Here is the second short (11 minute) video from VICE News in its series on ISIS, “The Islamic State.” There will be five such videos, and I’ll post them all.
Part 2 is called “Grooming children for jihad“. To me, there are few things more distressing than young kids who are brainwashed into wanting to “kill all the infidels.” They should be learning math, and reading, and science—not hatred and murder. As this video shows, ISIS starts the military training of children when they become sixteen.
The son of Abdullah the Belgian looks a bit coerced, but it won’t take long until this kind of pressure creates a new generation of jihadis. Who is to tell these young folk otherwise?
I was quite surprised at the number of commenters who are eager to pin what ISIS is doing on the actions of the U.S. and their allies. One commenter said, “Do you really suppose that the actions of the US and its allies have nothing to do with this mess?” My response would be, “Well, of course there are different factors involved in this, including a power vacuum in Iraq, but we simply don’t know whether ISIS would exist had the West stayed out of the region”. And is it going to help the situation now to parse the unrecoverable events of history. We can’t do a multifactorial analysis of murder.
What we do know is that ISIS is a group of brutalized and brainwashed thugs, motivated (as its adherents proclaim) by the desire to establish the longed-for Muslim Caliphate, and that most of the people they kill are Shiite Muslims. The split between Sunnis and Shiites long antedated the incursion of the West into the region. ISIS wants to exterminate all apostates, including Christians and Shiites, and it is my view that the wellspring of that aim is not mainly a need for retribution for Western perfidies, but a need to establish religious hegemony. Why else would they kill other Muslims, or try to impose sharia law on the areas they conquer? What does that have to do with the West?
At any rate, the important thing is not what role the West played in the past in the region (and I do agree that invasion of Iraq was a serious mistake), but what we do now. The marooning of 40,000 Christians on a mountaintop by ISIS is a humanitarian crisis, and it would be a cold-hearted person indeed who thinks we should just let them be executed or starved to death. So far the Obama administration’s response has been measured, and, in my view, correct. But it isn’t a long term—or even a short-term—solution. ISIS and other jihadist groups will continue to exist, even if we beat them back in this one case.
But we get absolutely nowhere by saying, “It’s all our fault.” We can simply stand by and do nothing, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to be slaughtered, with the view that “It’s not our problem.” Or we can try to help those people, mindful of mistakes we’ve made in the past. Perhaps, indeed, we should do nothing about those fleeing Christians, but that thought makes me unspeakably sad.
I don’t know what to do. How do you stop religiously-motivated barbarians, regardless of what brought them into being? (And again I’d urge you to read Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-Prize winning The Looming Tower, which makes a good case that Islamic terrorism was prompted largely by the desire to restore a pure Muslim state, not by the presence of “foreign boots on Islamic soil.”)
Finally, if you want to see a masterpiece of Western apologetics for ISIS, all you have to do is go over to the Guardian, which is rapidly becoming the West’s biggest media apologist for Islamic terrorism. (That, by the way, may explain its hatred for Richard Dawkins, a passionate critic of Islam). There you’ll find an editorial, “This Islamic State nightmare is not a holy war but an unholy mess“, written by Jonathan Freedland, the lead editor of the Guardian ‘s comment section.
Here are two excerpts:
According to Toby Dodge, the scholar of Iraq at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), what’s driving IS, or at least making its phenomenal success possible, is not pre-modern religious zeal so much as a pre-modern absence of state power. The state structures of both Iraq and Syria have all but collapsed. The result is a power vacuum of a kind that would have been recognised in the lawless Europe of seven or eight centuries ago – and which IS has exploited with the ruthless discipline of those long ago baronial warlords who turned themselves into European princes.
“Islamic State are jihadis with MBAs,” says Dodge, speaking of a movement so modern it has its own gift shop. He notes its combination of fierce religious ideology, financial acumen and tactical nous. “It’s Darwinian,” he adds, describing IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his inner circle as those strong enough to have survived the US hammering of al-Qaida in Iraq between 2007 and 2009. But what has been crucial, Dodge says, is “not ancient hatreds but this collapse of state power”.
. . . Islamic State may wrap itself in the flag of jihad, but its success owes more to medieval lawlessness than medieval religious enmity – helped by the very 21st-century decline of the global behemoth. Our world is being shaken, but the persistence of religion is more a symptom than a cause. The larger problem, as old as mankind, is power and the lack of it. For sometimes weakness can be just as dangerous as strength.
