The things you describe are permutations of how any political organization behaves. For clarity, the class of political organizations that use force/violence. That class includes all governments.
Filming ritualistic beheadings is a propaganda technique. It helps both ISIS and the US. This is why the filmed beheadings are played for the US audience by American media. The meaning of the beheadings is different for both audiences, but ISIS continues to produce the videos because it views the tradeoff as being beneficial to its growth and survival.
Rapes are unfortunately a standard part of military conduct. Due to financial constraints, combatants must be recruited with promises of glory in the afterlife, but the more secular among them may join just for the opportunity to have sex. This is sad and extremely ugly, but it is a response to resource scarcity and the need to recruit fighters. The constituents must consent to military action by joining, and the compensation (supernatural or earthly) is the price of that consent.
In the US, soldiers are recruited from the ghettos, slums, and backwoods of America. Many are desperate to be educated and to become employable because the K-12 system has failed them. In the first world we can pay our soldiers with salary, training, and subsidized loans. This is not possible without significant wealth, which is why a professional class of soldiers did not exist in Europe until economic development made it feasible.
Suicide bombings are not any different from drone strikes. For a given drone strike, there is some nonzero probability of civilian deaths. The bar is pretty low, as we've found out. You can call them "accidental" but that is a propaganda word. The truth is, the value we attribute to a human life in regions where we have drone strikes is appallingly low.
Further, the purpose of suicide bombings is terror, which is the same purpose that drone strikes serve. The potential victims are intended to lie awake at night hearing the buzz of propellers, unable to sleep soundly in case a bomb rains down upon their home. The intention of flying lots of drones everywhere is to make the US force projection seem unstoppable and ubiquitous, so that the locals get fed up with living in terror of being "accidentally" killed and stand up to their leaders.
This is the same goal of suicide bombings, incidentally.
Rhetoric about entire populations of people and all the religious rhetoric is part of ISIS' growth strategy. For historical reasons, secularism is associated with occupation and mistrust, and Islam is largely decentralized (friendly to pluralism). It makes sense to attach any grassroots movement to the existing social structures and network of Islam. This both creates a vocabulary for the struggle but also a moral code that has stood the test of time. This happens everywhere... Religion was used in the American abolitionist movement and anti-slavery movement, as well as the civil rights movement. It is used in America today to support the war on terror as well. ISIS is simply doing the same thing. Over time, if ISIS gains power it will moderate its stated views in order to appeal to a wider audience. Early adopters like highly opinionated, absolutist rhetoric and ISIS knows that. It can be safely ignored as irrelevant to ISIS's slow process of institution building, and can also be considered irrelevant to ISIS's military strategy.
> if your politics takes violence to convince others, you are not a political movement, but a terrorist organization
Was this true of the colonists in the American revolution? How do you determine the legitimate use of lethal force by a political organization. I'm curious how you reason about this. My take is that it's all equally illegitimate, but strongly desired by all political organizations (power aggregators). Power is useful because it lets the group control some aspect of society. Without the need to control, there would be no need for power and no need to consolidate power.
> yet the libertarian grassroots movement doesnt resort to violence of any kind to further its political agenda. same can be said for the green party or tea party.
This is true, but not for the reason you suppose, but because in the US there is already a government monopoly on force. This is why the issue of gun control is so clear-cut for most people. Clearly nobody is going to form a successful militia with their 2nd amendment rights, so why worry about that aspect of the 2nd amendment. Gun control is considered actionable precisely because guns could be easily taken by force from all gun owners if the government desired to do so.
The goal of all political organizations is to a) take power, and b) control a monopoly on lethal force in their region of influence. Whether we like it or not, and whether we agree with it or not, this is a law of the universe of politics. It's an artificial distinction to claim that simply because organizations in the US do not seek to overturn the government's monopoly on force that a monopoly on lethal force isn't the first and foremost priority of every government.
The Green and Tea party are not revolutionary movements. If one of them started to look like one, it would quickly be categorized as a terrorist organization. Consider how quickly the Patriot Act allowed officials to classify all sort of behavior as "terrorism". There is no room in the US for any group to attempt this sort of thing.
I do not think of this as good or bad, it's just the way human political groups work.
> To identify what is morally wrong, you need to determine the reasoning behind the action.
This is true, but I think that your view of ISIS comes from some convenient definitions about what constitutes war and what constitutes a combatant:
Definitions I'd use: A war is a political dispute that has become violent. The notion of a combatant came out of Geneva Convention-era conflict involving major powers. In an asymmetrical conflict such as the US vs ISIS, the notion of a combatant is of limited usefulness.
