Fighting ISIS has become ever more difficult because it is more than just a random terror organization, according to Major General Michael K. Nagata, special operations commander for the U.S. Military in the Middle East. “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea,” he said, according to The New York Times.
This idea of what ISIS stands for has become more tangible through high-definition videos online. As stated by theatlantic.com, “Their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; hungers for genocide; its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; it considers itself a harbinger of – and headline player in – the imminent end of the world.”
Matthew Bowen, assistant professor of religion, sees ISIS patterned after a much simpler idea. “That’s like 3 Nephi 7. The Gadianton robbers are a group like that. ISIS very much is an organization founded to get gain. They operate in the same guerilla tactics, trying to spread their influence through terror.”
According to Bowen, the roots go back even to the second generation of mankind. “Cain becomes Mahan, the Master of this great secret, ‘whereby I can murder and get gain.’ [These terror organizations] are patterned after this original secret combination of Cain.”
Reflecting on the situation in the Middle East, Dr. Michael Murdock, associate professor and department chair of political science, saw an interesting side effect of ISIS. “Holding Iraq together right now is ISIS. Iraq is a country that never should have existed. It was created by British imperialism.
“In order to control that region, the British washed together lots of different people: Kurds, Sunnis, Shias. ISIS is hated so much by Iraq that the different parties cooperate. A common enemy. My idea is if ISIS was gone we would be right back to the violence that we had in the time from the war.”
Bowen agreed with Murdock. “The people [in 3 Nephi 7] are separated through a lot of different things but they are all united in their hatred of this group. It’s much like that.”
Murdock continued to explain the political reality in the Middle East. He said, “You can either have a dictator or you have factionalism and war. You can’t have democracy. It doesn’t really work. The factions are so different.”
He said democracy works in the United States because the people in political parties are mostly the same. “But there, the opposite party is Satan to you. The historical baggage is so thick, so heavy that people cannot tolerate the existence of the other. That’s why ISIS keeps executing people.”
He said democracy cannot work among people with “that degree of intolerance. It’s just impossible. If the enemy (the other party) wins, you have an obligation to God to shoot them, to destroy them. You just cannot have democracy.”
Associate professor Chad Ford, director of the David O. McKay Center for Intercultural Understanding, said, “Human beings have this basic need for security, meaning and identity, and whenever these needs are frustrated, they go outside of the norms to get them back.
“The military can’t solve those needs, and we have to be more creative in how we are satisfying the basic human needs of people. There are people who say peace comes not through negotiation but through economic development. There is the idea that we can offer them a job, education, good schools, something that gives them hope.”
Bowen noted, “There is always hope for peace. It can only exist to the degree people’s hearts aren’t hardened. I sense in modern Islam there is a lot of goodwill and a lot of desire for peace, but there is also a lot of fear. The radical Islam exerts a disproportionate level of influence in Islam as a whole. That’s unfortunate. People want to see their children grow old. That’s going to be one of the things that ultimately motivates people to seek peace. Most people united in that want to enjoy the company of their family.”
Ford continued to say the problems of insecurity cannot be permanently solved through military force. “We don’t spend the time or energy financially or academically or intellectually, figuring out how to help things go right instead of dealing with things when they go wrong. The problem with spending all of our time on things that go wrong is that they just continue to go wrong. The fixes are too temporary.”
Nonetheless, ISIS is different in many ways from other known terror groups. Their commitment seems to be “to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse,” reports theatlantic.com.“
The Book of Mormon shows us,” said Bowen, “that those secret combinations did not just bring down one nation, but two. You’ve got two witnesses, the Gentile and the Israelite nation that are destroyed that way.”