance cameras, and “profilers”—police officers, sometimes in plain clothes—around public transportation venues. Steps may go further; right-wing politicians reiterated calls for preventive detention or electronic bracelets for suspected Islamists, longer prison sentences, shutting down mosques, and deporting radical imams

The Caliphate

Pro-Caliphate activists have partnered with French Islamist organizations from the beginning of the State. They have shouted support for the Caliphate at demonstrations and waved the “black flag of Jihad,” which quotes the Shahada—“There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” By January 2016, France was host to 8,250 radical Islamists, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. As in Britain and France, Islamists have infiltrated the civil services, police forces, and armed forces. According to one report, police officers broadcast Muslim chants while on patrol. France is between 9 and 11 percent Muslim, and 16 percent of French citizens have a positive opinion of the Caliphate. This percentage increases among younger respondents, spiking at 27 percent for those aged eighteen to twenty-four.

Profile Thirty-Four: A French Girl and a French Woman

In France, more teenage girls than boys joined the Caliphate in 2016. Among recruits, women began to outpace French male residents preparing to travel to the Caliphate or who had already done so.

“The Story of A”

It is sometimes difficult to determine which factors drive the transition from conventional politics and everyday life to a full embrace of the Caliphate’s beliefs, values, and aspirations. Some teenagers who live uneventful, seemingly normal lifestyles have become Caliphate propagandists or gunmen. But the full-turn conversions and blood lust of some converts beggar the imagination. This is the story of “A.” Because A is not an adult, her full name was not released, but authorities did reveal that she was Jewish, one of two known French Jews to join the State, and she had been raised in a religious home. Her parents were described as “loving and open,” and she was an outstanding student until she found Islam online. She began to wear a veil, but this did not mask her increasing hatred of the West, France, and Jews.

A is certainly an anomaly within the Islamic State's spiritual ranks. According to a French anthropologist who extensively studied French women in the State, most converts to Islam come from atheistic homes with spiritual voids. But A was raised in a religious home. Her parents don’t know what happened to her. A feels obligated to kill her parents because they are not Muslim. Many people convert to Islam, very few of whom feel compelled to kill their parents.

A’s mother and father moved to a new apartment because of their daughter’s Jihadi ties, and they keep their address a secret. They are worried about their daughter attacking them, as she has repeatedly sworn to do. Perhaps some Friday, as they are lighting candles, breaking bread, and saying prayers over their Sabbath meal, their daughter will storm into their home brandishing a butcher knife and lunge at them, shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

Emilie’s Manhunt

Emilie converted to Islam at age seventeen and changed her name to Samra. She began wearing a niqab because she believed it would help her attain the highest level of paradise. However, she began wearing it only after the French government banned it in 2012. A female journalist remarked that without her heavy clothing, Emilie/Samra is strikingly pretty. She takes Islam very seriously, and when Emilie thought her son was possessed by a demon, she shook her boy, yelling, “Jinn [a jinn is a spirit], leave my son!” According to Emilie’s account, the jinn quickly left her son.

As with many European converts to Islam, Emilie had a tough childhood. She lamented, “My father has erased me from his heart.” He left the family when Emilie was two years old, and her experiences with men never improved. She described her life as “a series of failures.” She dropped out of school and became both a Muslim and a barmaid. She married an Islamic man who impregnated her, but he beat her, sold drugs, and went off to prison.

She looked for a new man and advertised for a “virile and pious Muslim.” One suitor claimed to be a former friend of bin Laden, which initially impressed Emilie because she admired bin Laden and mourned his death. But Emilie later became convinced that this man had never met bin Laden and had made up the story to get her into bed. After he published a selfie with a naked Emilie, she broke off the relationship.

Emilie hoped to travel to the Islamic State to find the right kind of man. But police were on to her, froze her bank account, and kept an eye on her. She supports violence against nonbelievers, including those killed in Paris. Nonetheless, she insists, “I am French, born French. I consider myself a human being. I am no monster.”

Attacks

The Islamic State has aggressively targeted France. In 2015, Islamic State spokesperson Abu Muhammad al-Adnani demanded, “If you can, kill a disbelieving American or European—especially the spiteful and filthy French—or a Canadian.” Why were the French singled out as particularly “filthy”? According to the Clarion Foundation, there are several reasons. First, France fights. Its soldiers have been battling Jihadis around the world, from Syria to Timbuktu. The French approve of the French armed forces' intervention in Iraq, and 70 percent support the air strikes in Syria.

The Caliphate views France as a leading infidel state and one committed to destroying its organization and similar Islamist organizations around the world. Furthermore, French leaders, unlike many other Western leaders, have asserted that their country is at war with a variant of Islam. The French ambassador to America later clarified, saying, “We are at war with radical Islam. It means that right now . . . Islam is breeding radicalism, which is quite dangerous for everybody.” This language is much sharper than that of most other Western leaders.

Further, the Caliphate and other Islamists despise French civilization, which is centered on and helped create the Western canon. France is the home of the Enlightenment and promotes liberal values. In 732, France held the thin line of European civilization at the Battle of Tours. Later, the nobility and commoners fought in the Crusades. Some symbols are unendurable to the Caliphate. The acerbic, anti-religious Charlie Hebdo weekly, the Bataclan theater, home to Western music, police and military personnel, and Bastille Day are hateful signs for Islamists.

In July 2016, a Tunisian Jihadist plowed a rented eighteen-ton truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. At full throttle, the driver zig-zagged through spectators who had come to enjoy the fireworks and patriotism. The driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was shot dead while yelling “Allahu Akbar,” but not before killing eighty-four people, including ten children, and injuring over a hundred more. Babies lay dead in the street, having been jolted from their buggies, which were crushed during the mile-long killing spree. There were twenty-seven nationalities among the dead. Before the blood was cleaned from the pavement, the Caliphate’s fans flooded social media with posts celebrating the event.

The Caliphate claimed responsibility. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who agree on very little, viewed the carnage through the same lens. Secretary Clinton said, “I’d even call this World War III. It’s a very different kind of war.” Her rival, Trump, echoed the same words: “This is war.”

Profile Thirty-Five: “Kiss the Devil”

Some survived the rampage in Nice by pure chance. “I was supposed to be there on Friday night,” said a twenty-eight-year-old journalist of the web magazine French Metal who struggles with survivor’s guilt. “I had a ticket but couldn’t find anyone who wanted to go. It was pure chance.” She lived, but several of her friends died, and she wept in front of a makeshift memorial at the Bataclan theater in Paris. Others wept, too, for the eighty-eight people who were killed and the scores more who were wounded.

The theater was one of six attack sites where coordinated shootings and suicide bombings killed at least 129 people. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks. The terrorists shot anything that moved in the theater, which has hosted artists from Edith Piaf to Prince. Elsewhere in Paris, on November 13, 2015, their Caliphate-connected associates killed without mercy anyone they believed to be non-Muslim. They struck cultural targets in Paris’s vibrant east end, which teems with nightlife. A local woman explained, “They were attacking culture—music, celebrations, everything fanatics don’t like.”  The group Eagles of Death, a California heavy metal band, had played a favorite, “Kiss the Devil.”

As they shot into the audience, the killers laughed, played with some musical instruments, and asked, “Where’s the singer? Where are the Yanks. Some of the doomed were shot while huddling in dressing rooms. Some of the survivors played dead. Others threw their bodies on the injured, young, or female to save them. Some of the victims died quickly and others slowly, having bled out on the floor. For some it was a family catastrophe. A thirty-five-year-old mother clutched her son against her, probably saving his life. But her mother, the boy’s grandmother, was killed.  The killers kicked the fallen victims to check for signs of life. One man lived thanks to his artificial leg.

Very quickly after the attack, Western leaders assured the world that it had nothing to do with Islam. Others said they refused to fight hate with hate, words that would presage US Attorney General Lynch’s sentiments after the Orlando killing, less than one year later. One Frenchman told the Caliphate, “I will not give you the gift of hating you.” His wife, Helen, had been murdered with the rest. The widower said, “I do not know who you are, and I do not want to know. You are dead souls.”

T

This reading continues to explore tensions and pathologies in Muslim-non-Muslim relations in Britain and Germany. We hear European girls and young women pleading to be heard.

The Caliphate Abroad, Part Two: The French Speakers

“It took Hitler 10 years to control France. But our state shook France in an hour from the north to south. May Allah bless you O soldiers of the Caliphate.” A Caliphate supporter’s tweet after a French priest was beheaded, July 2016

Introduction

France and Belgium have proportionately large Muslim populations. They are also venues for Caliphate attacks and breeding grounds for Islamism. The Islamic State struck both countries in 2015 and 2016 and changed the lives of their citizens.

France

Muslim–Non-Muslim Tensions

In France, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims have long been strained. The French absorbed many French nationals who fled Algeria in the 1960s. Subsequently, waves of North Africans arrived in the following decades. Elites predicted assimilation on the basis of earlier successes. But relations, always tenuous, became tense by the twenty-first century, as discussed in chapter 2.

By the new millennium, many leaders and opinion-makers in Europe were nervous about growing Islamic communities. French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut coined the term “homesick at home.” He and his compatriot, Eric Zemmour, sometimes called the “Rush Limbaugh of France,” write wistfully of “les Trente Glorieuses,” the thirty years following liberation from the Nazis until the leftist cultural ascent of the mid-1970s. In 1965, few Europeans could have imagined that their compatriots would be too afraid to sketch religious cartoons a half-century later. Fewer still could have imagined that groups such as the Islamic State would appeal to European Muslims who were raised on the Continent and were often well educated.

Today, French intellectuals still speak in hushed tones about Islam, lest they offend the sensitivities of a watchful and politically active Islamic constituency. As mentioned in chapter 3, some critics are scared they could be harmed, fired, or taken to civil or criminal courts for making the wrong comment about Islam in France. Bridget Bardot was threatened with prison and fined for opining that France was “being invaded by sheep-slaughtering Muslims.” Michel Houellebecq was tried for defaming Islam in 2001, when he called it “the most stupid religion.” These high-profile cases serve as warnings to critics of radical Islam.

In Britain, Germany, and the United States, ordinary people have become more alarmed by Islam than politicians or intellectuals. After two deadly attacks in 2015, the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan killings, the image of Muslims plummeted in the eyes of the French, even among socialists. The image would dive even further after the truck attack on the Riviera. By spring 2016, 47 percent of the French saw Islam as a threat to French identity, and many wanted to halt mosque construction. This has bolstered the fortunes of right-wing politicians in France, particularly Marine Le Pen of the right-wing National Front (FN), who is expected to run for president in 2017.

Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s general directorate for internal security, warned that his country was “on the verge of civil war” between Muslim communities and French nationalists. Gilles Kepel, a political scientist and specialist in Islam, also claimed that France is on the verge of a major social explosion because of Muslims’ failure to integrate into French society. Islamic fundamentalists despise social liberalism and sexual license, which helps explain honor killings and Sharia patrols. The Islamic State has called for attacks on symbols of Western sexual decadence, such as swinger clubs, but it finds any criticism of Muhammad even more offensive.

The killing in Nice was particularly explosive. Unlike cosmopolitan Paris, Nice is politically and culturally conservative. Many of the non-Muslims are descended from the white Algerian population, known as “pied noirs.” Nice also has a large Muslim population. Said one observer, “If you wanted to light the fuse of race war in France, Nice would be a clever choice.”

The Caliphate

            Before 2016, some of the Caliphate’s recruiting was loud, open, and unmasked. There was unfettered street proselytizing, and when young men traveled in packs, they were sometimes emboldened. For example, a group of seven men sang a war chant favored by the Islamic State and tried to recruit fellow passengers while riding on the Berlin U-Bahn railway. They were singing one of the Jihad nashids, mentioned earlier. Some of this was caught on video and posted on social media. This further tarnishes the image of the migrants, but it draws some troubled young German men to the ranks of Islamists, where they find camaraderie. According to the German military security service, twenty-nine former German soldiers have traveled to Syria and Iraq, and twenty-two soldiers were classified as Islamists, as of spring 2016.

            In 2015 and 2016, German police arrested many suspects for terrorist-related activities. They expect more. Some security officials speculate that the Caliphate will plan a sustained attack using the Mumbai model. This was a sophisticated three-day attack, in Mumbai, India, in which simultaneous sites were struck, including a railway station, a Jewish institution, two hotels, and a restaurant. It garnered world media attention, and the Indian military and paramilitary forces appeared unprepared and incompetent. Some killers acted independently; others were more coordinated. German security is also concerned about Istanbul-style attacks, and so is the German public. One survey found that almost two-thirds of Germans expect an attack like those in Istanbul or Brussels to happen at a German airport.

Returning in Singles and Doubles

            The Caliphate ordered its support base to kill at will and with fury. Its tactics of choice were shooting, stabbing or gutting with a knife, running over, hurling victims from a building, choking, or poisoning Western symbols of authority. Their followers responded with random, unexpected, and lethal attacks. This has caused great social anxiety, particularly for police officers who want to patrol the street but often cannot do so for fear of their safety.

            German police units are facing something unprecedented. There are stabbing sprees of random pedestrians, similar to those committed by Palestinians in Israel. For example, in Hanover, a fifteen-year-old girl with a German passport and Moroccan ancestors, as well as suspected ties to the Caliphate, stabbed a police officer in the neck. The stab came as a bolt from the blue.

            The Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack on board a train in Germany in mid-July 2016 that left three people seriously injured, according to the terrorist group’s news agency. The announcement came hours after an axe-wielding teenage Afghan refugee attacked passengers on a train. He was shot and killed by police. During an investigation, officials said they found a hand-painted flag of the Islamic State group in the attacker’s room. During the attack, he yelled “Allahu Akbar.”

            German courts are ramping up to handle cases of residents and nationals returned from Middle East fighting. Germans are trickling home in singles and in pairs, hoping to reintegrate into the society they left. The Federal Criminal Police Office estimates that 820 people with German passports have left Europe to fight in Syria and Iraq with the Islamic State, and by January 2016, an estimated 250 fighters had returned. According to a former Jihadi who served the Caliphate, those who return are “treated like heroes” in the Muslim areas of Germany.

            When German fighters return, they sometimes face the justice system. Referred to in the German press as “Jihadi tourists,” they chose to return to Germany because they were “disappointed” with the Islamic State. In 2014, a court sentenced a twenty-year-old man who had traveled to Syria to fight alongside a group associated with the Islamic State to three years and nine months in juvenile detention, marking the country’s first conviction of a returned Jihadist. Another Caliphate fighter who returned to Germany was sentenced to four and one-half years in prison for belonging to a terrorist organization. The twenty-five-year-old German national traveled to Syria in October 2013 and later swore allegiance to the Caliphate. He participated in interrogations and served as a prison guard. He may have killed people, and German authorities are determined to find out. He is Harry S., profiled below.

Profile Thirty-One: Harry S.—When They Return

            The case of Harry S. illustrates the challenge Western societies face when Western Caliphate fighters return home. Harry S. was put on trial in Germany for belonging to a terrorist organization. Baptized as a Catholic, he grew up in a poor part of Bremen. His parents emigrated from Ghana to Germany and then London to build a better life. Harry S. certainly had above-average intelligence and studied engineering at university for a while. Something happened to him emotionally, he converted to Islam, and his religious Christian mother threw him out of her house. But London’s mosques welcomed him, and so, too, did minor criminal syndicates. Serving as a lookout for a robbery, he was arrested and imprisoned, where he was radicalized. Upon release, he returned to Bremen, married, and resolved to travel to Syria to fight the Jihad, which he did.

            Harry reported that he underwent several arduous phases of commando training. There were 10 training levels. “Hardly anyone reaches the last; most die before that.” However, he wanted to leave because of the suffering he witnessed and the lack of compassion. “Humanity—that is of interest to nobody.” In Palmyra, his nerves were shattered, and his conscience jolted as he watched blindfolded prisoners standing in rows, riddled with bullets. A few weeks later, he fled to Turkey and then to Germany, where he was arrested at Bremen Airport.

            German prosecutors are not convinced that Harry’s stories are truthful. His account of events has changed, and his sudden pangs of morality are dubious. Did he voluntarily leave the commando school, or did he wash out? In Palmyra, did he merely witness the killings, or did he take part? Is there evidence to support his claims? Certainly, other Westerners who return home will face similar questioning. Harry could face up to ten years in prison for belonging to a terrorist organization. Regarding the foreign fighters remaining with the Caliphate, Harry has greater respect for the French than for the Germans. The French rushed the enemy and blasted their weapons into their battle lines. The French had élan. The Germans were more reluctant. In Harry’s words, when it came to fighting, “the Germans always got cold feet.”

            In October 2015, “Emily” of Rotherham, England, wrote an open letter to social services. She, like Bibi, weeps with the frustration, anger, and fatalism of a girl who feels powerless and is convinced that the civil service and civil society have abandoned her.

To the medical professionals who did nothing—Were you blind to my bruises, multiple sexually transmitted infections . . . You gave me treatment, I took the medication but how could it work when I was being raped by the same men every day . . . Were you deaf to my pleas for help? Did you even listen when I told you what was happening? No. You had me down as a sex worker.

            To the school as a whole—Did you never wonder why I missed so much school? While you were teaching students math, science, and English. I was in a cold room of a half-renovated flat. Lying naked on a bed while approximately eight men were taking turns raping me.

            To the policeman who told my mother I was a known prostitute when she came to you for help—I was a child. Is there such thing a child prostitute? You were the most insensitive officer I ever met, and the only reason I can think of for you being how you were, is that maybe you were covering up out of fear of causing racial tension?

            To the politically correct government who refuses to see that Muslims are a problem, the idiots that think Islam is compatible with our ways—Think again. Open your eyes to the million girls already raped and trafficked by Pakistani Muslim gangs. I wait and I wait. I wait for justice, it’s never served.

From Willkommenskultur to Pegida

            By summer 2016, polling revealed that, in the view of many Germans, Muslim migrants were no longer very welcome. The era of Willkommenskultur, or Welcome Culture, quickly faded. By then, less than a third of native Germans, or 32.3 percent, still wanted more immigrants, and half strongly associated the migration with terrorism. Some Germans saw the million-migrant inflow as the latest twist in a continuing cultural death spiral, reflecting a deep national self-loathing. Importing Muslims to serve as a vast labor pool for menial jobs was, in this view, shortsighted and, ultimately, self-destructive. For them, Eurabia is a teeming Muslim ghetto within Germany. It is poor, unassimilated, angry, and religiously supremacist. They fear Yugoslavian-style balkanization and, then, disintegration.

            Fearing Islamic swamping of German society and anger at censored dissenting voices, antimigrant activists established Pegida, short for Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident. Some called it blatant racism, and its controversial leader did not help his cause by calling foreigners “cattle” and “trash.” Some intellectuals have argued that Pegida has become a catch-all movement for frustrated Europeans who are turning to nationalism to cope with social trends they do not understand or welcome. Others do not see an alternative.

Militant Islam

            The number of Caliphate supporters in Germany continues to grow. Germany’s domestic security services set the number of radical Salafists at over 8,000 in September 2015, and it could be over 10,000 by summer 2016. By summer 2016, 60 percent of the new arrivals had no documentation, making it difficult and sometimes impossible to verify their claims of nationality and age. The radical element in Germany is growing. Some of the Islamist groups have canvassed the refugee centers for those who share their radical views or those who look like easy marks for conversion to the cause. Under the flag of humanitarian assistance, radicals recruit for the Caliphate, and the police are challenged to stop it or even fully understand it. Guarding against the Caliphate or other Islamists is fraught with problems.

            First, German police, like other European police and security forces, often cannot verify the identity of migrants. In 2015, the German border police were only able to obtain 10 percent of the migrants’ fingerprints. Hundreds of thousands of migrants could not be identified by their travel documents, many of which were forged.

            Second, it is difficult to monitor and penetrate domestic Islamist cells, some of which recruit for the Islamic State. There are civil liberties that hamper investigations. There are well-known figures in the German Islamist movement, but many take care to avoid language that might be perceived as threatening. But by late July 2016, many Germans were anticipating a mass killing, like those suffered by Britain, France, Spain, and Belgium. According to a poll released on July 22, 2016, 69 percent of Germans believed that a terrorist attack would hit Germany “soon.” They were right. Later that day in Munich, an Iranian-German, previously unknown to German security professionals, killed nine victims and then himself. Germany had joined the killing club.

Profile Thirty: A Long, Hot Summer

            Munich had not seen anything like this since the 1972 Munich Olympics. Ali Sonboly, eighteen years old, lured children to a McDonald’s by offering free food. Perhaps the tactic worked; most of his victims were in their teens. He killed nine and then killed himself. Sonboly was an Iranian-German, who didn’t precisely fit the mold of Caliphate killers. Most Iranians are Shia, and the Islamic State is Sunni. After an investigation, the Munich chief of police said, “There is absolutely no link to the Islamic State.” It was a “classic act by a deranged person” and described an individual “obsessed” with mass shootings. When the shooting started, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer initially speculated that a “right-wing” anti-refugee shooting was taking place. At MSNBC, Chris Matthews explained that Germany was undergoing a “nativist attack.” But why, then, did Sonboly yell “Allahu Akbar”?

            Two days after the McDonald’s attack, a twenty-one-year-old Syrian refugee killed a forty-five-year-old Polish woman with a machete and injured two other people before being arrested in the southern German city of Reutlingen. Authorities said the assailant and victim knew each other from working in the same restaurant, and the incident was not related to terrorism. Others are not sure.

            One day after that, a Syrian man, whose asylum bid had been rejected in Germany, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on his cell phone. He then tried to get into an outdoor music festival so he could explode his bomb-laden backpack. Having been turned away, he blew himself up outside a wine bar instead, injuring fifteen people. The perpetrator was identified as Mohammad D. The Bavarian interior minister said that he didn’t know if this man “planned suicide or if he had the intention of killing others.” The BBC headlines ran, “Syrian Migrant Dies in German Blast.” The BBC changed the headlines after being mocked on social media. Readers snickered at what they saw as the anodyne and empty wording of the headline. The revised column read, “Syrian Asylum Seeker Blows Himself Up in Germany.” The Caliphate attacker explained his motive. He did it so “Germans won’t be able to sleep peacefully.” Many don’t.

            July 2016 ended in an explosion near a migrant processing center near Munich. At first, the police suspected that right-wing extremists had detonated the bombs. But witnesses described several “Arab-looking men” seen fleeing from the scene. By the end of the month, the motive was still unknown. The summer of 2016 rocked Germany as few summers since unification. Rage at the chancellor spewed across the social networks, coining a new hashtag of contempt—”#Merkelsommer.”

Muslim–Non-Muslim Relations

“Of course there are Muslims in Germany. But Islam is not part of the German mainstream culture.”  Alexander Dobrindt, the general secretary of the Christian Social Union, 2011

            History follows Germany, and many Germans are sensitive about their global image. Germany never had the colonial associations Britain or France had with the Middle East, although there were some connections in the twentieth century to Muslim states and people. The Ottomans were allied with Germany as a member of the Central Powers in World War I, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a guest and a minor, though enthusiastic, collaborator of Hitler in World War II. But Germany’s connection to the Muslim world began to develop in earnest during the post-war economic boom, when Turks were invited to live there as guest workers.

            For reasons that will be debated for years, Chancellor Merkel invited over one million refugees to settle in Germany and put down roots. She called this influx “an opportunity for tomorrow” and urged her fellow Germans to be “self-confident and free, humanitarian and open to the world.” Amid the world’s greatest refugee wave since World War II, some Germans drew hope from history. In the wake of World War II, twelve million refugees in Germany had fled the Russian army’s onslaught. They were absorbed and helped build the German Economic Miracle of the 1950s and early 1960s. Many Germans were confident that their model could be replicated with their new Muslim neighbors.

            But many Germans were unprepared for the current influx of people and are bewildered by Chancellor Merkel’s decision-making. Some offer an economic explanation, noting that Germany’s birth rate is well below replacement, which may lead to an insufficient domestic workforce. Others have suggested that the chancellor wants to purge any lingering traces of German war guilt. There are other, less conventional explanations. Some have turned to psychology, suggesting that, having no children of her own, the chancellor, as leader of a country, has adopted millions of children.

Kultur Kampf

            Many Germans openly welcomed their new neighbors. Germans gave migrant children teddy bears and candy and offered parents assistance with housing and directions. Some German families took in refugee families and donated their own possessions to donation centers. In November 2015, an Ernst & Young study concluded that Germany would not be able to provide shelter for a projected 370,000 migrants fleeing Middle Eastern misery. The migrant population had soared to many times that figure less than one year later.

            However, problems became increasingly apparent. Initially, the press ran stories about cultural idiosyncrasies and clever anecdotes. For example, German nudists were forced to dress when a refugee shelter was built next door. Public swimming pools in Germany struggled with certain Muslim swimming customs; some banned the burka-bikini, or “burkini,” as potentially unhygienic. However, serious problems soon emerged between the cultures. Germans could establish separate swimming times for the sexes, but there were thousands of reports of mass groping by those with “migrant backgrounds.” In Munich, public pools, for instance, published cartoons warning migrants not to grope women in bikinis. The sex-pest dust-ups flared in summer 2016. Sharia patrols yelled at women and children in a nudist swimming pool, calling them “sluts” and “infidels” and saying they should be “exterminated.”

            Other anecdotes are ominous. In the summer of 2016, a Muslim set a German woman’s hair on fire at a train platform. Why? According to the Muslim, “She wasn’t wearing a hijab.” Earlier, a Jewish man wearing a kippah, a traditional Jewish head covering, was beaten and kicked by Middle Eastern–appearing men. The victim volunteered at a refugee center in Cologne, where they welcomed Middle Eastern immigrants.

            If any single event drew public attention to the cultural clash, it was the New Year’s Eve 2016 celebration in Cologne, which led to more than 1,000 complaints of molestation. Women and girls reported thefts, molestation, and harassment by Middle Eastern–appearing men. Cologne’s mayor dismissed the assaults as cultural misunderstandings and poor policing.