This is why the US sends captives to Gitmo, because an offshore location was needed to get around the legal ambiguity of doing so.
ISIS (or any small group aka "terrorist" organization) will attempt to break the enemy's will in any way possible. This includes attacking civilians, because there are few American combatants in the region, and traditional military style campaigns against American forces would be doomed.
This brings us to the goal of war. Why fight a war? To attempt to break the enemy's will to continue fighting. Historically, the US has been flexible about what it considers acceptable conduct depending on the probability of victory. The lower the probability, the more slack is allowed in the definition.
So I'd argue that if you are ISIS you will do as many acts to break the will of Americans as you possibly can, and you won't worry about it if some civilians get killed. Surely you'd rather kill military members, but if doing so doesn't seem possible you'll target civilians. Terrorism is a tactic by which an attack creates fear disproportional to the actual amount of damage (property damage and loss of life).
So unless you think ISIS should just give up, I think it's hard to find fault with its tactics on a moral basis. Yes, I disapprove of the tactics, but I also disapprove of using drones the way the US does, and the many other things the US does that are essentially terrorism.
More broadly, political conflict will always exist between nations. I'd prefer it if my own country was completely transparent about the objective of any use of force. National interest is fine, but we are told that the US is destroying the middle east for noble, moral reasons. This is far from true.
>Filming ritualistic beheadings is a propaganda technique.
Its a lot more than a propaganda technique. this is one of my huge problems with your entire argument, you conflate things as if they are even similar.
You are making the statement that ritualistic beheadings is no worse than anti-communist posters in the cold war era.
are they both techniques used by propagandists? absolutely. Are they in any way shape or form of the same magnitude of moral reprehensibility? absolutely not.
You are boiling something down to its most raw elements, then ignoring half of them. You cannot simply put aside the fact that beheadings involve beheading a person, and then hand wave that its the same as other forms of propaganda.
>but ISIS continues to produce the videos because it views the tradeoff as being beneficial to its growth and survival.
or because they are using terroristic threats to achieve political or economic goals.
>Due to financial constraints, combatants must be recruited with promises of glory in the afterlife
ahh but this does not in any way describe a grassroots political movement. you are describing not a political group but a military one.
>This is not possible without significant wealth, which is why a professional class of soldiers did not exist in Europe until economic development made it feasible.
yet armies existed without needing to rely on the promise of women to rape and glory in the afterlife. again you are not describing a grassroots political movement, but an organization that desires war in and of itself.
>Suicide bombings are not any different from drone strikes.
again you are conflating two absolutely different things as one by ignoring major parts of them.
what is a suicide bomb attack?
why would a group choose this type of attack over other types?
who is the intended target of this attack?
what message does this type of attack send to those on the receiving end?
what is the intent of the attack? to harm the enemy? to provoke fear amongst a civilian population? to take away the enemy's ability to take a specific action?
who are the innocents that could be harmed during this attack?
these same questions must be asked about a drone strike
what is the attacks intention?
who is the intended target of this attack?
what message does this type of attack send to those on the receiving end?
etc.
Have you ever met someone who operated a military drone? Do you believe they feel the same way as someone committing a suicide bombing would feel? Do you think these operators feel righteous authority when they launch missiles? Do you think they cheer at all the innocent civilians who were killed?
>This is the same goal of suicide bombings, incidentally.
oh now purposefully murdering groups of civilians is the same thing as flying drones over an area in military conflict.
>Rhetoric about entire populations of people and all the religious rhetoric is part of ISIS' growth strategy.
so its a grassroots movement that gets new members by promising them women to rape, glory in the afterlife and also lies about its motives completely? to the very members its trying to attract?
are you seeing why no one is buying this 'grassroots movement' line you keep bringing up? you are absolutely not describing a political movement. You are describing a militia through and through.
>Religion was used in the American abolitionist movement and anti-slavery movement, as well as the civil rights movement.
do you have any source videos of leaders of those movements calling for the deaths of vast groups of people? any live beheadings? any promise of women to rape? surely as you explained earlier, these upstart movements couldnt have gained any members without such promises?
>Was this true of the colonists in the American revolution?
yes, the american revolutionaries were absolutely terrorists. They used violence to revolt against their existing government.
> but because in the US there is already a government monopoly on force.
there is also already a monopoly on the use of force in the middle east by the governments of the respective governments. there are political ways to capture that control for an organization if they are politically motivated. If we were talking about a grassroots political movement trying to gain control of the government of a country, this would be a different conversation with a lot less about beheadings and rape, but we are talking about a theological military organization.