11 ms·

Why ISIS Attacked Paris

41 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

peterwaller 11y ago
I can't see the article, I see this: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 64 bytes) in /home/content/83/12119383/html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 193 Nice. 60MiB of RAM needed to show a single article. I know, I know, RAM is cheap...
- task_queue 11y ago
  RAM isn't cheap when it's integrated in your chipset.
- rythie 11y ago
  It's $120/GB/year with Digital ocean, not what I'd call cheap (Yes, you get more CPU and disk, but you don't need it).
brimtown 11y ago
Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lV-hx4M_v9YJ:juergensmeyer.org/why-isis-attacked-paris/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lV-hx4M...
sbuttgereit 11y ago
There are many points in this article with which I disagree. To treat an enemy as though it is not an enemy is folly. To suggest that violent ideology, dogma, and history have no bearing on the actions of individuals that adhere to that ideology/dogma, and then claim that somehow we (assuming the Western world) have more control over the responses of the Islamic world is foolishness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a much more informed perspective. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/09/islam-is-a-religion-of-violence-ayaan-hirsi-ali-debate-islamic-state/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/09/islam-is-a-religion-of-...
- sbuttgereit 11y ago
  An off-topic aside: It's interesting watching the up/down votes on my post. As much as Hacker News likes to think of itself as self monitoring the substantiveness of comments, often times it degrades itself to simply trying to silence opposing opinions. How cheap. How little. My comments might not bear much currency, but the contrarian article that I link is substantive even if you disagree with it. While I don't think you are obliged to upvote my comments if you disagree with them, to down vote them because you oppose me is to merely to attempt to silence discussion rather than ensure that it is a quality discussion.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  First we must ask who is our enemy? My enemy is anyone who uses violence as a tool to gain power. I am not represented by the military actions of Western governments. When I see the Muslim hashtag #notinmyname I feel it applies to me too but in relation to all that has gone on in North Africa and the Middle East in recent times. When I see my cousin join the Marines to go fight in Afghanistan I see the same thing as what I see when I see young angry Islamic men shooting up a concert in Paris, that is misguided, brainwashed and exploited young men doing the bidding of power hungry assholes.
dopamean 11y ago
I have to ask, and please excuse my ignorance here, but what are we supposed to do? If men, armed with guns and explosives, kill scores of civilians and injure hundreds more in the name of a particular ideology what are we supposed to actually do? When I hear the thought that "responding with knee-jerk Islamophobia" is exactly what they want it begs the question: should we do nothing? Any response is going to be deemed Islamophobic because the response is going to single out Muslims. Is that really a crazy thing though? The shooters sure weren't Shinto. If we do literally nothing then what? We wait for another deadly, and possibly more spectacular attack. Are we supposed to do nothing then too? At what point are we supposed to act? I feel very torn on this because I have at times thought that as crazy as some may be Islamist extremists sometimes have a point about Western interference in the Middle East. However, I cannot get behind the idea that when they gun down civilians at restaurants and concerts that the response should be anything but severe. I also take issue with people who label Western aggression in response to terrorism "Islamophobic." We in the West are not the ones making it about Islam. The terrorists are. They are the ones showing up with guns screaming about their God. They are the ones using their religion to recruit and justify their actions. And so when governments go after them then YES, they are going after Muslims. That is the bed they made and unfortunately we all have to sleep in it.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  Follow the money. It might be uncomfortable to find out that much of it originates at home but would it be all that surprising? Money is our god and the West continually turns a blind eye when we can also turn a profit. Violence is like a terminal virus, propagating it doesn't bring a cure, it just ruins more peoples lives.
  - mercurial 11y ago
    The other thing is to destroy their power base by finding a way to turn Iraqi Sunni tribes against them.
    - rorykoehler 11y ago
mercurial 11y ago