            One of the victims was 15-year-old Bibi Wilhailm, a German girl, whose cri de coeur was censored by Facebook on charges of hate speech. Bibi recounted being harassed by Muslim men. “You [Muslim men] have no right to attack us because we are wearing T-shirts . . . why should we, children, have to grow up in such fear?” She continued, “The politicians live alone in their villas, drink their cocktails, and do nothing . . . Please, do something.” In England, another girl, far more violated than Bibi, pleaded for her voice to be heard. Below are their words.

Profile Twenty-Nine: Two Anglo-Saxon Teenage Girls

Bibi’s Plea to Germany and Its Men  “You have killed Germany.” Bibi, 2016

This comes from a 15-year-old German girl. 

“I am almost 16. I would like everyone to know what is going on, what I am authentically feeling at this moment . . . And I am so scared everywhere. . . . It is just very hard to live day-to-day life as a woman. I just want to say that I am not a racist. But one day, a terrible thing happened at the supermarket. I ran all the way home. I was so frightened for my life. There’s no other way to describe it.

But more importantly, I cannot understand why Germany is doing nothing!. . . Men of Germany, these people are killing your children, they are killing your women. We need your protection. We are so scared, we don’t want to be frightened to go to the grocery store alone after sunset. One day, my friend and I were walking down the street, and a group of Arabs were protesting and demonstrating. They shouted, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah is the one God! Kill those infidels! Allah Allah!’ What should I do? Should I wear a burka? Why should I have to convert to Islam. . . .

            The life of Germany has changed because these people cannot integrate. We give them so much help. We support them financially and they do not have to work. But they only want more babies and more welfare and more money. Men of Germany, please, patrol the streets and protect us. Do this for your women and your children. If you do that, I believe that we will have a chance. Thank you, Angela Merkel, for killing Germany! I have no more respect for you, Merkel. . . . You have killed Germany!

Britain, like the United States, France, and Belgium, has been victimized by Islamic terror for years. The government has tried to fight, as Prime Minister Cameron called it, the “poisonous Islamist ideology,” while being respectful to Islam. Nonetheless, four out of ten British Muslims want Sharia law introduced into parts of the country. A fifth of the Muslims surveyed expressed sympathy with the “feelings and motives” of the suicide bombers who attacked London. In 2006, then Labour MP Sadiq Khan bewailed how many Muslims “feel disengaged and alienated.” Less than one decade later, there would be twice as many British Muslims fighting for the Caliphate as there would be British Muslims serving in the British armed forces, and Mr. Khan would be Lord Mayor of London.

            By fall 2015, British security forces were monitoring more than 3,000 homegrown Islamic extremists. Half of the Islamists on terrorist watch lists live in London, especially in the capital’s east and west, and most others live in the West Midlands and Manchester. Despite efforts to assimilate Muslims into the mainstream of British society, the number of violent suspects under surveillance has risen by more than 50 percent since 2007. Only one in three British Muslims would inform the police if they believed a fellow Muslim was connected to a terrorist organization. British Muslim organizations are, at best, ambivalent about cooperating with police and security forces. Some leaders have disparaged the Prevent Strategy, a national program designed to reduce radicalism. Prevent was based on four pillars: stopping terrorist attacks, preventing people from becoming terrorists, protecting Britons against terror, and mitigating the impacts of terrorist attacks.

            Daily trials, arrests, convictions, sentencing, incarceration, and parole of Islamic extremists are part of the British justice system. But there is angst about where to incarcerate the incorrigibly radical, particularly those who are Caliphate supporters. Some criminologists recommend housing them collectively to isolate the contagion or militancy. Others are concerned about the optics of a British Guantanamo Bay or “The British Alcatraz.”

Profile Twenty-Eight: Banned in Britain

The Home Secretary will seek to exclude an individual if she considers that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good.

Statement from the British Home Office, BBC News, 2012

            What do Americans Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Michael Savage have in common? Beyond despising Islam, they share the dubious distinction of being banned from Britain. They are not alone. Duane “Dog” Chapman, a husky, roughly hewn American celebrity bounty hunter who used the “N” word once too often; Albert Speer, the Nazi war criminal; L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology; Pablo Neruda, a Nobel laureate in literature; and Fred Phelps Sr., who founded the antihomosexual Westboro Baptist Church, were all on the eclectic banned-persons list, though at different times. Menachem Begin was on it, then off it, then back on it, and then off it when he died. The list keeps American Klansmen and neo-Nazis off British shores. Many Muslims and leftists petitioned then-Secretary May to keep Republican candidate Donald Trump out of Britain. As the prime minister, her decision is pending.

            Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was banned. Over the years, Farrakhan has applauded Sharia-driven violence and poured scorn on whites and Jews. But in 2001, then-attorney and now-mayor Sadiq Khan had the decision overturned.Khan described the judge’s decision as “brave and sensible.”

            But Geller, Spencer, and Savage do not understand why Louis Farrakhan is permitted to visit Britain while they are not. They claim they never advocated violence. In fact, Spencer and Geller planned to lay a wreath at a memorial to British soldier Lee Rigby, who was beheaded by Islamic jihadists in spring 2013. However, the British government wrote to them, “Your presence here is not conducive to the public good.” The government called their rhetoric “Islamophobic.” All are still fighting the ban, and Geller said, “The Magna Carta is dead.” As for the petition to ban Republican nominee Donald Trump from British shores, Geert Wilders said, “Welcome, Donald Trump, to the company of Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and myself.”

Radicals in the Ranks

            Many elements of Muslim civil society partner with British authorities. But some who advise the British government are themselves radicalized. Some Islamists enter the British civil service intending to advance their agenda, while others are radicalized while serving. Others are not employed by the government but serve as advisers. Some are unmasked by their own sloppiness, while others are exposed through investigations.

            The Caliphate likely has other activists working in the government. Accounts supporting the Caliphate can be traced to offices within the national civil service. Far more alarming is the Caliphate’s penetration of the military. A navy officer who trained at one of Britain’s most prestigious maritime colleges joined the State and brought with him an exhaustive knowledge of Britain’s navy and commercial fleet. “This suddenly raises the specter of IS damaging shipping,” said former Royal Navy chief admiral Lord West. Veterans of other services have also shown sympathy for the State. Two radicals, neither of whom served in the military, one still emboldened and one repentant, are profiled below.

Profile Twenty-Nine: A Tale of Two Britons

Anjem Choudary—Black Flag over Downing Street

            British activist and lawyer Anjem Choudary was arrested in August 2015, and many Britons do not understand why it took so long to incarcerate him. Britain’s most notorious radical Muslim preacher was formally charged with enlisting British citizens to support the Caliphate.

            For years, prominent on the radical Islamist scene, Anjem Choudary promised, “One day, the black flag of Islam will be flying over Downing Street.” He is very vocal about this goal. Though a practicing lawyer, he despises any man-made laws, particularly those of his own country. “Who said that you own Britain anyway? You belong to Allah. Britain belongs to Allah, the whole world belongs to Allah. There isn’t anywhere on the earth that I won’t propagate God’s law.”

            He has no time for individual countries, which he considers man-made and, therefore, inauthentic political constructs. Countries will “not be liberated by individuals, but by an army. Eventually there’ll have to be a Muslim army. It’s just a matter of time before it happens.” He has many followers.

            He promises that the Islamic State offers a delightful lifestyle. “Close your eyes and imagine a society in which everybody has free food, clothing, and shelter. You haven’t got a house? Here is your house. You don’t have to go live in a cardboard box outside the council for a few weeks before they give you a house. You don’t have electricity? Here is free electricity. Here is free water. What else do you want? Do you want a salary? Here, take some money. There is no society like that.”

            He hates the Pope, whom, in his words, should be killed for criticizing Muhammad. He seemed pleased with the killing of drummer Lee Rigby. Choudary told his followers that Rigby is being tortured in hell. He said, “If an adult non-Muslim dies in a state of disbelief, then he is going to the hellfire.” He proclaimed, “It’s Cameron who’s guilty, not me.” In September 2016, at the Old Bailey, Choudary was convicted of “inviting support for a proscribed organization.” The proscribed organization was the Islamic State. He was given a five-and-one-half-year sentence.

Abu Muntasir—“I Am Sorry”

            The “godfather” of the British Jihadis has openly wept in regret for brainwashing young British Muslims to kill in the name of Islam. In the 1980s and 1990s, Abu Muntasir recruited scores of young men to fight in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Burma, Bosnia, Chechnya, and in other distant wars in the name of Jihad. “For me, I always had an inner voice telling me that a lot of this is not right.” He grew to hate himself for promoting Jihad. In recent years, he has partnered with other ex-radical recruiters, including ex-skinheads, gang leaders, and Islamists, to halt the spread of radicalism.

            Emmy-winning filmmaker Deeyah Khan made a video about Muntasir and several former extremists. In the film, Muntasir admitted that he encouraged British Muslims to fight abroad and die for Islam. But his conscience began to haunt him when he imagined those whom he recruited as mangled corpses and amputees. Muntasir was convinced that killing or hurting people was contrary to his nature. He had to stop, and he did.

            Today, he warns the West of radical Islam. “There is grooming [referring to the radicalization process]. . . . So the parents need to have more communication with their children, they need to have more of an overseeing aspect of how to be a good parent.” As for his past, Muntasir sighed, “Why I have never been arrested, I don’t know.”

The Caliphate

            As mentioned in chapters 5 and 6, British subjects are well represented in the ranks of the Caliphate. At home, British police and security forces try to balance civil liberties with public security. The Caliphate can fly its black banner in London because, as its former mayor said, “Britain is a free country.” Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London, opined that carrying the flag was “not necessarily the worst thing in the world.” But some Londoners see this as cavalier and have pressed the police to be more aggressive. London police failed to arrest a man who draped himself in an Islamic State flag and strolled past Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. On his shoulders was a small child waving a smaller State flag. Some Britons saw this as trespassing the bounds of free speech and wading into the danger zone of incitement. They ask themselves, “What will come next?” Germans ask the same questions.

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to continue listening to other chapters. The book is available online or at major bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World," will be available for purchase in early spring 2026. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.  

“Many people born in Britain have little attachment to the country, which makes them vulnerable to radicalization.” UK Prime Minister David Cameron, referring to some Muslims

Muslim–Non-Muslim Relations

The Muslim population of Britain surpassed 3.5 million in 2015, representing approximately 5.5 percent of the overall population of 64 million. Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France and Germany. As the number of Muslims in Britain swells, so do concerns about their influence in society. Many Britons, particularly the less educated, are concerned about a social transformation they cannot prevent.

As discussed in Chapter 4, this tension is reflected in the media, particularly in tabloids and on radio and television talk shows. The year 2016 marked the tenth-year anniversary of the publication of Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan. Her disquieting neologism “Londonistan” resonated with many public intellectuals and became a buzzword in debates about Islamic influence. Non-elites organized among themselves.

Largely in response to the growth of Muslim populations, the English Defence League was launched in May 2009 among the working class. It was widely loathed by the intelligentsia but resonated in many rough-and-tumble neighborhoods. Its creator, Tommy Robinson, was physically assaulted on video by Islamists in his hometown of Luton. Britons increasingly share his concerns about the march of Islam. A 2010 survey found that 63 percent of Britons did not disagree with the statement “Muslims are terrorists,” and 94 percent agreed that “Islam oppresses women.” Three-quarters of those interviewed believe that Islam is bad for Britain. The numbers are higher today.

In cities, many working-class parents fear that their daughters will become prey to Pakistani child-rape gangs and prostitution rings, and that municipal officials will be hampered by fear of being charged with anti-Muslim animus. The autobiography Girl for Sale described the sexual exploitation of Lara McDonnell, who was victimized by a Muslim pedophile gang when she was only thirteen years old. Some youths fear their nation’s future. A 2015 survey of ten-to-sixteen-year-old British children revealed that 35 percent agreed that “Muslims are taking over England.”

Police and security forces find themselves hindered in conducting anti-terrorism planning. From patrolling the streets to entering homes to interviewing suspects to conducting training exercises, all activities must be conducted with religious sensitivity. In an antiterrorist exercise conducted in 2016 to test emergency response capabilities, a participant pretending to be a Caliphate operative yelled “Allahu Akbar.” The chief constable who ran the exercise was forced to ask forgiveness from the Muslim community. He apologized, “On reflection, we acknowledge that it was unacceptable to use this religious phrase immediately before the mock suicide bombing, which so vocally linked this exercise to Islam.”

Other Britons are less contrite than confused. Many cannot understand why some of the brightest, most ambitious, and high-achieving young British Muslims support the Caliphate. They do not understand why a prestigious, left-oriented school would produce suicide bombers, as described in the following profile.

Twenty-Seven: The Old School Tie—The Holland Park Martyrs and the “Socialist Eton”

If there is any British secondary school that could lay claim to the title of alma mater for Caliphate Britons, it would probably be London’s Holland Park School, which is also a good example of the red-green partnership in schools and on campuses discussed in Chapter 3. Dubbed the “Socialist Eton,” Holland Park embodies multicultural London. In the words of the academy, “Latin mottos gave way to egalitarian ideals.” It has attracted the children of the trendy rich, such as Anthony “Wedgie” Benn; powerful socialist politicians, such as Prime Minister Tony Blair and Roy Jenkins; and the progeny of left-oriented public intellectuals, particularly those connected with the newspaper The Guardian. The school calls them “socialist grandees and a smattering of literati and glitterati of West London.”

Holland Park boasts impressive educational statistics. Many of its graduates, from all ethnic backgrounds, perform well on standardized tests and in university admissions. Some continue on to Oxford or Cambridge. But by May 2015, what set Holland Park apart from other schools was its five alumni who had died fighting for the Islamic State. At least six former pupils from Holland Park School left Britain to become Islamic fighters or have been linked to terrorism. Former female students have also been arrested for supporting the Caliphate.

This is confusing for most of the academy’s graduates. They remember a Holland Park that promoted poetry, multiculturalism, and inclusion. Many warmly reminisce about their old school. Their salad days bring memories of long hair, rock and roll, stealing a smoke, and making out. One graduate stated, “Contrary to popular opinion, we didn’t have bomb-making classes at Holland Park Comprehensive.”

            In many Muslim countries, once seen as embracing modernity, support for the Caliphate and suicide operations is growing. Tunisia is one such country, and it is profiled below.

Profile Twenty-Six: Tunisia—On the Beach

“If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.” Islamic proverb

“How could a place of such beauty, of relaxation and happiness, be turned into such a scene of brutality and destruction?” Then British Home Secretary Theresa May

            Tunisia is a popular vacation destination for Europeans. Only 600 miles from Italy, it has an educated but highly unemployed workforce. For Britons, there is sun, gardens, birds, flowers, and turquoise water. For the culturally minded, there are historic sites and ancient Roman treasures. But Tunisia has also produced over 3,000 volunteers for the Islamic State. The country has been transformed from a model of progressive secularism into a center of radicalism.39 Cities are marked by youth unemployment or underemployment. Some work in the tourist trade, and others are students with free time. One was Seifeddine Rezgui.

The Shooting Starts

            Seifeddine Rezgui was a twenty-three-year-old student who pledged allegiance to the State. In his youth, he enjoyed breakdancing and later switched to kung fu, which he practiced often. To those who knew him, he seemed content and smiled frequently. For this reason, he went unnoticed as he rented a lair to plan a killing spree. From his safe house near popular resorts, Rezgui could walk near the Marhaba Hotel and mingle among European guests to plan his attack. He would later return, this time with an assault weapon, to walk along the shoreline of a Tunisian resort and kill Westerners. Ambling from the beach to the pool to the lobby, he sprayed fire at anyone who looked European. He did so as an operative for the State and with apparent merriment. By the end of his spree, he had shot dead thirty-eight foreigners, thirty of whom were British.

            Rezgui decided who would live and who would die. One young woman spoke Arabic to him and convinced him she was a fellow Muslim. The killer chuckled, “You go away.” A Briton recalled, “He was laughing and joking around, like a normal guy.” Rezgui walked up to a local mechanic and said with a smile, “I don’t want to kill you. I want to hit tourists.” The survivors recounted the panic, the running, and the gunshots. Some people went to their rooms to barricade themselves. As with the Florida killer a year later, his Tunisian counterpart laughed and smiled as he shot his victims.

            There were heroes on the beach that day. A sixty-one-year-old man pounded the beach, searching for survivors and rendering aid amid periodic gunfire. He used towels to bandage those with gunshot wounds. A British nurse wanted to help, but she couldn’t. She had been shot in both legs. Sarah Wilson recounts how her fiancé, Matthew, took bullets for her: “Matthew put himself in front of me, then he was hit, he moved, and the man shot him again.” Matthew lived, but not Rezgui, the killer. A police officer shot the murderer as he knelt, praying. Rezgui stumbled, and a shop owner threw terracotta tiles onto his head. A police officer fired a coup de grâce into his skull.

            The Caliphate claimed the massacre was an “attack upon the nests of fornication, vice and disbelief in God . . . worse is to follow.” The State’s supporters chuckled about the butchery and posted morbidly sarcastic comments on their tweets. But most Britons were somber. A national moment of silence was held in the House of Commons, and royalty and commoners alike took part.

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to continue listening to other chapters. The book is available online or at major bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World," will be available for purchase in early spring 2026. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.  

This is the Syria of 2015, where anyone who is upwardly mobile is now also westwardly mobile.

            Many Westerners were moved by the human dimension of the migration crisis. Commercial and social media captured some of the pain. A Swedish journalist found a love poem, protected in a plastic bag and washed up on the shore of a Greek island. Many rickety boats coming from the Middle East capsized, and the poem may have been part of the flotsam. Translated from Arabic, some lines read, “My Rose, I promise you, I will love you till the last minute of my life . . . will not let anything separate us . . . I promise you.” The fates of the author and his beloved Rose are unknown as of this writing.

            Particularly stirring was a photograph of a drowned little boy washed up on a Turkish shore in September 2014. This image touched the heartstrings of the world. Alan (sometimes spelled Ayan) Kurdi was three years old and dressed in Western clothing. Some of the boy’s family drowned with him. His father, Abdullah, pleaded to the world, “My message is I’d like the whole world to open its doors to Syrians.” His voice opened the doors of Europe.

            European celebrities and intellectuals tended to be more sympathetic to migrants than others. Academy Award-winning actress Emma Thompson blamed racism, saying that if the refugees were white, the British would feel “quite differently about it.” In London, after the curtain fell on a performance of Hamlet, Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the Dane, delivered an impassioned soliloquy against the “utter disgrace of the British government!”

Festung Europa

The Belgians, like the British security services before 7/7, believed that if they allowed Islamism to gestate at home, the terrorists would spare the country that had given them sanctuary. That fallacy now lies on the scrapheap of ideas where it always belonged.

Editorial from the Spectator

            Attitudinal surveys reveal growing European panic about the Islamic State and concern about the rising tide of migration. By June 2016, three out of four respondents to a survey viewed migrants as a “significant” threat. Self-identified conservatives tended to see migration as a greater crisis than self-identified liberals.

While many in Europe’s chattering classes have welcomed Middle Easterners to their continent, others are less hospitable. Tabloid journalists and ordinary Europeans are not persuaded that there is a human right to move to a particular country and become a citizen. This was, in part, reflected in the British vote to leave the European Union.

            Many Europeans do not want any more Middle Eastern refugees. Katie Hopkins of the British Daily Mail proposed launching a fleet of “gun ships” to stop the armada of refugees from reaching British shores. In that spirit, Rod Liddie of the Sun mocks “lefties” who bleat, “They [the migrants] are human beings! Let them in.” But Liddie rejoins that there are “7 billion people in the world. They would not all fit in Britain.”

            With resignation, Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, a survivor of Auschwitz, predicted Europe’s end because of liberalism, which he called “childish and suicidal.” Having lived through the Nazi era, he lamented and feared the end of democracy. He bemoaned the idea that “the doors are wide open for Islam.” Former Briton Niall Ferguson, a Harvard professor, said Europe had “opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith” and whose views are “not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies.” Former Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that British voters backed a vote to leave the European Union because people believe the country has “no control” over its borders.

            France, home to persistent and spectacular attacks, saw national concern about Islamic extremism more than double between 2005 and 2015. There was a surge in concern in other Western countries, probably reflecting the rise in Islamist-driven attacks. Interestingly, Russia saw a significant decline in concern about Islamic extremism.

            According to a different poll, conducted by Pew Polling in spring 2016, there was a significant increase in “unfavorable views of Muslims.”

            The Washington-based Pew Research Center found that the share of people who believed “refugees will increase the likelihood of terrorism in our country” was 46 percent in France, 52 percent in Britain, 61 percent in Germany, 71 percent in Poland, and 76 percent in Hungary.

“Raqqa Scatter,” Refugees, and Infiltrators

            Many European security and intelligence personnel agree that it is easy for the State to infiltrate its forces into Europe. As elements of the State are driven from large towns and cities, such as Raqqa, its soldiers scatter and, often, desperately seek to leave the Middle East. They can buy Syrian identity documents that allow them to hide among refugees.

Anecdotes highlight the dangers of accommodating those who crawl ashore, including Ahmad al Mohammad. He was fed and clothed by French Médecins Sans Frontières volunteers, who wished him bon voyage on his trip to Paris. In November 2015, al Mohammad detonated himself as a suicide bomber in that city while his coconspirators killed targets in a nightclub and on the streets.

European leaders have tightened security at transportation and public venues. However, determined Caliphate militants remain effective, as demonstrated by the June 2016 attack on Istanbul. By international standards, that airport was well protected. However, there were glaring vulnerabilities in both physical protective measures—such as barriers, gates, and fences—and in the human security element. Vetting guards, many of whom are foreign-born and most of whom earn meager wages, has proved very difficult. In France, eighty-two of the people hired for security posts during the soccer championship were on French terror watch lists. One of the men responsible for beheading a French priest in 2016 had worked at a French airport as a luggage handler. He “easily” passed employment security checks.

            Earlier chapters examined why Westerners are drawn to and sometimes repulsed by life in the Caliphate. Chapters 8 and 9 will return to Europe to provide more detail on Muslim–non-Muslim relations in selected countries. These chapters will expand on the Caliphate-related themes presented earlier, including social divisions, recruitment, support bases, cell formation, and the political environment in selected European countries and the United States. The Anglo-Saxon countries are Britain, Germany, and the United States. The French-speaking countries are France and Belgium.

The Deluge

            The influx of migrants and refugees into Europe and the United States created opportunities for the Caliphate. In the West, reports of the Caliphate’s troops disguising themselves as refugees and migrants became central national security concerns in 2015 and 2016. Thousands of migrants moved north across the continent and encamped in the “jungle refugee centers” in Calais and other French coastal cities. Many hoped to brave the choppy English Channel for a new home in Britain. After the Florida, Istanbul, and Nice attacks, the great migration became a dominant issue in Europe and in the American presidential election year of 2016.

            In April 2016, soon after the Brussels attack, a survey found that respondents in nine out of ten European countries described the Caliphate as a “major threat.” At the time, migrants were streaming from the Middle East, North Africa, and Eurasia by the hundreds of thousands. Many Europeans saw this as the gravest threat to European harmony since the Cold War and the greatest menace to social cohesion since the ethnic shifts and cleansing in the post–World War II period.    Some Europeans used biblical metaphors, including the “great flood,” to describe the current migration. British commentators looked to history, citing the French invasion of England 1,000 years earlier. Continentals drew on imagery of the Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns, using vastly exaggerated and alarmist historical analogies that reflect the unease some Europeans feel with their new nationals.

Social services throughout Europe were inundated with demands they could not meet. Federal and local authorities needed to innovate to provide shelter for individuals, families, and entire Middle Eastern neighborhoods now transported to Europe. Police forces were strained, and some felt hampered by the inability to communicate in a common language or by customs that were distinctly non-European. There were simply not enough officers, prosecutors, prison guards, or prison space to cope. For example, police in the German city of Keil allegedly collectively stopped pursuing cases in which refugees were caught shoplifting because it was too much work to prosecute them.

            Greece, the entry point for many migrants, faced daunting and morbid problems in 2015, as nearly 90 percent of migrants arrived on Greek soil as their point of entry into Europe. Pope Francis praised the Greek people for their kindness to “the cradle of civilization, the heart of humanity.” But many Greeks found it hard to cope. The island of Lesbos, of Greek myth, was inundated with migrants, some of whom died there. The mayor explained that there was no room left in the main cemetery to bury anyone.

            Bodies that washed ashore in Greece were identified by “cadaver number.” On the small island of Samos, the body of a short-haired boy wearing a black shirt and jeans was tagged “Cadaver #4” in January 2016. It belonged to a young Syrian named Yamen, who, like so many others, had drowned at sea. His cousins, aunts, and uncles survived the journey to Europe and Canada and searched for Yamen. His uncle flew from Montreal to bring the boy to Canada for burial in a family plot.

Northern Bound—”Just Wait”

“It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.” A Caliphate leader, referring to the migration to Europe, 2015

            The route through the Greek islands was the most frequently used entry point for the million-plus migrants in 2015 and 2016. Passage through the Balkans was dubbed “Jihadist highways.” The head of France’s internal intelligence service confirmed that the Islamic State was using migrant routes through the Balkans to infiltrate Europe. European security services were strained as they tried to monitor migrants and migratory patterns. From Greece, migrants often headed north, hoping to reach wealthier states, primarily Germany, France, and Britain. Some had immigrated because they were destitute and desperate. Others came to improve their lives and those of their families. Others came to emulate Muhammad’s hijrah, the journey from Mecca to Medina. Some came to infiltrate, plan attacks, and kill. Greek officials uncovered locations in Athens where Caliphate operatives would stay before dispersing to France, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, and Germany. They would be provisioned in these safe houses and given contact information for their destinations.

