You're All In or You're Not

 --Ceci n'est pas une pomme 
  (This is not an apple), 
Rene Magritte   

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, 
the word "snapshot" was originally a hunting term 
 --One Hour Photo (2002)

Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know the boys in the newsroom
got a running bet 
--Dirty Laundry, Don Henley 

--It’s strange that we’ve never
 read of this in the newspapers

--Well… that’s newspapers for you, ma’am.
You could fill volumes with
what you don’t read in them 
--The Green Berets (1968)
 ___________________

Subtitle: This is not a Muslim. 

"The Islamic State is not really Islamic" -- perhaps one of President Obama's most disingenuous recent statements. Perhaps they remind him more of Urantians?

Now that's like saying a Dodge Ram pickup is really a Toyota, or a cherry cheesecake is actually a rhubarb pie. Is it blasphemy, a lie, or a massive denial? Perhaps cognitive dissonance of the highest level, or just the canniness of a politician seeking to curry favor with the less animated members of that one-billion strong religion?

Of course it is Islamic, as Islamic as Islamic can get. It's just that most Muslims practice a form of Muslim Lite, like cafeteria Catholics who haven't the stomach for transubstantiation, a doctrine which explains the transformation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Jesus.

Religions in general serve as primers on how to live a good life, and they are founded by crusaders with an agenda, some more benign and ecumenical than others, their words often warped by their inheritors. They basically tend to man's basic needs and they all have their quirks, but if you're a believer you cleave to The Word, regardless of those seeming hiccups.

For the Catholic, The Word is that you are eating His flesh and drinking His blood in the rite of the Eucharist. It is cannibalism, but by invitation (sort of like the Germans in the recent press who had placed classified adverts requesting to be eaten, like a nice sushi.) Christopher Hitchens deconstructed the idea of belief completely. The dogma is clear and if you reject any of it, you are a hypocrite at best. But hey, religion (and the world) is full of them.

Likewise, if one is a true believer in the prophet Mohammed, one believes that infidels (= those of other religions) should be killed. It is all there, in their Good Book, the Koran. It's not a very happy (for non-Muslims) or modern concept, but for those feeling nostalgic or who have never entered modernity, it is spot-on and clear as day.

Just as the Christian crusaders fought both for belief and booty, so too the thoroughly modern Muslim crusader. To have a caliphate of your own is a pretty fine thing, after all.

Our misbegotten wars have served to animate vast swaths of often unemployed usually young people disenfranchised in their own countries, subjected to the brutalities and insults of an invading and occupying Army. Some people come to God when their back is against the wall -- it is the last comfort of and the last depot for the desperate.

These desperadoes are finding common ground with the True Believers (always a much smaller minority.) They yearn to live in their own "ownership society" (as President George W. Bush encouraged us to do) and regain a state of grace and dignity (regardless of how undignified their methods might appear to us.)

And being salacious Westerners in bondage to easy and gory visuals we give them incessant free press, providing them with the most valuable asset they possess: the ability to spread fear beyond the discrete beheading or other vulgar murder. We are aiding and abetting the criminal/terrorist, wittingly or not. Do we acknowledge our role in the crimes we behold?

We are like Yuri Bezmenov's demoralized useful idiots. But to what end?

Waging jihad is every bit as faithful to doctrine as the flesh and blood consumption of the believing Catholic. What right have we to dismiss or deny the validity of these doctrinal beliefs to the adherent? But to deny these realities is not to do justice to the facts.

If indeed the slashers and hackers and beheaders are the rare breed, why are we proliferating their self-aggrandizing videos? Shouldn't the goal be to minimize that message while elevating anything opposed to it?

Have I missed anything?