Religion is a Mental Illness

Allah has promised the believing men and believing women gardens beneath which rivers flow, wherein they abide eternally, and pleasant dwellings in gardens of perpetual residence; but approval from Allah is greater. It is that which is the great attainment. O Prophet, fight against the disbelievers and the hypocrites and be harsh upon them. And their refuge is Hell, and wretched is the destination.

Those who believe say, "Why has a surah not been sent down? But when a precise surah is revealed and fighting is mentioned therein, you see those in whose hearts is hypocrisy looking at you with a look of one overcome by death. And more appropriate for them [would have been] Obedience and good words. And when the matter [of fighting] was determined, if they had been true to Allah, it would have been better for them.

It has been narrated on the authority of Anas b. Malik (through a different chain of transmitters) that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: Nobody who enters Paradise will (ever like to) return to this world even if he were offered everything on the surface of the earth (as an inducement) except the martyr who will desire to return to this world and be killed ten times for the sake of the great honour that has been bestowed upon him.

Narrated Anas bin Malik: The Prophet (ﷺ) said, "Nobody who enters Paradise likes to go back to the world even if he got everything on the earth, except a Mujahid who wishes to return to the world so that he may be martyred ten times because of the dignity he receives (from Allah)."

Opinion | What It Would Mean to Treat Hamas Like ISIS

The rules of war are quite explicit about what has to happen.

nytimes.com

The instant I understood the scale of Hamas’s attack on Israel, I understood the probable response. As I read reports of Hamas terrorists murdering entire families, raping Israeli women beside the bodies of their dead friends and dragging Israeli hostages into Gaza, it was apparent that Hamas had chosen to behave like ISIS, and if it behaved like ISIS, then the Israel Defense Forces were justified in treating Hamas in Gaza the same way the United States and its allies treated ISIS in Iraq.

The comparison is not lost on Israel. After the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Hamas is ISIS. And just as the forces of civilization united to defeat ISIS, the forces of civilization must support Israel in defeating Hamas.”

This means Israel’s goal is not to punish Hamas but to defeat it — to remove it from power in Gaza the way the Iraqi military, the United States and their allies removed ISIS from Mosul, Falluja, Ramadi and every other city ISIS controlled in Iraq. That can’t be accomplished by air power alone. If removing Hamas from power is the goal, then that almost certainly means soldiers and tanks fighting in Gazan cities, block by block, house to house in an area of roughly two million people.

The purpose of this newsletter is to give you a primer on both the military difficulty of the task and the humanitarian constraints on it, along with the limitations that are unique to Israel. It, like every other advanced democracy, is bound by the law of armed conflict. This means Israel may not treat Gaza the way, say, the Soviet Army treated Berlin in 1945. Even in its rage and pain, Israel may not level cities without regard for innocent life.

There is a model for Israeli victory in Gaza, but that model also illustrates the magnitude of the challenge. In the fall of 2016, around 100,000 Iraqi security forces and their allies massed outside Mosul and faced a daunting task: to remove the Islamic State from a vast, densely populated city when that army was deeply embedded in the city and had been able to prepare elaborate defenses.

Compounding the problem were that the civilian population, unlike during other recent urban battles in Iraq, largely remained in the city and that ISIS had no desire to facilitate a civilian evacuation. When the United States entered Falluja in 2004 during its war against Al Qaeda in Iraq, a vast majority of civilians had already fled. When soldiers and Marines engaged insurgents in street battles there, there were far fewer civilians in the zone of combat.

Mosul, by contrast, was largely fought in and around the civilian population and was at the time quite possibly the largest and deadliest urban battle since the end of World War II. Iraqi soldiers — supported by American air power — assaulted a city of more than one million people. The resulting battle took nine months to complete; killed thousands of ISIS fighters, by most estimates; cost the Iraqi security forces thousands of casualties; and, despite considerable efforts to protect noncombatants, killed up to 11,000 civilians. But Iraq won, ISIS lost, and ISIS no longer controls Mosul.

