The entire piece is essential, it was almost pointless to pull out a quote. \u00a0But in a nation that is tired of war, with significant antiwar political movements on the left and right, and with people from all political perspectives engaging in much wishful thinking about ISIS, I thought this was the essential bit:<\/p>\n
We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of\u2014and headline player in\u2014the imminent end of the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One can neither reason with nor rationally deter an inbound kamikaze pilot.<\/p>\n
I try to avoid the old blogger’s crutch “read the whole thing” – so when I say it, I mean it. \u00a0By all means do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And me, too. This piece – “What Isis Really Wants“, by Graeme Wood, in that noted conservative tool\u00a0The Atlantic –\u00a0explains ISIS in political, social and theological terms better than any single thing I’ve ever read. It’s a long read, but a valuable, even vital one. The entire piece is essential, it was almost pointless to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,131,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faiths-and-their-followers","category-war-and-peace","category-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51365"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51380,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51365\/revisions\/51380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}