Monday morning, we learned that US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will be resigning, apparently pushed out by the Obama administration. On Twitter, ISIS claimed responsibility — with a hashtag and an image meme.
ISIS celebrates Chuck Hagel’s departure with a Twitter meme
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
The hashtag, translated from the Arabic, reads, “The Islamic State Topples the American Defense Minister.” There are fancy social media graphics for it and everything:
Secretary of Defence Hagel resigned ... #IS celebrates with hashtag #الدولة_الإسلامية_تطيح_بوزير_الدفاع_الامريكي pic.twitter.com/VY0kyQDhJH
— Pieter Van Ostaeyen (@p_vanostaeyen) November 24, 2014 According to the New York Times, one of the reasons Hagel left is because of a White House “recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ.” The Obama administration lost faith in Hagel’s ability to manage the fight against ISIS, and so he’s gone.
That said, ISIS can’t really brag about its performance against the Hagel-supervised US military. Though airstrikes can’t destroy ISIS, they’ve helped slow the group’s advance in Iraq considerably.
By Andrew Prokop and Zack Beauchamp
By Zack Beauchamp