How does this fight compare with a battle in the heart of Gaza? The Israel Defense Forces will be better trained and more prepared than the Iraqi security forces — with a greater capacity to protect noncombatants — but if Israeli military history informs the present situation, the Israel Defense Forces will not have the luxury of time. It will almost certainly have to execute its major combat operations in much less than the nine months it took to defeat ISIS in Mosul.

To help me more fully understand the nature of the battle in Gaza, I called John Spencer, the chairman of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern Warfare Institute. The conversation made one thing very clear to me and resonated with my training and experience as a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom: Israel’s military mission is inseparable from its legal obligations. When a nation abides by the law of war, which Israel requires its soldiers to do, it fundamentally changes the way it fights and the experiences of its soldiers on the ground.

For example, a nation that disregards the law of war often approaches urban combat by destroying as much of the city as it can to weaken defenses before the attack and then, when it enters the city, it presumes structures are full of enemies and destroys buildings at will.

When a nation complies with the law of war, the presumptions switch. Civilian structures are presumed to be benign unless solid intelligence or hostile action demonstrates otherwise. As a practical matter, this means that air power alone is insufficient for the job. As Spencer told me, aircraft “can’t see through steel-reinforced concrete,” so tanks and troops have to enter a city to truly clear it.

But when they do, the defender gets an initial advantage. As Spencer said, the “attacker has to walk down the street and take a punch to the face.” Then it can respond. Israel understands that reality and adjusts its tactics accordingly, often leading with armored vehicles that can take the punch without incurring casualties.

Don’t think for a moment, however, that use of precision weapons means that cities can endure invasions without suffering terrifying damage. Before and after aerial views of Mosul reveal incredible devastation. Iraqi forces were generally less trained than the Israel Defense Forces, but that doesn’t account for the full extent of the destruction. Much of the damage was the result of the large-scale use of America’s most precise weapons. Spencer told me that the U.S. dangerously depleted its stocks of its extremely precise Hellfire missiles during the battle.

Spencer called the widespread destruction inflicted by precise weapons the “precision paradox.” I’ve also heard it described as spiderwebbing. Imagine if you have 10 ISIS fighters in one building. Iraqi forces call in an airstrike, and U.S. forces hit the building with a missile or bomb, but it doesn’t kill every fighter in the building. The remaining fighters scatter to two or three nearby buildings, which are then precisely targeted by additional munitions. The result is a form of slow-motion demolition, in which each strike might be quite precise but the cumulative effect can eventually make the city look as if it had been carpet-bombed.

We’re already seeing the phenomenon in Gaza. We are witnessing nothing like the immediate mass destruction of an indiscriminate attack, but large numbers of precision attacks can still inflict extreme (and deadly) damage.

If civilians aren’t evacuated from the combat zone, the intensity of combat makes significant civilian casualties inevitable, even if Israel fully complies with the law of war. I also spoke this week to James Verini, a contributing writer to The Times Magazine, who wrote “They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate,” perhaps the definitive on-the-ground account of the fight for Mosul, and two things he said stood out in the conversation.

First, because precision weapons sometimes miss and intelligence often fails, airstrikes inevitably inflict serious collateral damage, including civilian casualties. Second, as the fight drags on and ramps up in intensity, concern for civilian lives often diminishes. That was the pattern for the less-disciplined Iraqi security forces, but we can’t for a moment presume that Israeli soldiers are superhuman. Most of them are draftees and reservists. They’re subject to the same fears and temptations under extreme stress and anger as any other soldier in any other army.

Then there’s the factor of time. Spencer observed that Israel always fights against the backdrop of a ticking clock. The United States is an independent economic and military superpower. We possess the world’s most powerful military and the world’s most potent economy. We have the luxury of fighting on timetables we set. If we want to slow down and take nine months to clear a city, we can take nine months to clear a city.

Israel possesses a powerful military and a strong economy, but it is still ultimately a dependent power. It cannot ignore international (and especially U.S.) pressure. In addition, calling hundreds of thousands of reservists out of the work force weakens the economy. In every major conflict since its war for independence, Israel has had to race to accomplish its military objectives before international pressure forced a cease-fire. The sheer scale of Hamas’s atrocities may increase the patience of the international community for an Israeli offensive, but that patience has never been unlimited.

