ISIS chops off heads, incinerates hostages, kills gays, enslaves girls. Obama: Blame the Crusades.

They are the JV team. It's no different than the various mafia factions, incarcerated murders, drug war thugs, local police, and so on and so forth.

It's served Obama and America fine.

Stop living in fear of boogeymen.

If you are truly afraid of Isis you are welcome to arm yourself, travel overseas and take up the fight.

 

Seriously?

They are the JV at best. They are successful because it is difficult to stop cell and lone wolf organizations/terrorists. If they reach US soil and are able to sporadically kill people or destroy buildings, it will have nothing to do with Obama. For a supposed Muslim, the President sure has had no problem hunting down and killing Muslims.

On a side note... Let's hope they don't pull off many successful terrorist attacks on US soil... the reaction here politically and militarily and socially would not be good... Many, many people would die and we would see even less civil liberties and I cannot imagine the difficulty Muslim Americans would face, and the fear and panic spread by television. We still haven't recovered from our reaction to 9-11. This is coming from someone that is very critical of Islam fundamentalism and the associated culture in a secular world.

 

Not according to Obama. He says his administration 'underestimated ISIS' . This was a **** up even he couldn't spin, but you are gonna try.

 

It's different for several reasons.

First, mafia factions and other criminals are usually motivated by material gain. That doesn't make it any better for the people they murder, but it makes their actions somewhat more predictable - they don't murder civilians on a large scale just for an ideology. I don't think you would have seen the mafia fly planes into the world trade center or bomb hundreds of commuters in Madrid and London.

Secondly, you are looking at this very much from a shielded US perspective. You think that they are far away. For Europeans (and South East Asians), that perspective is different. But I also think that your sense of safety is misguided because you have sleeper cells in the USA as well. The problem is the poisonous ideology. Borders don't really stop it.

 

There's a 1st for everything... The US is big in the dope game and Afghanistan supplies 70%-80% of heroin to the west. And this is after we invaded after 9/11. This country usually only goes to war if there's a drug source nearby.

The government and the media just uses boogeyman tactics to keep American citizens eyes off the prize while they keep pumping in dope into the country.

 

It is also different in that we are discussing culture and religion. People are very sensitive on these points and can cause all sorts of issues. There are segments of the world where there are lots of people that support Sharia Law and are not even remotely secular or value personal freedoms.

 

A friend posted this on facebook. Made me think of this thread: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/isis-american-south-lynching/

 

This is partly true and partly not. Certainly for the Middle Eastern recruits and the like, it's absolutely true - they've bought into the religious angle of it all. But the foreign recruits are different. There have been a lot of psychological profiles done on them. Here's some interesting articles on the topic:

http://www.ibtimes.com/why-do-people-join-isis-psychology-terrorist-1680444
http://taskandpurpose.com/psychology-terror-people-join-jihadi-movements/

In a general sense, they aren't being drawn to the ideology. They aren't the antisocial loner angry at the world or being drawn to Islam for one reason or another. They tend to be people with fairly normal lives yearning to do something important, and this seems to just be a way to do it. They are the same disaffected people that would have joined rebellious groups at any point in time over history (for example, communist groups in the 50s). ISIS is the flavor of the day that is challenging the people of power in the world at this moment in time, but the story appears to be the same as its always been. What really makes it different today is that the recruiting is easier and the damage that can be done is greater, both thanks to technology.

Fighting ISIS in the Middle East is different than fighting ISIS in the West. Not just in terms of their tactics but their entire reasons for fighting. It's not necessarily an ideological thing for many of them here. It almost seems that it's just easier and more meaningful for people to join a lunatic organization than to try to do it all themselves.

 

So you're basically saying that Obama is akin to Nino Brown?

 

What else are they being drawn to then? The beaches and the weather?

Islam is the ideology they are being drawn to. Whatever they would have done in the 50s is speculation made up by people like you.

Relativizing terror. No, it's not the same. Communist rebels in the 50s were not the same as ISIS is now.

What really makes it different is that the "cause" they are drawn to is absurdly disgusting and everyone can see it.

No **** Sherlock. ISIS fights for a lot of the goals that are shared with many in the Middle East, like a strict interpretation of Sharia law. Obviously, fighting someone who has popular support, massive funding and infrastructure from people who share the same ideology and can move freely in their own region is going to be different from fighting them where they are just splinter cells poisoned with the hateful ideology, but otherwise outnumbered.

