US ‘militia’ members compared to ‘vanilla ISIS’

A protest on April 30 in which armed Americans were photographed at Michigan’s State House has been derided as an example of “vanilla ISIS,” where American armed protesters increasingly look like Middle East militias and terrorist groups. Images of the protesters, mostly men, some with AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles and even wearing camo and tactical vests, sparked a debate on Twitter about divisions in America and how extremism may be growing.

The comparison of armed Americans to Middle East militias represents a growing recognition that armed groups may share similarities and is also an attempt to question stereotypes of what “terrorists” look like. The discussion largely involves shock that an armed “militia group” would be allowed to protest with rifles so prominently at a state capital. Numerous social-media users used the term “vanilla ISIS,” and others posted photos of the armed men next to photos of ISIS in 2014. Similar photos of armed men at a protest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on April 21 brought comparisons to terrorist or militia parades in the Middle East.

The accusation that right-leaning Americans, particularly armed protesters who make up a fringe of some anti-lockdown protests in recent weeks in the US, are similar to the divisions in the Middle East raises some needed discussion about terminology and assumptions.

In the Middle East, armed militants are largely divided into two groups. One spectrum consist of Islamist Sunni groups, such as al-Qaeda, ISIS and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and those further afield, such Boko Haram, al-Shabab and the Taliban.

These groups can be subdivided into more extreme jihadist and terrorist groups and those portrayed more as local insurgent groups. Some of them seem to be described in more neutral terms, depending on who is talking about them. For instance, Hamas, which uses terrorism in the form of bus bombings and then indiscriminate rocket fire for years, is sometimes portrayed as merely a form of “armed struggle” and a “social” movement with an “armed wing.”

Another type of Middle East militia are those linked to Iran, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hashd al-Sha’abi in Iraq. These groups are mostly Shi’ite. Some of them are nominal allies as opposed to direct religious allies of Iran, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis in Yemen.

These groups largely are open about their ideology. The official slogan of the Houthis in Yemen is “death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.” The Hamas charter openly incorporated elements of the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion and anti-Masonic conspiracies. Yet the leader of the Houthis wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2018, and Hamas officials such as Mousa Abu Marzook have been interviewed by The Forward as recently as 2012.

The main difference between the depictions of terrorist and militia groups in the Middle East and armed American militias is that while photos of the two may be easily juxtaposed to create similarities, one group is widely portrayed as more moderate and legitimate. Despite ISIS genocide of minorities, including the systematic enslavement of children and rape of women, articles appeared in 2015 arguing that the US and others should “negotiate with ISIS” and later “try poetry and negotiation” with the extremist group. ISIS could “get round the table” with the UK, suggested one left-leaning politician.

No one argues that the US should use poetry to deal with far-right militias and invite them to the table. They don’t get op-eds at major Western newspapers. Nor are they described as part of the “global Left” and “progressive” the way Hamas and Hezbollah have been rather oddly described.

Despite ethnic cleansing of minorities, one Western human-rights expert praised ISIS in June 2014 for “reportedly trying not to alienate [the] local population.”

The difference in descriptions of groups such as ISIS and US-based armed protester militias is very different. While comparisons are inviting because both groups may parade with weapons, the overall treatment of such groups is quite different by both mass media and policy makers.

Armed groups in the Middle East generally do get a kind of “seat at the table,” whether it is HTS running most of Idlib province in Syria, or the Taliban getting invites to discussions from Qatar to Moscow and Tehran, or Shi’ite militias being part of the government of Lebanon and Iraq. In other cases, these groups face withering assaults from governments, such as ISIS in Sinai. However, even in those cases, commentators generally depict ISIS and similar groups as feeding off neglect, discrimination, poverty or disenfranchisement. Al-Shabab and Boko Haram, for instance, were both portrayed this way. A 2012 op-ed in The New York Times claimed there was no evidence that Boko Haram “even exists,” asserting that it was conjured up as a threat to justify government persecution. A 2015 article at Human Rights Watch asserted that “barrel bombs, not ISIS, are the greatest threat to Syrians.”

The desire to humanize and understand groups such as ISIS or al-Qaeda, study their poetry and legal rulings and how they feed off neglect and religious radicalization has no commonality with studies of the far Right in the US or the West. There is little effort to study the “poetry” or religious underpinnings of various “militias” in the US. While armed militia protesters in the US may look similar, in photos and video, to groups such as Hezbollah or ISIS, the actual understanding of them and discussion about them does not seek to understand them through the same lens that such groups are widely understood in the Middle East.