The Terror Business

From FEE.org (Aug. 7):

Headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who holds a Ph.D. from the Islamic University in Baghdad, IS is run like a firm. Similar to traditional firms, IS issues what The Economist refers to as a corporate report, a document detailing IS's attacks throughout the past year. Within IS, the “group’s leaders had been meticulously chosen,” and the management even keeps a detailed accounting of the group's war effort. “They had itemized everything,” according to The Guardian’s source. IS also provides services that the Iraqi government struggled to provide effectively: It directs traffic, fights crime, and issues receipts for taxes collected.

Many who understand how markets and incentives promote prosperity through bottom-up entrepreneurship fail to apply the same logic of incentives and decentralized actors to foreign affairs. Destructive entrepreneurship is a decentralized process of searching for opportunities—which is exactly how IS formed. As an intelligence official speaking to The Guardian put it, “There was no state actor at all behind them, which we had long known. They don't need one.”  [read more]

So, IS is run like an organized crime syndicate. I wonder if they have a code of silence too like the mob. Both employ similar terroristic tactics. But the motives are different. The mob killed purely for money. IS kills for religion or ideology. 

From The Blaze.com (Aug. 8): Militant Websites: Islamic State Leader to Declare ‘Jihad Against America’  What else is new.

Also, from The Blaze.com (Aug. 8): “[W]e will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”