Salon: The United States is scarier than the Islamic State [View all]

[loyalsister]

I have been very behind in educating myself on ISIL. I'm amazed at how similar they are to Christian fundamentalists in using endtimes prophecies to manipulate people. I can't help but wonder how the substance of some of the war mongering we hear (and what is said in religious groups behind closed doors) is truly different from the terrorist leaders? Do our power and technology dress up the very same phenmomenon? Getting this many people to die for an endtimes cause is Jim Jones shit.

Even our closest allies fear that we are a menace militarily and environmentally

In addition, the Iraq War convinced a whole generation of Muslims — both Sunni and Shi’ite — that the end of the world is imminent, leading to a rise of apocalyptic fervor in the Middle East. As the Islamic scholar David Cook notes, it was “widely accepted” that the U.S.-led war fulfilled certain Islamic prophecies, and in fact a leading Shia militia in Iraq whose explicit aim was to expel the foreign invaders named itself the Mahdi Army after Islam’s end-of-days messianic figure, the Mahdi. A 2014 Reuters article even cites a Shi’ite fighter as saying that he became convinced that the end was nigh after the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq. “That was the first sign,” he said, “and then everything else followed.”

What’s perhaps most fascinating about this situation is that Trump appears to be peddling his own apocalyptic narrative to his followers, the least educated Americans. According to Chip Berlet, a scholar of right-wing and apocalyptic movements, Trump’s followers are fixated on urgent phenomena — from China and ISIS to illegal immigration and economic uncertainty — that together create an apocalyptic climate in which a messianic figure of some sort is needed to “save” the believers. As Berlet puts it, “current leaders are corrupt and betraying us, [and] the middle class is having its pocket picked by the parasites below. So white Christians say they have to build a wall to protect themselves from raping and murdering Mexican neighbors, meanwhile registering and rounding up Muslims because they’re plotting terrorism. That’s a pretty good apocalyptic scenario because those threats are existential to the U.S.” The result is, of course, that Muslims are further alienated and the “clash of eschatologies” is ossified, which is exactly what the Islamic State wants. In a sense, it’s a win-win for fundamentalisms.
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/20/the_united_states_is_scarier_than_the_islamic_state/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Trump and republicans may be employing this most efficiently, but I really think it's in response to a large number of endtimes fundamentalists. They are the ones who worry that gay marriage and abortion will visit some kind of armegeddon rage upon us. Democrats are not above pandering to them. We need to pay close attentions to local elections!
They attacked evolution by getting on school boards where they could.