Napoleoni on the Caliphate - new national boundaries

 At a recent event in Seattle, Loretta Napoleoni spoke about her understanding of ISIS/ISIL and the emergence of the Caliphate. The redesign of state borders took place in 2014 with the announcement on June 14 2014, of The Caliphate. Announcement

Her recorded comments were broadcast in Sounds of Dissent, WZBC, 90.3, Boston College Radio, March 28, 2015.

Napoleoni is the author or Terror Incorporated: Tracing the dollars behind the terror networks and The Islamic Pheonix: Islamic State and the Redrawing of the Middle East (2014) among others. Bio

She is an enlivened speaker as a Ted talk indicates: Napoleoni Talk

Her understanding of the Caliphate can be taken at face value if only because the counter argument in circulation amount to denials of the obvious. Any attempt to make the counter argument is flawed by the fact that the Caliphate exists and functions.

Here is Napoleoni on the Caliphate:

None of them (the US President and other world leaders) use that word "Caliphate" because they don't want to admit we are not dealing with an armed organization, we are dealing with a state. The use of ISIL, ISIS is actually to prevent admitting that they have been able to create a nation. So they actually have succeeded in nation building. 

Against this, the dominant media representations of the Caliphate have been of an unhinged group of Internet-recruited terrorists posting horrific videos of violence and murder as part of a direct challenge to western values of civility, decency and liberal sensibility (meaning tolerance for other religions and The Other more generally).

It is in the land claim redefining borders, that the real challenge is playing out, Here Balkanization has taken place - new borders and a self managed state exists and functions outside of the protocols of Enlightenment systems of justice and individual autonomy.  In fact, the collision of values is to be found in the western orientation to individual realization of the self and state sponsored access to knowledge, versus the Caliphate's religious demand for collective agreement of a specific reading and interpretation of the Koran. The individualistic versus collectivist reading of civilization is clearly becoming defined.

The Internet enhances the presence of the Caliphate, allowing it to organize its business, as well as promote recruitment of fighters, wives and supporters, plus expand militant action. Perhaps more important, are the deep historical roots that connect the Khilafat in Pakistan and India, (and potentially Afghanistan and the region generally) to the Caliphate of ISIS / ISIL. This is a powerful history that draws on past injustices to the religious-ethnic nexus. example and Ghandi's interest

The arrangement of borders is taking place marking the realization of long-held dreams for theocratic states. The Internet reinforces the claims, drawing in believers like moths to the flame. Napoleoni is right to make the point that the moment world leaders start referring to the Caliphate, the new state is acknowledged and with it a long held dream...    

Is the US really an advanced country?

"US businesses do not need to give workers any days off whatsoever – for vacation or sick days – under federal law." does liberal democracy = no holidays

As a naturalized citizen, it is sometimes difficult to keep the faith of my citizenship when stories like this emerge. Not having holidays for a native-born Australian like me seems an impossibility. 

Australia, "Land of the long weekend," has, like most countries in Western Europe, been defined by social democracy. The national political economy is historically different, defined by wonderful successes, where the language of business is not the default... although that, sadly, is changing. The default has been a series of compromises between labor and management, where the Labor parties have insisted that the workforce deserves a break.

Not surprisingly, this Guardian article caught my eye.

The US is also the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity or parental leave to its citizens. Three states have local policies.

In 2014, 77% of Americans working for privately owned companies got paid vacation days, typically between 10 to 14 days a year. And 74% of full-time workers and 24% of part-time workers in the private sector were offered paid sick leave, according to the US Department of Labor.

 “Today, we are the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers. Forty-three million workers have no paid sick leave – 43 million,” Barack Obama said during his State of the Union address in January.

Within the political economy of social versus liberal democracy comes the role of the corporation in US society. 

The Guardian report stated that Microsoft is insisting that its US suppliers give their employees holidays. The privatization of labor operates in this way, where private interests set their own rules, exploit labor however it likes and refuse to engage in humane treatment of workers, until government or a major corporation makes a determination for humane treatment. 

