Kerry working to get state, religious and broadcast powers in the Middle east to condemn ISIS [View all]

Kerry is so animated by this war of ideas that he calls it even more important than the military campaign against the group. Sitting in a gilded room at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Paris, Kerry sounded irritated at the media’s focus on air strikes and ground forces. “The military piece is one piece,” Kerry said. “It’s a critical component — but it’s only one component.”

“Probably far more important than the military in the end,” Kerry continued, is the effort “to start drying up this pool of jihadis.” The goal is to mobilize Arab leaders, preachers, and media outlets behind a message that ISIS does not represent a “pure” vision of Islam, but a grotesque distortion of it. That, they hope, can blunt ISIS’ ability to recruit new fighters among impressionable young Muslim men. Stopping a fighter from signing up, Kerry said, is “a far better mechanism than having to go chase him down in the battlefield.”

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Abdullah can also summon his clerics to action. In a speech last month that a U.S. State Department official calls “unprecedented” in its vehemence, Abdullah denounced radical Islamists for using Islam to justify their actions — and castigated Saudi clerics for not making the point more forcefully. Days later, the kingdom’s top religious authority declared that ISIS and al-Qaeda “are enemy No. 1 of Islam.” Another senior cleric soon declared it “a major sin” to join ISIS. He added that the group’s fighters might avoid damnation if they murder their commanders.
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The effort also extends beyond the mosque. The U.S. is pressing major Arab media outlets, including Dubai-based al-Arabiya and Qatar’s al-Jazeera, to broadcast more antiradical programming. (State Department officials say Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Richard Stengel — a former managing editor of TIME — will soon return to the region to pursue that topic.)

http://time.com/3379004/kerry-isis-saudi/

This effort really explains why Kerry made the speech on Islam that he made at this busy time. Though the right will mock this as naive, it is a very ambitious effort to create change that would work to weaken some of the root causes behind these terrorists. The far left is likely to dismiss this as well as it does not posit that everything stems from economic roots especially the politics of oil.

Like everything in this Obama administration effort, it is complex, a lofty goal not easy to accomplish, and something that refuses to pander to American myths. The article is worth reading entirely. The facts are themselves interesting, as is the way the author writes it. It is pretty clear that he is skeptical and that he wanted to frame the article around 911 - which he mentioned at both the beginning and the end.