A recent post on +972, a web magazine that that gets its name from the telephone area code shared by Israel and Palestine, reports that at least three of the East Africans who were videotaped being beheaded or shot by the ISIS on a Libyan beach were deported from Israel last year after failing to obtain legal status. They were identified by a number of Eritreans detained at the notorious Holot, a desert detention center in southern Israel. (Haaretz reported earlier this month that Israel informed asylum seekers at Holot that they will soon be deported to an unknown African country.)
What appears to have happened is that after returning to Africa, the identified three made their way to Libya in the hope of crossing the Mediterranean to Europe on a boat.
This kind of desperate journey is now appearing to be more dangerous than ever before. Not only are the boats shoddy, the trips crammed, the sea unpredictable, but it seems the ISIS has spread its hyper-violent brand of fanaticism to Libya, a country that went from very bad to even worse after the world-famous nutter/dictator Muammar Gaddafi was removed from power with military assistance from the West.
What is pointed out by +972's Haggai Matar is that one of the men killed by the ISIS, referred to as T., was actually being detained in Libya after failing to reach Europe—his brother lives in Norway. How did the ISIS get a hold of T. and other prisoners? Is the gang now working with authorities? Or are they themselves filling a power vacuum in Libya? Is that why ISIS is in that country, because no one is in control? And is this not exactly what Gaddafi predicted would happen if he was deposed? He also warned that the Mediterranean "will become a sea of chaos." What has become of Arab Spring? The thing that is increasingly revealed by the disorder in Iraq, Syria, and now Libya is that neoliberal global governance cannot function without dictators.
It's also interesting to note that the ISIS is actually far more backward than the caliphates that ruled Spain between 711 and 1492. For them, Christians and Jews were respected because they believed in a God—they only had to pay a tax, jizya, for non-Muslims. Atheists and pagans did not get the tax, they got the sword.
