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Want more bonus points? Kill a rich Westerner. Their blood is like the Golden Snitch of Terrorism Quidditch.

And ISIS is careful to note that picking a prominent location and looking really scary is as important as actually killing people.

The practical goal of all this point-counting is to inspire young people to really "top" each other in the violence, body count, and prominence of their attacks. They even include these calls for one-upsmanship in articles about successful attacks, like this profile of some young shooters in Bengal:

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"... for Cesare Tavella was just a warning, the Gulshan attack was just a glimpse, and what is yet to come by the permission of Allah will be worse and far more bitter."

You could say the same thing about Artan's recent attack in Ohio -- that he was just a proof of concept. Rumiyah didn't make him want to go out and stab a bunch of people. Muslims aren't magically more susceptible to insane Islamist propaganda than white people are to Nazi propaganda. (And many of the Muslim soldiers I met in Iraq are fighting ISIS right now.) But some people are vulnerable to this shit. Especially the kind of young, alienated men ISIS targets. That's why they spend more time appealing to guys like Abdul Artan than small children. Although they do that, too.



"Choose your target!" A little on the nose, ISIS.

Want something lighter than ISIS? Robert Evans also has a whimsical book about how drugs built civilization, A Brief History of Vice. It's on sale now!