Doomsday cultism drives the deranged islamic

Tobin Harshaw has a good review of ISIS and Al Qaeda. He points out the recruiting theme: 'The coming apocalypse of the west'.  It is a fabrication, but it appeals to the young, uneducated Sunni teenager.

All these developments may cut deeply into the narrative of scriptural inevitability that Islamic State uses to attract and keep its followers. The problem with a doomsday cult is that you have to keep your followers on edge, believing that the Apocalypse is just around the corner even though the sun keeps rising every day. As William McCants of the Brookings Institution put it in his excellent new book "ISIS Apocalypse," "end-time prophecies were an especially inviting target for fabricators." And while the group's current caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is in fact a scholar of Islam, the illiterate Zarqawi was nothing if not a fabricator.

It is all about the illusion of sudden collapse and re-birth.   The illusion provides a short  path to wealth and power, but it never works.  Terrorism's effect is mostly to extinguish the ignorant terrorists, and they never really achieve wealth and power.