Put all this together, and you can immediately perceive Israel’s asymmetric challenge. Hamas scorns the law of war. The reports of its intentional mass killing, mutilation, rape and civilian hostage taking are evidence enough of that fact. Israel legally and morally obligates the Israel Defense Forces to comply with the law. As a result, civilians become one of Hamas’s principal military assets. The presence of civilians gives Hamas the ability to punch first in any given street fight. The presence of civilians raises the bar for approving airstrikes or any other use of long-range weapons. And when civilians die, Hamas uses their deaths to inflame the international community and to help run out the clock on international patience for Israeli military operations.

Even worse, Hamas is helped by an enormous amount of public ignorance combined with outright misinformation. The average journalist — much less the average citizen — doesn’t know much, if anything, about the laws of war. Let’s take, for example, two key legal concepts that will be relevant every single day of the fighting in Gaza: proportionality and distinction.

As the war continues and as the destruction mounts, you will hear a number of voices condemn Israel for a disproportionate response, but many of these critics fundamentally misunderstand what proportionality means in the law of war. The U.S. Army’s “Law of Land Warfare” field manual — which is deeply grounded in the international law of armed conflict and governed our urban operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — defines the legal obligation of proportionality as requiring “commanders to refrain from attacks in which the expected loss or injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects incidental to such attacks would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained.” It also requires that commanders “take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians, other protected persons and civilian objects.”

Proportionality does not require the Israel Defense Forces to respond with the same degree of force or take the same proportion of casualties as Hamas. In addition, as the manual states, “the proportionality standard does not require that no incidental harm results from attacks.” If you’re a soldier on patrol and someone fires at you with a rifle, you don’t have to respond with a rifle. You can use a tank round or a missile in response, unless you have reason to believe the tank round or missile will cause extraordinary collateral damage. But if you’re taking fire from a single house, proportionality prohibits you from destroying the entire block. Throughout the war on terrorism, American forces used powerful, longer-range weapons to attack individual targets. That does not violate the laws of war.

In reality, inflicting disproportionate casualties can be one of the goals of a fighting force. Ukraine appears to have inflicted substantially greater casualties on Russia than the Russian Army has inflicted on Ukraine. That doesn’t mean Ukraine’s response was disproportionate under the law of armed conflict. In every fight, the goal is to inflict as many losses as possible on your opponent while taking as few losses as possible.

There is a similar public ignorance problem with the concept of distinction, which “The Law of Land Warfare” defines as requiring combatants to distinguish “between combatants and military objectives on the one hand and civilians and civilian objects on the other in offense and defense.” Distinction requires soldiers to separate themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms, for example, or by fighting from marked military vehicles. It prohibits militaries from fighting from places like hospitals, schools and mosques.

Hamas disregards the principle of distinction. Its fighters take aim from civilian buildings while wearing civilian clothes and using civilian vehicles. This presents an attacking military with serious targeting problems. It is easy to identify, say, an armored personnel carrier as a military vehicle. But what if there are four Toyota Tacomas in the street and only one is full of Hamas fighters?

But here’s the key point: When Hamas abandons the principle of distinction, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian damage that results. If Hamas fights from a hospital — or stores munitions in a hospital — damage to that hospital is Hamas’s responsibility. If Hamas fighters shoot at Israel Defense Forces from a home that contains a Palestinian family, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties if that family is harmed in the resulting exchange of fire.

There is also the unique military legal doctrine of siege warfare. On Monday, Israel announced a “complete siege” and said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed inside the Gaza Strip. A siege is an ancient form of warfare, and the modern legal obligations of a besieging party are a matter of dispute, but again, “The Law of Land Warfare” is instructive. It explicitly declares it “lawful” to cut off “reinforcements, supplies and communications,” but it also states that the belligerents should “make reasonable, good-faith efforts to conclude local agreements for the removal of wounded, sick, infirm and aged persons, children and maternity cases from the besieged or encircled area.”

