Islamic Jihadists ISIS

[Over the Bar]

To me, what ISIS did to the 2 journalists was disgusting.  To most people in the world beheading is simply inhuman and barbaric.

Saudi Arabia beheaded more than 20 men and women in August for their 'crimes' yet Saudi are strong US and UK allies benefiting from arms and jet airplanes from both.

Why are Saudi's public beheadings more acceptable to the UK, USA and other western democracies then?

[Mike Sheehy]

To me, what ISIS did to the 2 journalists was disgusting.  To most people in the world beheading is simply inhuman and barbaric.

Saudi Arabia beheaded more than 20 men and women in August for their 'crimes' yet Saudi are strong US and UK allies benefiting from arms and jet airplanes from both.

Why are Saudi's public beheadings more acceptable to the UK, USA and other western democracies then?

The west is not responsible for what happens in Saudi Arabia. The west must coexist and deal with whatever regimes/theocracies/tyrannies Arab/Islamic states impose on themselves.This is one of the great lies that Jihadi apologists force on western civilization, that it is somehow to blame for their fuckwittery. This must stop. It must not be tolerated anymore. Anyone perpetuating this line must be called out.

Western civilization is superior to Islamic Jihadi barbarism. We must not be dictated to by these backward extremists. 

[rossiewanderer]

Oil would you think?

The work shy/professional protesting/ Hippy brigade will tell you that the reason for Islamic barbarism is careful manipulation on the part of the west to secure future oil reserves.
ISIS now control vast Oil reserves and have more money than Man Utd, alot more. around 6 billion.Not bad for a group of like minded savages who doctor the Koran to legitimise their thirst for blood.

Apart from the vast swathes of humanity and children ISIS have killed they carry thousands of sex slaves which is ironic considering they kill homosexuals yet indulge among themselves after a hard days killing.

[Mike Sheehy]

Now they want to make Spain an Islamic state like it was before.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/07/01/ISIS-Releases-Map-of-5-Year-Plan-to-Spread-from-Spain-to-China

One of the things the Spanish kings did after the Reconquista from the Arabs was to emphasise the Spanish love for Pork to distinguish the people from the Moors.

ISIS have no chance of putting the Spaniards off their chorizo.
Spanish supermarkets have at least a quarter of their shop space devoted to the stuff.

No doubt you celebrated when those bombs went off in Madrid. The sooner Europe wakes up to the threat that Jihadi apologists like you pose the better.

[Mike Sheehy]

Oil would you think?

The work shy/professional protesting/ Hippy brigade will tell you that the reason for Islamic barbarism is careful manipulation on the part of the west to secure future oil reserves.
ISIS now control vast Oil reserves and have more money than Man Utd, alot more. around 6 billion.Not bad for a group of like minded savages who doctor the Koran to legitimise their thirst for blood.

Apart from the vast swathes of humanity and children ISIS have killed they carry thousands of sex slaves which is ironic considering they kill homosexuals yet indulge among themselves after a hard days killing.

Indeed, this preoccupation with the decadence of the west whilst indulging in the most extreme moral depravities is a feature of Jihadi Islamic extremists and their apologists as evidenced by Seafoids , shall we say, very particular taste in Tel Aviv nightlife. The fact that he purrs in admiration of the Iranian regimes "rationality" while they hang gay 16 year olds tells you all you need to know about his moral compass.

[Mike Sheehy]

The first mistake we make is apologizing for what we believe in.
Always remember our women have a voice. Our girls should not have to justify their voice in society.

This is how women are described when they dare go against the jihadi message

seafoid says:   
March 3, 2014 at 4:42 pm   
I bet Scarlett has her own mikvah to get rid of all those menstrual impurities.

seafoid says:   
March 3, 2014 at 12:47 pm   
Did Scarlett strip down to her undies and lick a map of Israel at AIPAC ? Or am I confusing her with Miley? I often get my slappers mixed up .

[orangeman]

US and the allies including some Arab states allegedly have started to strike inside Syria. The brown stuff has hit the fan.