It is tempting to congratulate Microsoft. But the shift here, as in much of the discussion in the technology sector, is of a domain that has been seeking emancipation from public policy. In many contexts the IT sector has actively sought to operate outside of, even refuse a role for government. This is the anti-statist, de-regulationist, all-regulation-is-bad school of political economy, run by people who misread Adam Smith and never intend to get to Marx. This recent article from Der Spiegal lays out the situation: the Germans don't buy it.  Der Spiegal - IT trends 

The operationalization of the libertarian perspective works well within the dominant liberal democratic paradigm. Not being awarded holidays, sick days, humane working conditions, takes society back beyond liberalism to a state barely above feudalism, as workers are considered chattels, owned and used, then thrown out as the emperors of technology decide their fate. 

• Australians, stand up for the dignity of labor - more long weekends! 
• Alternatively, is it time to say? "Put away that computer and the feudal values it represents."    
• Other critics will surely ask, Is the US really an advanced society?   

Reverse history: Distributed ISIS as the global jihad?

Do we have to watch the world get turned upside down by counter-revolutionary religious fervor?

It appears that we have little if any say in it. The fundamentalist religious action of ISIS is there for anyone to see on Internet videos: beheadings, torture, celebratory convoys, martyrs, the works. The media richness of the shift backwards in human history is almost beyond belief.

What is stunning is the way the clock that applied to European, then western and human civilization through the agency of the Enlightenment has been stopped. Then wound back. The reversal of history is achieving a perverse universality through ISIS. The universality of liberalism and its ideals was the revolution that emanated from France. Now the universality of non-liberalism exists as an alternative.

ISIS began as a local Islamic uprising against imperially-imposed national borders. The revolt is rapidly moving to a new phase, stretching itself and its influence largely through media memes, to anyone with an axe to grind and the pathology to apply the axe.

That amounts to a lot of people with an interest in sharia law, the Caliphate and Apocalyptic Islamic theology, as Graeme Wood helpfully documented in "What ISIS really wants," in The Atlantic, February, 2015. What ISIS really wants The other side of this coin is becoming clear - as the Caliphate consolidates in parts of the Middle East, a number of interest groups express support in other geographical areas of the planet.

Distributed revolt has a model in play (in the Caliphate) plus a network of activist agents. Or to put is another way, many thousands of ISIS supporters now have agency in areas remote from Syria, Iraq and Turkey.  
   
The news that Nigeria's Boko Haram has recognized ISIS consolidates a bad week or two. Islamist militants with ISIS orientations have been appearing in Pakistan, Afghanistan and, well, everywhere.  Boko Haram goes global This is in addition to recruits attempting to move to Syria then into the Caliphate, prompted by ISIS evangelists on the Internet. Indeed, as the travel associated with the recruits is madeillegal and halted, the connections and activism is translated to localized activity. Through on-line sites, they can plan remote dedication.

(The model here is closing down a heroin distribution site - it pops up on the other side of town).

The question is where to go to find solutions to the emergence of this movement?

What is the value in arming fighters and placing them in designated war zones? ISIS has become a distributed struggle. It is virtual and material.

In the 1990's there there was an "end of history" movement, prompted by Francis Fukuyama's book of the same name. Is it time to rethink the idea that global forward momentum is over and with it assumed history? There is plenty to think about here, even years after the original claims by Fukuyama: end of history

Somewhere, the pieces will need to be brought together in a new global governance theory that acknowledges that the ways of "being enlightened" are no longer a universal ideal. What then?

Block and filter Internet information in India - How culture and speech rights collide

The Internet was pretty much invented by the American belief in free speech. As an unregulated communication technology, it has been promoted as a vehicle in which anything can be uttered. The libertarian impulse driving this approach has been codified in US Constitutional Rights, most commonly the First Amendment of The Bill of Rights:

.Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Rights and related documents

The claims therein are barely contestable for Americans. The free flow of information on the Internet seems to approach the realization of this "code." In the US, entire enterprises are built around the free exercise of speech.

What happens when those same rights move off-shore? If the US Constitution applies strictly to US citizens on US soil, What happens when US citizens and their enterprises promote speech rights outside the United States? Such an act would surely qualify as improper, because the US Constitution is not the same as the European Union's, or India's or China's.. any other nation.

To make the story more complex, what happens when US speech rights are embodied in the Internet? As a global phenomena, does this amount to the imposition US speech values on all Internet users? In such an instance, is the Internet a means of extending US Constitutional ideals everywhere?  