> In the case of the Paris attacks it appears to be ISIS’ own demoralized supporters and the French public who could easily be whipped up into enthusiasm for a military attack on ISIS Er, France has carried a large number of airstrikes against ISIS targets already. If he means boots on the ground, I don't think that's going to happen unless restricted to a small number of spec ops personnel, which for all I know is already happening.
wazoox 11y ago
This is spot on. I can't fathom how people can still pretend that more of the terrible, stupid, catastrophic policy that has been practiced since 2001 could be the response. ISIS is desperate. It needs a victory, a vivid show of force to bolster the morale of its supporters, attract new volunteers, and with luck, intimidate its foes. [...] This is why the response to ISIS is such a critical matter. A knee-jerk Islamophobic response that accuses Islam of violence will help ISIS by alienating Muslims and reinforcing the notion that the Islamic world is under siege and needs to be defended. Similarly, policies that will restrict Syrian refugees—themselves victims of ISIS—will only enhance the anti-Muslim image of the West. And military action might make matters worse, much worse.
obrero 11y ago
All through the last month, the French have been bombing their "former" colony, Syria, continually. Last week reports were coming about the French bombs ( http://www.france24.com/en/20151109-france-syria-strike-islamic-state-oil-facility-military http://www.france24.com/en/20151109-france-syria-strike-isla... ). Now the Syrians dodging French bombs have turned around and bombed the French. News reports say the bombers contained Syrians, and ISIS's statement makes the reason very clear - about the French's "strikes against Muslims in the land of the Caliphate with their jets". France's bullying and killing of Syrians didn't get much press...if it did it was celebrated. Of course, the corporate media doesn't mention at all that the French have been bombing the Syrians for a month - only that some Syrians finally retaliated. Insofar as ISIS being beyond the pale and such...ho-hum...US and EU leaders were saying that about Syria's secular leader over the past few years, that he was a monster gassing his own people. They've been trying to undermine his government for the past years (thus helping cause this over and above the bombings). It looks like the imperialist powers have finally found some people with the courage to bomb the bombers. When Syria was a French colony, Syrians marched in the streets at the end of World War II in 1945 to show their desire for independence. The French army shot into the crowds (as they did in Algeria etc.) That the French have been bombing the people who just bombed them is probably unknown to 99% of people, since the corporate press never mentions it. So anything I hear is just some Orwellian Two Minute Hate. It's kind of like 9/11...it was never mentioned the US had military bases in their puppet dictatorship "Saudi" Arabia for over a decade. Never mentioned most Arabians wanted them gone. Never mentioned that the US had armed and sent Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan, to overthrow a secular government, and replace it with an Islamic one. Even among the educated classes, everything that happened in history disappeared, just some people came out of the blue and decided to start bombing their cities.
- acv20 11y ago
  How uneducated do you have to be to equate ISIS with the Syrian people? Yes, the bombings are taking place in Syria, but they are targeting ISIS, whose fighters are in large parts non-Syrian foreigners (many of them from Europe). This is one of the reasons that, of all the insurgent groups in Syria, ISIS has the least support from the local population. From what we know right now, most of the Paris attackers were not from Syria, many of them were born and raised in Europe. It's also not the case that people do not know the history. US support for Bin Laden's faction against the soviets in Afhghanistan is well known. The same is true for Saudi Arabia. What is your point though, where's the connection to the current conflict? What should the West do? Sit back and let ISIS take over more and more uncontrolled territory?
NKCSS 11y ago
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 261900 bytes) in /home/content/83/12119383/html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 1247
rdancer 11y ago
I may be crazy, but it may have something to do with us waging a war on them. What are they supposed to do, take the bombings sitting down, and never retaliate?
- arrrg 11y ago