Given these realities, you can see the dynamic that will unfold. Bound by the laws of war, Israel has every incentive to decrease civilian casualties. The Israel Defense Forces are already providing detailed evacuation instructions for civilians to remove them from the zones of expected conflict. Netanyahu has urged residents to leave Gaza. Disregarding the law of war, Hamas has concrete tactical and strategic reasons to keep civilians in harm’s way and capitalize on their deaths.

To accurately describe that dynamic is not to pre-emptively excuse every single civilian death at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces. We are already seeing reports of significant civilian casualties from Israeli airstrikes, and it will be necessary to investigate them to ensure that the Israeli military followed proper protocols when approving those strikes. The siege will become legally and morally untenable if civilians cannot leave the besieged areas and if they’re blocked from receiving life-sustaining supplies. Egypt has responsibilities as well. If it continues to block entry into Sinai from Gaza, it will be contributing to the humanitarian crisis.

During the war on terrorism, the Army and Marines often embedded JAG officers (lawyers specifically trained in the law of armed conflict) with combat arms units to try to ensure compliance with the laws of war under circumstances every bit as difficult as the ones the Israel Defense Forces face in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces also rely heavily on their lawyers. When I served in Iraq with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, that was my job. Yet our military still made mistakes. Some American soldiers (not in my unit) committed war crimes, in spite of comprehensive training and numerous constraints placed on the use of force.

Every violation of the law should carry a consequence, but the law of war does not prevent Israel from destroying a terrorist army embedded in a civilian population. It can be done. It has been done. And as Israel embarks on perhaps its most difficult military operation since its war for independence, public clarity about the law of war will be indispensable for depriving Hamas of one of its chief propaganda weapons, and continued enforcement of the law of war can prevent atrocities that could fuel this conflict for generations to come.

I tried every tactic my nine-year-old brain could muster, but nothing worked. Gone were all my clothes; pants were no longer allowed. Now, I was to cover every inch of my body but my face and hands. This was the moment that the final nail was hammered into the coffin of my childhood.

I felt so awkward, so uncomfortable, so hot, in those stupid oversized clothes. My whole body was suffocating. My head throbbed, and my skin oozed sweat from every pore. And every day, they told me that dressing like the kuffar was evil and that I would go to hell if I dressed that way. Besides, when the Caliphate rises, if you're not wearing hijab, how will you be distinguished from the nonbelievers? If you look like them, you’ll be killed like them.

Ah, the Caliphate. Always about the Caliphate. Every Friday khutba (sermon) there was the declaration that Muslims will succeed in turning the whole planet Islamic. Every Friday, we chant “Ameen” as the Imam makes a dua, plea to Allah, that the Caliphate rises soon and that we eradicate nonbelievers. Then there will be peace. It is why when ISIS rose in Iraq and Syria so many people from around the world-inexplicable people like university students from affluent families in Western countries-decided to join ISIS then burn their passports. The response from pundits was to assume that these people were all recruited online. That’s some pretty quick recruiting! The reason why all those young and women so quickly joined ISIS was because, just like me, they were raised hearing about how it was their duty to join the ummah against the nonbelievers. They were taught that it was their duty to join the Caliphate when it rises. Probably, like me, they didn't really think they would ever see the day, but then there it was. An Islamic State. As soon as it existed, these people already knew what they had to do. It had been drilled into them since childhood.

My mother used to sit me down and make me promise that I would be willing to kill nonbelievers when the time came.

“Yes, sure,” I would respond in monotone.

There was always some sort of coercion going on. I was forced to pray, to memorize Quran, to promise to kill my friends, and of course to wear this hideous hijab. Every conceivable method of coercion was deployed—fear, a desire to please Allah, emotional blackmail. It was all unending. Only obedient Muslim daughters can go to Heaven. If you dress like the kuffar, you are choosing hell. That is the self-hate that I was filled with from the age of nine.