There are increasing instances where US speech rights operating within US Internet firms are merely taken up in the system regardless of their suitability for other cultures. Informational Free Speech is assumed as a global good.

There are several areas for discussion: Constitutional Law, International Law, Jurisprudence - the theory of law itself and its application, United States Government ideals, Culture, Internet Studies, Media Studies, History, Theology and Heritage. The list can be extended of course. It illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary research.

Imagine the surprise Speech Rights advocates and libertarian political activists had when the Indian Supreme Court ordered three major US Internet firms to stop carrying information. The information was culturally specific and sensitive to India.

It is information that gives Indian parents details about the gender of a fetus. Acting on that information has meant aborting a female fetus in favor of keeping a male one.

Here is the report.    

Foreign Policy South Asia Daily, January 29.

The Indian Supreme Court ordered companies including Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc., and Microsoft Corp. not to advertise sex determination tests that reveal a child's sex, according to news reports on Wednesday (BBC, Livemint).

The interim court order came after the central government said the three search engines have "relevant technology and deep-domain knowledge and expertise to block/filter the words/phrases/expressions and sponsored links" (NDTV).

The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, prohibits advertisements related to prenatal determination of sex due to the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses in India.

According to the 2011 census, there has been a decline in the number of girls under the age of seven. Activists claim that as many as eight million female fetuses in India may have been aborted in the last decade.

-- Neeli Shah

The agreement among Indian legislators is that female abortions, should be stopped, by stopping information about it in that country. US Internet firms are thereby drawn into this cultural collusion.

A great research project would be to list all the informational exceptions to Internet Free Speech such as this one, by nations outside the US. what speech is not allowed that collides with US ideals. The list in the US is extensive as well...

Making sense of Charlie Hebdo in the Networked age - the media exceptionalism vortex

"Making sense?" What a ridiculous and unworthy claim!

Who can make sense of the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the murder of 10 of its journalist-cartoonists plus two police officers, as well as four shoppers in a Vicennes Kosher supermarket, and in a separate incident, a police officer: 17 in all.

So far, the events in Paris, like the events in Sydney in December last year, have been accorded high level importance as exceptions to everyday life. Each event was accorded detailed coverage as the most important event on hand - until the next one. The media makes is possible to magnify outrageous acts as exceptional, generating  an equal and opposite sense of exceptionalism in more media coverage. As long as the media can be there - through the combined convenience of modern travel (the journalists are on the spot) and the immediacy of communication networks - the events are seen as exceptional, and thus worthy of coverage.

For students of media this can be considered the media exceptionalism vortex. In this domain, a mediated act provokes another in order to match the first. However, because the first "event" happens in an unplanned and spontaneous way, the explanation takes much longer than the event. The media takes on the role of instantaneous historian: responding to the the event by filling in a landscape that keeps changing.

While the reporting continues, claims and counterclaims emerge about the intentions of the perpetrators, the impact of the event and a long term view or perspective.  These four categories need to be immediately serviced with speculative claims, evidence, and theory. Contemporary news media is constructed around a sequence of event-intent-impact-perspective. Truth and justice is not the principle goal of this reporting. The goal is images and personages whose contributions heighten these four pillars of contemporary mediation.

Anyone can set up a television or Internet site to report on the four. In fact millions have - web pages, social media, You Tube,Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Ali Baba ...

Why are there so many outlets for news and analysis? How do they flourish in the crowded marketplace of ideas, amidst the media clutter?

The answer can be found in the fragmentary yet maximized claims each outlet and individual offers. Every one claims to be an exception and to be exceptional.

In other words, the key proposition driving every media report and comment is its claim to be exceptional. Only exceptional events are covered, and as Noam Chomsky pointed out, these are the events considered by the media to belong to the Righteous, to us, not to them, which are horrendous. Chomsky

To start with, the "event" must be exceptional to gain the attention of the media, after which every piece of analysis offered fits into claims of exceptionality. The intent-impact-perspective create a framework for sustaining the exceptionalism. Nothing can be banal, everyday or ordinary.  Reporting must be exceptional, while every report associated with the original event has a hint of the virtue of us as watchers.

Several aspects of the events in Paris illustrate this analysis.