[seafoid]

The romance of terror
People don't become terrorists because they are poor or uneducated, schooled in radical religion or brainwashed
•   o   Scott Atran
o   
o   theguardian.com, Monday 19 July 2010 13.15 BST
   
The question: Can you do counterterrorism without theology?
Especially for young men, mortal combat in the service of a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. One heroic cause for disaffected souls in the world today is jihad, through which anyone from anywhere can make a mark against the most powerful countries and armies in the history of the world. How glorious to cut off Goliath's head with a box cutter – or at least cause him a big headache.
Yet, although many millions of people express sympathy with al-Qaida's viral social movement or other forms of violent political expression that abuse religion and support terrorism, relatively few willingly use violence. Following a 2001-2007 survey of 35 predominantly Muslim nations, a Gallup study estimated that 7% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims thought that the 9/11 attacks were "completely justified". That's about 100 million people; however, of these many millions who express support for violence against the outgroup, there are only thousands willing to actually commit violence.
This is also true in the Muslim diaspora, which provides the overwhelming majority of al-Qaida followers. In the European Union, fewer than 3,000 suspects have been imprisoned for jihadi activities out of a Muslim population of perhaps 20 million. In the United States, fewer than 500 suspects have been arrested for having anything remotely to do with support for holy war against America after 9/11, with less than 100 cases being considered serious out of an immigrant Muslim population of more than two million.
If so many millions support jihad, why are only relatively few willing to kill and die for it? Although heroic action for a great cause is the ultimate end, the path to violent extremism is mostly a matter of individual motivations and small group dynamics in specific historical contexts. Those who go on to violence generally do so by way of family and friends within specific "scenes": neighbourhoods, schools (classes, dorms), workplaces, common leisure activities (soccer, barbershop, café), and, increasingly, online chat rooms.
The process of self selection into violence within these scenes is stimulated by a massive, media-driven political awakening in which jihad is represented as the only the way to permanently resolve glaring problems of global injustice. When this perceived injustice resonates with frustrated personal aspirations, violence may be seen as a way out. Al-Qaida and its associates do not so much recruit as attract and enlist those disaffected people who have already decided to embark on the path to violent extremism with the help of a few fellow travellers.
Research shows that terrorists generally don't commit terrorism because they are extraordinarily vengeful or uncaring, poor or uneducated, schooled as children in radical religion or brainwashed, criminally-minded or suicidal, or sex-starved for virgins in heaven. Most have no personal history of violent emotions and generally peaceful in their daily lives but become "born again" into a radical cause.
Before and just after 9/11, jihadis, including suicide bombers, were on average materially better-off and better-educated relative to their populations of origin. Many had college educations or advanced technical training. A background in science, particularly engineering and medicine, was positively associated with the likelihood of joining jihad. Now, the main threat to the west isn't from any organisation, or from well-trained cadres of volunteers, but from an al-Qaida-inspired viral social movement that is particularly contagious among young adults who are in transition stages in their lives: immigrants, students, those still in search of friends, mates or jobs.
The popular notion of a "clash of civilizations" is woefully misleading. Violent extremism represents the collapse of traditional territorial cultures, not their resurgence, as people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity. Individuals now mostly radicalise horizontally with their peers, rather than vertically through institutional leaders or organisational hierarchies: in small groups of friends – from the same neighbourhood or social network – or even as loners who find common cause with a virtual internet community. Appeals to moderate Islam are about as irrelevant as older people appealing to adolescents to moderate their music or clothes.
In the long run, perhaps the most important counterterrorism measure of all is to provide alternative heroes and hopes that are more enticing and empowering than any moral lessons or material offerings (jobs that help to relieve the terrible boredom and inactivity of immigrant youth in Europe and the underemployed throughout much of the Muslim world, will not alone offset the allure of playing at war). It is also important to provide alternate local networks and chatrooms that speak to the inherent idealism, sense of risk and adventure, and need for peer approval that young people everywhere tend toward. It could even be a 21st-century version of what the Boy Scouts and high school football teams did for immigrants and potentially troublesome youth as America urbanised a century ago. Ask any cop on the beat: those things work. It has to be done with the input and insight of local communities, and chiefly peer-to-peer, or it won't be effective: deradicalisation, like radicalisation itself, works mainly from the bottom up, not from the top down. This, of course, is not how you stop terrorism today, but how you do it for tomorrow.

[heganboy]

One view on ISIS:

[orangeman]

Obama can deliver a speech. He's good.

He can even keep his face straight most of the time.

[StGallsGAA]

Yet another western powers v bad muslims do-or-die war.  Not surprisingly music to the ears of George Bush and Dick Cheney via their Halliburton and Carlyle Corporations!  War against anybody is just great!

