To defeat ISIS, we need something more than a military strategy. A large part of the terrorists’ success lies in their skill at propaganda.
ISIS propaganda aids in its successes by doing at least two things: the first, however improbable it may seem, is that it convinces some credulous people to believe that they must join ISIS to wage war against a Western world that has supposedly been on a “crusade” against Islam since its foundation in the 7th century. Thus ISIS manages the neat trick of appearing to play defence, and in so doing achieves a second success: exploiting both massive Western ignorance of our own history and Christian guilt about the bloodier parts of the same to achieve a sense of justification for its atrocities. ISIS is always the victim; the West always the aggressor.