Charlie Hebdo itself has been exceptionalized. Its foolhardy bravery in publishing secular cartoons and caricatures was necessary in a liberal society - but it was also stupid. After raising the ire of Muslims and no doubt true believers of many other faiths that it pilloried with parody, it crossed the threshold. As an anonymous poster on b/chan wrote: "Charlie Hebdo was an extremely racist publication that punched down at the oppressed Muslim minorities of Europe." boards Anon

In more elaborate terms, here is a perspective from Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine: 

Similarly, the media has refused to even consider what it would mean to a French Muslim, living among Muslims who are economically marginalized and portrayed as nothing but terrorists, their religious garb banned in public, their religion demeaned, to encounter a humor magazine that ridiculed the one thing that gives them some sense of community and higher purpose, namely Mohammed and the religion he founded. Lerner criticism

Were Charlie Hebdo's editors ignorant of the way their images transcended the libertarian malcontents drawing cartoons and publishing in an office in Paris? Were they unthinking of the way those images circulated around the world in the virtual space? Did they care about the implications of their actions? Did the editor, Stephane Charbonnier recognize that in being added to an el-Qaida in Yemen hit list in 2012, and not changing his behavior he was provoking a reaction? Presumably yes. Slate report

"Our job is not to defend freedom of speech but without it we're dead. We can't live in a country without freedom of speech. I prefer to die than to live like a rat," Charbonnier told ABC News. ABC News

Foolhardy indeed.

Lenin referred to "infantile disorder" in the ultra-left? Is it possible to see the libertarianism that is available to social entrepreneurs like the Charlie Hebdo journalists as similarly infantile? "We can do whatever we like!" goes the mantra. We are exceptional in seeking to overthrow the tyranny that controls society through religion. This exceptionalism proved to be ill-advised.

The exceptionalism of Charlie Hebdo was realized when Charbonnier and his colleagues were gunned down. They became the event. All of a sudden the intent-impact-perspective became central to the coverage, as every journalist and writer attempted to be exceptional in their coverage.    

No wonder it is impossible to make sense of the Charlier Hebdo assassinations and related Parisian events. There are so many claims to exceptionalism that there is no way to process those claims as the media begs us to accept that their coverage of the event mirrors that exceptionality. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Comprehension becomes a fuzz of unethical recognition - there is no virtue in any of this exceptionalism.

Spending more time trying to understand the events makes it necessary to immerse oneself in the media.  As they offer analysis in the  intent-impact-perspective stakes, comprehension diminishes. What does it all mean? In the first instance it means remaining in the media exceptionalism vortex, which provides its own limited meaning about itself.

We enter the realm of the meaning deficit, which grows in inverse proportion to the news coverage and the activities of publicists. The Public Relations and Marketing people who are a large part of the media business, work diligently to attract audiences to their programs. They make a living insisting on the exceptionalism of the coverage their media outlet offers.

This cycle of exceptionalism proves itself to itself, while reducing comprehension of the event in an absurd cycle of decreasing knowledge. This is in contrast to Immanuel Kant's Imperative, where knowledge has a structure that originates in experience. Contemporary media offers less experience in an ever-widening circle of exceptionalism - seeing events as spectacular, the viewer is folded into the exception, into action that happens on the screen, of which they are a meaningless part, even while told their participant-observation is worthwhile. This is an extension of Guy DeBord's Society of the Spectacle thesis. Debord saw society as a series of images, overpowering collective interests to produce alienation. This alienation is accentuated in the Internet age, although the technology industry tells us to believe that more networking is good for us. What we get instead is  exceptionalism without activist content as the vortex folds our consciousness into its limits.

(MacKenzie Wark has published a welcome dual volume study on Debord, which should herald more attention to the spectacle associated with media coverage of terror Wark, Wark 2.)  

The million-plus person march on Sunday January 11, 2015, in Paris  consisted primarily of middle class white folk, indicated by detailed and lengthy watching of CNN and Al Jazeera television coverage. All were worthy protagonists advocating by their presence a commitment to the idea of free speech. What they were really doing was participating in the exceptionalism offered by the media reproduction of themselves.