There are other ways to fill power vacuums than by mass extermination of “apostates” and imposition of religious law. And to even bring up Darwin in this context makes me ill. Anybody who wants to kill or dominate others could be described as “Darwinian,” if you stretch the term far enough. But somehow I doubt that the Sage of Downe would want his name attached to the barbarities of ISIS.
Talk about false dichotomies.
Prediction: within 5 years, there will be a Kurdistan. Maybe as soon as next year.
Yes, they’re the only ones in the area that seem to have this governing thing down.
What good has Islam done for anyone or what good has been done in the name of Islam? It appears to be outweighed by 1000-1 by the bad actions.
Their definition of ‘aid’ is 10% humanitarian and 90% armament – sometimes even worse as in the case of the Yezidi.
/rant
I’ve heard some analysts say that an ISIS like phenomenon was going to happen regardless of whether the US entered Iraq and it would have occurred sooner if they had not.
Either way, this has to be the biggest threat to the west purely because of the zealotry. There is no negotiating with them.
I think if Saddam had been left alone he’d have kept ISIS on the fringes, or more likely obliterated them.
That’s exactly what he had done with al Qaeda.
b&
Yes, Saddam would have stopped them by butchering far more people than there are Islamists.
Hussein butchered hundreds of thousands:
http://history1900s.about.com/od/saddamhussein/a/husseincrimes.htm
Yes, he was truly an evil motherfucking sonofabitch.
But he had “our” oil, and we had the hubris to think that, by killing “just a few” Iraqis, we could make things better. Now we’ve got about as much blood on our hands as Hussein did on his, and Iraq, what once was the least worst Islamic regime, is now about as bad as it gets.
Had we stayed out, it’s unlikely Iraq would today be significantly worse than it was before Shrub’s war of conquest. It might even have been somewhat better, maybe. But now it’s in tatters — and there never was any realistic hope for anything else from the start of the debacle.
First, do no harm.
b&
I agree with this. The seeds for this existed already in the mindset of the religion and the culture.
The US did not create that. The US could not create that.
I’m NOT an apologist for bad behavior by our country (I was a draft resistor during Vietnam) but there is an ideological mindset in the American left (and the peace movement) finds some way to link foreign policy to every international issue. The same mindset that blames Israel for all the trouble in Palestine.
There are times, when dealing with a very violent irrational opponent, that violence is necessary. Ugly but sometimes there is no alternative.
There’s almost no doubt this would have happened regardless of our invasion. We can’t say it’d be ISIS, but it would’ve been something. One of the leading critiques going into the war in 2003 was that the people there do not have a craving for democracy. The only way to maintain control would be to keep a strong military presence there, and what do you know, we left and now it’s all gone more to shit than it was after we reducing the infrastructure to rubble.
We can’t push democracy on a people who live and die by the sword. If a group there attempted to establish an independent secular state and were being invading by jihadist thugs, it would be worth considering sending help in the form of military aid. But as so many other posters have pointed out in these recent threads, we’ve managed to make the region even less democratic anytime we intervene with anything.
We need to stop. I can’t convey enough sympathy for those who have been slaughtered and those are are being threatened, but until we have a plan that demonstrates how another rogue group won’t rise to the top and start doing the same thing as soon as we’re out of there, then it’s best we don’t start bombing the place to begin with. A more useful tactic, though it’s not at all clear how this could be done on a large scale, would be to arrange to aid people in fleeing, support them as refugees, and have very targeted military strikes of the sort we had when we took bin Laden out. Leveling cities and shrugging about the unfortunate collateral damage just isn’t cutting it.
There are various strains of sectarian pathogens and their murderous exudate. ISIS turns out to be the most virulent (the Ebola of Islam).
Historically, using the blade of a sword, or the barrel of a rifle, was pretty successful.
Hoping that positive change will come from within, as radical militant elements are self-policed into disfavor by the moderate majority (if it even exists) doesn’t seem to work too well, even multi-generationally.
Hoping that Islam will naturally become more secular as it encounters enlightened culture also seems to be a failing strategy, as secular Islam is being replaced slowly but surely worldwide by Islamism.
