Islamic State takes region back to the Middle Ages

By Claude Salhani - Trend:

The group known as the Islamic State that is fighting to install an Islamic Caliphate in Syria and Iraq - as a first step to expanding that caliphate - has made time travel a possibility.

Indeed, through their worse-than medieval manners of beheadings and crucifixions, torture and mass executions and the selling of captured women as slaves, they have managed to transport the areas under their dominance from a modern era of satellite imagery and stellar communications into a dark, bottomless abyss of savagery and orgies of evil probably not seen since the days when barbarians were at the gates of Rome.

Today similar bloodthirsty barbarians are knocking at the gates of modern civilization, threatening the very concept of the fragile world we live in.

Had the Internet and video recording existed in the days of the Goths, Vizigoths and the Ostrogoths they probably would have behaved similarly to the IS; video recording their monstrous acts and proudly displaying it on the Internet.

The Islamic State's latest abominable act of brutality comes in the beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, who has been held captive in Syria since 2012, a deed that was recorded on video.

The IS claims that the killing of James Foley is in retaliation for the U.S. bombing of several of their positions in Iraq. It must also mean that these bombings have hurt them. In their utter ignorance the group fails to realize that individual Americans, like James Foley, have no say in U.S. foreign policy.

These "knights" of a hijacked faith are poisoning a decent religion with their interpretation of Islam.

Forcing a captive to "denounce" his country requires no bravery on the part of the captors. Rather it reveals the low level of their understanding of reality.

The result of this hideous act will not prevent future bombings of IS positions by the U.S. military.

Indeed, it may very well have the opposite effect as the Obama Administration understands that there can be no mid-way solution to the plague that this new stigma represents, not only for decent followers of Islam, but for the whole civilized world.

Claude Salhani is a political analyst and senior editor with Trend Agency.