I was reminded of the anti-Iraq war marches in 2003. In London, more than a million people protesting the US move against Saddam Hussein.(Beautifully rendered by Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday McEwan) All around the world people were recoreded expressing their anger and frustration at the "weapons of mass destruction" claims George W Bush had made as the premise for the invasion of Iraq. The media reported these exceptional events, and nothing happened.

Last weekend in Paris, the PR was superb. The line up of international leadership pretty good.

French Primer Minister François Hollande got in first, claiming: '“Paris is the capital of the world today,” ...  'as world leaders linked arms to begin the march in Paris.' An exceptional day, with exceptional coverage.

It was difficult not to be disturbed by the publicity-insistence of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, generating his own exceptionalism. According to The Times of Israel, "Netanyahu was initially situated in a second row of leaders, but shimmied his way into the front row." Bibby can't help himself Ever the exceptionalist, Netanyahu managed to make himself the center of attention. Then he gave a sermon on the wrongs of fundamentalism, violence and injustice. When you are exceptional, all you can see is the media, you cannot see hypocrisy.

An exceptional day with a concatenation of media forces at work. And what was achieved? The global system of media reproduced itself in the media exceptionalism vortex.  

Deadly Nexus: Australia in the mix. Add ISIS for dissonance

The Sydney chocolate shop siege of December 15, 2014, garnered non-stop media coverage in many parts of the world. Indeed, the media (Internet) gave a hyper-local event global intensity, connecting local action to dispersed audiences who watched events unfold wherever they were.

The live action could be watched on television, confirming what Australians have long desired - to be part of the first world. In this case, the media provided real time updates on all media sources (I cannot comment on European or South American or African Middle East or Asian ones), heralding that first world aspiration that Australians most desire.

In that context, it shares and bares its soul in synchronicity with the imperial powers. This is the cost of partnering with global power. It could be said. "It was ever thus."

One conclusion that follows from this kind of critical analysis, is the perverse fact that once a nation partners with great powers, its people suffer accordingly. The cost of freedom in a liberal democracy is a seamless association with the aggrandizement of the great powers and their self-inflicted woes. Sadly, when a nation lacks independence, marrying itself to the biggest-greatest power of the moment - the US and before 1945 the UK - the relations falls into place, as do the miseries.

There's hardly a skerrick of independent action to be seen in this sorry history of compliance.

Two exceptions stand out in recent memory:  Kevin Rudd was outspoken as opposition Foreign Affairs minister against the US invasion of Iraq, suggesting that it was "illegal and unlawful," thereby siding with the United Nations position. UN position  (Disclosure - Rudd is an old friend of mine). In recent history, after he became Prime Minister in 2007, (in and out, he completed the role in 2013) he almost looked like a giant when viewed against the tawdry history of Australian compliance with the great powers. It will be fascinating to see how he balances his affection for the US in his new role as President of the Asia Council.announcement

The other exception to this minimalist Australian independence, appears with another Australian Labor Party Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, who won an election in 1972, promising to bring the troops home from Vietnam. He also was prepared to reveal what was happening at Pine Gap, the CIA listening post in Central Australia. His dismissal in 1975, is considered to have been orchestrated by "the agency."

Against these brief exceptions in recent Australian history, the compliance, the cupidity and the willful absence of independent orientation by Australia can be seen as a lazy mirror of great power interests. Conservative governments in Australia, like the current one led by Tony Abbott, are deeply committed to the US "Pivot to Asia," even while the real story - China - is in their regional backyard. Apparently it is better to side with a diminishing great power like the USA than an emerging peaceful power like China. It is better to be associated with the trouble maker than the rising star...

The absence of independence in the Australian polity is palpable. It should be resisted. The loss of a national culture to a dominant and dominating set of values is a loss for civilization. As the options for independent thought and practice are narrowed to align with the great powers, the possibility for ideas that sustain human diversity and national and regional problem solving are reduced. We argue about losing ancient tribes in the Amazon or outback Australia, because we value diversity. Surely we should say the same thing about national cultures generally?

Culture is a major part of this synchronous similarity. From 2007-2011, I managed groups of American undergraduates for month long study tours to Australia. Astute students would comment on the surfeit of American television and media. Why so much American TV? And, "Australians know a lot about American politics." So far from home, yet so familiar.

There were some students who loved not missing an episode of their favorite television show, just like back home.