Wait, so you are making up that it is not ideological although quite clearly, they themselves are saying it is ideological. I guess it's the leftist reflex: "It has nothing to do with Islam."

 

The idea of doing something, having meaning, changing the world in their own warped way. There are any number of things. ISIS gives them an outlet for that. The articles I posted covered it fairly well:

“Very often we see radicals decide they want to become a terrorist turn away at the last minute, but [Poulin’s] message hit the nail on the head, which is to say there is a road for everyone. It makes radicalization and recruitment much easier,” Horgan said. “It is an equal opportunity organization. It has everything from the sadistic psychopath to the humanitarian to the idealistic driven.”

As far as foreign fighters are concerned, Horgan said, they are driven to join ISIS by the need to “belong to something special.”

“They want to find something meaningful for their life,” he said. “Some are thrill seeking, some are seeking redemption.”

...

“If you ask terrorists why they joined an organization after they have been in it, they will pair it with the official line of the group,” Abrahms said. “But in reality they don’t join the group for that reason.”

You're narrowly focused on "fighting" being the actual battlefield. ISIS (and any extremist ideology) isn't defeated on the battlefield. That's a necessary fight, but it's never going to lead to the end of ISIS.

When I'm talking about fighting Eastern and Western ISIS people differently, I'm talking about the core of it - you only win when people no longer want to join the movement. Eastern ISIS people tend to be true believers in the cause. People in the West who are more often radicalized for completely different reasons. You have to address each group differently.

That's exactly the point - look at the research and data and psychological profiles of the people being recruited. For the lifelong Muslims that are radicalized, it's absolutely about living out their version of Islam. But for so many of the Westerners joining ISIS, it has very little to do with Islam. That's just the group that provides them an outlet right now. It could just as easily be any other idealogical underpinning.

Instead of spending all your time posting every example of terrorism you can find, I ask you a simple question: How would YOU propose comprehensively trying to defeat the ideology? Challenge yourself to actually think about this analytically instead of just trying to throw out insults and convince yourself that no one else cares about the problem or understands it - that's surface level garbage that you find in the comments section of CNN. What are your military options? What do you do about sleeper cells in the West? How do you stop the next generation of recruits? Is recruiting in the US fundamentally different than recruiting in Yemen? How so, and how do you address each scenario? Do any of these responses multiply the problems down the line? Is there a way to avoid that? Is there a difference in winning the battle short term vs long term? Which is more important and are there things that help in one battle while hurting the other?

Analyzing all of that is a hell of a lot more interesting and useful than regurgitating that leftists don't understand things or that everyone needs to condemn every attack or they are condoning it. You might just find that the problem is a whole lot more complex than you think, and that those people that don't get it in your mind actually understand it at a far deeper level than you.

 

But it isn't. And the "Westerners joining ISIS" - most of them were Muslims to begin with.

If there was a simple solution to your seemingly simple question, don't you think it would have been found already? I don't know the full solution, but I know the first step: Don't tell people they have a cold when they have cancer. That's just ignorant. And pretending that it is not Islam that is the problem, but "could be anything" is telling people they have a cold when they have cancer.

Challenge yourself to acknowledge that Islam is the problem. Once you realize that, that is the first step. As long as you are refusing to realize that the ideology is the root cause, you will not be able to find a solution. When you have cancer, it doesn't help you that someone tells you it's just a cold.

As to military options: I guess airstrikes are one, but I believe we both agree that they do not defeat the root cause.

One thing would be to cut off funding for them (e.g. Saudi Arabia, pretend charities in Muslim organizations such as the Dahwa center Hakeem donated to) and to punish them to the fullest extent of the law.

By finding a consensus in society that Islam is the actual ideological root cause of lameness and terror, marginalizing those that think it's "cool" to join an Islamist organization.

You should be able to answer that question.

You should be able to answer that question.

Give us your best attempt at answering these questions.

Prove how deeply you understand it. The truth is, you still haven't acknowledged that the religious ideology is the root cause of the problem. I maintain that unless und until you understand it, your "analysis" is faulty.

 

Well, they're both black.

But considering 9/11 happened during Bush's term I guess that makes it a Boston George and Diego situation. Two drug dealers with beef wanting to control the Afghanistan drug market and Bush won.

Religious persecution... Great idea. Hitler would be proud of you.

 

If you think that fighting Islamist terrorists is "religious persecution"...you are even more brain dead than I thought.