How many times must we watch this same 1400-year historical record repeat itself before we make a tentative hypothesis that Islam is a toxic ideology? And that, perhaps, it is important that its religious expression – when it contradicts the secular ideals of enlightened culture – should not be accommodated.
From CNN news today: There are stories, Abu Raad says, of young men who have been recruited by ISIS and within weeks are carrying out suicide bombings.
He wonders if one them will be his son.
“My son dreamed of becoming a computer engineer,” Abu Raad said, his voice breaking. “Now he’s just a terrorist.”
Which is why, if I may make a critical point, it is important to distinguish between ordinary Muslims like Abu Raad and his son who seem to be good people and who simply want to get on with their lives and pursue innocuous interests, on the one hand, and Islamist fanatics, on the other, just as it is important to take into account the all factors that led to this mess, without simply and – forgive me -simplistically blaming everything on ‘Islam’. Blanket assignments of blame lead to calls for carpet bombings and massacres, such as have been made by at least two commenters on this and the ISIS (1) thread. I have never found convincing the contention that all members of a religion ‘enable’ and are therefore responsible for the excesses of fanatics.
We see boys and men, young and old. Sometimes the invisible is the most obvious — women and girls.
They are hidden and are only mentioned as temptations and rewards, well in line with the views on the female sex within the “Religion of Peace”.
I am left leaning too, yet I can still not quite fathom how the left on one hand is infused with feminism, yet at the same time is apparently quite fine when some other culture (thought to have superiority over the invividual) treats them like slaves.
I noticed as much, too. Not a single woman or girl appeared in the entire video, and the only mention of women were the virgins awaiting them after death and the man’s beautiful wife whom he left behind in Europe and the family that’s never visited and is far less important than Allah’s war.
These people are as sick as sick gets. But what the cure is I haven’t a clue…though I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve massacring them, which is the only cure being offered or pursued.
First, do no harm. It’s not an easy directive to follow by any stretch of the imagination, and it often opens yourself to great risks. But it’s an essential element of civilization, and something we must follow if we wish to consider ourselves civilized. Even if — nay, especially if — those who surround us have no intention of being civilized themselves.
If they actually manage to take their fight to us or our allies or are credibly poised to do so, we can reasonably defend ourselves. But the current course of meddling is inexcusable.
b&
I cannot help to think that women could turn this thing [IS] off. They may be absent in the video, but little boys do not come from men.
I doubt any single force has the power to stop the Caliphate, though it’s a fair bet that the Caliphate won’t be stopped without the help of Islamic women. But also keep in mind that the lot of Islamic women in liberal Islamic societies (if such exist) is worse than that of American Blacks in the Jim Crow era, and for the women under the control of the Caliphate, it’s basically full-on slavery. Those chains will not be easily cast off.
b&
Not if they manage to grow a generation of women under their sick system. Those women will be illeterate, uneducated, and baby making machines, submissive, and completely overpowered by men.
“I noticed as much, too. Not a single woman or girl appeared in the entire video…”
For decades I’ve been noticing the lack of women in stories/photos from much of the middle east. It frosts me when the captions read, “Iraqis gather,” “Afghanis protest,” etc., when it should be Iraqi men gather…” I think NYT has started to do that now & then, but it’s very rare overall. I think if the news emphasized female disenfranchisement this way it might start to sink in with more liberals.
The lack of women at Islamic protests probably is related in more than one way to what happened to Lara Logan.
Maryam Namazie deserves a medal. If only she represented the average for Islamic women….
b&
Some nitpicking: the Yazidi are not Christian, if they were they would be eligible for the whole “people of the book” tax as opposed to outright extermination. That’s not to say there aren’t similarities to the Abrahamic religions.
Second, they will die of dehydration far before they starve to death. What they need first is water. From what I’ve read several children have died from what is most likely dehydration.
Hopefully the Kurds manage to cut a path to them and evacuate the civilians stuck on that mountain.
This mess goes back way before the ill-advised American invasion of Iraq.
The cat was out of the bag ( sorry Jerry), back in the early 1950’s when the UK & USA conspired to take down the fledgling democratically elected Iranian parliament because they had the temerity to declare that the oil under their feet belonged to Iran. The West’s gift in place of a home-grown democracy? – The Shah & his police state.
