Poultry Jihad: Islamic State Destroys ‘Infidel Chicken’ While Civilians Starve

The difficulty of life under the dominion of a psychopathic jihad state is highlighted by a Foreign Policy article cheekily entitled “Death to the Infidel Chicken!” ISIS has been busy burning boxes of chicken because the food is supposedly impure from their religious standards, while ten million hungry people watch. (For the record, the food was certified halal, i.e. compliant with Islamic dietary restrictions).

As usual, the Islamic State was eager to spread its brutal antics across social media, producing a stream of Tweets that show grim overseers dumping piles of frozen chicken into a ditch and setting them ablaze in the midst of a country wracked by years of savage civil war, where the U.N. estimates 9.8 million people need food:

Elias Groll at Foreign Policy sees this as a sign of the Islamic State’s difficulty at managing anything more constructive than jihad warfare: “The group manages the distribution of social services and has succeeded imposing a brutal kind of order in the areas it rules. But in many areas the group has struggled to govern effectively and appears to have prioritized the implementation of its strict laws over basic services such as providing clean drinking water. Heavy on fighters and ideologues and short on engineers and administrators, the group ends up taking absurd actions such as burning hundreds of chickens amid a food crisis.”

Buttressing this point, Groll relates a list of “job opportunities” in the Islamic State that reads like a dark satire of totalitarian fanaticism, mixing “hospital assistant,” “chef,” and “fitness trainer” with “bomb making department” and “Islamic police.”

International Business Times adds that according to the U.N., Syria’s civil war has “plunged 80% of its citizens into poverty, reduced life expectancy by 20 years, and led to massive economic losses that have been estimated at over $200 billion.” The willful destruction of humanitarian supplies amid such a crisis is heinous, and par for the course with this evil “caliphate.”

There might be more to burning all that chicken, since hunger is a powerful tool for controlling subjugated populations, with both grisly real-world history and pop-culture relevance. Hungry people are more likely to obey those who feed them. Wiping out the stockpile of “infidel chicken” gives ISIS a sharp instrument of enforced starvation to punish the disobedient.

On the bright side, this could widen the bridge of understanding between ISIS and the American Left, which has also been known to have religious issues with chicken, and dislikes anything associated with the name “Koch.”