DiGiovani: I think we have to understand first of all what ISIS wants more than anything is to provoke retaliation. The don’t like to see unity. The thing they fear the most is a cohesive society of people living together united. So, for instance, the photographs of Germans welcoming refugees into their society to make it more of a mixed society is terrible for them. They want a society, a country, a caliphate that is extreme Islam.
Roberts: When we talk about the country or the territory, they don’t have that. What they have is the territory that borders between Syria and Iraq. If that is stripped from them Janine, do they fall away?
DiGiovani: Personally, I believe that you cannot destroy their ideology. Even if we took Raqqa tomorrow, if we crushed it, which I have to point out there is one thing about the bombing of Raqqa, there is five hundred thousand civilians who are inside Raqqa, it’s not just ISIS who are suffering, it’s civilians that have been overcome by them.
But even if we took out Raqqa tomorrow, how do you destroy this ideology which is sweeping so many youth, which is recruiting so many, if they have what is a very sophisticated social media, as we know, and their psychology is very appealing to those who are downtrodden, who are disenfranchised from society.
So what I’m saying Thomas is even if we can stop a caliphate they’re not going to get to Mecca — which is what they want, we still have to deal with the underlying reasons of where they came from and why they prey on countries like France which they see as weak because there are divisions here between the Muslim populations which is the highest is all of Europe. They saw that as an opportunity and that’s why this operation was horrifically and tragically successful.
If you have even the slightest bit of common sense this is all something you can easily discern by just reading the newspapers. But on cable TV she’s the equivalent of the Oracle of Delphi for pointing out that this problem isn’t just a matter of “taking out those bastards.”
It would be really helpful if these people would not feed the revenge fantasies of the American right wing which is playing into the terrorists’ hand so perfectly they might as well join the jihad and get it over with.
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