My strategy was to take the students on a five day desert safari to Central Australia, where the media system was minimal, and phones did not work. In Alice Springs we visited Imparja and the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) and learned about slow media - Aboriginal communication that connects to a 40,000+ years old culture. We watched Australian Rules football on local television together, enjoying indigeneity in the national sport and often in the faces of many Aboriginal players.

Against the local is the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement that gave the US power to send volumes of media down the digital pipeline with the Intellectual Property guarantees in place. digital determinism  Australia accepted most of the conditions and the creative industries in the US loved them for it.

Poor fellow my former country!

Readers may well ask how these comments relate to ISIS fundamentalism in this Uprising blog. Rightly so.

The chocolate shop siege is the manifestation of the Australian fixation on cultural synchronicity. By that I mean, the persistent Australian commitment to imperial power generates a direct connection to the world through two means: the media and material events. Geographically so far removed, yet feeling and experiencing the action.

There is new form of dissonance: cognitive dissonance combined with emotional dissonance. Australians know less but experience more.

Where the US commitment to the pursuit of happiness is played out in the media Australians enjoy that pleasure too. After all, consumer capitalism is an easy sell. The pleasure is there to be had by turning on the television / Internet. No one needs to know anything except the convenience of the advertising-media-consumption nexus. The US media's packaged emotion avoids critical and rational evaluations of pleasure. It is pleasure for its own sake. Both knowledge and pleasure are out of alignment with the national project of life made in an independent state. Thus the dissonance.

Meanwhile, knowledge is generated far away from Australia and delivered pre-packaged through the media network. The cultural nuances of American life are becoming unknown, while the consciousness of national uniqueness is fading. Emotion in lived experience (culture) is imagined on the streets of Los Angeles or New York, not the streets of Melbourne or Sydney, or an outback Australian town. Anything of value is increasingly evaluated through the lens of how American would appreciate it.

Unfortunately, Australians lack the knowingness that results from living in the US. When the musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson referred to the US as the "land of the brave," Australians, for the most part, had no idea what she was singing about. (Frankly back in the 1980s when the song was released, neither did I).

Australians try desperately to "get" the world. Their diminished independent national political life means that increasingly they live in a liminal state - in between. They imagine themselves and their daydreams in the USA. The chocolate shop event confirms this positioning. They are in Sydney, yet connected to ISIS, to terror, to the provocations of the imperial power.






   

ISIS expands its negative social movement - global internet rolls on

News that ISIS has a new base in Derna, Libya, extends the thesis that this movement is dynamic and dedicated to making material and geographical gains. It will continue to swarm, and the so-called "franchisees" - groups outside the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria - will flourish. They have an unsteady connection to the core ideological apparatus through the Internet.
ISIS in Derna

According to The Guardian, the US military is making public its concerns abut the expansion:

This week, the Pentagon went public with its concerns, when the commander of the US army’sAfrica Command told reporters that Isis – also known as Isil – is now running training camps in Libya, where as many as 200 fighters are receiving instruction.

This comment indicates an appreciation that ISIS is capable of expanding and making substantial claims on lands it believes should be either connected to the Caliphate, or centers of Sharia law. How to respond to the fundamentalism that informs this negative social movement is the question.

As the Caliphate movement expands the scenarios do not improve for peace and cohabitation. Rather, they degenerate. They get to be worst case scenarios as they connect and reinforce each other. Very little of the intellectual and conceptual superstructure and language from contemporary secular Internet Studies, Political Science and Sociology is helpful in the face of the virtual organization of fundamentalism.  

Take for example, commentary by Professor Peter Newman a security studies academic at King's College London. It indicates how far removed from reality western experts are in their analysis.

"It will be a challenge for Isis to show they can rule. That’s the downside of running a state: with power comes responsibility,” said Newman. Newman comment

This comment indicates how far off beam, western liberal commentary is about Caliphate claims to form government in towns and regions in the Middle East. The western liberal analyst looks for power and responsibility, as if Voltaire's Enlightenment principles can be applied in the Caliphate, like so much western secularism.

In contrast, the resistance fighter, the history maker, the religious fundamentalist, in seeking to make a new moral order, is happy to overthrow such banalities.    (As indeed was Voltaire.)