‘Is’ in ISIS and Isis

It is mooncake day in China, practiced widely by exchanging cakes. Xi Jinping is curtailing the corruption it spawned. We are lauding the effort, but we will go directly to Obama’s IS-cake.

ISIS is a terrorist group by the western media, a “terrorist” defined as anyone against the U.S. started during the War on Terror by Cheney and company while George II Bush sat upfront.

With the emergence of Sunni and Shia fundamentalists, the word “terrorist” was further refined to be synonymous to “Islam,” unless one is a sheik with oil under his control available and accessible to refinery and shipping lords, in which case, he is a Muslim of dawa (social services), a friend of the Red Crescent!

The Brits called American militia in Boston terrorists, too, in the same way as the Han brands fiery Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz as waging a war on terror. The Zang of Xizang self-immolate with gas sans explosives but Vietnam takes moveable oil derricks near their shore as unfriendly and light up their Mahayana gas on plants and factories of foreign investors. Historically, Yue of Indochina is not friendly to Han, cousin of old Chang’an.

Chinese derisively refer to any Japanese as a bandit (wokou), more so now that Shinzo Abe drums up Nippon militarism. Manchukuo memory in Manchurian consciousness is aflame again. China recently played up the lessons it learned from Meiji Japan’s aggressions. That marquee will play awhile.

Current mythmakers/destroyers cornered themselves into calling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria by the acronym ISIS. The Egyptian goddess Isis played a very prominent role in the history of Egypt down to the much-adored mother and child motif in Rome.

Isis was the consort of Osiris who birthed the powerful god Horus, later decried by missionaries as a pagan whore! Isis enabled the resurrection of Osiris when the latter was dismembered to death; we hear echoes of that in the empty tomb of Gethsemani evolving into bodily resurrection. The image of Isis suckling Horus is no less than the revered Christian picture of Mary suckling the infant Jesus!

ISIS is the hand behind journalists Farley and Sotloff’s head losses, becoming the demonized dartboard of the U.S.and Israel; ISIS is not a foreign child to a suckling American Madonna. An inheritor of the al-Qaeda mantle, ISIS directly leads to the mujahedeen we armed against the Russians in the Khyber Pass from whom one of its famous practitioners was Saudi Osama bin Laden. (ISIS is now also called ISIL as the Islamic State in the Levant!)

The Levant gave us Moses of the Zion of Eretz Israel, Paul of Tarsus whose efforts led to the idolatry of Iesu, and the transcendent mystery of the no-thing al-lah from the vision of the Prophet in the desert. Gaza paid dearly to the sacrificial altars of Abram recently. Christian soldiers are again crusading to war, while Mahmoud’s followers assert themselves in the politics of oil. No one has clean hands. Like Vietnam’s Montagnards who scrambled when U.S. forces pulled out, the Yazidi of Iraq is seen as enemies of Islam in their collaboration with the infidels against Sharia law! For Hamas’ trigger happy ways, Israel just land grabbed 4 square km. of Palestinian land!

Since the earthrise of ‘68, I appropriated the gifts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and moved on. n my time, the planet birthed democracy’s promise of universal suffrage, a communist culture in search of justice, and socialist economics of promised equity that hover over the industrialization of the planet in obeisance to oil. The health of our finances is measured on the rise and fall of the traded commodity. It is also the basis of the local conflicts that flares now and then around pumps and refineries in Sudan, the whole Near East, and South China Sea.

We know of conservative socialist democrat Obama, and Deng Xiaoping, the free enterprise socialist with unadulterated Chinese characteristics bent on reform-and-opening-up of the bamboo curtain. The capitalist-socialist-communist spectrum shades my time and I judge the value of any system on its workable combination in bringing justice and welfare to common folks.

Cui niu bi is a “dirty” word in Chinese, used on one who talks big but no one believes. ISIS threatens U.S. Obama and U.K. Cameron. They’ve been posturing to do something about it.

What has become clear now is that the terrorist/liberator divide is not a useful dichotomy as one’s terrorist is another’s liberator. Indeed, in many parts of the world, the Caucasian soldier and those under its command are regarded as terrorists. One Kievan Rus unreported aspect of Ukraine is its “Christian” root; the separatists from eastern Ukraine are pro-Russians so they are “terrorists”.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba of the U.S. Armed Forces investigated the Abu Graib tortures and told the Senate Armed Services Committee of findings. He was ordered to retire shortly thereafter. Liberating U.S. warriors have been determined practitioners of terror. Ask Congress. And Taguba.