Free Republic

Commentary Useful Idiot The curious case of Max Blumenthal AUG, 2019 BY BRUCE BAWER Its back cover features encomia from Reza Aslan, Andrew Cockburn, and Oliver Stone, and its jacket copy promises that readers will find in its pages “the real story behind America’s dealings with the world” and proof that “the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of American imperial design.” The book is The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump, and its author is Max Blumenthal, the son of...

If there is a positive side to the rise of ISIS, it is that the West has had its head jerked from the sand and has been made to witness a bottomless, bloodthirsty evil: crucifixions, beheadings, enslavement of women, live burial of children, mass executions. But as one analyst writes, this violence is not “whimsical, crazed fanaticism, but a very deliberate, considered strategy” – one that seems to derive in part from a book called The Management of Savagery. In the spring of 2004 a strategist who called himself Abu Bakr Naji published online The Management of Savagery: The Most...

Back in 2005, Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein published al-Qaida’s manifesto. In his book, he outlined al-Qaida’s seven-point plan over a 20-year period: “An Islamic Caliphate in Seven Easy Steps.” Ten years later, we can see how al-Qaida and other Islamic jihad groups have followed this plan to the letter – with remarkable success, thanks to the weakness, fecklessness and willful ignorance of Western leaders.

No sooner had it seized the Iraqi city of Mosul and surrounding villages, than the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) began outlining how it would govern its dawla (state). The best way to get a sense of ISIS’s blueprint for state-building is to look at how it has ruled al-Raqqa governorate and other territory in neighboring Syria. The group’s first move is often to set up billboards around town that emphasize the importance of jihad, sharia, women’s purity, and other pietistic themes. The group also has a surprisingly sophisticated bureaucracy, which typically includes an Islamic court system and...