To me they fit the old time definition of brigands or warlords.
thanks for posting. Is definitely a political system cloaked in the burka of a religion ...
I agree with the sentiment of the article, but when he says the following he is wrong:
” A state has borders, a central government, and a bureaucratic structure. None of this is true of ISIS...”
ISIS has borders - the ends of the earth, or at least the ends of the Muslim ummah.
ISIS has a central government. It has a caliph.
ISIS has a real bureaucracy: “I feel like I am dealing with a respected state, not thugs,†said a Raqqa goldsmith in his small shop as a woman shopped for gold pieces with cash sent from abroad by her husband. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/world/middleeast/islamic-state-controls-raqqa-syria.html?_r=0
They have as much of a bureaucracy as the U.S. does: http://www.aymennjawad.org/2015/01/archive-of-islamic-state-administrative-documents
Furthermore, unlike Islam and Judaism, Christianity includes the Magisterium of the Church, with authority in the intellectual domain.
Catholicism has the Magisterium, not Christianity. Besides, the idea that some group of people is in charge is not unique in Catholicism. There are 2 splinter groups in Islam that both claim authority.
Interesting article, but failure in one part impacts the rest...
There is nothing more dangerous than Islam.
It is a corrosive poison within any society.
John Quincy Adams on Islam
In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust, by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.
Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture, which has been permitted by Providence to prolong the degeneracy of man. While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. It is, indeed, amongst the mysterious dealings of God, that this delusion should have been suffered for so many ages, and during so many generations of human kind, to prevail over the doctrines of the meek and peaceful and benevolent Jesus (Blunt, 1830, 29:269, capitals in orig.).