(March 8, 2015 at 12:43 pm)Metis Wrote: I suspect this isn't too different from the mentality behind the final solution; "shit the world is after us, we've got a few weeks left, what can we do to make an impact?"
I don't think that ISIS thinks its number is up. They still control large swathes of Syria and Iraq, the latter of which contain rich oilfields which can finance a powerful armed force, and fuel its machinery. Boko Haram just pledged alliance with them, opening up the possibility of co-ordinated attacks and perhaps even campaigns -- a nightmare scenario of playing whack-a-mole, it seems to me. With the fading of Al Qaeda, the center of gravity for violent Muslim extremism has shifted to them.
I think they are doing this as a direct assault on the intellectual discipline of history. I think they regard education as suspicious, at the least, if not haram, and educating people about pre-Islamic history in particular would be seen as distracting intellectual interest from the Almighty.
Also, not to be pedantic, but that was not the mentality behind the "final solution", which Hitler foreshadowed long before WWII, and had almost completed by the autumn of 1944.
