By SETH J. FRANTZMAN

Everyday there is misinformation about ISIS.  Recently I read an NPR fawning piece about ISIS prisoners captured by the Kurds.  “It can be hard to understand why young Muslims join ISIS. The group is so bloodthirsty and so ready to advertise its brutality,” claims the author. One of those interviewed joined because of the “oppressive Assad regime.”

Later there was an interview on France 24 with filmmaker Deeyah Khan who had made a new documentary on British men and women who joined ISIS.  In an interview she claimed the men she met had felt “immasculated” by society. They were searching for “belonging” and “meaning” and were having an “identity crises.”

It sounds like teenage angst.  But most teenagers don’t join ISIS and go to Syria and Iraq and burn people alive and buy and sell women and rape children.  In a subsequent France24 special they followed Yazidi politician Vian Dakhil to a home of a Yazidi woman rescued from ISIS.  She had been purchased eight times.  She had been raped each time.  In an interview with The Independent a Yazidi woman told how she was captured by ISIS with many members of her family. “They separated us into three groups, men, married women and single women, then took the single women and girls to Mosul…Sometimes they would come and take girls for their pleasure. They did everything to the girls.” She was raped by Australian extremist Abdul Salam Mahmoud and later sold to British ISIS volunteer and executioner Siddhartha Dhar.

We are supposed to believe that the rapists who enslave women and murder people are all just innocent nice misguided people “searching”. Why is it only with them their “searching” means who indigenous groups have to face genocide?  When a European born man decides he needs some “belonging” he has to go half way around the world to commit genocide?

There were some 50,000 foreign volunteers who joined ISIS, many of them from privileged Europe.  They were not suppressed.  The people that were suppressed were the Kurds and Yazidis in the Middle East.  Yet they didn’t become ISIS rapists.  It was middle class Europeans, some of them converts to Islam, who needed to “belong” and commit a genocide to do so.

Why is it that never will western interviewers of ISIS admit that these men are chauvinists, they are nationalist right wing religious extremists who want to kill and rape.  They have a superiority complex similar to Nazism and it leads them to view the world in black and white, those who deserve death and are sub-human, and their little group.  Just like those who joined the Nazi party and loved torture and rape, many of these people are men who dream of colonialism and conquest and murder.  It isn’t that they feel suppressed or immasculated, it is that they want to suppress and immasculate others.  They want to oppress.  They are natural born dictators.

ISIS is not a movement of the oppressed, it is the oppressors.  Never have so many Europeans gone abroad to oppress than since colonialism, because ISIS is primarily a rape-murder-colonial-terror movement.  It has many similarities to Nazism.  Those who were oppressed are the Yazidis, instead of wanting to humanize ISIS, the western media should humanize them.  Those who suffered under Assad and Saddam were the Kurds, and they fight ISIS, because ISIS is the foreign oppressor, not the indigenous people. Kurdish fighters have to suffer at the hands of European privileged men “searching for meaning.” Luckily they find meaning in the bullets that strike them and the shallow graves their bodies are deservedly put in.  Say no to ISIS manipulations.  Jihadists are never victims, they are oppressors joining an extreme-right wing supremacist movement. They seek to oppress, not escape oppression. Almost all Jihadists are wealthy and middle class.  Poor Muslims, and truly pious Muslims, rarely join.  Shammar tribesmen don’t join ISIS. French men join ISIS.