  I'm really struggling to see what's wrong with that … Priority number one should be to find those responsible and put them on trial. The second priority (connected to the first one – the organizers are probably still posing some danger) should be excellent police work aimed at preventing attacks like this in the future (with the knowledge that absolute security will be impossible and as such any kind of anything goes surveillance would be a bad idea). Looking at the wider context ending the conflict in Syria and Iraq should also be a goal, obviously, but that is not as simple as war, certainly not. That's and always will be a delicate operation, full of pitfalls and with no easy victories. I don't think you will be able to achieve anything there if you just view it as a war against Daesh.
  - rdancer 11y ago
    > I'm really struggling to see what's wrong with that We've been bombing ISIS for some time. When they bomb us back, we post tricoloras on Facebook, in a solidarity with France, a target of this "hyenous", "unprovoked", act of "terrorism". The wilful inability to see the Paris attacks as a direct response to our military operation that is literally on the news at the same time, that's what is wrong with that. I hope cooler heads will prevail, and the response you outline will be implemented. If we fail to see what's really going on, the response will be something crazy, and potentially very harmful.
- iofj 11y ago
  What the Kurds ever did to provoke them ? The Yezidi ? The Shi'a ? The Iranians ? Iraqi Christians ? Assyrians ? Alawites ? Druze ? The Lebanese ? Even if I can sort-of understand that Israel, Turkey and Jordan did do a few attacks, it did not justify the response at all.
  - 11y ago
MarcScott 11y ago
Cached as down for me http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://juergensmeyer.org/why-isis-attacked-paris/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
rrggrr 11y ago
ISIS attacked because their key financiers in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere aren't dead yet. Western intelligence knows who many of these people are. eg. http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl2605.aspx http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl... The mosques where operations are financed, recruiting done and plans laid are still standing. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11000794/Muslim-bank-accounts-closed-by-HSBC-in-wake-of-money-laundering-fine.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1... Terrorism viewed as overhead by some countries, encourages more of the same. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/08/italian-intelligence-lied-hostage-rescue-bruno-pelizzari-debbie-calitz http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/08/italian-intelli... I imagine much lip service will be paid and funds expended further analyzing and discussing the problem.
- cm2187 11y ago
  In wonder if we shouldn't treat Qatar gas and Saudi oil the same way as blood diamond.
UhUhUhUh 11y ago
Direct, low-level answer: because it begins to lose on the ground. High-level answer: because humiliated rage knows no bound.
ranjeethacker 11y ago
Convert Muslim to Christian.
- rdancer 11y ago
  Show the western intellectual tradition as superior. Once again become the beacon of civil liberties, human rights, and democracy. Most importantly, provide safe space for apostates.
d--b 11y ago
This conversation does not belong here...
cm2187 11y ago
I am not convinced ISIS is really the problem in Paris. It sure is the problem in the regions under its control in the middle east. But re Paris, it appears that all the terrorists identified so far were French (or from Belgium). In fact all the previous terrorist attempts in France were made by French nationals or residents. I hear people claiming it is still ISIS because they have been trained and armed by ISIS in Syria. That may be the case but they haven't gone to Syria to do some innocent tourism and came back terrorists. We are talking about home grown radicalised activists here. If there wouldn't be ISIS there would probably be another cause.
- maxxxxx 11y ago
  I have been thinking along the same line too. The same people would probably have associated with Al Qaeda when they were stronger years ago.
- elthran 11y ago
  I wonder how much of the "Frenchness" of the attacks that Paris has experienced is to do with Syria being post-WW1 French mandate? I suspect not much - but part of me does wonder why they're the main EU country involved in the conflict.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    I am not a specialist but my intuition is that history does play a role in France's hostility to Al Assad. France has been traditionally close to Lebanon and the Syrian sponsored violence and terrorism didn't go well with the French diplomacy (Chirac in particular was personally outraged by the assassination of Hariri). But I doubt it has anything to do with ISIS. It's a relatively recent creation, and mostly a Saudi inspired organisation so I doubt there is much to do with France. I think France is mostly involved because they are the largest western contributor country to ISIS in term of jihadists.