            In February 2015, the Caliphate claimed it would infiltrate thousands of its followers among the migrants. According to one source, in September 2015, 4,000 Islamic State Jihadis had already entered Europe. A Caliphate leader said, “These Muslims were going to Europe in the service of that caliphate. They are going like refugees. Just wait.”

            Several European Union member states, particularly in Eastern Europe, constructed temporary fences. Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, Romania, and Croatia erected barriers. However, once migrants entered Europe, it was highly unlikely they would be deported; at one point in 2016, the European Union deported only seven migrants per day. Many deportation-bound migrants claimed sudden, unrecognizable illnesses that prevented them from flying. They could stay. The EU counterterrorism chief conceded that it was “relatively easy” to enter the European Union amid the sea of refugees. Enter they did.

            This chapter now moves to the Western fight against the Caliphate in the Middle East. Western states and individuals fight the Islamic State with both nonviolent and violent means.

Western-Led Nonviolent Resistance

            Some Westerners travel to Mesopotamia in the name of humanity. They seek to ease the suffering of refugees. NGOs help feed, shelter, and provide medical care to the dispossessed. Just as some Westerners are drawn to the Caliphate to serve and kill in the name of Jihad, Western humanitarians are drawn to the Middle East to relieve, feed, heal, and nurture. One of these was Kayla Mueller.

Profile Twenty-Five: Kayla Mueller—“I Find God in the Suffering’s Eyes”

            By all accounts, she was a loving, spiritual, and kind woman. She was trusting, perhaps too trusting. Kayla Mueller grew up in Prescott, Arizona, and after college devoted herself to helping the less fortunate. She said she was doing God’s work. In a letter to her parents, she wrote, “I find God in the suffering’s eyes reflected in mine.” She helped HIV/AIDS patients and volunteered at a women’s shelter.

            Kayla traveled the world to ease the suffering of the downtrodden. This took her to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey. “For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal.” She and her boyfriend were kidnapped in August 2013 after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria. Leaders of what would become the Islamic State sentenced her to life in prison in retaliation for the imprisonment of an American of Pakistani descent who had tried to join the Taliban. The United States refused to swap the women.

            Kayla became the sex slave of the Caliphate’s leader. Abu Bakr announced that he had “married her,” and Kayla’s parents wept. Her mother countered, “Kayla did not marry this man. He took her to his room and he abused her, and she came back crying.” Kayla was allowed to write a few letters to her parents, in which she pleaded for their forgiveness. She begged them to forgive “the suffering I have put you all through . . . in the end, the only one you really have is God.”

            In February 201, President Obama announced that Kayla had been murdered. The Islamic State claimed that she was killed by an errant US bomb, but this is almost certainly a lie. Al-Baghdadi may have grown tired of her and had her killed. As of this writing, there are no exact details, but a Yazidi sex slave who later escaped had shared a cell with Kayla and had firsthand knowledge of Kayla’s murder. The Yazidi girl also shared another memory of Kayla—that she had eaten very little in her captivity. Instead, she gave what little food she had to the Yazidi girls. Why? “[Kayla] didn’t want us to be hungry.”

Kinetic Operations—“Harvesting Jihadis”

            Several Western countries have made war on the State and continue to do so through drone warfare and elite teams of special operators. There are Western hunter-killer teams that partner with Iraqi forces. One observer quoted a British officer as saying, “It is now time to harvest the Jihadis.” Some Western civilians have tried to do so in the service of Kurdish forces. As in the Spanish Civil War, they come from all over the Western world to fight for cause and comrades. The Lions of Rojava, a Kurdish organization, helps foreigners join up with anti-State fighting units.

            According to one source, 108 Americans had fought against the State as of summer 2016. “These volunteers paid their own way to the war zone and usually returned home when their funds ran out.” They were drawn to fight the State because of the killing of Christians, the general atrocities, and the lure of battle for a good cause. Some veterans had nostalgia for the camaraderie of prior military service.

            Canadian Dillon Hillier, a veteran of the Canadian military and the son of a politician, became a minor celebrity in his homeland, earning the moniker “Canadian Peshmerga.” Reece Harding of Queensland, Australia, nicknamed “Surfie,” could not abide what he saw as Western inaction. A fellow surfer described Harding as having a spark of humanity. “Everybody liked him.” Leaving his surfing days behind, the handsome, blond, twenty-three-year-old man told his parents he needed a short break. In fact, he left to fight with the Kurds and was killed by a landmine. His comrades posted a tribute to him on Facebook. The next day, they called his father in Australia to share the tragic news.

            Richard Jansen, a Dutch sniper older than Surfie, left a comfortable home like the Australian to fight with the Kurds. In the Netherlands, he worked as a bodyguard for 10 years. He wanted to fight Jihadis in Europe but couldn’t. So he traveled to Turkey to fight with the Kurds. Jansen found Syria a target-rich environment and claims to have killed forty State fighters. On Dutch television, he seemed to relish the memories of killing the enemy. “These are not people. It is prize shooting at the carnival.” The “carnival” ended for Jansen when he was wounded in combat and sent to a medical clinic in Germany.

            The German-born Ivana Hoffmann was the first foreign woman to die alongside Kurds. She joined a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party at an early age. Her parents were black South Africans, and she said she wanted to fight for internationalism. Ivana was killed on the eve of International Women’s Day in March 2015. She was not forgotten in Germany, and several thousand friends and supporters carried red banners in Duisburg in her memory. She was nineteen years old.

            Thirtysomething Canadian-Israeli Gill Rosenberg fought among the ranks of the Peshmerga forces, becoming the first foreign woman to do so. Rosenberg explained, “We Jews always say of the Holocaust, never again. In my opinion, that’s true not only for the Jews, but for all mankind.” Thirty-six-year-old Keith Broomfield of Massachusetts, like Rosenberg, had a strong religious identity, though in a different religion. Keith was a devout Baptist who had had a difficult youth. He heard a calling to fight with the Kurds and stop the State’s slaughter. The New Englander had no contacts and knew it was “a crazy thing to do.” His father stated that his son was led by the Lord to the battle lines. He did so, where he fought and fell.

            An energetic senior citizen, Alan Brooke was desperate to join Kurdish forces, but the sixty-two-year-old retired archaeologist was told to return to his seventy-one-year-old wife in England. Undeterred as of 2016, he said, “I intend to go back. I can’t think of a better way to use my pension. My wife is fully supportive.”

            Some other fighters are highly idiosyncratic, and British character actor Michael Enright is among them. After basic training with the Kurds, he made himself useful as a photographer, documenting the brutality of the Caliphate’s war. He took risks. His comrades in arms do not doubt his enthusiasm, but some question his stability. Reportedly, he suffers from emotional aberrations that are sometimes very melodramatic. “It’s gotten to the point where I just want to absolutely annihilate them and kill them on sight.”

Summary

            The Caliphate has ordered killings throughout the West. Some of its cadres have traveled from Europe to the Middle East and back. Others have pledged fealty to the State and killed on its behalf. Westerners have traveled to the Middle East to fight with the Kurds against the State.

            In June 2016, an American killed forty-nine people at a gay nightclub. He paused after a few volleys to pledge allegiance to the Caliphate. He was killed, but other Islamic State operatives plan to attack Westerners. Non-Muslims, particularly those high on the State’s enemies list, have taken note. After the Florida attacks, many American gays are worried.

            Some public intellectuals and politicians dismiss the charge that the Caliphate-directed or -inspired attacks are driven by Islam. They warn against backlashes against Muslims and the continued need to partner with Muslim leaders to suppress radicalism. A seventeen-year-old New Yorker explained, “Islam is all about peace. In Ramadan, we don’t even curse. You’re not supposed to do anything bad.”92 But, increasingly, many Westerners see this and similar statements as tortured apologetics. They see the State’s attacks as Islam—pure and simple.

Whose Fault?

            The killing ignited the long-familiar debate on gun control. President Obama wanted to tighten gun-control laws to “make it harder for [terrorists] to kill.” Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, blamed America’s “deadly fetish” with firearms. This claim was rubbished by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA’s Chris Cox countered that the weapons used were illegal in California. Laws banning high-capacity magazines in assault weapons were already on the books. A letter to the Washington Post opined, “The reason these laws didn’t prevent Wednesday’s shooting is that gun control does not stop evil.”

Campaigning for president, Hillary Clinton did not blame the Caliphate; she blamed the NRA.

            Others point to a workplace dispute that preceded the shooting. University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole blamed “someone going postal over his work situation.” But others rejoined that there are daily, sometimes bitter, disputes at work, almost none of which lead to mass murder.

            Professor Steven Salaita blamed American “political violence . . . endemic to the United States.” A Columbia University professor underscored the American and Western “Islamophobia and the wanton cruelty of imperialist warfare, [and] the colonial occupation and domination of other people’s homeland.” This was echoed by the Los Angeles executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Hussam Ayloush, who added that the United States supports the “dictatorships” and “coups” that “push people over the edge.” For this reason, according to the CAIR spokesperson, “We [Americans] are partly responsible.”

            The argument over gun control would reemerge with vigor after the Florida killing of June 2016. But in winter 2015, residents of San Bernardino tried to heal their community. Several high school girls wore hijabs in solidarity with Islamic students. A seventeen-year-old Muslim girl, Zarifeh Shalabi, was voted prom queen at Summit High School. Her non-Muslim friends passed out colorful scarves and balloons on which were written, “Don’t be a baddie, vote for the hijabi.” Her friends celebrated: “I feel like we have something to teach the rest of the country. It makes me really proud.”

Three Views of Caliphate-Inspired Killings

            In response to the multiple murders and the high death count in the name of the Caliphate, Western journalists, politicians, intellectuals, and civil servants often placed the attacks in one of three categories. First, the attacks were not related to Islam; second, the attacks were driven by a distorted view of Islam; third, the attacks were an expression of Islamic mandates. The debate continues.

View One—The Attacks Were Not Islamic

            Some in the West hold that political violence perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam is not and cannot be authentically Islamic. If Islam is a religion of peace, just as Judaism and Christianity are religions of peace, those who commit violence in its name have warped the religion’s meaning. In this view, the perpetrators are fueled with a rage unconnected to any religion. Even when perpetrators roar “Allahu Akbar” or bellow praises for the Caliphate, these proclamations are dismissed as empty or misguided rhetoric.

            Those who hold this view emphasize the perpetrator's emotional instability or anger. For example, in Le Mans, France, police arrested a Muslim who was tearing down Christmas decorations from the city center. The perpetrator then tried to grab a police officer’s weapon while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” Prosecutors declared him mentally ill and had him hospitalized. In Dijon, France, a man yelling “Allahu Akbar” ran over a pedestrian. French prosecutors said, “This is absolutely not an act of terrorism.” Rather, it was a “long-lasting and severe psychological disorder.”  In Bavaria, Germany, a man stabbed four people at a train station while he was yelling “Allahu Akbar.” The Bavarian interior minister said the incident was probably not political but an expression of mental illness. There are many similar cases.

            This happens in the United States, too. In November 2015, a student at the Merced campus of the University of California, Faisal Mohammed, stabbed four of his fellow students and was, in turn, shot dead. Police found a printout of the Caliphate’s black flag in his possession. But the county sheriff claimed that Mohammed’s religion had nothing to do with his stabbing spree. Rather, he was angry at rejection. The sheriff compared Mohammed’s references to Allah to a Christian who comes to Jesus.

View Two—A Twisted View of Islam

            The first view is that the attacks were unrelated to Islam and likely driven by mental illness or anger management issues. The second view is that Caliphate-connected violence results from a twisted view of Islam. For example, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a young and attractive engineer, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, went on a shooting spree, leaving four Marines and a sailor dead. In his words, these were symbols of American power. Before the killing started, he texted a friend: “Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, then I have declared war against him.” Vice President Joe Biden called this the act of a “perverted jihadist.”

View Three—The Attacks Are Driven by Islam

            The third view of Caliphate-related attacks is that they are a pure expression of Islam. This view takes the killers and the Caliphate at their word. Many of the Caliphate-associated killers declared loudly, openly, and repeatedly their allegiance to the Caliphate and their belief in Jihad. In one case, a would-be pro-Caliphate killer repeatedly stated his intentions before and after his failed murder attempt. He was Abdul Shaheed, formerly known as Edward Archer.

            Shaheed was well known at the local mosque, had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and studied Arabic. He pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State and was determined to assassinate a police officer in a show of solidarity. But his thirteen-shot blast into officer Jesse Hartnett only wounded his victim, who then returned fire and winged the Jihadi.

            Despite Shaheed’s declaration of fealty to the State, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney said, “This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers. This has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.” But the perpetrator contradicted the mayor and was emphatic that his motives had everything to do with Islam. Under arrest, he explained to investigating officers, “I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic State, and that’s why I did what I did.” Shaheed, in his view, could not have been clearer about his motives.

Despite Shaheed’s declaration of fealty to the State, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney said, “This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers. This has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.” But the perpetrator contradicted the mayor and was emphatic that his motives had everything to do with Islam. Under arrest, he explained to investigating officers, “I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic State, and that’s why I did what I did.” Shaheed, in his view, could not have been clearer about his motives.

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West – Black Flag over Babylon. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to continue listening to other chapters. The book is available online or at major bookstores worldwide. Also, Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World," will be available for purchase in early spring 2026. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Killing floor: “That part of the slaughterhouse where animals are killed.”

“I want to do an Islamic Bonnie and Clyde on the kaffir.” Bridget Namoa, Australian convert to Islam, 2016

Introduction

            By 2015, the Caliphate’s long, lethal arm had reached well beyond Mesopotamia. Its cells and lone operatives plotted in European cities and suburbs. A sleepy Southern California town, a Tunisian beach filled with British vacationers, a hip Parisian nightclub, a watering hole for Orlando’s gay community, the French Riviera, the squares, streets, and haunts of London—all these venues, and others, became slaughter pens for the State. The first part of this chapter will discuss the Caliphate’s killing in the West and in places frequented by Westerners. The second part will discuss some Westerners who have gone to the Middle East to fight their enemy—the Islamic State.

Killing on the Homefront—Westerners Make Sense of the Violence

            From its inception, the Caliphate encouraged its followers to kill non-Muslim Westerners. Some adherents did so, proclaiming their solidarity with the State. The killings became so frequent that the carnage lost its shock value. The Caliphate innovated and escalated the level of violence. The State’s death list is long. Occasionally, Jews were targeted, as in Copenhagen and Paris, because Islamists hate Jews in particular. Many killings were random, but some were deeply personal. A blonde Danish teenager murdered her mother after watching the Caliphate’s beheadings of British hostages. Only fifteen years old when she savaged her mother with a large kitchen knife, she was a convert to Islam.

            Most of the State’s victims had little or no interest in politics and simply wanted to live fulfilling, joyful lives. Many were killed by chance. They could not have known their lives were in danger. One case among hundreds is Nohemi Gonzalez. The Mexican American was studying design in Paris, and her boyfriend missed his “little firecracker,” as he called her. Dining with friends at a Parisian bistro, she was killed in a bomb blast on November 13, 2015. Dead at twenty-three, the “little firecracker” was the only known American killed in the Caliphate’s Paris attack that day. Like many similar victims, she had fatally bad luck. Had she finished her meal an hour earlier, she would likely be alive today in Los Angeles.

            In August 2016, a Norwegian citizen of Somali descent who had moved to Britain went on a stabbing spree in Russell Square, London. One of the victims was a sixty-year-old American woman whose husband was a psychology professor at Florida State University. She and three others—an Israeli woman, an Australian woman, and an American man—were stabbed. Only she died.

            Often, the killings are directed. In the hills of San Bernardino, a husband-and-wife pair of Caliphate-supporting killers left their baby with family and then went to a well-attended Christmas party, where they shot at anything that moved. They killed fourteen fellow workers. The Caliphate was delighted and called the killers, both of whom were slain in a police shootout, “lions [who] made us proud. They are still alive.” This is what happened.

Pofile Twenty-Three: San Bernardino—“Cry Me a River”

            Two-hundred-year-old San Bernardino is a small city located in the hills of Southern California. It is not particularly chic or famous. Gene Hackman, the two-time Oscar-winning actor, was born there. Julie London, whose song “Cry Me a River” made her a famous torch singer in the 1950s, grew up there. San Bernardino is the first major town on Route 66 in California, reached from the east. A famous song invited Americans to “get your kicks on Route 66.” Many listened. San Bernardino was the gateway for millions of Americans beginning a new life in California, the Golden State.

            San Bernardino was also home to Syed Farook and Tashfeen Melik, a married couple with a baby daughter. Syed Farook was born in the United States and turned to Islam with fervor. A county food inspector, he spent much of his free time in the mosque, memorizing the Koran. He described himself on a dating website as enjoying “working on vintage and modern cars, reading and . . . target practice with younger sister and friends.” The target practice would prove useful later.

            His lonely-hearts ad landed him a wife, Tashfeen Malik. They married in August 2014 and had a baby girl. Tashfeen Malik was born in Saudi Arabia to a middle-class Pakistani family. She studied pharmacology but was deeply religious, exploring Islam with passion at night. Most of her neighbors did not know her at all, and she did not mix with men outside her family. She was almost always veiled when outside the house.

            Few people outside of the family knew the depth of hatred the husband and wife held for the United States. But they made their presence known on December 2, 2015. They dropped off their baby with relatives, explaining that they had a doctor’s appointment. They had no such appointment. The couple drove to the San Bernardino County Health Department with heavy firepower. They discharged up to seventy-five assault-rifle rounds into a crowd of workers, some of whom had worked with Farook. They killed fourteen, taking them completely by surprise.

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“Let believers not take for friends and allies infidels rather than believers: and whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.” Koran 3:28

            The Caliphate’s conquest of Mesopotamian cities and towns has tested Christian–Muslim relations. Many Christians did not understand how tenuous their peaceful associations were with their Muslim nationals. Families had grown up together, and children studied and played together. They thought they were friends. But soon after the Caliphate took control, some Muslim neighbors very quickly partnered with State operatives to harass Christians and take their property. A Christian man explained that the most vicious of the Jihadis were not the “Bosnians, Arabs, and even Americans and British fighters”; they were their neighbors. Other Muslim neighbors joined the State and killed or chased away Christians from their homes.

            Often, Christians have nowhere to go. One explained, “Our neighbors and other people threatened us. But . . . where would we go? Christians have no support in Iraq.” A Christian woman from Mosul recalled the murder of her daughter, who died in her arms. According to the mother’s account, her girl’s dying words were, “Forgive them.”

Level Four—Life for Yazidis, a House of Pain

“These men are not human. They only think of death, killing.”   Recollections of a Yazidi captive

            Of all social and religious cohorts, Yazidis have the worst quality of life. The Caliphate declared this religious minority to be devil worshippers. Yazidis constantly fear for their lives and sometimes pray for death. Men and boys have been randomly killed, taken from their homes, and sometimes conscripted to fight for the Caliphate. Women and girls are often sold as slaves, particularly sex slaves. They live in brothels, houses of pain. They hold a status comparable to that held by Slavs in Nazi-occupied Europe. International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who defends Yazidi women, said, “We know that systematic rapes have taken place, and that they are still taking place. And yet no one is being held to account.” An escaped Yazidi girl said, “Every day I died 100 times over. Not just once. Every hour I died, every hour. . . . From the beating, from the misery, from the torture.”

            If Yazidi girls are sexual fodder for the Caliphate, the boys are seen as potential fighters or suicide operators. They drill their dogma into children’s minds. One Yazidi mother, whose husband was shot by the State and who later escaped the Caliphate, explained that her nine-year-old son did not want to leave. He wanted to stay in the Caliphate. “My son’s brain was changed,” said the mother.

By summer 2016, as Iraqi forces dislodged the Caliphate from towns and cities, they sometimes had to protect the Yazidi dead as well as the living. The Yazidi mass grave sites need to be guarded because they contain evidence for future war-crimes trials. But sometimes there is vengeance. According to one media account, a Caliphate commander was killed by his former Yazidi slave. He had offered her to his friends, and later she shot him. Some Yazidis can fight in military units, as profiled below.

Profile Twenty-One: Sisters of the Sun

“To Abu Bakr—I am the sister of the girls you captured, the daughter of the mothers you hold.” A Yazidi fighter in the Sun Brigade, 2015

            By 2015, some Yazidi women could mete out justice to their former tormentors. Fighting in a battalion operationally controlled by Kurdish forces, Yazidi women stand proud in the ranks of the “Sun Brigade.” It was organized by a Yazidi musician-turned-soldier and staffed with Yazidi women, many of whose friends and relatives were kidnapped by the Caliphate.

            Most of the Sun ladies were between eighteen and thirty, and many had never held a gun before joining the brigade. In their better, younger years, they were students, teachers, and cooks. Some were wives or sweethearts. Then came the Caliphate and the killing. By midsummer 2016, Yazidi women and girls were fighting.

            A Sun leader said of Yazidis, “Women were throwing their children from the mountains and then jumping themselves because it was a faster way to die. Our hands were all tied. We couldn’t do anything about it.” Now they can. Today, their hands hold weapons. “We are Yazidi. We are women. You will never be able to take away our honor. . . . We will liberate our homeland.” Another said, “We will wipe you out.”

            Muslims have enjoyed music for centuries, relishing folk, religious, popular, and foreign songs. But the State outlawed most music. Soon after their conquest, State operatives confiscated or destroyed musical instruments. They also killed musicians. Some musicians have sold or hidden their instruments, too terrified to play them. A celebrated local musician, Ahmad, entertained refugees by pulling his piano in a wagon from one refugee camp to another to deliver his “concerts in the ruins.” Some found relief, if only fleeting, in his piano playing and lighthearted singing. But the State set his prized piano on fire. He said, “They burned it on my birthday.”

            Others pay higher prices for enjoying a song. A fifteen-year-old boy was arrested in central Mosul for listening to “Western music” at his father’s grocery store. He was publicly beheaded. There are some exceptions to the ban on music. The music of Cat Stevens, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, who became Yusuf Islam, is allowed. Nasheeds are songs that praise Allah and are sung without instrumental accompaniment. They are allowed, particularly if they promote the Caliphate.

Generation Caliphate—Child Care and Education in the Islamic State

“They told us we want to make an army to open Rome, and we will control the West and America.”  Taha Jalo Murada boy in Raqqa

“They arrive here as children and quickly turn into killing machines.” Commentary on boys’ education in Raqqa

            The State views today’s children as tomorrow’s iron-souled leaders. This parallels the Nazis’ Hitler Youth and the Soviets’ Young Pioneers. The Caliphate grooms Generation Z to serve as a shock force to conquer the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe. The boys are raised to obey even the harshest and most dangerous orders without hesitation.

            Education for boys is very strict, particularly for those abducted from Yazidi or Christian households. They are taught how to behead men by first practicing on dolls. They are deprived of sleep and edible food. A boy explained, “We were given dirty food—rice and beans [and] sometimes soup, but it had worms in it.” They have no opportunity to fraternize without supervision.

            The slightest infraction—being late for prayers, failing to handle weapons correctly—would result in a beating, as recounted by thirteen-year-old Taha, a boy who was grabbed from his Yazidi family. He was constantly terrified and beaten with sticks. Some boys of Taha’s age have been sent on suicide missions with bombs strapped around their waist. Taha explained, “We did not get enough training, but they said in the future you will fight for Jihad.”

            Primary and secondary education is strikingly different from that in Europe. The State canceled all classes except religious studies. The State decided that basic principles of science are un-Islamic because they declare that there are physical rules of the universe that do not change.70 This is considered sacrilegious. Any equations that are connected to moneylending are forbidden. The Caliphate promotes works by Islamic scholar Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of Wahhabism; Muhammad’s hadiths and biography; Quranic sciences; Islamic jurisprudence; and the Islamic doctrine. For the more secular-minded parents, home study has become popular.

Profile Nineteen: Profiles in Killing

            Death is an ever-present part of daily life in the Islamic State. Many have watched the deaths of family members, friends, neighbors, and work and schoolmates. It has become part of the common culture, as during the Great Plague in Europe and the Thirty Years' War. The Caliphate has captured international headlines for both the frequency and cruelty of its death sentences. They justify the killings by reference to Islamic mandates.

Beheadings

            In some Western civilizations, beheading was, according to the epoch, a noble way to die. Hanging was reserved for the lowborn. In Britain, bluebloods condemned to die were often, though not always, beheaded. As late as 1977, the guillotine was still being used in France. In America’s colonial era, severed heads of criminals were sometimes displayed on Boston Common.  Beheading also has a place in Islam’s early history. In 680 in Karbala, central Iraq, Muhammad’s favorite grandson, Hussein bin Ali, had his head chopped off by the soldiers of the Caliph.  In fact, Muslim history is rife with beheadings. Legendary Muslim warrior Saladin ordered the heads removed from 230 Knights Templar in 1187; Turkish invaders beheaded 800 martyrs in Otranto, Italy, in 1480.

            Early in the Islamic State, beheading became popular, in part because it is often referenced in Sharia. In the Koran, Allah ordered his followers to smite the infidels’ necks. He said, in Koran 47:4, “When you meet those who disbelieve on the battlefield, smite at their necks until you have killed.” The Islamic State does this today. It also impales the severed heads of its enemies on spikes.

Stoning

“Even the monkeys practiced stoning.” From the Hadiths

            Stoning is part of Sharia. Caliphate leaders endorse this punishment. The caliph Omar, one of Muhammad’s closest companions, maintained that the punishment of stoning for adultery was originally in the Koran. He said, “Surely Allah’s Apostle carried out the penalty . . . and so did we after him.” One hadith discusses a group of monkeys stoning a female monkey to death for adultery. The most accepted hadith, al-Bukhari, has four references to death by stoning.

            In Sharia, adultery must be proven by four eyewitnesses to the actual act. But in the State, the legal standards are much lower. Sometimes gossip is sufficient evidence for the judges. Males to be stoned are buried to the waist, and women to the neck. After this is complete, a crowd pelts the condemned with rocks until the person dies. The condemned are tightly bound, and the soil around the hole into which they are placed is well compacted. According to Sharia, if the condemned can wrest themselves from the hole, they can live without punishment. Sometimes there are double stonings of unmarried couples found en flagrante.

