Originally published by Glenn Beck.
Yesterday’s shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego by two apparent anti-Muslim terrorists should not be characterized as a response to the Islamist threat. In fact, it is—according to ISIS’s own philosophy—a jihadist victory; a critical one necessary for jihadists to fulfill their global and apocalyptic ambitions. We have understandably fixated on ISIS’s efforts to create a Caliphate. Hence, its official name: the Islamic State. But ISIS has told us that it has a strategic objective that is even bigger than creating a Caliphate: The “Extinction of the Grayzone.”
In the seventh issue of its English-language magazine, ISIS dedicated over a dozen whole pages to explaining this strategy, but almost no one seems to have heard of it. In light of yesterday’s atrocity, it is imperative that we know it.
The “grayzone” that ISIS strives to eliminate is the Muslim middle ground between having complete loyalty to the West, including its Muslim allies in the Middle East, and embracing jihad for the sake of the caliphate.
The ISIS magazine gives the impression that ISIS has all but given up on trying to shake the loyalty of patriotic and pro-Western Muslims in North America and Europe. The frustration of the Islamist authors is palpable — nearly an admission of ideological defeat.
Those Muslim populations simply love the West too much for any propaganda to work. There is only one way to deal with those Muslims, according to this text: Slaughter them, ideally using the hands of non- believers who hate Muslims.
The population that ISIS believes it can win over is the Muslim middle ground: Muslims who are “independent of both camps”—the West and its Muslim allies on one side; the caliphate-seeking jihadists on the other.
ISIS indirectly admits that Islamists can’t defeat the West’s arguments—unless they have Westerners make their arguments for them. And the way to do this, it says, is to compel “the enraged crusaders” to “actively destroy the grayzone themselves” by “increas[ing] persecution against Muslims in Western lands.” The strategy is to make Muslims so feared and hated that the West and Muslim governments allied with the West “increase their imprisonment of any Muslim they think might have a mustard seed of jealousy for his religion.”
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