[seafoid]

It all seemed so idiotic
all the accusations of unpatriotic
The fall we'll always remember,
capitulating silence election November
before the winter
of the long hot summer
Somewhere in the desert
we raised the oil pressure
and waited for the weather
to get much better
for the new wind to blow in the storm
We tried to remember the history in the region
the French foreign legion, Imperialism,
Peter O'Toole and hate the Ayatollah
were all we learned in school
Not that we gave Hussein five billion
Not of our new bed partner the Syrian
and of course no mention
of the Palestine situation
It was amazing how they steamrolled
They said eighty percent approval
but there was no one that I knew polled
No one had a reason for being in the Gulf
We waited for congress to speak up
illegal build up
But no one would wake up
Our representatives were Milli Vanilli's
for corporate Dallas Cowboy Beverly Hillbillies
With perfect timing
the politicians rhyming their sentiments
so nicely oil gold and sand
my sediments precisely....
We regretfully support the lunacy
I'm afraid there is no time for more scrutiny
National unity preserve our community
Teflon election opportunities
were in profundant abundance

On January second the Bush administration
announced a recession had stricken the Nation
the highest quarterly earnings in ten years
were posted by Chevron
Meanwhile a budget was placed in our hands
as the deadline in the sand came to an end
so much for the peace dividend
one billion a day is what we spent
and our grandchildren will pay for it 'til the end
When schools are unfunded
and kids don't get their diplomas
they get used for gun boat diplomacy
disproportionately black or brown we see
bullet catchers for the slave master



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g_t8tQ4zyo

[seafoid]

It must have been like this when between 1570 and the departure of Cromwell from Ireland
The English destroyed most of the abbeys in the late 1500s. There are ruins of one in the middle of Ballina.
Never replaced.   


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/sep/25/iraq-outlaw-state/?insrc=whc

The SIC has also systematically destroyed tombs, temples, shrines, statues, and monuments that might hint at exalting anything other than the one true God. Some of the world's most significant archaeological sites, including the great pre-Islamic Arab city of Hatra, with its magnificent temples to pagan gods, are at risk of destruction or plunder: aside from protection rackets and kidnap ransom, the SIC has developed a lucrative sideline in antiquities smuggling.

Sad to say, Baghdadi's fusion of the homicidal and messianic is not without precedent in Iraq. The use of seemingly gratuitous cruelty as a form of display—as a talisman of godlike power and an advertisement of worldly success—has old roots here. Some can be traced just outside of Mosul in the fields of dusty ruins that mark the sites of Nineveh and Nimrud, great cities of the ancient Assyrian empire.

For centuries before its collapse in 612 BC, Assyria controlled the upper plains between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, a span of flat, semiarid, and hard-to-defend terrain that is possibly the most often fought-over patch of real estate on the planet, and that happens to be remarkably similar to the SIC's present domain. Assyria's perpetual rival and eventual nemesis was Babylon, a kingdom that, rather like the rump Iraq now held by the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, centered on the lower reaches of the two rivers. Just as today the area around Baghdad (the city was not founded until the eighth century AD) formed an uneasy border between them.

What stands out in the iconography of the Assyrian kingdom is its unusually frequent and detailed depiction of extreme violence. Again and again we find muscle-bound Assyrians doing terrible things to captives: slitting throats, lopping off limbs and heads, impaling, flaying alive, displaying corpses and body parts atop city walls. Just as in the SIC's propaganda, too, the smashing of enemy idols provides another common theme.

The British Museum, which houses a spectacular collection of Assyrian art, devotes an entire gallery to reliefs from the palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The image that draws most comment is a small domestic scene showing the king relaxing with his queen in a garden as a musician strums on a harp. They sit in the shade of a tree decorated with an eye-catching ornament: the severed head of a troublesome neighboring king.

In short, the country that is now Iraq—although alas not, perhaps, for much longer in its current shape—is no stranger to the ghoulish and macabre. The Mongols, famously, built pyramids of skulls when they pillaged and razed Baghdad in 1258 and again in 1401. It was in Iraq in the 1920s that Britain introduced newer, cheaper methods for keeping unruly natives under control, such as chemical weapons and aerial "terror" bombings. Saddam Hussein's three-decade-long Republic of Fear, with its gassing of Kurdish villagers, grotesque tortures, and mass slaughter of dissidents, made the later American jailers of Abu Ghraib look downright amateur.

The SIC captures the headlines, but the group is hardly alone in its viciousness. In recent years Shia gangs have proved no less cruel than such Sunni rivals, one small example being the puritan vigilantes who have regularly and murderously attacked sex workers in Baghdad. The carnage from a raid on a brothel in the district of Zayuna on July 12 included twenty-eight prostitutes and six of their clients. In another incident on July 30, Shia militias in the town of Baaquba, northeast of Baghdad, executed fifteen Sunni men they had earlier kidnapped, strung their corpses on electricity poles, and for several days refused to let medical teams remove them.

