What ‘evil losers’ gets right
Once Donald Trump finds a personalized insult he likes, he sticks with it — mating with it for life, like a wild swan. He hit on “low-energy” for Jeb Bush, and stuck with it until Bush slinked away. Ted Cruz became “Lyin’ Ted.” By the time of the election, his supporters came to think “Crooked Hillary” was the name on his opponent’s birth certificate.
In the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Tuesday, President Trump may have found his insult of choice for ISIS. “We stand in absolute solidarity with the people of the United Kingdom,” Trump said. “So many young, beautiful, innocent people living and enjoying their lives, murdered by evil losers.”
As taunts against ISIS go, this is a moderate upgrade from the Obama-era accusation that it is merely “un-Islamic” (as if the Christian President of a secular nation had the authority to make that declaration).
ISIS is certainly evil: to slaughter 22 attendees of a children’s concert is first-ballot Hall of Fame evil material. And many of the supporters of ISIS may as well have the scarlet “L” of loserdom tattooed on their foreheads. Before falling for the ISIS cult, they often drop out of school, can’t keep jobs and get busted for pathetic street crimes.
The name-calling will have no real effect on ISIS. It has names far more colorful for us (my favorite was directed at John Kerry (an “uncircumcised geezer”), and to be called an “evil loser” by a brittle anti-Muslim bigot might even be a badge of honor.
But the phrase “evil loser” does, in a strange way, cut to the quick of what motivates many of ISIS’ foot soldiers. They often have a deep sense of their own evil, and their own status as losers. And they seek ISIS as a cure for their evil loserdom.
For many outsiders, it is surprising to discover that these outwardly pious warriors are in fact drenched in guilt over their own sin. They believe they are evil, or were evil, without having to hear Trump confirm it.
When ISIS recruits them, it first reminds them of the sins of their pre-ISIS lives — how they drank, slept around, maybe worked as rent boys or hustlers. Fighting for ISIS, ISIS says, will clear their accounts before God. As the mad monk Rasputin said, “To be purged, you must first sin.”
It is an orthodox Muslim belief, not a strange ISIS heresy, that martyrs and prophets receive special favor in the afterlife. Ordinary people endure a kind of purgatory, a cleansing by fire. It is as unpleasant as it sounds.
But those whom God loves enough to martyr or hear His voice directly skip that phase and proceed straight to paradise, a land of sumptuous feasts, scintillating conversation and sexual delights — a sort of combination of Plato’s Symposium and the Playboy mansion. Needless to say, a person with a deep sense of his own sin would covet a VIP pass to such a gathering.
No less potent is the sense among many ISIS recruits that they are, just as Trump reminds them, losers. Quite apart from any heavenly delights they might expect, they crave recognition from peers for having finally done something brave, astonishing or praiseworthy.
Remember that line we so often hear about ISIS fighters from the friends and family they leave behind: “We never thought he was capable of something like this.” That is precisely the intended effect — to astonish those who thought he would never amount to anything.
I repeat: ISIS recruits don’t care what Trump says. But they do care how their peers think of them. And if their peers keep thinking of them as evil losers, even after they commit themselves to dying for the group, that peer judgment seems to matter.
Consider the case of India. Nearly one in 10 Muslims — 183 million — live in India, but the number of Indian Muslims fighting for ISIS is in the dozens.
There are many reasons for this extremely low number, but one critical one is the story of Arif Majeed, an early recruit who came back in 2014 and reported that ISIS assigned him latrine duty and made him fetch water for its real fighters, the Chechens and Arabs.
For Indians, this report confirmed suspicions that if they went to Syria, they would be denied glory, perhaps even denied martyrdom. They would be treated like so many South Asians who go to Arabia, as the lowest of the low, picking up teacups (and perhaps also feces) of their ethnic and social betters. They would be the same evil losers as before, only more so. The “evil loser” insult may not sting when Trump says it; for so many other reasons, he’s the perfect foil for ISIS, one who is likely to aid, not damage, recruitment. But the words are the right frame. It’s how we want ISIS recruits to think their peers think of them, not only before they go to ISIS but after as well.