On & on it goes from there. The West has not been a friend to the Midfle East.
The Middle East could have been a very different place if the West had respected the people of this region enough to foster the roots of democracy by encouraging real education and enlightenment values. The seeds were there; they just needed to be supported. Instead, we opted for exploitation and dictatorships. I’m not sure this benighted region can be brought back into any form of civilized society now.
It’s such a bloody shame.
– evan
Okay, as an Iranaian I have to tell you that contrary to the seemingly massive ego of Americans, the influence of the coup against Mosaddeq (which by the way, was co-sponsored by the British) on the region and Iran is highly exaggerated.
Even if you erase the coup from the history, the tape of the history would have rolled pretty much the same. The “national oil” would not have made so much of a difference for Iran. In fact, it would have been just like the situation today. Iran’s oil is national right now and we happily sell it to any buyer who pays dollars, Euros or chinese Yuan. The Shah would have stayed in power, as he was still in power during Mosaddeq. Many the various shades of nationalists or communists would have gained a bit more power in Iran during his time but they have never had any sort of backing from the general public. Mosaddeq would have been out of his office and everything would have gone back to “normal”. One democratically elected president does not mean that a country has welcomed democracy. Just look at the numbers: At 1976, 23 years after the coup, the literacy rate in Iran was about 50% with the majority of the people religious and very sympathetic towards the claims of the clerics. Mosaddeq and his nationalist party would have been very powerless against the Islamists.
So no, the cat was not out of the bag in 1950s. It was out of the bag in the 6th century when Mohammad and the following Caliphs left an idealogy of expansionism, military conquests, and subjugation of people through sword. Why do you think “the sword” symbolism shows up all over the place on flags of various Islamist groups? The unofficial holy symbol of Islam is the sword. The critics of Islam have it exactly right: Islam is one of the most evil wide-spread idealogies today and talking about role of US or British or whatever western power is a distraction.
There are many factors that contribute to the spread of religion. Maybe economical inequality, low literacy, wars, or poverty ease the spread of religions and thus Islam. But the Islamic beheadings, stonings, subjugation of women, and the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate can only be blamed on Islam and the Islamists who follow it.
+1
I posted the following comment on the previous blog post on this topic which supports your comment.
Well, here’s another slant on the removal of Mosaddeq in 1954 which claims that the contributions of the US and Great Britain have been exaggerated to say the least. It should be noted that the article appeared in a reputable publication, unlike many of the articles lambasting the CIA and MI6. In fact, it has been my information for a long time that Kermit Roosevelt, who liked to take credit for the regime change in Iran in 1954, exaggerated his contribution for his own self-aggrandizement.</i?
http://goo.gl/vQV4Ej
Thanks for the link.
The clergy had never been completely comfortable with Mosaddeq’s penchant for modernization and had come to miss the deference they received from the conservative and insecure shah. Watching Iran’s economy collapse and fearing, like Washington, that the crisis could lead to a communist takeover, religious leaders such as Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Kashani began to subtly shift their allegiances. (Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran’s theocratic rulers have attempted to obscure the inconvenient fact that, at a critical juncture, the mullahs sided with the shah.)
Kashani used to be a key figure in there and this inconvenient truth is not well-known and very embarrassing for a lot of people. For a long time the clergy was against any sort of modernization. Even many years laters, the clergy strongly condemned giving women the right of voting. Even without the coup, Mosaddeq would have faced the Ismalists and would have lost.
Islam is obviously at the root of all this, but the West, deliberately or ineptly, has certainly helped to water the tree with blood.
But what would you have as a solution to the Caliphate and Islamic warmongering in general? I fail to see how the West can help through force of arms, and there’s not much else we can offer outside of humanitarian aid and, hopefully, someday, trade.
I suppose we could stop buying oil from the Middle East, and from everywhere else. And I’ve certainly personally minimized my fossil fuel consumption far below typical for Americans. But there’s not much else I can think of other than to look on the fire from outside and weep for those caught in the chaos.
b&
Why do you fail to see the role of West in this?
Ultimatley, we would like to see prospering countries in Middle East where economical advances combined with freedom and education erodes the role and influence of Islam.