Such atrocities represent average daily tolls for violent death in Iraq, where the total of civilian dead since the American invasion of 2003 has almost certainly mounted well beyond 100,000—no one really knows. The postwar sectarian bloodletting reached a flood in 2006–2007, as Shia death squads sought revenge for the bombing of a revered Shia shrine by one of the SIC's Sunni precursors. Under the impact of ceaseless bombings and tit-for-tat assassinations, Baghdad, once a pixelation of faiths, forcibly rearranged itself into monochrome sectarian blocs divided by grim concrete walls. Following a merciful lowering of the tempo of violence that lingered into 2013, the awful daily drumbeat has again quickened. Instead of wobbling slowly to recovery, a wounded Iraq has found itself staggering into new and possibly worse dangers.

Even by the standards of Iraq's turbulent history, its past few decades have been unusually relentless. Just since 1980 Iraqis have experienced three major wars that wrecked the country's physical infrastructure and left perhaps half a million dead; an attempt at genocide that permanently alienated Iraq's five million Kurds; a ten-year siege under the UN's "Oil-for-Food" program that devastated the economy, ruined the middle class, and forced the most talented into exile; an American invasion that shattered national pride and stoked bitter divisions; and a civil war that displaced as many as 4.7 million Iraqis from their homes and has driven a deep, perhaps irreparable chasm of mistrust between Iraq's 60 percent Shia Arab majority and the once-dominant 20 percent Sunni Arab minority. Excepting perhaps the Russians from 1914 to 1953, few modern nations have been so cursed by ill luck for such an extended period.

[Gaffer]

Would love to trap a squad of the ISIS boys in a large shed

I would then unwrap a machine gun and get to work until they were all horizontal!

[Eamonnca1]

Latecomer to the thread here.

I've always noticed that religious people tend to play down the role of religion in conflict. They point to the other causes of division and insist that that is the real cause. Anti-religious people tend to play up the role of religion in conflict. The late lamented Christopher Hitchens maintained that Islamic terrorists carry out unspeakable acts not because they deviate from their religious doctrine but because they adhere to it quite literally. Sam Harris wrote about it in The End of Faith where he devoted several pages to quoting from Islamic holy texts one instruction after another to kill, punish, or at least despise infidels. There are hundreds of them.

My take on it is that there are numerous factors in these conflicts, and while religion might not be the only root of each one, it certainly magnifies problems. When people are divided on ethnic or nationalist lines, that division gets even sharper when people adhere to a belief system that denigrates an "evil other" group out of fear of what'll happen to them in the afterlife if they're too friendly with the enemy. Religion is a very handy tool for recruiting extremists, and it can make people commit atrocities that would never be committed by a non-believer. There's no atheist equivalent of the seventeen virgin sex slaves awaiting them in heaven as a reward for carrying out a suicide bombing.

As others have alluded to, the late unlamented Ian Paisley was a master of hijacking religion as a means of motivating the mobs to attack innocent Catholics and keeping society divided according to which type of church people attended. Widespread belief in a divine imperative makes it a lot easier to recruit angry young men with an axe to grind, particularly if they live in sexually-frustrated gender-segregated societies like they have in the middle east.

There are those who play the whatabout game and point to historic wrongdoing in the name of religions other than Islam. The problem with that is Islam is different in being the youngest of the big three desert religions. Judaism went through its adolescent hissy fit a long time ago, Christianity went through its tantrum around the time of the Inquisition. Islam is going through its pain-in-the-neck teenage years now, and with modern weapons that's a big problem.  The Inquisition was awful, but imagine how much worse it would have been if automatic guns had existed at the time.

Since Islam is convulsing with rage at the minute, I think it does deserve to be singled out as being a bigger problem than other religions, particularly when its most violent adherents are armed with twenty-first century weapons.

Would abolishing religion also abolish conflict? Probably not. But it would tone things down a bit and make it a lot less violent and less dangerous IMHO.

Is Islam responsible for violence? Probably not per se, but let's not play down its role in fanning the flames of conflict and making solutions harder to find. Obama's claim that ISIS is "not Islamic" is a bit like saying that the Inquisition was not Catholic. We have to confront the elephant in the room and stop making excuses for religion.