Last month, the Islamic State’s magazine Dabiq included an “interview” with a prisoner named Muhammad Said Ismail Musallam, who was supposedly a spy recruited by Israeli intelligence. Now it has been followed by a videotaped execution perpetrated by a pistol-packing child.
The global allure of a self-designated Caliphate, especially one that insists that its every barbaric action is Qur’an-based and Sharia-true, should not be underestimated.
Graeme Wood’s article, “What ISIS Really Wants,” in the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic is a fantastic summary of how the Islamic State (ISIS) interprets Islam – and, perhaps more importantly, how the rest of the Islamic world looks at ISIS. It does a great deal of damage to President Obama’s preferred narrative about how the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam, as well as his characterization of the terror state as “nihilistic.”
The new issue of Dabiq, the Islamic State English-language magazine, is officially out. Its headlining story boasts the capture of a Mossad informant, but the magazine serves less to bring news than to reframe the war between the Islamic State and civilization as a revisiting of the Crusades.