Crucifixion

            For Western readers, crucifixions are associated with Romans, Jesus, and Spartacus. Like stoning, crucifixion is a dreadful way to die. The condemned is either tied or nailed to a cross, and death usually comes from suffocation. Emperor Constantine abolished it in the fourth century for its cruelty. The Islamic State brought it back to the Middle East in the twenty-first century.

            Sometimes crucifixion can be combined with other tortures. Passions often run high during Ramadan, and, in June 2016, the State reportedly whipped and then crucified three people for eating during the day.

Exotic Torture

            The Caliphate experiments with killing. For example, the State murdered five prisoners by locking them in a metal cage and lowering them into a swimming pool. Filmed in Mosul with expensive underwater cameras, a seven-minute-long video captured the terror and agony of the drowning men. The cages were lifted from the pool, revealing dead and nearly dead men foaming at the mouth. Other depraved deaths include bathing the doomed in acid.

.

            Westerners accustomed to European health care standards are often shocked by the primitive conditions in their new Middle Eastern home. By 2015, most of the Caliphate’s hospitals had fallen into disrepair. Citizens without money or influence receive the most rudimentary health care or none at all. In Raqqa, the hospital’s dialysis machines and incubators stopped working soon after the Caliphate’s conquest. Humanitarian aid was blocked from Raqqa because it came “from the infidels.”

            The Caliphate’s medicine is particularly agonizing for women giving birth. The State curtailed Caesarean operations, which it considers Western and effeminate. The clerics determined that Muslim women should be stoic enough to endure childbirth pains without modern medicine. Muhammad’s wives and daughters did not receive anesthesia or antibiotics, and they should serve as exemplars.

            Women doctors are terrified by al-Khansaa, and most have stopped treating patients at the larger hospitals in Raqqa. They are too scared of being whipped. After the clerics assumed control of the Raqqa National Hospital, only one female physician, Raheb, continued to practice there.

            With health care in chaos and resources insufficient, physicians help boost hospital funding. Some harvest organs from living or recently deceased individuals for sale on the black market. This is legal according to the State’s mullahs, as long as the organs come from non-Muslims or apostates. The Caliphate’s Fatwa Sixty-Eight declared that “the apostate’s life and organs don’t have to be respected and may be taken with impunity.”

            Health care administrators relieve their hospital’s overcrowding by killing some patients. For example, HIV-positive fighters have been ordered to carry out suicide attacks, freeing the State of its medical costs. If there is a shortage of blood, Christians and Yazidis are forced to give blood for transfusions. A Christian woman said, “They even take our girls’ and old women’s blood. They use it for their wounded ISIS fighters.” By summer 2016, State fighters in embattled Fallujah grabbed healthy-looking pedestrians off the streets or dragged them from their homes and forced them to give blood. This left some drained and dying in the city streets.

            Some of the medical services are healing; some are marginal; most are substandard; some are lethal. In the Caliphate, there is little room for “defectives.” For example, the Caliphate issued a fatwa to kill babies and children with Down’s syndrome. They were to be suffocated. Medical clinics can be death centers for enemies of the State. Hospitals sometimes lure State opponents in for care and then inject them with poisons. Some of the victims had no idea that they were on a list of enemies until they began to die.

            Some medical experiments resemble those conducted by the Germans during World War II. The Caliphate’s foreign fighters, particularly French, Tunisians, and Libyans, injected poisons into the veins of prisoners. One of the prison guards said that corpses taken out of these rooms “looked like skeletons, only an hour after being injected with the needles.”

            By summer 2016, Caliphate militants began injecting severely injured soldiers with potassium chloride. Leaders calculated that pictures of injured, disfigured, or maimed soldiers might lower morale.

Fashion in the Islamic State—Black Is the New Black

“God loves women who are covered.”  A placard in a street in Raqqa

            The Caliphate takes dress seriously. Men and women must appear the way the first generation of Muslims were believed to have looked. Men who can’t grow a beard need to improvise. “Nadhim,” a thirty-year-old taxi driver, despaired because skin rashes prevented him from growing a beard or moustache. Nadhim pleaded his case to the religious police, but, he moaned, “they didn’t care. . . . One of them told me I’d better stay at home if I shaved.” Men may not cut their hair, apply gel to it, or wear it in any style that resembles Western fashion.

            Still, men have more fashion freedom than women, who must always be covered in public. The tent-like niqab covers everything but the eyes, which must be covered with a veil. Schoolgirls must wear them, too. Most women find this suffocating. Only women may sell clothing to women. Women must not wear high heels. The few hair salons that remain open are required to black out images of women from the packaging of hair dye products.

            If women do not dress in accordance with the State’s morality codes, they are beaten and, sometimes, severely tortured. Morality police are unforgiving. A nineteen-year-old-woman was placed in a cage “with some skulls” to teach her a lesson about inappropriate dress. Women face particularly challenging obstacles should they require hospitalization, as even there they must remain completely clothed. An elderly woman suffering cardiac arrest was forbidden from removing any of her clothing, despite the pleas of attending nurses. She died.

            Those girls and women who escape the Caliphate cast aside their raven-colored coverings as soon as they can. This is what happened in the summer of 2016, when the State was driven from some Syrian towns and villages. For the first time in years, they could show their faces in the street and wear whatever colors and styles of clothing they pleased. A nineteen-year-old northern woman freed from State-controlled Syria ripped off the khimar (a long hijab) she had been forced to wear for two years, proclaiming, “I felt liberated. . . . They made us wear it against our will, so I removed it that way to spite them.”

            Life in the Caliphate is tedious and dangerous. Well-paying jobs, scarce across the Caliphate’s territory, are often unattainable for those unconnected to the leadership. For most residents, life is marked by mundanity, fear, and misery. Basic services—electricity, waste management, potable water, and road repair—are unreliable. In the villages, electricity can be cut for an entire week. Only the wealthiest or most well-connected cadre have sustained access to private generators, and after 2015 the price of petrol became out of reach for most residents. 2015. For most households, basic services and medical supplies are scarce. As in other failed states, women wait in long lines for food, and men walk the streets in search of employment, taking whatever is offered.

            The State feeds and houses its own. Depending on cash flow, most of its soldiers earn several hundred dollars each month. They are paid more for each wife, child, and slave. Teachers’ salaries range from seventy-five to ninety dollars, barely enough to buy a family's bread for a month. But most teachers, other than religious instructors, are unemployed. Others have lost hope. Many civil servants, who lost their positions after 2014, have fallen into destitution. Some have turned to subsistence farming to feed their families. Some men have despaired of work and commiserate with each other in cafés, where they chat, read the papers, and network for jobs.

            The rules for socializing at cafés have changed under the Caliphate. Historically a staple of Middle East popular culture, the café is a very male environment, filled with burbling water pipes, songs from the radio or television, and smiling men telling jokes and stories. No longer. Under the State, the water pipes were pulled, as were all forms of tobacco. If caught by the morality police, a smoker will be flogged, up to forty lashes. After a second offense, he will be whipped again and imprisoned. The third time results in imprisonment and a crippling fine. For café owners, the Caliphate is bad for business. One owner explained, “No customers come in. They do not enjoy a cup of coffee if they can’t smoke a cigarette with it.” There are also shortages of coffee and food, and most music is forbidden.

            Without smoking or sipping coffee, there is little to do in cafés beyond chatting and watching television. Soccer has been popular in the Middle East for decades, and men and boys would gather in cafés to cheer their teams, but this now poses hazards. In May 2016, in the small town of Balad in northern Iraq, Caliphate assassins burst into a café and shot at least fourteen Real Madrid fans dead while shouting that soccer is un-Islamic. Local police caught one of the culprits, and locals burned him alive. Two weeks later, Islamic State killers struck again, killing men in a café watching soccer. The Islamic State then went after the players themselves. The soccer stars were well known and well liked, but in July 2016, the State gathered a crowd of children and beheaded these local sports heroes in front of their weeping fans.

Bureaucrats in Black

            Though gainful employment is hard to find for most residents of Mosul or Raqqa, there is no shortage of bureaucrats. The Caliphate’s economic model is unique among terrorist organizations. One European observer opined that the Caliphate was a functioning state because it had “an administration, infrastructures, an education system, and a complaints bureau.” A Paris-based think tank estimated the State’s wealth at $2.2 billion in 2015.

            The State’s ownership of land, natural resources, and control of human capital give it a revenue stream, and the Caliphate cadre serve as administrators and managers. They issue and inspect numerous permits required to obtain basic goods, rent apartments, obtain medical care, and access transportation. The religious police are ubiquitous. Pedestrians are stopped and forced to present identification; these are usually shakedowns. Civil servants extort money from passersby to help fund State operations and to provide themselves with some spending money. Some of these civil servants speak French, English, German, or other European languages. This is because some are Western Jihadis.

            Bureaucrats were busy and creative in the early, victorious years, raising money for the State and paying themselves a livable salary. An early source of income was a “repentance” fee from those unconnected to the Caliphate. In 2015, the new conquerors imposed a one-time tax on those they deemed insufficiently Islamic. If they paid and repented, they were issued a repentance card. If they didn’t, they were beaten or killed. Some individuals and families who paid a smuggler's fee of several hundred dollars were able to leave.

            By spring 2016, the Islamic State had lost about 30 percent of the revenue it had collected in 2015 because oil sites had been bombed. Many people with taxable income in 2015 were much poorer a year later. However, bureaucrats continue to tax anyone and anything they can. They stop truck drivers for tax enforcement and impose a tax on anyone installing new satellite dishes or repairing broken ones. They stop men on the street and force them to recite the Koran; those who fail the test are fined or beaten. Sometimes they are shot.

            Some entrepreneurs trade in slaves on the internet. The most attractive virgins are auctioned to the highest bidders. Non-Muslim women have been awarded prizes in Koran-memorization competitions in Syria. Non-Muslim women arriving at the jail are given two choices: convert to Islam or refuse and be subjected to rape, slavery, and slow death. Women aged 20 to 30 are more prized and can fetch $84 for a bottle of high-end single-malt Scotch. A girl can be sold and resold by five or six different men. The phrase “smelling the girls” is slang for determining whether their hymens are intact. In a report by the British newspaper The Independent, surgery is forced on sex slaves to restore their virginity after every rape. Many of the captives try to kill themselves, and some succeed.

            Among the most notorious of the civil services is the all-women’s al-Khansaa unit, named for a bard of the first generation of Muslims. Tumadir bint Amr, or al-Khansaa, was Muhammad’s favorite poet. Today, her name lives on in the al-Khansaa (often spelled Al-Khansaa or Al-Khansa) women’s unit. It was formed in early 2014 to expose men who dressed as women to escape.

            Today, they enforce a morality code for women. Al-Khansaa’s mission has expanded to include operating brothels and prisons and recruiting women to join the Caliphate’s ranks. There are many Western fighters in al-Khansaa. British women work as “recruiting sergeants” for the State. Its leadership in 2015 and 2016 was heavily British.

            Women are terrified of brigade members who can stop, frisk, and beat any woman they choose. They sometimes inflict collective punishment. Some Al-Khansaa members operate covertly, moving between different shopping stands and waiting lines to listen in on conversations that might reveal hostility to the State. To keep Yazidi slaves sexually available, the State forces abortions. When birth-control pills are available, the prettier Yazidi sex slaves are forced to take them.

“ISIS is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust.”  V. S. Naipaul, March 2015

Introduction

            Earlier chapters detailed the Caliphate’s geography, philosophy, origins, and support base. They surveyed tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the West and observed the lures of the Caliphate. This chapter returns to Mesopotamia and walks the besieged streets of Raqqa, Mosul, and other Caliphate towns to examine the lifestyles of those under the sway of the Islamic State.

Daily Life

“We are afraid to leave our house—they are degrading Islam.” Maisaa, Raqqa resident

“It looked so beautiful the sisters and I joked around and called it the New York City of Syria.

Umm Haritha, Raqqa resident

This is what daily life is like. You wake up in the morning and if you don’t hear the sound of shelling, or a jet breaking the sound barrier, you feel like it could be a good day.”   Abu Hadi, a resident of Raqqa, 2015

            Westerners who travel to Planet Caliphate find lifestyles very different from those they knew at home. With its bodies strewn in the streets, sex-slave auctions, public executions, random beatings, and deteriorated infrastructure, Raqqa is unlike anything most Europeans could imagine. Circumstances are often worse in rural areas because there are few public services. Like something out of the Black Death of medieval Europe, rotting corpses are a common sight, and there is a constant reek of the dead in the streets. Some of the conditions are so vile that Caliphate cadre leave, if only temporarily, the towns they conquered because of the stench of decaying corpses.

            The Caliphate is often very open about its killings. In the twentieth century, some states used the fog of war to hide their butcheries. Behind the doors of Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison or the gates of German concentration camps, Nazis and Communists veiled some of their slaughters. Not so the Caliphate. Its leaders bask in their flamboyant cruelty, regularly filming beheadings, shootings, stonings, and other methods of murder, including throwing people off buildings and setting them on fire. From spring 2014 to spring 2016, the Caliphate executed over 4,000 people and often made little attempt to hide the acts.

            In some parts of the Caliphate, public killings have a circuslike atmosphere. Young boys, sometimes barely taller than the rifles they wield, shoot other boys at point-blank range to the applause of their Caliphate leaders. Smiling, handicapped men in wheelchairs fire into groups of young men accused of spying, in a disturbing promotion of the Caliphate’s value of “equal opportunity,” according to Human Rights Watch.

            Some infamous centers of brutality have developed their own sobriquets. Raqqa’s central square has become known as Hell Square, which is where the State publicly executes people.

There was a celebrity torturer, known as “the Bulldozer” or “the Monster,” who administered Caliphate justice until he was captured. He boasted a fan club of admiring boys and young men. A mammoth of a man, he was the dean of the Caliphate’s “Chopping Committee.” He amputated hands or feet, sometimes both, and even heads. In April 2016, he killed a man accused of being a magician. The Bulldozer was caught in June 2016, tossed half-naked into the back of a truck, and hauled away by Syrian forces.

            There was another pinup killer in the Caliphate, who, like the Bulldozer, enjoyed celebrity and had a short shelf life. The photogenic Caliphate killer known as the Desert Lion is profiled below.

Profile Eighteen: Abu Waheeb—The Lion of the Desert

            Shaker Wahib, also known as Abu Waheeb, was a heartless man, dead at thirty, who lived his short life in rage. Born in 1986, the former computer science student savored the brutality he inflicted as a Caliphate leader. He basked in the heroic image his den of Caliphate cubs held of him. He was a tough jihadist, and by his mid-twenties, he had been arrested by US authorities in Iraq. As part of al-Qaeda, he was captured by US forces in 2006. Later, he escaped from a high-security prison to become a leader in the Islamic State.

            He became a local celebrity in 2013 when he was photographed interrogating three Syrian lorry drivers by the side of the road. Seemingly spontaneously, he shot them in the back of the head, and viewers began to speculate as to why. Unlike other State soldiers, he often showed his face. He challenged Western fighters to kill him. This vanity, like Jihadi John’s, ultimately proved self-destructive.

            Waheeb was al-Baghdadi’s personal assistant, and both survived a U.S. drone attack in Nineveh. But in May 2016, his luck ran out. The Pentagon confirmed he had been killed. A U.S. Department of Defense spokesperson said, “On May 6, a coalition airstrike targeted Abu Waheeb. . . . It is dangerous to be an ISIL leader in Iraq and Syria nowadays.”

Cruelty Was Not in Their Nature

            A final reason Westerners want to come home is the realization that they are not emotionally suited for the cruelty of the State. Some Western Jihadis relish the brutality they inflict on their enemies. Sadists are comfortable in the Caliphate today. But many people cannot witness this cruelty without becoming traumatized. The reality of war is not what they expected.

            The State requires recruits to prove allegiance by hurting people. Some eagerly do so. One Caliphate supporter was prepared to kill humans by slitting the throats of rabbits. Later, he would stab to death a French police officer and his wife in Paris in the summer of 2016.

            Many recruits realize that killing people would be too difficult. In the words of one recruit, “They told us, ‘When you capture someone, you will behead them.’ But as for me, I have never even beheaded a chicken. It is not easy . . . I can’t do that.” A New Yorker who joined and then left the State in 2016 warned his fellow Americans to “avoid the worst decision” he ever made. “I did see severed heads placed on spiked poles . . . I just blocked them out.” Some beheadings are shown on the Caliphate-produced snuff films with names such as “Harvest of the Apostates.”

            Sadism has its own dark humor in the Islamic State. A deserter described a prank at a water well in a small town called Hute. State security personnel would take blindfolded prisoners and tell them that they were free to leave but not to remove the blindfold until they had been walking for a few minutes. When the prisoners took a few steps forward, they would fall into a deep well, to the laughing delight of Caliphate spectators. They would die quickly or slowly. “It smells horrible because of all the corpses inside the well. I know that over 300 people were thrown into that well.”

            For many Western recruits, there is first an initial shock, followed by the numbing effect created by constant carnage, and sometimes feelings of guilt.  One woman cannot escape the memory of the pained expressions on the faces of women whom she hurt. She is remorseful that she served in al-Khansaa, an all-women religious enforcement brigade, and that she harmed people in enforcing virtue. She flogged women, sometimes delivering sixty lashes, for failed escape attempts. Wearing inappropriate clothes brought forty hits. “What upset me most was lashing old women when they weren’t wearing the proper clothes.” She said, “We’d lash them and humiliate them.”

            Al-Khansaa militants disfigure women by pouring acid on their faces. There is also a dehumanization of girls and women that many Westerners have not experienced. Among the most horrific illustrations is the sexual slave market, which splits mothers from daughters. Girls are priced according to their attractiveness. Then they are raped and discarded.

 A Syrian woman, racked by guilt for her earlier support of the State, warned, “The Caliphate is not what you think it is. Women are whipped, sold, and stoned. Corpses are on display publicly for weeks.”

            Sometimes it is difficult to know the truth. Those who are arrested upon return have every incentive to downplay their militancy and emphasize their compassion. A twenty-five-year-old German joined the Caliphate and then slipped back into Germany, where he was betrayed to the police. He confessed his service for the State, but said that he never took the oath of loyalty and that he only fired a single round in combat, which was aimed at an empty building. German prosecutors could not prove that he had hurt anyone in the Middle East. Had he done so, it is not likely that he would have volunteered the information and risked a stiffer prison sentence.

            Some Westerners escape the Caliphate. One British escapee explained, from hiding in Turkey, that she feared for her life every day. She was convinced that the State is tracking her down as a traitor. “I am a young girl. I want to live my life. I want to travel, go to cafes, meet friends like any normal girl.” Another said, “This is not the 1001 Nights.”

Summary

            Psychological and social drivers will continue to attract and repel Westerners. Those who are sadistic or driven to kill non-Muslims will find ample opportunities to do so in the Caliphate. For women who want to perform the sexual Jihad, there will be men available in Syria and Iraq. But many Western women will find life in the Caliphate onerous. Shukee Begum, a thirty-three-year-old British mother and university graduate, warns of the “gangster kind of mentality among the single women there.” She explained that the Caliphate was not “my cup of tea.” By summer 2016, the State responded to the Western flight by burying defectors alive, burning them to death, shooting them, or being macabrely creative with their killing skills.

            But some Westerners are elated with their new lives in the Caliphate, finding the prestige, power, and camaraderie that eluded them in the West. In Raqqa, a young woman phoned her European mother, who was weeping at the other end of the line, and said that she had not traveled to Syria just to return to Europe. She was at home in the Caliphate and there to stay.

A Woman’s World within a Man’s World

“It’s not Sharia that men scream or talk to us in the street. It’s not. I feel increasingly sad here now. There is so little respect for us.” A foreign fighter

“I know it may be shirk [idolatry] but sometimes I do miss Starbucks. The coffee here is beyond wretched.” Western woman called GreenBirdofDabiq

            By their own accounts, many female foreign fighters travel to the Caliphate to escape unwanted attentions of men. But, according to many tweets, Western women do not find the sanctuary they expect. For example, in August 2015, a Swedish woman moaned, “Seriously, I am getting so tired of many men muhajirin [emigrants] now. I feel harassed so often now. Women can’t do this or that. What is the point?”

            British girls are urged to take lingerie with them as they travel to Syria to marry Islamic State fighters.  One blogger suggests that women should bring as much milk as possible, but that hair straighteners and deodorant are available. Many Western women never fully adjust to Jihadi living. They do not like to share their husbands with other women. Young women in search of benevolent and “caring” mother figures may be similarly lured. Sometimes they find them. But cowives are not always friends; they compete against each other for their husband’s affections and lovemaking and for prestige and place in the household. Some of the household chores have a morbid twist; for example, the more talented seamstresses are impressed into sewing suicide vests.

            Sometimes Western girls and women are trapped in the Caliphate. Two early Western Caliphate volunteers were Samra Kizinovic (sometimes spelled Kesinovic) and her friend Sabina Clemovic (sometimes spelled Selimovic). Samra was sixteen and Sabina fifteen when they left their homes in Vienna in April 2014. First, they wanted to find husbands. The girls were very pretty, particularly Samra, who was given the moniker “Caliphate’s queen of beauty.”

            The promised adventure soon turned sour. When they realized they had made a mistake, they contacted their parents and pled to go home. They never would return. According to Kurdish sources, Samra, the fair-haired, blue-eyed young beauty, was dead by summer 2015. Her friend would die, too. According to the source, they were beaten to death.

            One woman who did make it out had a similar experience. Convert Sophie Kasiki, whose French husband was an atheist, traveled to Syria to live in “paradise.” She took their four-year-old son to look for “ISIS Prince Charming.” What she found was a prison, from which she eventually escaped. “I will always feel bad about taking my son to this hellish nightmare.”

<B>Reason Two—Fear<\>

            A second reason for wanting to leave the Caliphate is fear. Some Western men and women live in constant fear and would like to escape the Caliphate. One young man wrote, “They want to send me to the front, but I don’t know how to fight.” Westerners discover, often too late, that fellow Jihadis are killed for trivial offenses. Those who ask to return home are sometimes forced into suicide operations The Islamic State kills anyone from their own cadre who tries to leave. It has executed at least one hundred of its own foreign fighters who tried to flee Raqqa. Some make it out of Syria, but some are stranded in Turkey, where they are hunted down by agents of the State. By summer 2016, they were killing relatives of escapees. As one man said, “They got stricter as they worried we’d rebel, burning people alive and cutting people’s throats.”

            Western fighters do not know whom to trust. One described the situation: “It [the Caliphate’s security and intelligence service(s)] is a highly organized body, with very strong discipline. Everybody spies on everybody else. ”There is cybersecurity. In the shadowy world, cybercafes are often the only way Westerners can communicate with their friends and family.

For this reason, the Caliphate’s security operatives have installed keystroke-logging software.

            In summer 2015, the Caliphate tightened surveillance over Raqqa, the Caliphate’s capital. One year later, Raqqa was under regular and armed guards, increased checkpoints, and tightened security. The Caliphate has counterintelligence capabilities and uses double agents to unmask those persons and groups it considers subversive or untrustworthy. They deploy cadre members in the streets and cybercafes to infiltrate underground networks that organize foreigners’ departures. They regularly use double-agent operations to trap would-be deserters. Without passports or the ability to speak Arabic, some Westerners are too scared to try to leave. Others just disappear.

            This was the case with Zora, a girl from the French suburbs who left for Syria after turning fourteen. She had been recruited by three other women and, as of late 2015, lived in a communal setting with about fifty other girls and young women, mostly from Europe. They were heavily guarded and rarely permitted to leave their restricted living quarters. She and other females were, according to Zora, forced to watch beheadings and were often awoken by bomb blasts. She hoped to return to France, and her father offered to pay for anything. He sent her a scanned copy of her birth certificate in case she escaped. But he stopped hearing from her. “I call every morning. I’m waiting for her to get back online.”

            Most escapees must reach Turkey, where consular offices can assist them. Defections began as a trickle and then poured by spring 2016. Defectors arrive in singles, doubles, or small groups, usually disheveled and desperate. As one would-be defector explained in June 2016, “We don’t know where to go. We want to go further away, but Europe is too expensive,” he said. “We know people are after us and want to kill us. We feel lost.”

            Mohimanul Alam Bhuiya, a twenty-five-year-old former Brooklyn resident, is also certain that Caliphate gunmen are determined to kill him. From Syria, he emailed the FBI to “extract” him and bring him home. In high school, he wrote glowing term papers on World War II leaders of democracy, Churchill and Roosevelt. Subsequently, he converted to Islam and the Caliphate; today, he misses democracy.

 –

“The Revolution is like Saturn. It devours its own Children.” Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, 1835

“My iPod is broken. I want to come back.” A young French Jihadist’s tweet to his parents in France

            The first three parts of this chapter discussed the broad groupings of reasons why Westerners travel to the Caliphate. The chapter will now turn to reasons why some of them want to leave the Caliphate and return to their former homes.

Three Reasons for Wanting to Leave the Caliphate

            Some Westerners who have traveled to the Caliphate are happy there and do not want to leave. They have built new lives and found important positions. Some Westerners have died, often in combat, and are buried in what became their homeland. But many have not found what they hoped to find in the Caliphate and want to return to the West after a grim life. The diehard British Jihadis fighting for the State call their homesick comrades “mummy-boys.” It is hard to gauge how many or what proportion of those Western émigrés want to leave the Caliphate. Those who try to break out are often killed or threatened. Some are caring for their children and would not escape without ensuring their safety. There are three reasons they want to come home: disappointment, fear, and the belief that cruelty was not in their nature.

