Hillary Clinton does not understand the enemy

Rich Lowry:

Someone dares call it treason. Hillary Clinton used the occasion of the New York-area bombings to accuse Donald Trump of providing “aid and comfort” to ISIS.

This speaks both to her desperation, as polls show a tightening race, and her foolish misunderstanding of what drives ISIS and other Islamic radicals.

Clinton makes it sound like ISIS fighters are disaffected members of a swing-state focus group who, as soon as they hear an offensive statement from Donald Trump, prepare the next attack.

If Hillary really believes Trump is a “recruiting sergeant” for terrorists, she has a thin understanding of human motivation. It takes something very powerful to convince a young man to risk life and limb fighting for a terror group that is hunted and bombed wherever it gains a foothold. That something isn’t the ephemera of an American presidential campaign; it’s religion.

ISIS is an apocalyptic cult. As Graeme Wood wrote in a widely noted essay in The Atlantic last year, “Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, ‘the Prophetic methodology,’ which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail.”

It’s tempting, Wood writes, to consider jihadists “modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise,” when in reality ISIS is inexplicable outside of its “sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.”
...

This is what makes utterly destroying ISIL and the caliphate so important in this war.  The Radical Islamists think one of the reasons why the Muslim culture has fallen so far behind the West is because they have not been faithful to the last details of the Koranic scripture.  If you can defeat an apocalyptic cult that follows the Koran to the letter it goes a long way toward defeat the radical Islamist ideology.  I don't think Clinton comprehends this.

You also need to consider just how crazy someone would have to be to become a genocidal mass murderer just based on hearing Trump say a few things.  She can't really believe that.  That is actually more insulting than anything Trump has said about Muslims.