Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Ending the Ideology Behind ISIS

With the announcement that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS,  is dead, there is a wide range of reactions, from relief and happiness, to shock and anger, and to skepticism, to pragmatic. The governor of Nineveh, Iraq, Mansour Marid, said "This is only one page of the situation, and we presume there is another page to it. The important thing is to end the ideology, otherwise with these kind of men, one leader goes, another will come in his place."
The rise of ISIS reportedly came as the result of a prophecy, but there is probably a much larger picture here. If you look at the root cause of the crisis, it was probably one of the ripples of effects that came out as the result of the revenge against Saddam Hussein. The Iraq War destabilized the Middle East. The preemptive strike on Iraq went against the premise that someone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and it  is part of the US legal system because you cannot defend yourself from prejudice and ulterior motives. The judgment against Saddam Hussein was that he was Axis of Evil, which meant that the conflict devolved not as a war, but a genocide, and genocides are based on weaving an illusion. If so, ending ISIS involves addressing the prejudice and ulterior motives that motivated the founder of ISIS to get revenge on Saddam Hussein. This is a lesson mankind is learning, about how revenge works and why it doesn't work. This mankind will address it through the Exit Strategy for Iraq proposal. 
Back to the narrower perspective, what ends the ideology behind the prophecy of the rise of a caliphate in Syria and Iraq?
Prophecy is a potential future, and it can be either a warning or a promise. To understand how prophecy works, you must understand a bit about how time works. There are two types of time--Relative and Absolute. Think of Relative time as being a cycle, like a lifetime, with a beginning and an end, from birth to death. A good analogy is a spindle with many papers impaled in it, and each paper is an event in the person's life. Absolute time combines all the potential experiences in the person's life, and each spindle is one belief structure away. Which spindle you are on is dependent on your belief structure, so if the prophecy is a good one, and you would like it to come about, and if it doesn't come about, you must change what you believe. If it is a warning, and you don't want to experience what has been prophesied, then you also must change what you believe. Mankind has potential futures, too. Will we learn this lesson or continue on making the same mistakes? 
What you believe pegs you are a particular place. People who come from a sense of lack play compensatory power games, but games that compensate for lack of power don't work. Two power games are based on weaving an illusion--genocide and slavery--and both are associated with revenge. Terrorism is not based on weaving an illusion. Terrorists play the power game of Anger because they lack a voice and raise their voice to be heard, oftentimes to the point of violence. Slaves lack their freedom. It is a power game that backs people into the corner because they cannot stay and they cannot go home. 
Is there a real prophecy? Is the source from our Creator, who stands on the principles of Universal Law, and therefore sees the widest perspective? Who received the prophecy? Is it a warning or a promise? Is it meant to make people change what they believe? How should the prophecy be interpreted?  Was the prophecy woven into an illusion to justify killing people, and destroying sacred places, or was this a misunderstanding based on how to interpret prophecies? Where is it written? Have the scholars studied it an confirmed it? 
No one can change what another believes. What people believe is the result of a lifetime of experiences, but a time comes when people decide "enough it enough," that change is necessary, and then they must make their choice. They are no longer in Absolute  Time, with unlimited potential. They change what they believe. 
If the rise of ISIS is  one of the ripples that went out from the Grand Lie to justify the preemptive strike on Iraq, based on the revenge against Saddam Hussein, the Exit Strategy for Iraq proposal will start to unravel the illusion, and the prejudice and ulterior motives.