Reason One—Disappointment and Discomfort

“Syrian woman backbiting us [me and my Australian sister] while we’re sitting in front of her, thinking that I don’t speak Arabic.” A British woman called Umm Rayyan

            For some Westerners, there is a gap between what they expected in the Caliphate and what they found. Many did not find the enchanting village they were promised. The roasting temperatures and inadequate air conditioning are enervating. An Australian woman, “mother of the seeker of martyrdom,” carped about the blazing summer sun: “The heat in Sham [Syria] is shocking. I’m thinking to change my kunya [name] to Umm [mother] Sweat. Over this heat.”

            The sweltering heat creates ideal conditions for exotic bugs and diseases, including neglected tropical diseases largely unknown in the West, to flourish. Many Europeans in Syria today do not understand the cause of their skin sores. For example, a deadly flesh-eating disease, leishmaniasis, is carried by a sand fly that feasts on the corpses strewn in the streets by the State’s fighters. After devouring the dead, the bugs bore into the living.

            The searing temperatures, boutique diseases, and sand flies are not advertised in the Caliphate’s recruitment brochures. Nor is the mundanity awaiting many Western recruits. Some have blogged that their assigned tasks are menial or unfulfilling. There are a few luxury goods or cars. Male fighters are offered beautiful, nubile brides as well as sex slaves, but many are not as eye-catching or sexually enthusiastic as promised. An Australian recruiter preparing to leave for Syria and join his comrades canceled his plans when he heard about the squalid conditions in which he would live. They slept on “spongy” mattresses and took showers with dirty buckets of water. They also had no toilet paper.

            Those who come dream of becoming warriors, but instead they launder clothes, cook, and clean up after others. One fighter complained about cleaning weapons and transporting dead bodies from the front. He said, “Winter’s arrived here. It’s begun to get really hard.” A South African returning from the Caliphate said, “Much of the Islamic State’s appeal to outsiders is built on half-truths and propaganda. It’s no surprise that reality did not live up to the illusion.”

            An American Jihadi escaped from Syria, in part, because he was forced to study Islam for eight hours each day. A Virginian, he had earned a degree at a community college and worked as a teller at a local bank, but he was not academically inclined. He hoped to fight for Islam in the State, but was forced to study the religion instead. He was captured by the Kurdish Peshmerga and confessed that he could not endure the daily Koranic memorization and regurgitation. It became maddening. He also missed smoking. “My message to the American people is that life in Mosul is really, really bad.”

Beyond the weather, diseases, and tedious lifestyle, many Westerners are also astonished by the hatred locals show them. Westerners expect to be welcomed as liberators but are seen as occupiers and thieves. They have heard comments such as “You are here to sabotage my country; you are coming to force something on us.” State leaders explain to new Western recruits that some Syrians are not delighted by their presence. A Caliphate-produced book, Culture Clash: Understanding the Syrian Race, aims to lessen the culture shock.

In addition to the brutality, some Westerners are repulsed by the manners of their compatriots. They find Middle Easterners, particularly Arabs, vulgar and inconsiderate. One Briton blogged about the initial shock and steady fatigue he experienced while grappling with boorish table manners, peevish behavior, and brazen theft of personal property.

Others who want to leave are killed by their fellow fighters. This likely happened to “Florent,” a Cameroonian who immigrated to Germany, where he was raised as a Christian. He converted to Islam at fourteen and left for Syria the following year. He died at seventeen, and his German hometown was unsure whether to hold a Christian or Islamic memorial service. His former Christian pastor decided to hold a Muslim service in his church to show “learning and respect among religions.”T

            In the United States, the parents of Shannon Maureen Conley had evidence that their girl was preparing to fight as a Jihadi. Only after they exhausted their pleas to their daughter did they contact the FBI, knowing she would be arrested. Her story and that of a Russian college student are presented below.

Profile Sixteen: An American and a Russian: Halima and Amina

Shannon/Halima

            Christian-raised Shannon Maureen Conley, a nineteen-year-old Denver suburbanite, planned to make herself useful to the Islamic State after she became a Muslim. Shannon changed her name to Halima, which is loosely translated as “mild-mannered” and “generous.” She announced to the world that she had become a “slave of Allah.”

            All this was a surprise to some of those who had known her as a girl, well before she became Halima. Her neighbors commented that Shannon had undergone a drastic transformation late in high school. A neighbor related, “I would see her in shorts and, then, all of a sudden, she started wearing those [Islamic] clothes.” She found a new identity in Islam as she entered adulthood.

            Halima did not keep her newfound faith to herself. At Faith Bible Chapel, near her home, she made her presence known. Wearing a hijab and a backpack, she drew the pastor’s attention by adopting a curious hostility. A volunteer at the church’s small café noticed that Conley ordered biscuits and gravy one morning. However, Shannon became angry when she learned that her meal contained meat, and she threw it away. She also made political comments that alarmed churchgoers. She was asked not to return.

            The FBI intervened, interviewed her and her parents, and advised her not to make statements that could easily be construed as threatening. But she told the FBI, “If they [churchgoers] think I’m a terrorist, I’ll give them something to think I am.” The FBI monitored Halima and spoke to her nine times. They understood that she intended to travel to Syria. They were right.

            There was an element of romance, of sorts, to Shannon’s road to Jihad. She fell hard for a man she had never met in person. On the internet, she spooned her affections to a man she believed to be a fellow traveler. Her paramour and coconspirator boasted that he was an active Caliphate fighter. In turn, she crowed that she had attended a US Army Explorers camp and would use that training to wage Jihad against nonbelievers. She was also certified in shooting skills by the National Rifle Association. They had much in common. He proposed marriage, and she accepted. They aspired to meet and marry in Syria and then to fight for the Caliphate. She would cook and nurse injured Jihadis; he would kill the enemies of the State. But before traveling to Syria, Conley needed to prepare.

            Shannon’s father discovered her plan and notified the FBI, which arrested her at the Denver airport. In her luggage, agents found several CDs and DVDs labeled “Anwar al-Awlaki,” a leading propagandist for Islamic violence. She also carried a list of contacts, one of whom was the man she planned to marry. Shannon did not make it to the Middle East or get married. She was sentenced to four years in federal prison. As for the reaction of those who knew her? The church volunteer who had served Shannon the biscuit she had thrown in the trash with scorn said of her, “I feel sorry for her. She needs a lot of prayer.”

Amina

            A young Russian woman followed a path similar to Shannon’s. With a soft smile and a broad Slavic face, the nineteen-year-old Varvara Karaulova looked more like a Russian coed than a Jihadi aspirant. She was both. Varvara was enrolled at one of Russia’s most respected universities, Moscow State University, where she studied Arabic and philosophy. She had already mastered French and English, and her intellectual curiosity led her to the Middle East. Her Facebook profile lists her as liking authors J. R. R. Tolkien and the leading Russian writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov. But in late May 2015, she would be arrested, along with other Russians, while trying to infiltrate Syria from Turkey.

            Her father, Pavel, said, “She’s always home studying... she’s so trustworthy. But somehow she got twisted into this.” Varvara’s friends observed that she began acting and dressing differently after she began taking Arabic classes at her university. She grew more distant from non-Muslims and began wearing the hijab. Then, a week before she left, Pavel noticed she wasn’t wearing her cross necklace. “She said the chain broke,” he said. She changed her name to Amina and left for Syria.

            Interpol detained her when she tried to cross the border from Turkey to Syria illegally. Varvara was deported back to Russia. Her father was relieved yet despaired. “I just had no idea. This should be a lesson for all of us.”

            Siblings and friends of Western foreign fighters are surprised, too. They cannot explain the sadism they see in their sons, daughters, or former friends. Maxime Hauchard, twenty-two, from a village in Normandy in northern France, was filmed decapitating a Syrian prisoner. Those who knew him in France could not understand why he would hurt anyone. A former neighbor speculated that Maxime must have been drugged.

            In Australia, one couple agonized over their daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchild. Australians Karen and Peter Nettleton’s daughter converted to Islam and, with her husband, took their five children to the Caliphate. The Nettletons’ heartrending case is presented below.

Profile Fifteen: The Despair of Grandparents

“I accept that some will be critical of my daughter, who followed her heart and has paid an enormous price. Mr. Abbott, I beg you, please help bring my child and grandchildren home.”

Karen Nettleton to the then Prime Minister Abbott

            Australian grandmother Karen Nettleton struggles to make sense of what went wrong with her daughter, Tara. What caused it? How did it happen? A next-door neighbor described Tara as polite and attractive, not very different from other girls in the neighborhood. One day, the neighbor noticed Tara wearing Islamic attire. He told her, “You are too pretty to wear those things.” After that, Tara never spoke to him again.

            Tara met a Muslim while she was still a teenager and had his baby at seventeen. They were high school sweethearts. Her heartthrob was Khaled Sharrouf, a man with a troubled past, drifting in and out of petty crime and abusing drugs. He was mentally ill, first diagnosed with depression and later with schizophrenia. The son of Lebanese parents, raised in a dysfunctional family, Sharrouf served time for stockpiling weapons. Before his release, he was put on medication, and in early 2009, physicians noted his “remarkable recovery.” Later, both Tara and Khaled embraced fundamentalist Islam and left for the Caliphate to build a life. And they, along with their children, became famous.

“That’s My Boy!!!”

            Karen Nettleton still cannot comprehend her daughter’s descent into sadism or her delight in global publicity. Partnering with her husband, Tara enslaved, raped, and beat women. They made this a family affair. One of their sons, a seven-year-old, held a severed head for a photo. Bursting with pride, Khaled shouted, “That’s my boy!” That caught the world’s attention when it was posted on Facebook.

            At thirty-one, Tara succumbed to complications from appendicitis. Her husband, Khaled, may be dead or alive; Western authorities are not sure. The eldest daughter, Zaynab, who had a child of her own, was killed by a drone.

            According to reports, four of Tara and Khaled’s five children and one granddaughter are still alive, likely in Raqqa, and Karen is desperate to rescue them. She fears the girls will be forced into sex slavery or begging. “I am devastated because I wasn’t able to be at my daughter’s side. I’m not able to be there for my grandkids and great-grandchild, who are suffering traumatic events outside their control.”

Level Three—Family Were Active Dissuaders

“It’s better not to live than to be the mother of a terrorist. You realize what a monster you gave birth to.” Shakhla Bochkaryova

            The third level of family involvement is family members who intervened to stop radicalization. One mother, Shakhla Bochkaryova, chained her twenty-year-old daughter, Fatima, to the apartment’s radiator to keep her from fleeing to Siberia and becoming the fourth wife of a Jihadi. Like other similarly distraught mothers, Shakhla witnessed the irreversible transformation of a fashion-conscious, head-turning young woman into a Caliphate-bound, hate-spewing Jihadi, yet she was powerless to leash her daughter. The mother said plaintively, “I looked at her, and I could no longer see my child. She was simply a shell of my daughter, no soul, no thoughts, no heart.” From Raqqa, Fatima cursed her mother, calling her an infidel murderer and threatening to kill her when the Caliphate conquers Europe.

“We have the unborn martyrs in our wombs.” A woman shouting at the Muslim Day Parade in New York City, 2015

            The previous chapter focused on the Islamic State’s foreign legion of Westerners. Chapter Five continues to discuss this cohort, with attention to parental involvement and disillusionment with the Caliphate’s cause and its comrades.

Level One—Family Are Primary Driver

“Oh Allah, I ask for a death in your path, and I ask for death in the country of your prophet . . . heaven, heaven, heaven . . . I swear, I can’t wait.” An Italian woman converted to Islam by her Tunisian husband in 2016

            Family involvement in the radicalization of their children varies widely. Some parents and other family members actively promote their children’s radicalization; some are unaware of the transformation, and some are aware and try to dissuade them from joining the Caliphate.

            On the first level, parents or family members are involved in radicalization and have actively encouraged and/or facilitated their kin’s participation in the State. As mentioned earlier, many Muslims feel segregated in Europe. At home and in school, children are “fed on a diet of Islam,” as revealed in British investigations. After the Second World War, Western European schools stressed assimilation and liberalism, but many European schools today foster segregation, and some promote Islamist supremacy. This isolation is encouraged by some Muslim families.

            Entire families leave Europe to fight in the Caliphate. Their neighbors notice that, one day, they simply vanish. Local children wonder why their playmates stopped coming to class and ask what happened to them. Rumors circulate, especially when the families seem very religious and aloof from non-Muslims. Some of the missing have appeared on social media, sharing stories and photographs of their new lives. For example, a British family of twelve issued a statement in July 2015 from Raqqa, saying they had escaped the “so-called freedom and democracy that was forced down our throats.” Safely ensconced in Raqqa, they asked their former British neighbors to join them there.

            Sometimes it is hard to discern parents’ agendas for their children. For example, the father of a “Jihadi bride” was unmasked when he was filmed marching in solidarity with Islamist radicals, including the killer of British soldier Lee Rigby. He also took his daughter with him on the march.

            Other times, secular-oriented parents become legally entangled in a sordid spectacle their children create. A case in point is the arrest of the parents of the white British Muslim convert Jack Letts, dubbed “Jihadi Jack.” Initially, the parents, John and Sally, middle-class Oxford residents, were shocked that their son had joined the State. The police warned them not to support their son, but John and Sally tried twice to send him 1,000 pounds. After the second attempt, they were arrested for “fundraising and arranging availability of money and property for use in terrorism.” Their son’s response? Jack said he hated them because they were nonbelievers. “I call them to Islam.”

            Other times, the children suffer. After a Caliphate-bound British mother was imprisoned in spring 2016, her three children were sent to live with relatives. In a family court at the Old Bailey, the judge told the mother, “You knew perfectly well of your husband’s dedication to terrorism.” The children were kept from the Islamic State, but their lives were changed forever.

Level Two—Family was unaware of Radicalization

“ISIS is stealing our children, draining our life force.” Veronique Roy, whose French son was killed in the Islamic State, 2016

            On the second level of family involvement, family members were unaware of the person’s plans to leave for the Caliphate. These family members are usually shocked and emotionally traumatized when they learn what has happened. Despite therapy, some do not fully recover and are unable to shake an overwhelming sense of betrayal and loss. Many blame themselves.

            An Australian man was distraught when his twenty-six-year-old ex-wife abandoned their children and left for Syria. Jasmina Milovanov, a convert to Islam, left her children with a sitter, promising she would return soon. She never came home. Her ex-husband said, “I can’t believe that she left these beautiful children.” Similarly, a British Muslim was blindsided when his wife took their children to the Middle East on Valentine’s Day, 2015. Desperately, he asked, “My question is why did she go there? She has two kids, she has a family, and this house is in her name. Why has she left everything?”

            Mario Sciannimanica was born in Italy and raised in Germany. His mother was shaken when he left for the State, where he recruited fellow Europeans through German and Italian publications. Desperate to hear from her son, she wrote to Germany’s leading Salafi website: “Please, I beg you, anybody who is close to him, let us know how he is and whether we can do anything for him. In the name of God.”

This concludes a reading  from Chapter Five of "Cauldron of Terror Gaza, Hamas, Israel, and the World," by Mark Silinsky, published by Pen and Sword. If you enjoyed them, please consider subscribing to continue listening to other chapters. The book is available online or at major bookstores worldwide. Also, Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World," will be available for purchase in early spring 2026. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.  sulting, thank you for listening.  

“I’m glad I’ve lived to see an enemy prepared to die for something other than their bank balance.” Ian Brady, infamous British Moors murderer, referring to the Caliphate, 2016

            Sometimes called “psychopaths,” sometimes “sociopaths,” and historically called “evil,” they are men and women without remorse. Though they are not necessarily mentally ill, they lack a conscience. Lacking empathy, they can harm, betray, or kill people, even family members. But there is no current expert consensus that Westerners who fight for the Caliphate are significantly more psychopathic than other cohorts.

            Nevertheless, many of the foreign fighters display several classic traits of the psychopath. They enjoy hurting people and lying about activities and conditions in the Islamic State. Some have poor behavioral skills and act impulsively. They were juvenile delinquents and indulgent in parasitic lifestyles in their Western homes. They have not shown remorse for their harm to others.

            There are also female sadists, some of whom capture headlines in European tabloids. Some display great pleasure in the suffering of non-Muslims, much like the Nazi concentration camp guards. These “emotional vampires” sometimes brag about killing non-Muslims and regale their online audience with the details of torture. It is difficult to explain this sadism exclusively in religious terms because they take ostentatious joy in torture. Nonetheless, they justify mass murder, rape, and enslavement with Koranic verses. As with their male counterparts, some of the women have fun chuckling about bloody beheadings, regretting only that they did not commit the murder themselves. The husband-and-wife San Bernardino couple who killed their coworkers and abandoned their young child relished the planning and execution of their killing spree.

            However, other Westerners who serve the Caliphate are not abnormally antisocial in the context of life in the Islamic State. They cooperate with their companions in the Caliphate. A psychopath would not likely risk death for a cause that did not directly benefit him or her. Psychopaths are driven only by advancing their personal interests. Further, many foreign fighters in the Caliphate are protective of their fellow soldiers. Some have exposed themselves to danger for the Islamic State. Some have been self-sacrificial. Many more have emotionally bonded with their comrades, and a psychopath would not. But there are some psychopaths in the Caliphate, and they are profiled below.

Profile Fourteen: Very Cruel Men

Mehdi Nemmouche

            If there was a club for sadists in the Caliphate, Mehdi Nemmouche would certainly be a prominent member. By his own account, he relished torture. Well known to French police authorities, Nemmouche had been in and out of prison much of his twenty-nine years. That is where he was radicalized. Some of his convictions were petty, such as driving without a license, but he was also sentenced for armed robbery, which landed him a five-year sentence. Sometime in early 2013, Nemmouche went to Syria to fight for the Jihad. He flourished there.

            He was more than a garden-variety thug-turned-Islamist. Nemmouche was particularly sadistic toward captives, even by the brutal standards of the Caliphate’s foreign legion. Nemmouche delighted in torturing European captives: “The torture went on all night, until prayers at dawn,” a French survivor wrote in Le Point magazine. “The howls of the prisoners alternated with shouts in French.” He is also supposed to have serenaded his captives with his own rendition of Charles Aznavour love songs.

            But at some point, Nemmouche fell from the favor of the Caliphate’s leaders. French criminologist Alain Bauer says, “ISIS did not like him at all.” Bauer compares him to Zacarias Moussaoui, sometimes called “the twentieth hijacker” from the 9/11 plot, who was so crazy that al Qaeda leadership didn’t know what to do with him. In June 2014, French police in Marseilles arrested Mehdi Nemmouche for mass murder. He was the primary suspect in the Brussels Jewish Museum attack of May 2014, in which three Jews were shot dead. Today, Nemmouche sits in prison.

Mohammed Emwazi

“I’ve seen it before, you all squirm like animals, like pigs.”  Mohammed Emwazi referring to beheadings

            Like Nemmouche, Kuwaiti-born Mohammed Emwazi enjoyed hurting people. He certainly displayed the classic signs of psychopathy: lack of empathy, grandiosity, glibness, and a need for power. He was sadistic by any standard, and it was he who cut off the heads of Western captives for a global audience on YouTube.

            Emwazi’s family moved to Britain when he was six years old. He was smart enough to complete a college degree in computer science, and his primary- and secondary-school teachers remember him as quiet, lonely, and quick to take offense. In high school, Emwazi underwent anger management therapy after fighting with fellow students, and when he drank he had difficulty controlling his temper. He found Islam and became a leader in an Islamist sleeper cell, “The London Boys” and he raised money for the Jihadis.

            If he was uncomfortable in Britain, he appears to have been at ease in Syria. A released hostage related that the British John Cantlie and American Jim Foley were forced to compose a song titled “Welcome to the Lovely Hotel Osama.” They sang it to the mocking delight of the three British Jihadis who guarded them most of the time. These three were collectively known as “the Beatles.” Mohamed Emwazi was dubbed “Jihadi John” after John Lennon. Another Jihadi, dubbed “George,” was particularly fond of the song: “George shouted, ‘Anyone who doesn’t know the words, I’ll kick to death.’” Another torturer was Najim Laachraoui. He would leave the Middle East and travel to Europe, where he would die in the Brussells airport attack in 2016, which killed thirty-two people and injured more than 300.

            Jihadi John enjoyed torturing other captives. The group’s twenty-three hostages suffered constant beatings and degradations, and one survivor likened their condition to that of former presidential aspirant Senator John McCain at the hands of the Vietnamese communists. They called their digs the “ISIS Hilton.”

            Emwazi fathered a son in Syria, who is entitled to British citizenship. But the boy will never know his father, who was “vaporized” in an air strike in November 2015. “Vaporized” is current slang for killing people through drone-launched munitions. Emwazi knew he was being hunted by British and US Special Forces. He knew that modern technology and first-rate policing revealed his identity, despite his camouflage. But in his skyscraping vanity, he repeatedly gave away his positions. A New York baseball cap, his signature piece of apparel, may have identified him to targeteers, according to one British tabloid.

            Two MQ-9 Reaper drones locked in on him and flashed the “Beatle’s” image to Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. As Emwazi got in a car at the Islamic courts, two Hellfire missiles exploded atop his car. Few were surprised when the twenty-seven-year-old former Londoner was “vaporized.” The State later eulogized him as an “honorable brother.” But a military spokesperson for the country that killed him had a different take: “This guy was a human animal, and killing him is probably making the world a better place.”

Summary

            Westerners will still be drawn to the Caliphate. There will always be a desire among the young to live in a perfect society—a utopia. However, the image of Raqqa as an Islamic utopia, or even a habitable environment, has been tarnished. Some will be driven by Jihad and will come to fight. Some, like Thundercat, will die in battle and, in the words of the Islamic State, be finally at peace with Allah.

Bar girl to Johnny:        “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”   

            Johnny to bar girl: “Whaddya got?      From the film The Wild One, 1953

“If you’re scrambling for your identity, ISIS is the bright flame to follow.” Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, 2015

            Young Westerners with troubled pasts look to the Caliphate for a new beginning. Some seek to shed their past, embrace a new religion, adopt an Islamic name, join a new religious community, and move to a new land. Often, these young people were deeply troubled before their radicalization. Some drank excessively and abused and sold drugs. Later in life, many shed this lifestyle and image. Those who travel to Syria leave behind criminal records, dissolute lifestyles, toxic family associations, and weak employment prospects.

            A case in point is the Spaniard “Nabil,” who oscillated between legitimate and criminal behavior. His profile resembles that of some of the more antisocial and marginally functional characters who have joined the State. A small-time drug dealer in his youth, Nabil later joined the army, where he began trafficking in narcotics. Soon, he was investigated for “psychological-physical deficiencies” and, eventually, cashiered for stealing and dealing in medicine. He then shifted his criminal activities to support the Caliphate through smuggling and logistical support. He married a Muslim convert, and at age twenty-nine, he was arrested by Spanish authorities before he left for Syria. The troubled Nabil was the first Spanish soldier arrested for aiding the Caliphate.

            There have been many similar cases. Another young Westerner who left for Syria for a fresh start was Damian Boudreau, a Canadian. As a young man, he was haunted by hallucinations of demons and tried to kill himself by drinking antifreeze. He recovered and retreated to his bedroom, where he found Islam online. He told his mother he was leaving for Egypt to study Islam, then went to Syria to fight and was killed there. At first, Damian called and e-mailed his mother regularly, but the frequency and tone of his correspondence changed. He invited his half-brother to join him in battle. Damian wrote in stilted prose, “As for how you worry about me and love me, it is known to me. These are not new pieces of information.” His mother confided, “That’s when I realized that my son disappeared, that there was somebody new that’s in his body.” His mother, Christianne, described her pain: “It’s like being in a really black, dark movie and you can’t get out; it’s like some sort of prison. No questions ever answered.”

            Lukas Dam, a working-class boy from Copenhagen, followed a path similar to Damian’s. He suffered from both Asperger’s syndrome and attention deficit disorder. He, like Boudreau, went to Syria to join the State, where he started a new life. Soon, his new life was over; he was killed in combat.

            Other forms of radicalization move quickly. According to the French minister of interior, the man who drove a truck through a crowd in Nice, killing eighty-four people, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, rediscovered his faith very quickly.

            As with men, young women try to reinvent themselves before heading to the Middle East. This is what happened to the rebellious, tattooed “Betsy.” At twenty-one, Betsy dreamed of becoming a hip-hop superstar: Holland’s Eminem. She enjoyed narcotics and the nightlife. Then Betsy found religion and began dressing in full Muslim robes. After a family fight, she left for Syria. Her mother said, “I don’t blame Islam. I blame the people who made her believe in a radical way of life.”

The Caliphate uses its Western-raised recruits to spot emotional vulnerabilities through social media. Its cells in the West draw lonely hearts to the Caliphate’s cause, but they also attract young men and women who appeared perfectly normal to most of those who knew them.

Profile Twelve: Sally—Krunch and Carnage

            Sally Jones, a former rocker in an all-girl band, would appear to be an unlikely candidate for Jihad. Born in Kent and white, Jones enjoyed some wild times in her youth. In a performance from the early 1990s posted on YouTube, Sally plays lead guitar, wearing a leather miniskirt, in a group called Krunch. She also dabbled in the black art of witchcraft. One neighbor described her as “scatty,” but others remember her as an animal lover with a particular affection for cats. Long-term employment proved difficult for her. She went on welfare and accepted relief from churches.

            Forty-something Sally took up with Junaid Hussain, a computer-savvy man originally from Birmingham and twenty years her junior. By summer 2014, Jones had become known worldwide as Umm Hussain al-Britani. She and her husband moved to Syria, where her bloodlust made her a headline in Britain’s tabloids. She tweeted, “You Christians all need beheading with a nice blunt knife and stuck on the railings at Raqqa . . . Come here I’ll do it for you!” There was more. Umm expressed her love for Osama bin Laden and contempt for Jews.

            When her cyber-hacking husband was killed by allied forces, she tweeted to the world that she had become a “black widow.” She would follow the path of the Chechen woman, Hawa Barayev, who blew herself up among Russian Special Forces, killing twenty-seven of them. As for her invitation for Christians to come and be beheaded, as of this writing, there have been no takers.