But let ISIS rule for a generation and they can reasily run down the country to North Korea levels where there is no hope of any of the above happening. Imagine a generation grown up without internet, TV, limited or no radio, and only with males educated with Islamic propaganda. Do you think there would be any hope then? The easiest and the most effective way to prevert ISIS from achieving that is through use of force.
Military strikes are not going to give you an enlighted Middle East but at least (hopefully) they will prevent it from becoming an Islamic Hellhole. At this point, it is not about winning but about not losing.
I hope you haven’t gotten that from me. We’ve made things worse, but only in the sense that attempting to douse an out-of-control bonfire with gasoline makes things worse. The fire was already burning and was already poised to do lots of damage…but we did make it worse.
But that’s just it. Everything we’ve done in the past has just made it worse. Is not the definition of insanity continuing to do that which got you into the mess in the first place?
Me, too. But if we are to start with, “first, do no harm,” then I am at a loss as to what options are open to us, aside from air drops of food and water and medical supplies. Military action for certain isn’t going to make things better, even if we miraculously manage to pull out a short-term benefit…and it will just as certainly do harm.
But, of course, that’s irrelevant, as we’re already in there with guns blazing and a promise of even more and bigger guns in the near future.
Now would be a great time to reflect on this bit of commentary.
b&
Ordinarily I find Charles Krauthammer to be a despicable warmonger but, as with stopped clocks being right twice a day, he hit the nail on the head. Send arms to the Kurds to allow them to defend themselves. With the support of air cover provided by the US Navy and Airforce, they can push back the IFIL terrorists.
I agree completely, Ben.
It’s damned frustrating. What’s the point of having a superpower if you can’t actually change the world with it?
But the simple empirical fact is that we can’t, at least not like that. There is lots we can do by investing in the future the world over, with education and infrastructure and trade relations and R&D and all the rest. But today’s problems? We can no more solve them than the Roadrunner can get back on the cliff by running faster than fast.
We can, though, and likely will, make the situation even worse than it already is….
b&
Which seems to have been our history since I’ve been aware of international engagement. And we were so sure we’d learned a lesson from ‘Nam. In retrospect, Communism seems a much less dangerous foe than Islamism. Either way, we accomplish nothing by invading and killing.
If a superpower could bring about world change, you’d think it might start by setting a good example. But we can’t even bring some of our own citizens up to a decent standard of living. But I digress.
I dunno.
First, I don’t think Marx would recognize much of his own principles at work in many of the Communist bloc countries — but, then again, Smith likely wouldn’t think of the West as being particularly Capitalist, either. None of the utopias of a century or so ago have ever been realized, nor will nor should they be.
Some of what went under the banner of Communism was, and still is, about as nasty as it gets: Pol Pot and North Vietnam.
But, aside from North Vietnam, time has tempered the nastiness of the Communist world. Russia is back to the same sort of corrupt cronyism as was the norm in the Czarist days, and China — though they’ve still got a ways to go — actually seems on a trajectory to modern liberalism.
At the same time, Turkey generally isn’t a country to worry about.
I think a lot of it has to do with the shifting sands of time, and of opportunists taking advantage of whatever extremist elements are at hand. In that respect, having the official word of the most powerful imaginable authority on your side likely doesn’t hurt (and is, indeed, one of the most significant intended purposes of religion). As such, Islam may have more staying power than Communism, and thus really might be more dangerous.
b&
A thought-provoking elaboration, thanks.
I’ll admit that when I referenced Communism I was basically thinking of the Soviet Union, bogeyman of the Cold War. It’s true that most of our actions in Asia were hot wars. (Although we were never officially at war with the most heinous regimes, IIRC.) While the Cold War marched along before, during, and after those wars. Strange times.
Considering that Islam dates back to the 7th century, I’d say it has a bit of staying power.
If Prof. Coyne thinks that the Guardian is bad, I would suggest that the readers mosey over to the new blog of left wing hero Glenn Greenwald, which I will not link to, where the most outlandish conspiracy theories are to be found. Basically, Greenwald and his syncopates seem to believe that the US is the successor to Nazi Germany, and the source of all evil in the world (or at least those evils not attributable to Israel) and that Obama/Bush/Clinton = Schicklgruber. I find it appalling that a reckless sociopath like Greenwald is treated as some kind of hero by people who should know better.