-- Yasmine Mohammed, "Unveiled"

Why an ISIS Propagandist Abandoned Islam

“Seeing individuals dedicate themselves to tyrannical death cults led by suicidal maniacs is bad enough. Knowing that I may have contributed

The Atlantic|Graeme Wood

On February 7, 2016, Musa Cerantonio told a friend that his fame as Australia’s best-known ISIS supporter had become a burden. Fellow ISIS supporters felt mysteriously compelled to email or call him before committing crimes. “Why,” Cerantonio lamented, “does everyone, before they do stupid shit, get in contact with me?” In this case, the doer of stupid shit was Alo-Bridget Namoa, the “Bonnie” half of the terror couple she herself had dubbed “the jihadi Bonnie and Clyde.” She and Clyde, a.k.a. Sameh Bayda, were both later convicted of terror offenses. Namoa had contacted Cerantonio, the Australian authorities tapping his phone later revealed, because she needed to know where to get an ISIS flag in Sydney. ISIS supporters were treating him like a jihadist help desk. If you see her, Cerantonio told his friend, “slap her for me.” Later that year, Cerantonio was arrested for trying to travel by boat from Australia to ISIS territory in the southern Philippines. He has been in prison ever since, and he has 13 months left on his sentence.

But if you try dialing the help desk in 13 months, you might not get the encouragement you’d expect. Last year, Cerantonio wrote to me from Port Phillip Prison, in Melbourne, and told me that he had renounced ISIS.

In block letters—the Arabic transcriptions neatly bedecked with diacritical marks, all in the right places—he explained his journey back from jihad. “I have been wrong these last 17 years,” he wrote. “Seeing individuals dedicate themselves to tyrannical death cults led by suicidal maniacs is bad enough. Knowing that I may have contributed to their choices is terrible.” Perhaps he should be returned to the help desk before his sentence is up. “I hope that my experiences may be of help in drawing others away from the same mistakes.”

His rehabilitation, which he narrated in detail, is as bizarre as his career as an ISIS propagandist was. Born in 1985 to a middle-class Italian Australian family outside Melbourne, Cerantonio converted to Islam as a teenager. He showed an unusual inclination for linguistics and Islamic history, and within a few years a Saudi-funded satellite-TV channel, Iqraa, had hired him to preach on air, on subjects including Arabic philology and Islamic readings of The Wizard of Oz. Eventually his message grew too political and the channel fired him and, he said, attempted to administer a beating as part of his severance. When ISIS arose, this neofundamentalist autodidact had both the knowledge and the on-camera charisma necessary to influence thousands of fellow Muslims and help persuade many to immigrate to Syria and Iraq in order to fight and die for the new caliphate. If you seek out English translations of early ISIS documents, you may find his handiwork.

In prison, he began to study the Quran in greater detail, and focused on the aspects that most puzzled him. Among these was the figure called Dhu-l Qarnayn, “the two-horned one,” who appears in the Quran’s 18th chapter and is believed by many to refer to Alexander the Great. Cerantonio did not see a resemblance between Dhu-l Qarnayn and the Alexander of history—but he noted similarities between Dhu-l Qarnayn and a heavily fabulized version of Alexander’s story written in Aramaic. He considered that the Aramaic version may have plagiarized the Quran, but after acquiring a copy of the Aramaic and translating it for himself, he determined that the reverse was more likely. (“I always knew that being proficient in Aramaic would one day prove useful.”)

“Realizing that Dhu-l Qarnayn was not at all a real person but was rather based on a fictional account of Alexander the Great instantly left me with only one possible conclusion: The Quran was not divinely inspired,” he wrote. It had taken Alexander the Great fan fiction as fact. “Of course I would have preferred to have discovered all that 17 years ago and avoided much trouble.” He has therefore abandoned not only ISIS but Islam and religion as a whole. He is an atheist and admires the God Delusion author Richard Dawkins.

After the first letter, we traded correspondence and spoke by Skype. He now goes by his birth name, Robert, but when pressed on subjects related to ISIS doctrine will sometimes “answer your question as ‘Musa,’” channeling his former self to explain the ISIS view before recovering his “Rob” identity and speaking as his current self. He said he had been reluctant to go public about his apostasy—less because he feared being murdered by jihadists (apostasy is a capital offense in Islam) than because his detractors will say he’s just trying to get out of prison early.