Deadly Women

            Some women, like some men, are sadistic and power hungry, and the Islamic State provides them with opportunities. The British “White Widow” Samantha Lewthwaite married one of the perpetrators of the 2005 London bombings. She developed a sinister and legendary status as one of the world’s most wanted women. The London University dropout is credited with killing over 400 people in coordination with the terrorist group al Shabaab. A senior Somali official called her “an evil person, but a very clever operator.” She is not known to be currently associated with the Caliphate.

            The middle-aged Belgian Muriel Degauque blasted herself into history, if only in a footnote, as the first known European Muslim female suicide bomber.  American Colleen LaRose, known as “Jihad Jane,” was sent to prison for planning to kill Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks.

            These three women represent a cross-section of Western society. Intelligent Lewthwaite attended university; ordinary Degauque was from the industrial working class; and pathetic LaRose had a pitiable childhood. All turned to Islam to fill a spiritual void, as has happened with many other Western women.

Psychological and Social Drivers—Peace Symbols and Black Flags

The heart’s longings lead the mind, and the existential filler of ISIS nourishes the desperate and vulnerable soul, however much one is surrounded by material comfort.

Collective judgments of four psychiatrists referring to why Westerners are drawn to the Caliphate, 2015

            The draw of utopia and the compulsion of Jihad explain two of the broad lures of the Caliphate. The third group of motivators is grounded in psychology and social themes. Anger at perceived discrimination, alienation, fatalism, and a need to belong to a mass movement are psychosocial drivers for some Western Muslims. Today’s generation of Western Muslims is more attracted to Jihad than that of their parents or grandparents.

            Western youth joining the Caliphate are usually eager to make war. Among young men, there is a hypermasculine and virile ethos. The State’s recruiting themes cultivate the image of the heroic horseman who is master of his environment and admired by his fellow warriors. Elizabeth van der Heide, of the Dutch Center for Terrorism and Counterterrorism, said young males see the war as a video game: “Those are primarily young people who relocate to the war game in Syria and Iraq from a video game.”

            Another study observed that the most effective recruitment approach is to target a candidate’s sense of self-worth. The study cited the Florida killer Omar Mateen as “the perfect fit” for the Caliphate’s approach. Young men who felt neglected or weak as boys can become a part of something powerful and victorious. One young man who was not weak but still needed a purpose in life was Thundercat, profiled below.

Profile Eleven: Thundercat! “A Prince of a Man”

“[He was] a prince who everyone on the street knew and greeted.”  A friend of Thundercat, 2015

            One Jihadi who fought for the State did not have an apparent need to validate his masculinity. He had repeatedly proven it in the ring as a two-time Thai boxing world champion from Germany. Valdet Gashi traveled to Syria with three other Thai boxers to fight with weapons, rather than fists.

            Gashi arrived in Germany from Albania as a six-year-old boy and was raised in a relatively secular home. As a young man, he shot up the kickboxing ranks, and the local boys described him as a “prince who everyone on the street knew and greeted.” He fought 152 fights under the name Thundercat.  Some of his fights were posted on YouTube, and his speed and style are clearly devastating.

            Thundercat married his local sweetheart and then sired two daughters. But the fighter was drawn to the German Islamic Salafist program called Read, and he developed a moral obligation to leave his wife and daughters and join the Caliphate to fight for Islam. He said he would rather die for Allah than live as a coward.

            In an interview in May 2015, Thundercat declared his respect for the State, which, in his view, was deeply misunderstood in the West. As a Muslim, he could only be happy by “doing something good for Islam.” But many of his fans were disappointed, and some Muay Thai fans hoped to strip him of his championship titles. His father was fed up, too. Enver Gashi said, “Valdet’s place is with us—with his children, his wife, and his parents. . . . I want him to stop this nonsense, and I hope he’ll come back to us one day, because his place is here and nowhere else.” But Thundercat never came home.

            The champ tweeted from Syria that he was patrolling the Euphrates River to intercept smugglers. “If I die while doing good, I am sure I will be happy.” He did die, killed in a mission in July 2015. His brother eulogized him on social media and prayed that he rest in peace. Thundercat’s fights were over.

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World,” will be available in spring 2026. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Deadly Women

            Some women, like some men, are sadistic and power hungry, and the Islamic State provides them with opportunities. The British “White Widow” Samantha Lewthwaite married one of the perpetrators of the 2005 London bombings. She developed a sinister and legendary status as one of the world’s most wanted women. The London University dropout is credited with killing over 400 people in coordination with the terrorist group al Shabaab. A senior Somali official called her “an evil person, but a very clever operator.” She is not known to be currently associated with the Caliphate.

            The middle-aged Belgian Muriel Degauque blasted herself into history, if only in a footnote, as the first known European Muslim female suicide bomber.  American Colleen LaRose, known as “Jihad Jane,” was sent to prison for planning to kill Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks.

            These three women represent a cross-section of Western society. Intelligent Lewthwaite attended university; ordinary Degauque was from the industrial working class; and pathetic LaRose had a pitiable childhood. All turned to Islam to fill a spiritual void, as has happened with many other Western women.

Psychological and Social Drivers—Peace Symbols and Black Flags

The heart’s longings lead the mind, and the existential filler of ISIS nourishes the desperate and vulnerable soul, however much one is surrounded by material comfort.

Collective judgments of four psychiatrists referring to why Westerners are drawn to the Caliphate, 2015

            The draw of utopia and the compulsion of Jihad explain two of the broad lures of the Caliphate. The third group of motivators is grounded in psychology and social themes. Anger at perceived discrimination, alienation, fatalism, and a need to belong to a mass movement are psychosocial drivers for some Western Muslims. Today’s generation of Western Muslims is more attracted to Jihad than that of their parents or grandparents.

            Western youth joining the Caliphate are usually eager to make war. Among young men, there is a hypermasculine and virile ethos. The State’s recruiting themes cultivate the image of the heroic horseman who is master of his environment and admired by his fellow warriors. Elizabeth van der Heide, of the Dutch Center for Terrorism and Counterterrorism, said young males see the war as a video game: “Those are primarily young people who relocate to the war game in Syria and Iraq from a video game.”

            Another study observed that the most effective recruitment approach is to target a candidate’s sense of self-worth. The study cited the Florida killer Omar Mateen as “the perfect fit” for the Caliphate’s approach. Young men who felt neglected or weak as boys can become a part of something powerful and victorious. One young man who was not weak but still needed a purpose in life was Thundercat, profiled below.

Profile Eleven: Thundercat! “A Prince of a Man”

“[He was] a prince who everyone on the street knew and greeted.”  A friend of Thundercat, 2015

            One Jihadi who fought for the State did not have an apparent need to validate his masculinity. He had repeatedly proven it in the ring as a two-time Thai boxing world champion from Germany. Valdet Gashi traveled to Syria with three other Thai boxers to fight with weapons, rather than fists.

            Gashi arrived in Germany from Albania as a six-year-old boy and was raised in a relatively secular home. As a young man, he shot up the kickboxing ranks, and the local boys described him as a “prince who everyone on the street knew and greeted.” He fought 152 fights under the name Thundercat.  Some of his fights were posted on YouTube, and his speed and style are clearly devastating.

            Thundercat married his local sweetheart and then sired two daughters. But the fighter was drawn to the German Islamic Salafist program called Read, and he developed a moral obligation to leave his wife and daughters and join the Caliphate to fight for Islam. He said he would rather die for Allah than live as a coward.

            In an interview in May 2015, Thundercat declared his respect for the State, which, in his view, was deeply misunderstood in the West. As a Muslim, he could only be happy by “doing something good for Islam.” But many of his fans were disappointed, and some Muay Thai fans hoped to strip him of his championship titles. His father was fed up, too. Enver Gashi said, “Valdet’s place is with us—with his children, his wife, and his parents. . . . I want him to stop this nonsense, and I hope he’ll come back to us one day, because his place is here and nowhere else.” But Thundercat never came home.

            The champ tweeted from Syria that he was patrolling the Euphrates River to intercept smugglers. “If I die while doing good, I am sure I will be happy.” He did die, killed in a mission in July 2015. His brother eulogized him on social media and prayed that he rest in peace. Thundercat’s fights were over.

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World,” will be available in spring 2026. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

“There are a lot of things about us women that sadden me, considering how men see us as rascals.”     Lysistrata, from the play Lysistrata by Arisotphanes”

            As the Greek play goes, Athenian women were fed up with the war against the Spartans. Lysistrata organized a sex strike to force their men to stop killing Spartans, who, according to plan, would stop killing Athenians in turn. The older Athenian women seized the state treasury. The men, without money to buy wine or women to enjoy, made peace with each other, laid down their arms, and reveled in Bacchus and women. But this is not the story of the Islamic State.

            In the Caliphate, sexual Jihad is the obligation for women and girls to provide male Jihadis with sexual outlets to relieve the pent-up frustrations brought on by combat. Sexual intercourse is a recurring theme in Islamic sacred texts—when to have it, with whom to have it, where to have it, and the consequences of having it improperly. All kinds of advice about sex are given by the Islamic State. Posters in public places in Mosul read, “We call upon the people of this country to bring their unmarried girls so they can fulfill their duty in sex Jihad for their warrior brothers in the city.”

            There is the “groupie” effect. Some women are drawn to the sexual Jihad because of the charisma and derring-do of the Caliphate’s alpha males. The Caliphate’s propagandists use “Jihotties” to play on the hormonal drives of young women and girls. The British comedian Shazia Mirza, mentioned earlier, stresses, “This is not about radicalization; its sexualisation.” The repressed, sexually driven teenage girls have built a fantasy world around their longing for romance and adventure. Mirza argued that for them, State fighters promise “no-guilt halal sex of which Allah approves.”

            The matrimonial pairing is sometimes facilitated by a “fixer,” who acts as a matchmaker. There is also an electronic facilitator, “Jihad Matchmaker.”  Women seeking husbands may submit a photo of themselves, and men may select a woman. Women already living in Syria have more options. As one female Jihadi tweeted, “They’ll get a male foreign fighter in a room, and the girls will all walk up and down covered, and the fighter will have the opportunity to look at their face, and he will choose one.”

            Photographs of young men with bandoleros crisscrossing their chests populate the Caliphate’s websites. This led a Saudi woman to divorce her husband and smuggle herself and her two children into Syria and then Iraq. Her aim was to marry Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the paladin of al Qaeda in Iraq.

            Another example is the case of a young Dutch woman who was arrested upon her return to Holland from Syria. Earlier, she had gone to Raqqa to marry a Dutch-Turkish jihadist who had served in the Dutch military. She found him irresistibly attractive. The young woman’s mother explained her daughter’s overheated imagination: “She saw him as a sort of Robin Hood.”

The mother made the dangerous trip to fetch her daughter from Syria. She succeeded, and the romantic adventure was over.

War Widows—“It’s Like a Celebration”

            The call for sexual Jihad has had some successes and failures. Besotted women have trekked to the Middle East, but their sojourns usually do not end in the Gothic romance they expected. Some are initially glad to sexually service the warriors, but most soon regret their decision.  Many of those who leave the relative comforts and security of the West soon begin to tweet their regrets to their parents and friends.

            Some of these Western women become widowed soon after marriage. Many cannot mourn men they did not know. One explained, “In the whole year I probably saw him for less than one month altogether. Then he was martyred.” She then married an Egyptian, who left her to return to Egypt. She did not love either man.

            Western widows, particularly the less attractive ones, need to wait for new husbands. But many widows see the wait as an act of piety. “It’s not hard [the wait] because it’s for the sake of Allah, we are happy to observe it. When one husband gets martyred, it’s like a celebration.” But others enjoy the lifestyle and do not mind the replicable husbands. One of them is Aqsa Mahmood.

Profile Ten: Aqsa Mahmood “You Are a Disgrace to Your Family and the People of Scotland”

“I will become a martyr.” —Aqsa Mahmood

            The Mahmood family of Glasgow, Scotland, was taken completely by surprise. The parents could not explain why their daughter, a twenty-year-old Aqsa (also spelled Aksa), vanished for Syria to kill for the Caliphate. Aqsa’s mother and father became particularly alarmed when they saw a photograph of her holding a severed head as a trophy.

            A girl of relative privilege, Aqsa had studied at a tony all-girls’ school, where, it is thought, she developed radical beliefs. Her high school friends described her as “ambitious and talented” and as a “normal girl.” In her final year of school, as she prepared to begin a radiology course, she began wearing a hijab. In November 2013, she withdrew from university and moved to Syria. Something had happened to her.

            By September 2014, Mahmood had a new family in Syria and was encouraging her Facebook fans to follow her lead: “The family you get in exchange for leaving the ones behind is like the pearl in comparison to the shell you threw away into the foam of the sea.” She married an Islamic State fighter in Syria, who was killed in battle, and she penned a survival guide for Jihadi war widows. Her blog commentary soon became morbid, and she became a leader of an all-women morality police force. She saluted her sisters’ “desires and cravings to participate in the battlefield and give away your blood.” She was in her element.

            Aqsa has developed an international fan club, but her parents have yet to join. Her mother and father openly and repeatedly pled to Aqsa to return home, where she would be forgiven and loved. They whispered that they had raised her “with love and affection in a happy home.”  But she no longer loves her parents; she belongs to the Caliphate. In her words, “I [belong] only to our beloved Ameer, destroyer of the enemies, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and to the Islamic State.”

            Aqsa’s parents’ initial hope turned to anger and then despair. They called her a “bedroom radical.” They also sent a message to Aqsa: “You are a disgrace to your family and the people of Scotland, your actions are a perverted and evil distortion of Islam.” Mr. Mahmood is haunted by the last words his daughter said to him. She promised, “I will see you on the day of judgment. I will take you to heaven, I will hold your hand. I will become a martyr.” According to her father, “That’s what she said.”

            By the time she was in her early twenties, Muslim convert Maria Giulia Sergio had become famous in her country of birth, Italy. She was also well known in her new home, the Islamic State, under her new name, Fatima. The former biotechnology student at the University of Milan said, “I can’t wait to die as a martyr,” according to L’Espresso magazine. Sergio celebrated the Charlie Hebdo killings. “When we behead someone, we’re obeying Sharia Law.”

            For Maria, Jihad became a family affair. She persuaded her entire Catholic family to convert to Islam. She also had success with her in-laws. This made news because the general pattern of family radicalization begins with parental pressure. But it was the young Maria who made Muslims of her family. She then traveled to Syria and beckoned her father, “Dad, you are called by Islam, you are the master at home: bring Mum here to Syria. You are her husband: She’s obliged to obey.”  Her mother and father tried to do so, but were held by the police. Five Albanian in-laws connected to Sergio’s husband were arrested for planning to join their daughter-in-law.

            While living in Italy, Maria sought to present Islam to her Italian compatriots. But not all Italians are enamored of Maria and her Islamist designs. In 2009, the fiery Muslima met her match with El Duce’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini. In the 1980s, Mussolini posed for European men’s magazines, sometimes without wearing a top. Decades later, the two sparred on television. Hijab-clad Maria lectured Mussolini on feminine decorum, insisting that women should never wear revealing clothes that might excite men. But Mussolini, today a right-oriented European parliamentarian, was unconvinced. She, as well as her maternal aunt, Sophia Loren, made no apologies for the beauty of a woman’s form.

Jihad—Duty, Honor, Caliphate

“There’s no life, no life without Jihad.”  A Briton found guilty of terrorism in 2014, explaining his motives to a court in London

            Some of the Caliphate’s recruiting tropes have timeless and universal appeal. These refrains are duty, honor, and country. Pericles’s funeral oration of the Athenian dead of the First Peloponnesian War saluted the fallen and praised the living. It set a historical model for other Democratic leaders. Napoleon’s farewell to the Old Guard acknowledged France’s sacrifice. Both contained patriotic and martial themes that are used in the Caliphate’s information operations.

            Duty, honor, and country are also woven into the Caliphate’s general call for Jihad, which is the second general attraction. Jihad is a core tenet of Islam and is often described as the sixth pillar. Some have likened Jihad to self-improvement or spiritual yoga. This is the Greater Jihad, which often means becoming more pious.

            Generally, however, Jihad has meant defending Islam, expanding Islam’s domain by conquest, or subjugating cultures under its sway. It is a matter of obligation and honor for all Muslims to heed this call and migrate to the Islamic State. This has been the general Western, as well as consensus Islamic, view. Tocqueville wrote, in 1838, “Jihad, Holy War, is an obligation for all believers. The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels.” The late political scientist Samuel Huntington referenced “Islam’s bloody borders” in the context of Jihad. Bernard Lewis said, “The Muslim Jihad was perceived as unlimited, as a religious obligation that would continue until the entire world had adopted the Muslim faith or submitted to a Muslim Ruler.” This is the Caliphate’s view.

            Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian, was the late-twentieth-century activist-theologian who rallied the Islamic world to Jihad. He became the theorist of global Jihad in the 1980s. In the absence of a Caliphate, individuals could pursue their own Jihad. He was later killed, perhaps on the orders of Osama bin Laden, but his voice and writings gave individual Muslims a prominent role in the current anti-Western Jihad. Today, European-raised propagandists beckon Westerners to the Jihad.

            A Daily Mail undercover sting operation, undertaken in coordination with the London police, demonstrates the ease of travel and the assistance provided to the traveler at each step of the journey. A journalist posing as a fixer for the State advertised on Twitter, Kik, Surespot, and Telegram. A young woman living in Syria responded and asked the undercover journalist to help transport her sixteen-year-old sister to Syria. The fixer and the Jihadi’s sister would meet at a fast-food restaurant in niqabs, book a holiday to Basle, Switzerland, and pay with it on the fixer’s credit card. They would pack secretly and leave before dawn, dressed in Western attire. From Switzerland, they would book a one-way trip to Istanbul. From Istanbul, they would take a bus to Gaziantep, where they would be met by the State’s fixers. They would be escorted to a safe house, where they would be introduced to the man who would be the girl’s husband. However, police had been monitoring this from the outset and made arrests as a result.

            Travel from Europe is not expensive. A cheap flight from the continent to Turkey can cost as little as $150. In 2014, 2015, and 2016, a visa was generally not required to enter Turkey, the gateway to Syria. Smugglers ferrying pistachios, food, sugar, and fuel also transport Jihadis. Some of the smugglers act out of solidarity, others have mercenary motives, and still others do it because the State pressures and threatens them.

Women Hear the Caliphate’s Call

“Keep it Halal and get married.”

            There has long been a mystique associated with European women and the Islamic world. Stories of young, blonde beauties captured by Muslim pirates and imprisoned in harems were imagined in penny-dreadful Victorian novels and on the canvases of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. Mozart had some musical fun with a harem in his opera Abduction from the Seraglio. Fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blonde-haired girls and women were historically prized captives for Muslims. And today, European-appearing female captives fetch a handsome price in the Caliphate as sex slaves. However, only rarely did women voluntarily forgo European or American lifestyles to live as traditional Muslims in the Islamic world. But history does record several.

            Margaret Marcus was a well-to-do New Yorker who, as an adolescent, dreamed of a “new golden age” of Jews and Muslims. In early adulthood, she became tormented by schizophrenia. She converted to Islam and tried to build a new life in Pakistan, but her mental illness continued to stalk her there, too.

            A love-smitten twentysomething, Phyllis Chessler, followed her poetry-reciting Afghan sweetheart to Kabul and found herself trapped in a harem. She escaped to write a memoir about it. So did Betty Mahmoody, who fled Iran, as recounted in the docudrama Not Without My Daughter. These women learned, too late, that their husbands, like many men in the Islamic world, held deeply ingrained traditional Islamic values.

            This makes the Islamic State’s allure perplexing. In the Islamic world and in Western Islamic enclaves, girls and women can be psychologically or physically tormented for wearing fashionable clothes and makeup, for befriending non-Muslim schoolmates, and for demanding to chart their life’s course. Most horrific are “honor killings,” in which family members collude to snuff out the lives of women and girls, often in the flower of their youth. Flirtations, idle chatting with boys or men, and being seen with males to whom they are not related can be serious, sometimes capital, offenses for girls and women in traditional Islamic families.

            Women nevertheless journey to the Caliphate. Some come to Raqqa to find husbands, expecting an avalanche of manly suitors. Others travel to assume leadership roles and develop skills. As an analyst notes, “The girls go around making cookies. It’s almost like a Jihadi Tupperware party.” Anne Birgitta Nilsen, an associate professor at Oslo University College, researched the Facebook activity of European women who want to join the State. She pointed out the “gentle” day-to-day nature of information operations. The Caliphate’s media operations show children playing in schoolyards. And then there is sex.

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Blue-Eyed Jihad: The Caliphate’s Foreign Legion, Part One

Introduction

            Earlier chapters provide the background for examining foreign fighters. Chapter 4 explains the draw of the Caliphate. Who is an average foreign fighter? A think tank with the US Military Academy at West Point processed 4,000 captured records of foreign fighters. The average age was twenty-six, but the age range went from teenagers to men in their sixties. Many were uneducated, but several had advanced degrees. About 60 percent were single, but some were married with families. A third had gone to high school, and a quarter had some college education. Most are laborers.

            Westerners have heard the Caliphate’s call and have come by the thousands. There are three basic drives to the State: utopia, Jihad, and psychosocial factors.

Black Utopia—Heaven on Earth

“I left to build us all a house in heaven, Allah promised us heaven if we sacrifice our world life. . . . I’m not coming back. A London-raised mother writing from Raqqa, October 2014

            Some European foreign fighters go to the Middle East to build a paradise. Well-to-do as well as out-of-luck Western Muslims see limitless prospects in a society they can help create. The world they envision is ordained and described by Allah as the perfect society. It is an Islamic utopia, a heaven on earth.

            Other religions and civilizations have imagined perfect worlds. In his 1516 masterwork, Thomas More wrote of a pretend island named Utopia, translated as “happy land.” Its upbeat citizens dressed plainly, eat communally, and owned no private property. A darker utopic vision was crafted in the steamy, disease-ridden jungles of Paraguay in 1886. New Germany was to be protected from the contaminants of modernity, materialism, and racial spoilation. But it collapsed, and little remains today but a scattering of German family names and Nordic appearances in South American jungles.5 The Islamic State’s philosophy bears little resemblance to these societies. However, it shares some characteristics with totalitarian dystopias of the 1930s and 1940s, such as the Soviet Union and the Third Reich.

Three Utopias

            Like the Soviets and Nazis, today’s Islamist State adherents see their utopia as void of significant political or social faults. The Soviets sought to build a workers’ paradise of goods and services distributed equally. They saw the major defects in the world the result of unfair distribution of national and political wealth. The Nazis’ paradise was to build on the foundations of a pseudoscience of race. As with the Soviets, the Nazis envisioned a society in which its citizens would enjoy health care, education, nutrition, and wealth.

            All three philosophies are atavistic. Like the Marxists and Nazis, Jihadists want to eliminate the roots of war and to re-create elements of a largely mythical past. The Caliphate seeks to return to a period of “rightly guided” Muslims, namely the first generation of Muslims. Although modern technology has been employed, it would be a socially primitive society in which all human activity is circumscribed by Islamic law and Koranic revelation. A young Indonesian explained, “The Islamic State is like a dream come true for me and all Muslims. Now is the time to return to Islamic glory, like . . . in the old days.” The State would provide all the basic necessities for Muslims.

            All three philosophies are romantic. Nazis hoped to re-create a pure Aryan society, as expressed in German mythology and folklore. Similarly, Marxists hoped to recreate a world without private property. Islamists, too, look to a distant, largely imagined past. Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger, writers on terrorism, speak of the Caliphate’s hope to return Islam to an imaginary ideal of original purity.  Harvard’s Noah Feldman, a scholar of Islam, adds, “The more medieval the practice, the more they like it.”

            Like the Soviets and the Nazis, the Caliphate sees itself as constantly threatened by internal and external enemies. Yehuda Bauer, a scholar of the Nazi period, notes common elements of other twentieth-century utopias. “All three—Nazis, Stalinists, Islamists—aspired, or aspire, to rule over the entire world, promising a utopia and an apocalyptic end to history. All three were, or are, genocidal.”

Blogging the Life in Utopia

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” George Orwell, 1984, 1949

            The utopic aspirations of the State’s foreign fighters can be gleaned from their blog entries. Blogging is a large part of the Caliphate’s information operations. In 2011, before the creation of the Islamic State, a blogger on the al-Tahaddi Islamic Network described utopia as a “divine system, the Islamic system,” which is completely free of discrimination, injustice, or any social flaws. “It is not Arab nor regional, rather, it is Islamic.” This captures the utopic goal of the Caliphate today.

A recurring word in the Caliphate’s literature is “freedom,” which is promised in abundance in the Islamic State. But its usage contrasts with the Western understanding of freedom, which generally means the unfettered ability to say, believe, vote, and, often, behave as one would like. For the Caliphate, freedom is the ability to practice Islam unconstrained and to live in an exclusively Muslim society. This Islamic world has no legally defined borders because it aspires to global dominance. There is no clearly articulated concept of individual freedom in Islamic law, or Sharia. Islamic utopia is predicated on religious conformity.

            But many of the world’s Muslims support a level of religious freedom that would be antithetical to the State. In 2013, a Pew poll concluded that most Muslims around the world express support for democracy, and most say it is a good thing when others are very free to practice their religion. At the same time, many Muslims want religious leaders to have at least some influence in political matters.

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World” will be available in spring 2026. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

            Debates about the Islamic State are often framed within the broader context of Western–Islamic relations. In universities’ Middle East Studies and liberal arts departments, there is broad agreement that Western policies have provoked Muslims around the world. Some of this consensus reflects the red-green campus alliance, an informal and confusing solidarity among left-leaning professors and Muslims. As discussed earlier, leftists and Islamists seem like strange bedfellows, given their often-clashing views on women, homosexuality, religious piety, and certain democratic norms, yet both converge on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of establishing “cultural hegemony” and are highly critical of existing Western values.

