Richard Cohen: Why ISIS Trumps Freedom

A brilliant and spot-on analysis worthy of your serious reflection. Human history is littered with failed attempts to provide for our own meaning, purpose, and happiness. Look around. How’s that working out? See what you think.

Western societies have been going ever further in freeing their citizens’ choices — in releasing them from ties of tradition or religion, in allowing people to marry whom they want and divorce as often as they want, have sex with whom they want, die when they want and generally do what they want. There are few, if any, moral boundaries left.

In this context, radical Islam offers salvation, or at least purpose, in the form of a life whose moral parameters are strictly set, whose daily habits are prescribed, whose satisfaction of everyday needs is assured and whose rejection of freedom is unequivocal. By taking away freedom, the Islamic State lifts a psychological weight on its young followers adrift on the margins of European society.

Read and reflect on it all.