He said his conversion was “not making my time any easier in here.” And if he wanted to feign rehabilitation, he would have done so years ago, at sentencing, and not in this roundabout and arcane way involving Syriac texts and Hellenistic historiography. I asked him why the Alexander stuff had convinced him that ISIS was wrong, whereas the group’s practices of mass murder and sex slavery had never tipped him off. He said the latter were consistent with the religion, while the Alexander plagiarism failed intellectual tests on their own terms.

Whenever a prominent member of a terror group leaves it, he inspires a great deal of curiosity about how he was cured of his evil beliefs—which seem so durable when they are held that they may lead to violent death. So much of Cerantonio’s story is idiosyncratic that I am not sure what, if anything, can be used to deprogram others. Most ISIS supporters care little about the historical and linguistic minutiae that motivated Cerantonio. Teaching jihadists Aramaic is not a cure easily scaled up. Moreover, a rehab program that encourages patients to give up Islam (a religion practiced benignly by nearly all Muslims) instead of merely giving up terrorism is bound to be controversial.

Cerantonio himself said that the programs in prisons, in Australia and abroad, are almost all rubbish. They raise objections to jihadism that the jihadists can easily refute. He called the suggestion that jihadists be exposed to “true Islam,” such as the more moderate texts of medieval theologians, “idiotic.” “It doesn’t work,” he told me. “It has failed miserably time after time.” But he is equally withering about Dawkins’s polemics against Islam, even though he now shares Dawkins’s zero-calorie theology. “I’m no longer a Muslim,” he said, “but I still object to the things he’s saying. When he writes about Islam, he gets things wrong.” Dawkins quotes a scripture that claims martyrs will be given 72 virgins in paradise. “That hadith is not authentic!” Cerantonio said with frustration. “Dawkins! You’re smart. You do so much research. Why couldn’t you do just a little research on this?” Opponents of ISIS, even smart ones, suddenly make themselves stupid when combatting jihadism and assume—wrongly—that the jihadists themselves are stupid.

When Cerantonio now meets jihadists—he told me they are numerous, and unrepentant, in Australian prisons—he experiments with different approaches. “I can actually speak to hard-core jihadists on a level that they understand,” he said. At times, the approach that has worked is not even a coherent one. He described convincing two jihadists by explaining to them the mechanisms of evolution. In effect, he told me, he just “went at them hard” and outlined, without condescension, how a world without a divine Creator might look, how it made sense, and how it might be an alternative to their current beliefs.

“Both of them have drastically changed their lives,” he claimed. “They now denounce everything they were standing for before. I mean, they were planning to carry out a terrorist attack here in Melbourne—blow themselves up in a public square!” Now, he said, they’re not religious at all. “I thought, wow, I mean, surely, it can’t always be that easy. But who knows? Maybe it is.”

Last year in Saudi Arabia, I visited a prison that purported to deprogram jihadists by turning them into productive employees of a small business—complete with a CEO (himself a prisoner), an HR department, and a comptroller. I couldn’t tell how successful the prison’s strategy would be. All of the prisoners were still in jail, and subject to who knows what punishment if they lapsed. Beyond any doubt, however, is the failure of virtually every previous attempt to deprogram jihadists. So far, nothing seems to have worked better than defeating ISIS on the battlefield, reducing its caliphate to rubble, and inviting its followers to consider whether God might be sending them a message in the form of U.S. aerial bombardment. But drone strikes are expensive. Maybe Aramaic is worth a try.

"I asked him why the Alexander stuff had convinced him that ISIS was wrong, whereas the group’s practices of mass murder and sex slavery had never tipped him off. He said the latter were consistent with the religion, while the Alexander plagiarism failed intellectual tests on their own terms."

“I still can't find anything that ISIS does which isn't in the Quran, Hadith or life of Muhammad.” - @Atheist_Iran