            Within this campus alliance, there is broad agreement that Western foreign policy in the Middle East has often been ill-advised, counterproductive, and unjust. Many professors view the Caliphate's popularity as an unintended consequence of American-led wars in Iraq and of general American belligerence. These acerbic themes are underscored in academic publications, conferences, and campus-based advocacy. For example, celebrated American scholar Noam Chomsky holds that the root causes of the terrorist attacks in Paris were the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

            This was also true of Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi, who equated “ISIL’s atrocities [with] Trump’s vulgarities.” The behaviors of both the Caliphate and the presidential aspirant were “pornotopic.” Dabashi explained to al Jazeera that “pornotopic” refers to “the spatial formation of biopolitics in modernity, a dreadful exhibitionism transcending the false binaries we usually make between democracy and terrorism, between modern and medieval, between normative and barbaric.”

            University life has offered opportunities to prankster activists. James O’Keefe, a conservative provocateur, turned his attention to the academy. Pretending to be a Muslim, O’Keefe asked Cornell University’s assistant dean for students to invite a Caliphate “freedom fighter” to lead a campus “training camp” under the guise of a “sports camp.” The dean agreed. After the gag was revealed, O’Keefe said Cornell owed “people an apology, or at least an explanation.” But Cornell’s president offered neither.

            At a similar sting at Catholic University, an undercover student journalist posed as a spokesperson for “Sympathetic Students in Support of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” She confided, “I want to start fundraising efforts on campus, and what I want to do is raise funds to send overseas.” She received sympathetic consideration. At Barry College, a faculty adviser also agreed to permit fundraising for the Islamic State. This campus controversy is typified by two scholars with opposing views. Both Mark LeVine and Daniel Pipes have much to say about the Caliphate and political Islam, as discussed below.

            Some American leaders have turned to Hollywood to develop a propaganda strategy against the Caliphate. This action has precedent; presidents have partnered with movie studios to confront an external enemy before, including during World War II, when films boosted morale on the home front and many celebrities went to war against the Axis powers. Three generations later, the Obama administration is recruiting Hollywood to battle the Caliphate. In February 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry sought strategic advice from Hollywood producers, executives, and actors.

            Hollywood had some answers. The rock band U2’s lead singer, Bono, long an advocate for political causes, suggested that the White House build a team including comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and others who connect with millennials. They would joke and make sarcastic comments about the Caliphate. But some are skeptical that that would make for effective propaganda. “Bono says fight extremism with comedy? Yeah Bono, like that worked for Charlie Hebdo.”

            In Canada, a trio of Middle Eastern–raised Muslims host the Weekly Show, which lampoons hot issues in the Arab world, including sexual harassment and the Caliphate. One host explains, “Our message to young Muslims is that ISIS is using Islam in a sick way.”

            Western civil servants seek to undermine the State’s popularity by appealing to moderate Western Muslims. In Europe, some governments have subsidized anti-Caliphate popular culture. Belgian authorities funded a play titled Djihad, in which three Belgian Muslims stumble to Syria to fight for a cause they don’t understand. One of the militants is an Elvis impersonator. Belgian educators liked the play and subsidized its performance because young people found it funny.

            Elsewhere in Europe, government officials occasionally serve as talent scouts for entertainers who can keep young people away from the Caliphate. Britain’s Humza Arshad is a popular Muslim comedian. An eighteen-year-old woman explained that his popularity stems from his warmth, empathy, and wit. She said, “A lot of students look at police and think they don’t know what they’re talking about or don’t see things from our perspective. But Humza . . . we’ve grown up watching him. He raises awareness in a way we can understand.” For this reason, police have hired him to counter the Caliphate’s appeal.

            In Britain, funny-lady Shazia Mirza used comedy in her acclaimed 2015 one-woman show, The Kardashians Made Me Do It, in which she asks why so many young Western Muslim girls choose to run away to join the Islamic State. She crafted her script from public hearings of three teenage girls who left Britain for the Caliphate. Mirza was intrigued by what one of the girls took with her: “an epilator, a packet of new knickers, and body lotion. I thought, ‘You’re going to join a barbaric terrorist organization, and you are thinking of your bikini line?’”

            In Germany, satirists had fun with the Green Party’s focus on nonlethal force to stop the flurry of migrant violence. In one sketch, an actor dressed as a German police officer speaks to the camera, endorsing a new, nonlethal response to the random stabbings and machete slashings. He demonstrates a new tactic as a burly man, dressed in black and wielding a two-bladed axe, charges him. The police officer ducks, hugs his assailant, and says, “I love you.”

            The Iraqi government promotes parody on national television. One sketch portrays a coy European-looking journalist, anticipating the interview of her life, asking Caliph Abu Bakr if he had slaughtered a sheep in her honor. He replies, “A sheep? I slaughtered 300 men in your honor.”

            There is also far more stark satire than that presented in the West. A roaming band of avant-garde poets and activists travels to Iraqi towns reciting poetry in absurd situations. Wearing orange jumpsuits, they perform from a prisoners’ cage, an ambulance, even body bags. The poets kneel down with their hands tied behind their backs and orate. They burlesque the killing fields of their homeland and taunt the Caliphate through verse in what has been called “poetry of the absurd.”

Cringe Humor, Gallows Humor, and Caliphate Humor

            Some American comedians have fun with the Caliphate, too, but few joke about its Islamic component. They may find nothing humorous about Sharia or do not wish to meet the fate of the French satirical cartoonists. A late-night entertainer, Bill Maher has been a leading celebrity critic of the Caliphate, but he often feels alone. He admits, “I just don’t understand how liberals who fought the battle for civil rights in the  1960s, fought against apartheid in the 1980s, can then just simply ignore Sharia law in forty countries.” Milo Yiannopoulos, editor of the conservative Breitbart news outlet, said that it is “obscene that the political left . . . is happy to pander to and mollycoddle people that want me [referring to his homosexuality] dead . . . And I’m tired of being polite about it. . . . The problem is Islam.”

            Some Caliphate-connected humor has panicked the audience. In May 2016, there was no laughing when guests at a swanky hotel in Cannes, France, fled for their lives after a boat with a black flag and six men landed on the Riviera. Guests at the tony Hotel Du Cap Eden-Roc scrambled, hid, prayed, and clutched each other while sneering men in commando dress and make-believe suicide vests roamed the area. However, it turned out to be a publicity stunt by a French internet startup, which received the attention it sought.

            Far from the Riviera, many suffer the reality wrought by the Islamic State. Some use humor as both an escape and a means of protest. Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons subsist in the haunts and despair of vast refugee camps in the Levant. Some are under attack from all sides of the conflict. Mohammed is one of them, as shown below.

Profile Seven: Snickering from the Refugee Camp—“We Also Killed the Dentists”

            The unrelenting despondency of Caliphate-created refugee camps offers both opportunities and challenges for Syrian comics. An example of Mesopotamian cringe comedy comes from the comedian “Mohammed,” a refugee who wrote a story for an American audience. First, he apologized for being late in blogging his heartbreak at the death of Cecil the Lion, who was killed by a wealthy American dentist on an African bow-hunting safari. The death of the feline made world news. Wrote Mohammed, “Not Cecil the Lion! Not him! Truly, is there no innocence left in this world?”

            In thinly disguised mockery, Mohammed explained that he couldn’t use his email to communicate his sorrow at the lion’s death because Americans had bombed the local power plant, plunging his village into complete darkness. He wrote that he had had to walk for two days to reach an internet café, ducking fighters along the way, hopscotching over decomposing corpses of old friends, avoiding the blasts of Syrian barrel bombs, watching State soldiers decapitate boys, and wiping the tears off of the faces of girls who had had acid thrown at them. His journey was interrupted when “ISIS discovered my brother was gay and . . . they forced [me] to throw him off a building.” Mohammed then had to bury his daughter, who had died of cholera. He did not have to feed his wife because she had been carted off as a sex slave months ago.

            Mohammed could brave all of this. But the death of Cecil the Lion was too distressing to endure. Finally, stepping out of comedic character and now deadly serious, Mohammed wondered, “What is wrong with America?” and concluded, “You do not hear stories like this in Syria, partly because we already killed all our lions but also because we killed all our dentists.”

Profile Four: The Ever-Angry Mr. Bukhari Wants His Shoe Back

            Asghar Bukhari is a leading voice for angry Muslims in Britain. A founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, he discusses world events on European television and radio. He has appeared on Sky News, Russia Today, the BBC, the VIP, the James O’Brien Show, and many other media outlets to discuss the Islamic State. He has a supportive audience. Some viewers see his analysis of Islamic–Western relations as conspiratorial and incoherent; others see it as insightful. When he speaks on television talk shows, bearded men and hijab-clad women in the audience clap, smile, and nod in agreement.

            He defined the Caliphate as a “Sunni uprising.” Its members are not terrorists, and according to Bukhari, they do not pose a significant threat to Britain. “ISIS is not the problem.” Rather, Western elites are intent on forging a new “Sykes-Picot” version of the Middle East. “Muslims are the most oppressed people on earth. We have been denied our freedom, our equality, any justice, and even the right to tell the world our own story.” The public intellectual Douglas Murray accused him of living in “intellectual fever swamps.”

            Whatever the case, Bukhari is convinced he is being stalked by Zionist agents. He cites a recent break-in at his home by Zionists as an example. A Jew stole one of his shoes. According to Bukhari, the goal was not financial gain but intimidation. “They left one shoe behind, to let me know someone had been there.” He concedes that this sounds implausible but adds, “Why are you so shocked that a Zionist would try to intimidate or steal something from me? Man, they stole Palestine! Are you crazy?” Some bloggers clowned back. On the blog Israellycool, Aussie Dave wrote, “If Zionists harvest organs, will he next claim we stole his brain? Who stole his meds?” Another blogger, Bullfrogger, snickered, “I believe that I have been targeted by Muslim spies. I awoke this morning and my goat and her two favorite outfits are missing.”

            But not everyone is chuckling, and some fear that figures like the snarling Bukhari may portend Britain’s future. In 2006, Bukhari bemoaned the failing leadership among British Muslims, whom he described as “well intentioned . . . but out of touch.” They were a crusty old lot. He demanded that Britain’s Muslims “hand over the reins to a new generation of leaders more in tune with today’s young Muslims.” A decade later, Bukhari may be part of that new leadership.

Summary

            Muslims and non-Muslims in the West wrestle to accommodate each other while holding on to their traditions and values. At the same time, a widespread mutual distrust just below society’s surface is burbling. Muslims decry Islamophobia in the West, but many Westerners feel besieged by Muslim immigrants. When Sadiq Khan was elected mayor of London, some people tweeted their fear and fatalism under the hashtag “Londonhasfallen.”

            By mid-2016, the head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who had popularized the term “Islamophobia,” regretted ever using this word. In self-effacing candor uncommon among senior public officials, Trevor Phillips publicly admitted that he had been well intentioned but naïve about the blistering Muslim integration into British society: “I thought Muslims would blend into Britain . . . I should have known better.”

Other Westerners have gone further, claiming to suffer from “Islamonausea,” which is queasiness and fatigue at insatiable Muslim demands on democratic values and a growing fatalism that the conquering tide of Islam is now irreversible. They do not want to live in a “global village” or share in its burdens. Many are fatigued by what they see as empty gestures by preening politicians and of Sharia elbowing itself into common culture and law. One pundit wrote, “Je suis sick of it.” This and more is the subject of chapter 3, to which we invite you to listen..

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel and the World will be available for purchase in spring 2026.  Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

            In many ways, the West Yorkshire town of Dewsbury is unremarkable. Along its terraced streets are a few pubs, snooker clubs, and tea shops. The elderly tend their English gardens. Jean Wood, reflecting on her seventy-five years in Dewsbury, notes its transformation: “The change happened so quickly. One day it seemed it was all whites, and then it was all Asians.” The first Asians in Dewsbury were novelties. “We peered at them, and they peered back.”

Slowly, the churches were shuttered, as were the garment-producing industries. The town’s cricket pavilion was torn down. A journalist noted that almost everyone seemed to be Muslim. “Even the woman serving ice cream . . . was wearing a burka.” Girls waiting in line to buy ice cream were also swathed in Islamic garb. Today, Dewsbury boasts a disquieting distinction; it has produced more Islamic suicide bombers per capita than any other town in England.

            The leader of the pack of suicide bombers responsible for the attack in London on July 7, 2005, came from this town. The blasts killed fifty-two people. One of Britain’s youngest convicted terrorists, then sixteen years old, was arrested carrying bags of ball bearings. His brother, along with a friend, had traveled to Syria to fight for the Caliphate. There were other Islamic extremists linked to the town’s mosques.

            The town’s Muslims publicly condemn the suicide bombing. A journalist asking man-in-the-street questions heard, “He is not a martyr . . . is a statistic,” “He was . . . brainwashed,” and similar comments that disassociate Dewsbury’s Muslims from violence. They denounced the Caliphate. Former Tory minister Baroness Warsi, from Dewsbury, hopes to unmask the “drivers of radicalization” in her hometown.

            Nonetheless, many of the remaining non-Muslims are dissatisfied with the demographics. Jean Wood is unhappy about the rise in crime and white flight. Once, some Asians threw stones at her church’s bus, which alarmed her. Most of her friends are gone. Jean Wood misses the long-lost Dewsbury of her youth. England was very different then.

Islamophobia—The Muslim Side of the Story

            Many Muslims are dissatisfied with their status in the West, particularly in Europe. Tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe are high. Restive and alienated second- and third-generation Muslims feel like victims in a secular Europe. They see a continent beset by “Islamophobia,” a neologism for an irrational fear or hatred of Muslims. Outside their immediate Islamic neighborhoods, many do not feel at home. This has prompted some to leave for the Caliphate.

            Many young Muslims share a fatalism about their social status in Europe. This cohort is a recruiting pool for Islamists. Many Western Muslims who have joined the State say they did so because they could not live according to their faith in Europe. One wedge issue centers on Muslim apparel. In 2004, the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, was banned from French public schools and government office buildings. Women who left for Syria have cited what they claim as unwanted and hostile glares by non-Muslims in Europe when they wear their hijab in public.61

Europe’s Daunting Demographics

“There are twenty million refugees waiting at the doorstep of Europe.” Johannes Hahn, European Union Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, summer 2015

            Whatever the current state of relations, Europe’s future is likely to become notably more Islamic because of the high fertility rate of Muslim Europeans, patterns of immigration, and conversion to Islam. Domestic and foreign-funded efforts to convert Europeans to Islam have been steady, dynamic, and successful. In 2016, a former Archbishop of Canterbury warned that the Church of England is “one generation away from extinction.”

            A void of faith in the West creates opportunities for Muslims to proselytize and recruit for the Islamic State. Islam comprises a broad community of adherents who share religious, social, and, in many contexts, political values. Some converts to Islam have become enthusiastic soldiers in the Caliphate’s ranks. Other European Muslims provide rhetorical, financial, and logistical support to the State. In many European cities, the Islamic State has its champions, usually young, known as “fanboys.”

            Finally, there is a net emigration of native-born Europeans. For example, more Swedes chose to emigrate in 2015 than at any other time since the famine 160 years earlier. The most popular destination was the United States. If many young secular or Christian Europeans are trying to leave for the United States, many Muslim Europeans are content to live on the continent without becoming part of its dominant culture. Others loathe the non-Muslim West, and Asghar Bukhari is one of them. He is profiled in the next reading.

Eurabia

            Many Europeans were initially nonchalant about the cultural shift, but some later regretted this indifference. Many late-middle-aged and elderly intellectuals today miss the artistic and cultural freedoms of their youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Today’s Continental literati reminisce on a long-faded, culturally confident, and economically prosperous Europe. For years after the Second World War, Europe was exciting and liberal, and it arts scene burst with creative energies. But the freedoms then turned to restraint, which turned to self-censorship driven by fear of angering Muslims. European journalists have been threatened with death for unfavorable commentary on the Caliphate. Often, journalists cannot ask man-in-the-street questions in heavily Muslim areas because they are attacked. Some have been killed.

            British moderate Muslims also face challenges. In 2009, Baroness Warsi of Dewsbury literally had egg on her face after pleading with her coreligionists to embrace women’s rights. A convert to Islam pelted her with eggs while he and others chanted in Urdu and English for more Sharia in Britain. More cynical public intellectuals foresee a European future, sometime later this century, in which churches are replaced by mosques, civil law by Sharia, and the liberal values of the Enlightenment by a strict Islamic code of conduct.

            A prominent man of letters, Bernard Lewis, warned that Europe was becoming “part of the Arab West, the Maghreb.” Some Muslims gloat at the prospect. An example appears in a YouTube video by a man who crowns the march of Islam in Germany as inevitable: “Islam is coming to take over Germany whether you want it or not.” The tool of conquest, he says, is not war but reproduction, because “Muslims have seven or eight children each.” He says, “What does the German man have? One child and maybe a little pet dog!” And for the future? “Your daughters will wear the hijab.”

            The surge of migrants entering Europe in 2015 and 2016 brought shocks to the continent. In several countries, young women, some of whom had welcomed Middle Eastern and Eurasian migrants, were molested. Local police advised fair-skinned, blonde women, particularly in Northern Europe, to change their lifestyles and appearances. Police counseled them to dress modestly and dye their hair dark. Local municipalities established separate hours for male and female use of public swimming pools. For the first time in modern memory, train station waiting rooms had separate areas for men and women. Many Continentals no longer trust their local police or government. In 2015 and 2016, applications for firearm permits and membership in European shooting clubs increased perceptibly.

            All this terrifies vulnerable minorities. The Islamic State is just one of many outlets that churn out anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and anti-homosexual literature. Jews in traditional religious clothing and identifiable homosexuals can no longer stroll through some of Europe’s streets without fear of being spat on, beaten, or slashed. This increasingly dark world has become untenable for some Europeans, who feel there are few safe zones left. Many are emigrating to escape what they see as the unremitting buzz saw of Muslim immigration. Michel Houellebecq (pronounced “Wellbeck”) writes about this with a very sharp pen, as shown below.

Profile Two: French “Bad Boy” Michel Houellebecq—No Submission!

            Some see him as a poseur; others see him as a literary prophet. Editors of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo placed him on the cover with the words “The predictions of the Great Houellebecq.” The famous novelist was dressed as a magician and said, “In 2015, I will lose my teeth. In 2022, I will celebrate Ramadan.” Others see him as an alarmist Islamophobe and call him the bad boy of French letters. But most of the French intelligentsia are simply fascinated by his maverick novels and poetry. Le Figaro and Le Monde published a series on his life, views, ambitions, and the impact of his work on France. Some wondered whether this late-middle-aged, mild-mannered intellectual was determined to have a fatwa placed on his head.

            For years, Michel Houellebecq had been France’s enfant terrible of salon culture. He draws his literary inspiration from Albert Camus, and one American literary critic compares his style to Martin Amis’s, “at heart a deeply braised moralist, an unflinching observer of ugly human nature.” One literary highbrow described his style as a fusion of Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dennis Miller.

            If French antihate laws muzzle his open criticism of Muslims, Houellebecq grants his fictional characters unfettered freedom. In his novel Platform, a character relishes the deaths of Palestinian terrorists or children because “it meant one less Muslim.”38 The same character adds, “Islam could only have been born in a stupid desert among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do than—excuse my language—shag their camels.” In a physiological metaphor, he describes Muslims as “clots” in Europe’s “blood vessels.”

His sixth novel, Submission, catapulted him to international literary fame. Readers are asked to imagine France in 2022, when the ruling French Socialists partner with Islamists to govern the country. The Sorbonne is now an Islamic university. France has absorbed Francophone North Africa, becoming a Muslim superstate. France itself is governed by Muslims, collaborators, and unctuous civil servants. The narrator of Submission, François, is a middle-aged literature professor. He is underpaid, jaded, pathetic, and lonely.

Within days of the book’s publication, Prime Minister Manuel Valls assured the nation that “France is not Submission, it’s not Michel Houellebecq, it’s not intolerance, hate, or fear.” France would not sell the Sorbonne to Saudi Arabia, period! The French left erupted in outrage! But the timing of the publication boosted sales. The book was first available on January 7, 2015—the same day Islamists slaughtered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

Contested Zones in the West—Breeding Grounds for the Caliphate

“It does not take people long to discover that the Global Village is in reality the dark incarnation of Gotham City without Batman.”  Geert Wilders, Dutch parliamentarian, 2016

            Some Europeans have left the cities for the non-Muslim suburbs, and others have emigrated to the United States or Israel. But others lack the resources or inclination to escape what they perceive as pools of social pathology stagnating at the outskirts of their own cities. They call these places “no-go zones,” and some members of the Caliphate have grown up there.43 This hotly debated expression refers to the Muslim-dominated, chaotic neighborhoods that saturate Western Europe. London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin are home to more than 900 areas where authorities have limited control.

            In France, areas of high immigrant density are called banlieues or quartiers, originally built to house immigrants from former French colonies.45 European leaders dislike the term “no-go zone,” and so do many journalists and scholars. Some refer to them as “cultural islands.” Daniel Pipes considers the “no-go” term gratuitously derogatory and prefers the official French nomenclature: “sensitive urban zones.”

            In January 2015, American journalist Steven Emerson claimed, “there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” and was roundly censured. Some are gritty metropolitan areas hidden from tourists. An example is Nice, France. Dozens of its Muslim residents have traveled to Syria to fight for the State. In Germany, the Berlin Wall that separated the East from the West has long since crumbled, but there is a new civilizational divide, according to local Germans; they call it the “Arab Street.” A play on words, “Arab streets” are geographic locations in Europe where Muslims outnumber non-Muslims. It is also a synonym for Arab public opinion.

            But whether called “no-go zones,” “sensitive urban zones,” or occasional armed camps, these Muslim-only areas serve as recruiting pools for criminal syndicates. These areas are ideal for grooming foot soldiers for the Caliphate, and the Caliphate’s leaders have promised to use Muslims from those zones to attack Western targets. They provide sanctuary for the Caliphate’s cells, some of which fester in Dewsbury, in the next reading

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Eurabia

            Many Europeans were initially nonchalant about the cultural shift, but some later regretted this indifference. Many late-middle-aged and elderly intellectuals today miss the artistic and cultural freedoms of their youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Today’s Continental literati reminisce on a long-faded, culturally confident, and economically prosperous Europe. For years after the Second World War, Europe was exciting and liberal, and it arts scene burst with creative energies. But the freedoms then turned to restraint, which turned to self-censorship driven by fear of angering Muslims. European journalists have been threatened with death for unfavorable commentary on the Caliphate. Often, journalists cannot ask man-in-the-street questions in heavily Muslim areas because they are attacked. Some have been killed.

            British moderate Muslims also face challenges. In 2009, Baroness Warsi of Dewsbury literally had egg on her face after pleading with her coreligionists to embrace women’s rights. A convert to Islam pelted her with eggs while he and others chanted in Urdu and English for more Sharia in Britain. More cynical public intellectuals foresee a European future, sometime later this century, in which churches are replaced by mosques, civil law by Sharia, and the liberal values of the Enlightenment by a strict Islamic code of conduct.

            A prominent man of letters, Bernard Lewis, warned that Europe was becoming “part of the Arab West, the Maghreb.” Some Muslims gloat at the prospect. An example appears in a YouTube video by a man who crowns the march of Islam in Germany as inevitable: “Islam is coming to take over Germany whether you want it or not.” The tool of conquest, he says, is not war but reproduction, because “Muslims have seven or eight children each.” He says, “What does the German man have? One child and maybe a little pet dog!” And for the future? “Your daughters will wear the hijab.”

            The surge of migrants entering Europe in 2015 and 2016 brought shocks to the continent. In several countries, young women, some of whom had welcomed Middle Eastern and Eurasian migrants, were molested. Local police advised fair-skinned, blonde women, particularly in Northern Europe, to change their lifestyles and appearances. Police counseled them to dress modestly and dye their hair dark. Local municipalities established separate hours for male and female use of public swimming pools. For the first time in modern memory, train station waiting rooms had separate areas for men and women. Many Continentals no longer trust their local police or government. In 2015 and 2016, applications for firearm permits and membership in European shooting clubs increased perceptibly.

            All this terrifies vulnerable minorities. The Islamic State is just one of many outlets that churn out anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and anti-homosexual literature. Jews in traditional religious clothing and identifiable homosexuals can no longer stroll through some of Europe’s streets without fear of being spat on, beaten, or slashed. This increasingly dark world has become untenable for some Europeans, who feel there are few safe zones left. Many are emigrating to escape what they see as the unremitting buzz saw of Muslim immigration. Michel Houellebecq (pronounced “Wellbeck”) writes about this with a very sharp pen, as shown below.

Profile Two: French “Bad Boy” Michel Houellebecq—No Submission!

            Some see him as a poseur; others see him as a literary prophet. Editors of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo placed him on the cover with the words “The predictions of the Great Houellebecq.” The famous novelist was dressed as a magician and said, “In 2015, I will lose my teeth. In 2022, I will celebrate Ramadan.” Others see him as an alarmist Islamophobe and call him the bad boy of French letters. But most of the French intelligentsia are simply fascinated by his maverick novels and poetry. Le Figaro and Le Monde published a series on his life, views, ambitions, and the impact of his work on France. Some wondered whether this late-middle-aged, mild-mannered intellectual was determined to have a fatwa placed on his head.

            For years, Michel Houellebecq had been France’s enfant terrible of salon culture. He draws his literary inspiration from Albert Camus, and one American literary critic compares his style to Martin Amis’s, “at heart a deeply braised moralist, an unflinching observer of ugly human nature.” One literary highbrow described his style as a fusion of Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dennis Miller.

            If French antihate laws muzzle his open criticism of Muslims, Houellebecq grants his fictional characters unfettered freedom. In his novel Platform, a character relishes the deaths of Palestinian terrorists or children because “it meant one less Muslim.”38 The same character adds, “Islam could only have been born in a stupid desert among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do than—excuse my language—shag their camels.” In a physiological metaphor, he describes Muslims as “clots” in Europe’s “blood vessels.”

