ISIS-style extremists are not new: they are indeed a more obvious part of human history than Western-style liberals. They are, however, newly powerful.
Take the plight of Assyrian Christians driven from their homes in Mosul. Their grandparents had the same experience, but worse: 300,000 of them were massacred a century ago at the instigation of the Ottoman authorities (as described in Joseph Yacoub’s new book, The Year of the Sword).
That was not unprecedented. The Ottoman Empire just 20 years before had sent an army to kill or convert the Yazidis, just as ISIS later would try to do. It had also done the same in 1838. The sanction for this cruelty was a fatwa from the revered 14th-century cleric Ibn Taymiyyah, which licensed the killing of heterodox groups like the Yazidis and Druze.
