Because businesses struggling in this tough economic time need all the help they can get:

Because cultural institutions without our diligence will disappear even more swiftly:

I present: Why I Am Joining the Islamic State.

If we find ourselves fortunate enough to have a certain amount of financial stability in the current health and economic crisis; as coronavirus rends our society; we should take the opportunity of showing our support, and help all manner of collapsing small enterprises. If you have considered making donations to local causes in the fight against coronavirus, I would like to interest you in taking a more global view, and ask you to join me in supporting the Caliphate of the Islamic State. I’m afraid it is in danger of ruin.

When crisis afflicts a generous and supportive society such as the one that exists in our very robust America, we begin to see philanthropy and simple acts of kindness cultivated in every strata of the citizenry. We look inward and begin to donate our resources and time to foster those hardest hit among us and to prevent the destitution, which we are lucky to have avoided and which they’d surely otherwise face. But this crisis of dolor and dollar is worldwide. It is not only America who suffers by it. So I believe we should also look to assuring the future of certain borderless or international institutions for the sake of humanity’s shared heritage. The Caliphate was crumbling before the coronavirus. I’m afraid if we don’t act now, the Islamic State might join the indigenous people of North and South America, and many other annihilated populations, the cultures of which, preserved by scanty documents and ruins, we continue to study in universities and learned places, but with great sorrow that entire peoples can disappear from the earth if they are destroyed, and we destroy them, and nobody interferes.

The culture of the Islamic State’s Caliphate is highly influential. And it is widely agreed that everything influential ought to be prized. Its cultural significance is not only to be seen in the Near East, in places like Palmyra, where their charming vandalism innovated the ancient architecture of long prized temples and monuments; but that people of almost admirable enthusiasm and eager disruption have made significant cultural impact in Europe, namely in Paris, France. What would Paris be without its artists and thinkers, its cafes and concert halls; what would Paris be if some of the Islamic State’s great innovators hadn’t brought on cultural change, coordinating murders in the cafes and concert halls? Are we to let a visionary society fade that saw how well fashion, art, thought and fashionable violence look in apposition?

If you are unsure of whether you plan to support this endangered but all the more honorable people, like I will, with the contribution of your physical person, there are many perhaps unseen benefits they will confer upon you, which you are unlikely to derive from supporting any small charitable act or supporting any local business. The first is the glory one gets through mighty and justified combat. This honor will be all the more palpable in the knowledge that engagement, be it with gun, knife, bomb or galloping box truck, is for God! The spiritual satisfaction of fighting for the Lord is to be felt more acute and intensely than that from any bland, no-risk neighborhood causes. Anything positive you can do in walking distance from your house need be boring, and if you might perish by meaningless virus, isn’t there a more forward-thinking virtue in death by fighting for a cause?

If I have been persuasive enough, and enough readers feel moved with a common spirit, then we can probably coordinate and charter a jet to one of the sanctified strongholds held by the Holy Caliphate. For one of the great deterrents for most people I know, who would join the Islamic State, is what a schlep it is to get there.