His sixth novel, Submission, catapulted him to international literary fame. Readers are asked to imagine France in 2022, when the ruling French Socialists partner with Islamists to govern the country. The Sorbonne is now an Islamic university. France has absorbed Francophone North Africa, becoming a Muslim superstate. France itself is governed by Muslims, collaborators, and unctuous civil servants. The narrator of Submission, François, is a middle-aged literature professor. He is underpaid, jaded, pathetic, and lonely.

Within days of the book’s publication, Prime Minister Manuel Valls assured the nation that “France is not Submission, it’s not Michel Houellebecq, it’s not intolerance, hate, or fear.” France would not sell the Sorbonne to Saudi Arabia, period! The French left erupted in outrage! But the timing of the publication boosted sales. The book was first available on January 7, 2015—the same day Islamists slaughtered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

Contested Zones in the West—Breeding Grounds for the Caliphate

“It does not take people long to discover that the Global Village is in reality the dark incarnation of Gotham City without Batman.”  Geert Wilders, Dutch parliamentarian, 2016

            Some Europeans have left the cities for the non-Muslim suburbs, and others have emigrated to the United States or Israel. But others lack the resources or inclination to escape what they perceive as pools of social pathology stagnating at the outskirts of their own cities. They call these places “no-go zones,” and some members of the Caliphate have grown up there.43 This hotly debated expression refers to the Muslim-dominated, chaotic neighborhoods that saturate Western Europe. London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin are home to more than 900 areas where authorities have limited control.

            In France, areas of high immigrant density are called banlieues or quartiers, originally built to house immigrants from former French colonies.45 European leaders dislike the term “no-go zone,” and so do many journalists and scholars. Some refer to them as “cultural islands.” Daniel Pipes considers the “no-go” term gratuitously derogatory and prefers the official French nomenclature: “sensitive urban zones.”

            In January 2015, American journalist Steven Emerson claimed, “there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” and was roundly censured. Some are gritty metropolitan areas hidden from tourists. An example is Nice, France. Dozens of its Muslim residents have traveled to Syria to fight for the State. In Germany, the Berlin Wall that separated the East from the West has long since crumbled, but there is a new civilizational divide, according to local Germans; they call it the “Arab Street.” A play on words, “Arab streets” are geographic locations in Europe where Muslims outnumber non-Muslims. It is also a synonym for Arab public opinion.

            But whether called “no-go zones,” “sensitive urban zones,” or occasional armed camps, these Muslim-only areas serve as recruiting pools for criminal syndicates. These areas are ideal for grooming foot soldiers for the Caliphate, and the Caliphate’s leaders have promised to use Muslims from those zones to attack Western targets. They provide sanctuary for the Caliphate’s cells, some of which fester in Dewsbury, in the next reading

This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Walid al-Asaad, son of Khaled al-Asaad

Khaled al-Asaad, “Mr. Palmyra,” a beloved eighty-two-year-old antiquities scholar, devoted his life to exploring, preserving, and studying the town’s treasures. Holding degrees from Damascus University, he named his daughter Zenobia after the warrior-queen of Palmyra’s folklore. He directed the Antiquities and Museums Department’s archaeological site for forty years, then retired to read, write, dig, and educate the world about Palmyra. The Caliphate knew of him, and they beat and tortured the old man. Held for twenty-five days, he could neither speak to nor see his family, but there is no evidence that he betrayed a single artifact. The vandals demanded gold, but there was no bullion he could offer. As his son Mohammed said, “There was nothing to tell them; the gold in Palmyra is in the statues and the architecture.”

            The scholar could have escaped earlier, even after the Caliphate had conquered Palmyra. With his celebrity and prestige, he could have taken refuge in the West and lived near a prestigious university. But he told a fellow scholar, “I am from Palmyra, and I will stay here even if they kill me.” And they did.

            Trundled into a van, he was tossed into the town’s main square. He was not in an orange jumpsuit; he wore his ordinary clothes. Caliphate leaders read the charges against him, and the

Welcome to an excerpt from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. It was published by Indiana University Press in Bloomington and Indianapolis. This reading is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security.

The town’s greatest antiquities scholar was branded a “director of idols.” He also represented Syrian scholars at international “infidel conferences.” They found him guilty and beheaded him. Afterward, they strung what remained of his corpse to an ancient Roman column. Palmyra mourned.

Palmyra Tomorrow

            There is still life in Palmyra. Its territory is contested between pro-government and Caliphate forces. In March 2016, the Caliphate was expelled. One month later, Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra traveled to Palmyra and performed works by Bach and Prokofiev in the amphitheater the State had used to kill its enemies. The conductor declared it a concert against barbarism, and a Russian visitor paid tribute to the life of Khaled al-Assad.94 Nonetheless, an Islamic State spokesperson reveled in the devastation they had left: “We captured a whole town and houses from them, and they recaptured sand and destruction.” He was partially correct.

            But today Palmyra is more than sand and ruins. Omar Al-Farra’s warm poems and elegiac verse will likely be recited for years, albeit in hushed tones. They will remind Palmyra’s future generations of a sweeter, if bygone, life in Syria. The books of Palmyra’s bard, Khaled al-Asaad, will be read by lovers of history, art, and Syria. True, the proud Lion of Palmyra has been turned to dust. But it is not entirely lost. Its bold visage endures in photographs, and it will live on in memory.

In the World of Islam

            In the Islamic world, some nationalities support the Caliphate—its agenda, philosophy, and tactics—while others do not. In Pakistan, fewer than one-third of the population holds negative views of the Caliphate. This is particularly alarming to some observers given the country’s ever-growing nuclear arsenal. Other states with sizable support for the Islamic State include Nigeria, where 20 percent of the Muslim population supports it, and Malaysia, where 12 percent of Muslims support the State. Although the proportion of Muslims is often small, the combined number of Muslims who support the Caliphate is troubling. A Pew poll in 2015 found that in eleven nation-states with significant Muslim populations, there are between 63 and 287 million people who either support the Caliphate or are ambivalent.

Summary

            Mesopotamia, a home of empires and a host to religious monuments, has enduring ties to the West. A succession of empires has risen and fallen there, and one Islamic civilization became world-renowned for both science and piety. Europeans have engaged Muslims as both enemies and allies at different times and in different places. The balance of power in that part of the Middle East has shifted several times and in many ways. But today’s Caliphate is a unique challenge to Western interests, power, and prestige.

            In 2003, Saddam Hussein warned that the West would “open the gates of hell” if he were removed.97 He was removed, and the gates were flung wide open for the Islamic State. The Caliphate is devastating the treasures of ancient civilizations in Iraq and Syria that had survived for millennia. In summer 2016, it dynamited the 2,500-year-old temple of Nabu in Iraq. One week later, it boasted that it would soon destroy the pyramids of Egypt. As for today, the State is struggling to hold its Mesopotamian ground while infiltrating its cadre into Europe and throughout the West. This and more is the subject of the next reading of Jihad and the West.

This concludes the final reading from Chapter One of Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” You can purchase Jihad and the West on line, if you would like. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Welcome to an excerpt of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. This is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter One.

Ideological Divergence

While all four ideologies converge on seven points, they diverge on three issues, namely, the role of religion, the distribution of wealth and property, and the nature of utopia. In terms of the first, communism is atheistic, and fascist ideologues tolerated Christianity out of political necessity. In Islamism and Shia revivalism, religion defines legal and social norms in all elements of life. For example, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accorded the Twelfth Imam a special place during his weekly cabinet briefings.

Another point of divergence is the distribution of wealth and property. Communism advocates an equal distribution of wealth and the abolition of private property. Fascism and Islamism do not make that requirement.  Shia revivalism appeals to aid the poor but does not require that the means of production be placed in the hands of capital producers. As Fredrick Kagan has remarked, “The Islamic Republic’s ideology has virtually no significant economic component. It is an amalgam of anti-colonialism. . .anti-Zionism, Persian nationalism, and adherence to an idiosyncratic form of political Shiism.”

Finally, the ideologies diverge in their conception of utopia. While all four are utopian, their images of heaven differ markedly. Fascism saw utopia through the lens of racial and national power and purity. Both Islamic ideologies have found utopia in the first generation of Muslims, as recounted by the sacred Islamic script.

Khomeinism and a New Golden Age of Islam

What finally emerged in 1979 was a revolutionary political and religious philosophy that fused Islamism with Shia revivalism and elements of fascism and socialism. Known as Khomeinism, it echoes Qutb’s view that today’s world is one of ideological darkness and Shariati’s rebuke of a materialistic world. Khomeini was an aggressive rebel within a mostly quietist clergy who became an autocrat in 1979. When he came to power, his countrymen likened him to the prophet Abraham, who “smashed idols, was willing to sacrifice his son, and rose against tyrants.” Once in command of Iran, he crafted religious practices to create a “New Golden Age” of Islam. Like Islamism, Khomeinism is political Islam. Khomeini lectured that Islamic governance is the only valid system of rule because of conditions outlined in the Koran and the canonized history of Mohammed. He wrote, “An Islamic government is based on the laws and regulations of Islam and can, therefore, be defined as the rule of divine will over humanity.”

At the heart of Khomeinism is the concept of velayat-e faqih, or Islamic rule by guardian jurists. Although anticommunist, Khomeini promoted the redistribution of wealth under the slogans “Islam is for equality and social justice” and “Islam will eliminate class differences.” He also held that leaders are duty-bound to provide employment for workers, farmers, and laborers. However, the rights of workers to strike can be circumscribed by the jurists.

When he came to power, Khomeini seized private funds and placed them in the hands of bonyads, vast charities under religious leadership, which will be discussed in chapter 8. Many of these organizations are controlled by the Guards. Many care for the indigent and war handicapped. Constitutionally, the bonyads stand above the law and are answerable only to the supreme leader. In Khomeinism, the clergy rule by divine revelation. According to Shia  Islam, Mohammad vested the duty and responsibility of guiding and leading the community in the clergy.  The purpose of the state is to implement Islamic law. Khomeini, like other believing Muslims, held that all scriptures are free of error because they are the exact word of God. At the same time, Khomeini did not believe that Muslims could go directly to the text to understand scripture the way many Protestants think they can bypass a church hierarchy.  Khomeinism is a theocratic autocracy.

While Khomeinism contains elements sympathetic to fascism, it differs from Italian or German fascism on issues of race and religion. Khomeinism demands conformity and obedience to authority. It views democracy as weak and arrogant. Like fascist societies, Khomeinism upholds an inflexible leadership principle. Finally, Khomeinism includes elements of Shia revivalism. Both despise all religions and ideologies that diverge from Shia fundamentalism. Khomeini declared that every non-Shia system was a form of idolatry.

The presence of these ideological strands within Khomeinism explains why U.S. policymakers initially struggled to assess Khomeini. Observers of Iran recalled years later that “few U.S. policymakers knew much about him other than that he was.”76 Because Westerners could not understand Khomeini, they could not adequately grasp the collective mindset of the Guards.

From Khomeini to Khamenei

Khomeini’s legacy, revolutionary zeal, and philosophy were passed to his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Born in 1939 into a poor, religious family of eight siblings, three of whom became clerics, Khamenei recalls in his autobiography that he loathed the shah and the British and was inspired by the radical Islamist Navvab Safavi, who was later killed by the shah’s security forces after speaking at Khamenei’s school. He studied in Qom, sometimes spelled Qum, from 1958 to 1964 under Ruhollah Khomeini.77 Few were surprised when he was given the mantle of national leadership after Khomeini died. Fewer still were surprised when he bolstered the strength of the Guards. Khamenei’s view of leadership is sometimes called principlism, an umbrella term used by Iranian leaders to describe many forms of religious conservatism. In summer 2018, a Guards-affiliated journal encapsulated principlism as “an anti-hegemony, anti-aristocracy and pro-dispossessed revolution. Whoever embarks on this path will have the revolutionaries behind him.”7 For revolutionaries, the author could have substituted Guards.

Subsequent chapters will examine how the Guards seek to protect Khomeini’s revolution at home, or principlism, and to export it worldwide.79 Former IRGC commander Major General Jafari claimed that Khomeinism is solid in Iran and that “we are on the path that leads to the rule of Islam worldwide.” Jafari promised to use the Guards to “shape the picture of the Islamic world.”80 Jafari’s successor, Major General Salami, has openly shared this vision of transforming Iran into a global player.

Summary

Iran has a multi-religious and imperial past. Its fortunes faded after being conquered by Alexander and then the Arabs. But Iranians held fast to their language and built a literature of poems and songs that they still adore. The short-lived Pahlevi dynasty tried to modernize Iran but alienated religious leaders and civil society. The shah tried, too late, to appease both liberal and radical opponents and to lessen the incendiary atmosphere. In the early days of the revolution, some reformers were optimistic. Abbas Milani, a former political prisoner, recalls his release from Evin prison: “The gate opened, and with a strange sense of hesitation and exhilaration, I walked to freedom.”

Within a few years, the new regime vaporized civil freedoms. Gone was the salon set’s chirpy romanticism of ancient Persia and the love sonnets of its poets. Great works of the Western canon were pulped or burned to ashes by the Basij. By the mid-1980s, they were read only in secret, if at all. What remained was the mullahs' primitive religious architecture.

In 1944, George Orwell ventured, “Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’” Thirty-five years later, people would ask, “What is Khomeinism?” There was no quick answer. The question bedeviled successive generations of Iranians and Iran watchers because Khomeinism changed the world. Islamism, communism, fascism, and Shia revivalism overlapped in some respects, and elements of each found their way into Khomeinism. However it is defined, Khomeinism struck the world like lightning. The shock troops of the Revolution were the Guards, who rooted out dissent at home and thrust the spear of the mullahs throughout the greater Middle East.

This concludes the reading from the introduction of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by Mark Silinsky. If you enjoyed this reading, please consider subscribing. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

me not, therefore, this monument. —Inscription on the tomb of Cyrus the Great

Iran sits at the strategic center of the greater Middle East. Once boasting the most powerful kingdom of its day, Iran’s influence waned over the centuries. By the nineteenth century, its military and industrial capabilities could not match those of Western empires. In the twentieth century, many powers courted Iran until Iranian leaders broke from the Western orbit in 1979 to create a unique political philosophy rooted in fundamentalist Shia Islam. A newly formed Praetorian Guard would seek to export this philosophy worldwide. Iran is perched between two large oil fields in and around the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf and is awash in fossil fuel resources. In land area, it is second only to Saudi Arabia in the greater Middle East. It is twice the size of Texas and has a population of more than 70 million. Iran has been linguistically and ethnically diverse for many centuries. Persian is the mother tongue of only half of Iran’s population; one quarter is ethnic Azeri; the remaining quarter comprises Arabs, Baloch, Kurds, Turks, and others. Iran is a mountainous country, and its rugged terrain has served as a strategic barrier to would-be invaders.

The earliest traces of human civilization in Iran date to about 8,000 BCE. Cyrus I established the Achaemenian dynasty and laid the foundation for the Persian Empire in 630 BCE. His grandson, Cyrus the Great, conquered much of Greece. In the fifth century BCE, Persia was a global superpower. Many Iranians are proud of their ancient heritage and travel to King Cyrus the Great’s tomb in southwestern Fars Province to pay their respects to this legendary figure. The Greeks referred to “the West” as all land west of Persia, and the Greeks and Persians clashed for decades. The ancient Greeks forged many of their democratic freedoms in response to the Persian challenge.

The Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote The Persians in 472 BCE, casting civilized Greece against authoritarian Persia. In 338 BCE, Alexander the Great’s army reached Persepolis and was astounded by its beauty. Nonetheless, he leveled much of the city in retaliation for the Parthenon’s torching years earlier.

A Glorious Past

The ravages of the Greek army did not extinguish Persia’s artistic and literary beauty. The stories of Omar Khayyam and iconic Persian poetry, such as Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh,” recall the glories of pre-Islamic Persia. In the arts, the Parthians excelled in miniature painting and carpet weaving.2 The Mongols ravaged all lands under their control, including Persia. Yet artistic creativity survived and Thrived, and the works of Rumi and Hafez are still praised for their magnificence. Today in Iran, the works of the golden age are censored and redacted by the Guards to protect moral piety.

The Persian Empire declined and was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, and its inhabitants converted to Islam. But Persians retained their language and much of their culture. By the nineteenth century, the West had become militarily, economically, scientifically, and technologically dominant worldwide. Britain and Russia expanded their imperial and commercial reach to the borders of Persia.

Persia’s oil reserves made the country a central focus of international relations from the early twentieth century. Western oil firms tapped the country’s petroleum wealth, and Western cultural influence grew more prominent there. During World War I, rival Western powers competed for Muslim support. As part of the “Kaiser’s Jihad,” Germans spread the rumor that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam. For their part, the British circulated a story that an ancient Muslim holy figure would reemerge to lead Muslims in battle against German armies.

Some Iranians took sides in Western power jockeying, but many more avoided foreign meddling. The more pious Persians sought to resist the advance of European and American values by retreating into Islam and mysticism. To escape harassment by Iranian authorities, leading ayatollahs quietly moved to Najaf in newly created Iraq. They, like nationalists, embraced a romantic nostalgia for a long-lost empire and its prestige. Some intellectuals turned to Western dictatorial philosophies, such as those of Nazi Germany.

National Socialism challenged British imperialism, promoted anti-Semitism, and elevated the Aryans to a status of racial supremacy. Fritz Grobba, Berlin’s envoy to the Middle East, was often called “the German Lawrence of Arabia” for promising a Pan-Arab state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran. He built ties between Persian elites and the Nazi foreign office. One of those smitten by the Third Reich’s pomp and power was Reza Pahlevi.

This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

The earliest traces of human civilization in Iran date to about 8,000 BCE. Cyrus I established the Achaemenian dynasty and laid the foundation for the Persian Empire in 630 BCE. His grandson, Cyrus the Great, conquered much of Greece. In the fifth century BCE, Persia was a global superpower. Many Iranians are proud of their ancient heritage and travel to King Cyrus the Great’s tomb in southwestern Fars Province to pay their respects to this legendary figure. The Greeks referred to “the West” as all land west of Persia, and the Greeks and Persians clashed for decades. The ancient Greeks forged many of their democratic freedoms in response to the Persian challenge.

The Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote The Persians in 472 BCE, casting civilized Greece against authoritarian Persia. In 338 BCE, Alexander the Great’s army reached Persepolis and was astounded by its beauty. Nonetheless, he leveled much of the city in retaliation for the Parthenon’s torching years earlier.

The ravages of the Greek army did not extinguish Persia’s artistic and literary beauty. The stories of Omar Khayyam and iconic Persian poetry, such as Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh,” recall the glories of pre-Islamic Persia. In the arts, the Parthians excelled in miniature painting and carpet weaving.2 The Mongols ravaged all lands under their control, including Persia. Yet artistic creativity survived and thrived, and works by Rumi and Hafez are still praised for their magnificence. Within Iran today, the works of the golden age are censored and redacted by the Guards to protect moral piety.

The Persian Empire declined and was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, and its inhabitants converted to Islam. But Persians retained their language and much of their culture. By the nineteenth century, the West had become militarily, economically, scientifically, and technologically dominant worldwide. Britain and Russia expanded their imperial and commercial reach to the borders of Persia.

Persia’s oil reserves made the country a central focus of international relations from the early twentieth century. Western oil firms tapped the country’s petroleum wealth, and Western cultural influence grew more prominent there. During World War I, rival Western powers competed for Muslim support. As part of the “Kaiser’s Jihad,” Germans spread the rumor that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam. For their part, the British circulated a story that an ancient Muslim holy figure would reemerge to lead Muslims in battle against German armies.

Some Iranians took sides in Western power jockeying, but many more avoided foreign meddling. The more pious Persians sought to resist the advance of European and American values by retreating into Islam and mysticism. To escape harassment by Iranian authorities, leading ayatollahs quietly moved to Najaf in newly created Iraq. They, like nationalists, embraced a romantic nostalgia for a long-lost empire and its prestige. Some intellectuals turned to Western dictatorial philosophies, such as those of Nazi Germany.

National Socialism challenged British imperialism, promoted anti-Semitism, and elevated the Aryans to a status of racial supremacy. Fritz Grobba, Berlin’s envoy to the Middle East, was often called “the German Lawrence of Arabia” for promising a Pan-Arab state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran. He built ties between Persian elites and the Nazi foreign office. One of those smitten by the Third Reich’s pomp and power was Reza Pahlevi.

the Islamic East. Al-Banna was a Sunni Muslim, but he had no quarrel with the Shia, whom he regarded as fellow Muslims. Instead, he advocated a solid Shia-Sunni Islamic front against non-Muslims, and he particularly detested the British. Iranian Islamic revolutionaries praised the Brotherhood and mourned al-Banna when he was killed in 1949.

After al-Banna’s death, the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, sometimes spelled Sayeed Qutb, became the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading theorist until Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered his execution in 1966. In the late 1940s, Qutb attended a teachers’ college in the United States and penned a phantasmagorical account of his experience titled The America I Saw. He loathed America, describing its women as vixens, its men as vulgar, its society as void of religion, and its cultural tastes as unrefined and salacious. Iranian mullahs echoed his descriptions of America. Qutb was not a cleric, and his commentary on Islamic scripture does not carry authority among the more pious. However, he shone as a general strategist and opinion-maker for the Muslim masses. Future supreme leader of Iran Ali Khamenei translated Qutb’s works into Persian.

The Persian activist-intellectual Said Jamaleddin Asadabadi, sometimes called Jamal al-Dinal-Afghani, was a principal architect of the first wave of religious revivalism. Revolutionary Iran’s founders, including Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Khamenei, were profoundly influenced by the militant Navvab Safavi, who promoted the work of Egyptian Brotherhood leaders, notably Qutb. Iranian Ali Shariati is often called the ideologue of the Iranian Revolution. He promoted Islam as a complete lifestyle and advocated purging Iran of all nonreligious elements. This appealed to Iran’s religious, weak, and alienated.31 Shariati took avant-garde leftist designs for social justice and wedded them to Shia Islam. Shariati was influenced by the radical, trendy ideas popular in Paris, where he lived in the 1950s and earned a doctorate in religious studies from the Sorbonne. His prose was fluid and energetic. Said a friend, “He was a Gramsci, Guevara, Fanon, Malcolm X and Iqbal rolled into one.”

Stirred by the revolutionary zeal he found among Europe’s progressive salon set, Shariati sought to revitalize Shia Islam. He described two versions of Shia Islam—a “red” or authentic Shia and a “black” Shia, which was stagnant and worn. Shariati was part nationalist, Islamist, and revivalist, and his message inspired scores of activists during the 1960s and 1970s.33 Above all, he was an advocate of Shia Islam. He believed Shia Muslims should stop passively waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam. Instead, they should create conditions that would hasten his return, writing, “Every day is Ashura; every place is Karbala.” He argued that the clergy’s role was to guide society through a synthesis of Islamic values and left-oriented activism.34 His work remains foundational in Iran today.

Khomeini, like Shariati, was part Islamist and part revivalist, writing with flair and verve. He defined himself primarily as a Muslim and secondarily as an Iranian, insisting that the 1979 Revolution be primarily Islamic, not Iranian or Shia.35 He loathed the West, especially the British, Americans, and Israelis, and excoriated Iranians he deemed collaborators. Khomeini shared Qutb’s view of nationalism as idolatry. If Qutb vilified Nasser as the “Pharaoh,” Khomeini saw both Pahlevis as anachronisms and impediments to valid Islamic rule. Khomeini included these ideas in his manuscript The Jurist Guardianship—Islamic Government, which circulated widely in the 1970s.36 Years later, the Guards would project these ideas abroad and use them to rally Shia in the greater Middle East.

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Today its most important application is by the members of the Global Jihadist Movement, most specifically Al Qaeda and the Islamic State which grew out of Al Qaeda. For Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and the tens of thousands of young men who have joined his cause, “jihad” refers to the last Holy War against the Infidel, a war to be waged in the eschatologically highly significant territory of Syria and Iraq as well as on the soil of infidel lands, be it a nightclub in Orlando, a concert hall in Paris, or on the streets of Boston.

 Dr. Silinsky has done the Western world a great service by writing Jihad and the West: Black Flag over Babylon. In fact, his contribution must be read by as many national security professionals, policy-makers, and leaders as possible if we are to truly understand the threat we face and soon vanquish the new totalitarianism that is Global Jihadism.

The facts about the religiously-bounded ideology and strategy our foe follows is available for all to unearth without even having to learn Arabic. Al Qaeda has its English-language internet magazine Inspire, and the Islamic State, as I write these words, is already on the fifteenth issue of its End-Times-suffused Jihadi magazine Dabiq. These publications are the “field manuals” of modern Jihad. But the story of where these ideas came from and how they evolved over time is far richer than can be gleaned from reading today’s internet propaganda alone. The information is available, but it is dispersed, scattered around the globe. What Dr. Silinsky has done is bring all the disparate threads together in one tome, backed up by the latest news reports and on-the-ground information, which allows us to do the most important thing any nation can do in a war: understand the enemy as they understand themselves.

 With decades of practical experience inside the “machine” that is the US Intelligence community, Dr. Silinsky only writes of that which is relevant. This is best exemplified by the numerous case studies and three dozen profiles his book is built around. If the fact is not relevant to the war, it is not important. This is how such works should be written and is an exemplar for others.

Dr. Silinsky must also be commended for braving the political correctness that has so infected and distorted Western threat-assessment in recent years. Denying that Jihadism is but “Fascism with an Islamic face” will not secure our nations or help undermine our enemy. Lastly, I have a personal thank you to make. As someone who makes his living by reading and using such works, I am indebted to the author for making Jihad and the West: Black Flag over Babylon such an enjoyable text. As Dr. Silinsky subtly injects quotes from fine literature and stage plays to get his points across, he achieves that which I thought was nigh impossible: making a book on the horrors of Jihad eminently readable.