Given that the political boundaries, internal government and development of infrastructure in the Middle East were and are based on the economic and strategic priorities of Western powers, it should come as no surprise that the Middle East has had no chance of ever developing stable democratic forms of government and is completely fragmented and ripe for foreign take over.
Pretty much every major Middle Eastern infrastructure project (Suez Canal, railways, harbours, pipelines, air ports) is designed to move Middle Eastern natural resources (oil, gas, cotton, coal) out of the region as quickly as possible and to facilitate the deployment of western military assets within and through the region.
The result is that the Middle East has nothing comparable to the infrastructures developed in western countries which were built to support a developing majority middle class, absolutely necessary to the formation of a stable democracy.
I would expect that western powers are already tentatively starting negotiations with ISIS with the intention of stabilizing the region as quickly as possible with ISIS as a new major player, the primary (and really only) consideration being to minimize disruptions to the extraction of oil from the region.
How condescending (and borderline racist) inferring that people from a dozen different countries are incapable of doing anything constructive without outside help.
No, I’m saying that it’s very difficult for them to do anything constructive if their fates are being decided by external forces whose interests are diametrically opposed to their own.
And I wasn’t inferring anything, you were. At best I was implying.
And how is one “borderline” racist ? Either you are or you aren’t. It’s like being a little bit pregnant or partially dead.
Well, your assertion is faulty. Their fates are NOT being decided by external forces.
This is merely something that is claimed without evidence and can, therefore, be dismissed without evidence.
Do you honestly think that if The West ceased to exist and all Jews disappeared from the galaxy that everything will magically improve in Muslim Town?
Think again.
I think Obama’s “measured” response has been purely for show, and completely ineffective. I was appalled to read yesterday that the humanitarian airlift dropped only 3000-10,000 gallons of water for 30000-60000 people (numbers differ among sources). In that heat such an amount of water might last about half a day.
I agree. We should be loading up B52s for some carpet bombing of ISIL positions.
Including those kids in the video? You want to carpet bomb nine-year-old boys?
Really?
Have you never seen Phan Thi Kim Phuc‘s heartbreaking portrait?
b&
Absolutely, if one wants to make an omelet, one must break a few egg shells. By the way, in the last days of WW2, several German units consisted of boys barely into their teens.
Wow.
I don’t know if you’re trolling for the lulz or truly serious, but I’m surprised that Professor Ceiling Cat is letting you use his living room to call for the indiscriminate massacre of children.
Are you any relation to William Lane Craig?
b&
I’m on Ben’s side here; we shouldn’t be calling for carpet bombing. If they have kids in their ranks who are shooting at us, we have a right to fire back, but carpet-bombing ISIL position isn’t going to accomplish anything except embroil us in a wider war and cause more of a mess. Fortunately, 9-year-old kids aren’t fighting, but unfortunately we shouldn’t be doing anything but trying to save those people on the mountain, and perhaps giving weapons to the Kurds.
Anyway, I don’t like hearing calls for massacres.
German boys in their teens… the German writer and partiot Ernst Junger got a group of them to disobey orders, put down their arms, and not be silly… Others did not have such kindly mentors.
Ben and Professor Ceiling Cat are quite right here, and I, too, am appalled by this indoctrination of children (the Hitler Youth, the Red Guard, the Young Communists, etc). But I do want to say this: Jonathan Freedland decided, in a typically slick journalistic way, to put a slant on his article – and it is this that people are reacting to, rather than to what Dodge himself is actually saying. Google the man’s name; find out about him – he’s no ‘lefty’ who blames the USA or the West for everything, but a serious and respected historian who actually knows Iraq. In an article, printed earlier in the Guardian (which is sufficient for those who value provenance over content to damn it), he describes how al-Maliki’s stupidity and incompetence are largely responsible for bringing about this disaster.
And, pace Ben, I think there needs to be some serious support given to the Kurds as well as to – one hopes – Maliki-less Iraqi government so that ISIS can be defeated.
Yes – the kids (if any) recruited by any power for killing and destruction – are victims as much as anyone in the conflicts.
Just as there’s no such thing as a kid of religion X (cf. Dawkins’ suggestion) there’s no kid of political or economic ideology Y.
For once, I agree with Ben Goren here -that would be disastrous.
