The blessed attacks on the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon struck a major symbolic blow against symbols of the economic and military power of the America/Israel, and achieved their intended effect of dragging America into an unwinnable war of attrition.

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But it cannot really be said that these attacks directly damaged the fabric of the liberal world order. I would argue that IS's attacks on the West did much more to accelerate this process, and this is indeed the intended strategy.

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It's easy to overlook the value of the moral justification provided by the liberal world order, in part because its action is intentionally obscured. We are meant to believe that the values it propagates are universal and innate to human beings, rather than manufactured.

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Because access to the world market is contingent on adherence to liberal values, it creates an illusion that the economic and cultural dominance of the West is a result of moral superiority according to their metrics. Everyone has to help out in the maintenance of this...

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...illusion, or else risk being cut off. This is the dominant world religion; communism and capitalism are just two variants. Capitalism fulfills "human rights" through market mechanisms, and communism claims to be a superior system, protecting "human rights" of the...

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...oppressed from abuses of the capitalist class. Both of these variants are a mishmash of pagan, Christian, and Jewish ideas, which ultimately worship human desires and make the fulfilling of those desires the purpose of existence, which helps explain its wide appeal.

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When the kuffar attack Muslims, they prefer education 1000x to bombs, because they know that if you destroy the aqeeda of your opponent, you can defeat them without a fight. Military force only comes in when a country refuses the injection of international civil society...

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...institutions which can manipulate a people through subtler means.

The point is that breaking your opponent on the level of aqeeda is one of the most severe blows you can deal to them. Armies that fight only for money and power will never fight as well as an army...

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...motivated by sincere belief in an ideal. This is how nationalism became a dominant paradigm; the idea of serving your extended tribal/ideological family is very powerful. It's also clear that this innovation was necessary for the Christians and Jews to combat Islam.

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Christians tried very hard to overturn Muslim dominance, but as long as they tried to do so on the basis of Christianity, they failed. They only succeeded once they were able to formulate an ideology which was not explicitly Christian, and which was able to motivate...

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...nations to war. This ideology, of course, is usually variations of enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality.

So how did IS attacks strike these ideals, which are the foundation of Western civilization on the level of aqeeda?

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After IS achieved a global platform by aggressively violating the precepts of this moral order, they used their platform to project calls for violence by Muslims living in the West. These calls were very emphatic, emotive, and were repeated many times.

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Most of those who answered these calls came from families that had migrated from Muslim lands. Attacks of this nature forced a large scale mobilization of resources inside of the Western liberal democracies; in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, 80,000 French soldiers...

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...were deployed to public places in France. Many more resources were redirected towards surveillance of Muslim populations inside these countries. Many masajid were shut, and religious censorship, which was already pervasive, became even more pronounced.

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The obvious effect of forcing nations like the UK, America or France to shift resources inward is to put pressure on them to reduce the resources devoted to bombing and killing Muslims. But another effect was to accelerate polarization within Western societies.

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Extreme right, anti-immigrant parties were given a huge boost. Long standing liberal dominance started to become untenable due to how many "civil liberties" had to be violated to control the threat. Thus, liberal democracies are forced to choose between upholding their...

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...ideas of free speech and due process, or to discard them. The first option allows for the continued spread of authentic Islamic teachings which will continue to guide those with faith to fight against those who wage war against Allah. The second option demolishes the...

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...claim to moral superiority, and more or less forces the West to return to an autocratic, tribal, post-modern feudalism, which means losing the position of moral leadership.

They are trying their hardest to balance these two tendencies and find a middle ground, but...

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...the reality is that deep down, most people were motivated more by the economic advantages of the liberal order than any actual belief in its moral superiority. And the continued economic growth that enabled this was only secured by economic liberalism...

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...or "neo-liberalism," which requires ever greater penetration into world markets. This penetration requires openness, and this openness results in cultural exchange, of exactly the kind that the far right could no longer tolerate in the wake of IS inspired attacks.

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So this becomes a downward spiral; as liberal societies seek to close up to protect themselves, the REAL source of their legitimacy, their economic potency, diminishes (which is actually inevitable). This in turn further accelerates polarization. The right seeks to...

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...conserve resources by taking them from immigrants; the left responds to the economic deficit by demanding socialist attacks on the wealthy to raise more taxes (which also go toward funding immigrants, further enraging the right).

Muslims are left with the choice...

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...of
1) being thrown to the far-right
2) allying with the sodomy and abortion loving left or
3) leaving.

This process really did start with the 1422 AH attacks on America, but it seems to have accelerated more in the past 5 years than the preceding 15.

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This is all very obvious, and this was explicit IS strategy. What's strange is that I still see many people trying to suggest that IS is somehow deficient in strategy. I can't speak for the acceptability of this strategy in Islam, but as an observer of political strategy...

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...I cannot deny the effectiveness. The vision was much bigger than Sham, so actions like enslaving the Yazidis or beheading American hostages in a gruesome fashion brought disproportionate heat on ash-Sham and Iraq, but this is because the response was proportional...

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...to the damage done. And while the degrading of liberalism eroded the legitimacy of liberal democracies, the aggressiveness of the anti-IS campaign boosted IS's legitimacy by proving that they were a threat to the West.

This is not to discount the widespread...

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...idea that Mossad, the CIA, and other such organizations have a hand in all this; they are most certainly devoting a large amount of resources to analyzing, infiltrating, and manipulating the situation, as is the case with every other Islamic movement as well.

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But even this strategy has been supported by those seeking to increase arms sales, incite conflict between Muslims to weaken them, or to bring about some other such plot, there is no question that the damage done to liberalism is tremendous.

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And this actually fits with IS's focus, which is so strongly centered on aqeeda that it sometimes seems excessive. But it makes sense that if aqeeda has a lot of energy input, that there will be output on the level of aqeeda as well.

So while bin Laden was almost...

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...certainly a stronger strategic mind, it seems his legacy has been more to degrade the strategic position of the US led world order. IS, on the other hand, seems to have hit harder on the level of ideology. This may have less immediate results, but in the long run...

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...as I mentioned earlier, the destruction of aqeeda is even more devastating.

It's probably worth mentioning that while IS definitely accelerated this matter, that it would have eventually happened anyway without their actions. Allah knows how much longer it would have...

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...taken, and if the spiritual destruction or material suffering of Muslims will be decreased or increased overall as a result. Allah is well capable of judging that; we are not. And Allah is the best of judges.

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