I was talking about the lack of seriousness of the humanitarian effort. While the tactical military support shows the same lack of seriousness, your suggestion would surely backfire in the long run.
According to reports, the Kurdish Peshmerga forces have been able to open up a line of retreat allowing the trapped people to retreat into a safe area in Eastern Syria.
Unless it’s deep in the NE corner of Syria, I don’t see how that’s any improvement.
I, too, agree that while this is a good first step, it’s little more than a publicity stunt (like the capture of Bin Laden).
Correction: bin Laden was not captured. He was shot on sight without being given the opportunity to surrender. He was unarmed and posed no threat to the soldiers who killed them. In short, he was murdered in cold blood.
Was he, as Shrub might have put it, a very bad man? Yes. But that’s irrelevant. We like to pretend we are a civilized people, and a civilized people grants the full protection of the law to everybody, even (and especially) to its worst enemies. The injustice done to bin Laden with his murder is matched only by the injustice we did to ourselves by murdering him.
…and for Obama to brag about ordering the murder of a man and the desecration of his body….
b&
Excuse me, as I understand it, bin Laden, when confronted with the soldiers, attempted to retreat into his room in which a loaded gun was found. It is quite clear that there was no way he would allow himself to be taken alive (as I understand it, he was suffering from kidney disease and had little to lose by committing suicide by cop).
I knew I made a mistake the second after I hit the “reply” button.
Apparently, the intervention of US bombing planes has already had a salutary effect as, according to reports, the Peshmurga has been able to move forward and recapture 2 towns from the ISIL. Equally important, there appear to be some other positive events taking place. Apparently, the Iraq Parliament is voting to replace Maliki as prime minister and the Iraq military has decided to support the Kurds by sending a planeload of armaments along with the Iraqi foreign minister and launching their own air strikes against ISIL position.
The Taliban redux. They can intimidate and fight using “Terror Shock Value”, but they can’t run a country.
“. The marooning of 40,000 Christians on a mountaintop by ISIS”
Small mistake: the people on the mountain are of the Yazidi faith, which is a mix of Christian, Islamic, and Zoroastrian traditions.
Sullivan has some info on them here:
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/08/who-are-the-yazidis
The secular, anti-jihadists, pro-US power blog Notes On Error has a decent summary of the situation:
http://notesonerror.wordpress.com/2014/08/07/scenes-from-the-religious-war-vii-the-cleansing-of-sinjar/
Isn’t the “Darwinian” reference just a comment on that ISIS is the particularly nasty, resistant strain (“superbugs”) left from the initial treatment of antibacteria that killed of Al Qaeda version 1.0 and 2.0, and which now is growing in numbers without a cure so far?
That is exactly how I read it.
Indeed. A description of the process that gave rise to IS (as the surviving group of AlQ in Iraq post the US surge), rather than any commentary on their aims or ideology.
Professor Coyne,
I think you may have misunderstood the way “Darwinian” was used in the article. I don’t believe it was referring to the genocidal, ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ killing spree ISIS has gone on in Iraq, but rather how the group was nearly eliminated in the Sunni Awakening, then used the Syrian Civil War to re-invent itself.
As AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq) they were noted as being the best insurgent group at making car bombs and IED’s, but thought of as weak in infantry-style firefights. Later in Syria, they were just one of many, sometimes competing, rebel factions. There, insurgents and factions either became good at urban guerrilla warfare, or they didn’t. The groups that didn’t disbanded; the individuals that didn’t got killed. ISIL, through competition, thrived. They expanded to what they are today. A virus analogy, though not perfect, is apt.
On another note, “The Looming Tower” is one of my favorites on the topic. It’s not very well-known, despite winning that Pulitzer! Any Chomsky-lovers should read up! Great recommendation!
Spread the message. “There is no God”. No moderate god, no kind god, no prophets, no truth from on high. Spread the message so that people, most people come to understand a world with no God. Take the enabling umbrella of “moderate” belief away.
It is that moderate accepting umbrella that enables the belief to flourish.
Educate, to allow a sufficient knowledge of how the world works, without needing a god as any kind of reason. “There is no god”, we don’t need a god.
Get a solid ground of proper sceptical thinking and drive this insane thought from the conciousness of humanity.
“There is no god”!