I can't see the article, I see this: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 64 bytes) in /home/content/83/12119383/html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 193 Nice. 60MiB of RAM needed to show a single article. I know, I know, RAM is cheap...

task_queue 11y ago
RAM isn't cheap when it's integrated in your chipset.
rythie 11y ago
It's $120/GB/year with Digital ocean, not what I'd call cheap (Yes, you get more CPU and disk, but you don't need it).

brimtown 11y ago

Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lV-hx4M_v9YJ:juergensmeyer.org/why-isis-attacked-paris/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lV-hx4M...

sbuttgereit 11y ago

There are many points in this article with which I disagree. To treat an enemy as though it is not an enemy is folly. To suggest that violent ideology, dogma, and history have no bearing on the actions of individuals that adhere to that ideology/dogma, and then claim that somehow we (assuming the Western world) have more control over the responses of the Islamic world is foolishness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a much more informed perspective. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/09/islam-is-a-religion-of-violence-ayaan-hirsi-ali-debate-islamic-state/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/09/islam-is-a-religion-of-...

sbuttgereit 11y ago
An off-topic aside: It's interesting watching the up/down votes on my post. As much as Hacker News likes to think of itself as self monitoring the substantiveness of comments, often times it degrades itself to simply trying to silence opposing opinions. How cheap. How little. My comments might not bear much currency, but the contrarian article that I link is substantive even if you disagree with it. While I don't think you are obliged to upvote my comments if you disagree with them, to down vote them because you oppose me is to merely to attempt to silence discussion rather than ensure that it is a quality discussion.
rorykoehler 11y ago
First we must ask who is our enemy? My enemy is anyone who uses violence as a tool to gain power. I am not represented by the military actions of Western governments. When I see the Muslim hashtag #notinmyname I feel it applies to me too but in relation to all that has gone on in North Africa and the Middle East in recent times. When I see my cousin join the Marines to go fight in Afghanistan I see the same thing as what I see when I see young angry Islamic men shooting up a concert in Paris, that is misguided, brainwashed and exploited young men doing the bidding of power hungry assholes.

dopamean 11y ago

I have to ask, and please excuse my ignorance here, but what are we supposed to do? If men, armed with guns and explosives, kill scores of civilians and injure hundreds more in the name of a particular ideology what are we supposed to actually do? When I hear the thought that "responding with knee-jerk Islamophobia" is exactly what they want it begs the question: should we do nothing? Any response is going to be deemed Islamophobic because the response is going to single out Muslims. Is that really a crazy thing though? The shooters sure weren't Shinto. If we do literally nothing then what? We wait for another deadly, and possibly more spectacular attack. Are we supposed to do nothing then too? At what point are we supposed to act? I feel very torn on this because I have at times thought that as crazy as some may be Islamist extremists sometimes have a point about Western interference in the Middle East. However, I cannot get behind the idea that when they gun down civilians at restaurants and concerts that the response should be anything but severe. I also take issue with people who label Western aggression in response to terrorism "Islamophobic." We in the West are not the ones making it about Islam. The terrorists are. They are the ones showing up with guns screaming about their God. They are the ones using their religion to recruit and justify their actions. And so when governments go after them then YES, they are going after Muslims. That is the bed they made and unfortunately we all have to sleep in it.

rorykoehler 11y ago
Follow the money. It might be uncomfortable to find out that much of it originates at home but would it be all that surprising? Money is our god and the West continually turns a blind eye when we can also turn a profit. Violence is like a terminal virus, propagating it doesn't bring a cure, it just ruins more peoples lives.
- mercurial 11y ago
  The other thing is to destroy their power base by finding a way to turn Iraqi Sunni tribes against them.
  - rorykoehler 11y ago

mercurial 11y ago

> In the case of the Paris attacks it appears to be ISIS’ own demoralized supporters and the French public who could easily be whipped up into enthusiasm for a military attack on ISIS Er, France has carried a large number of airstrikes against ISIS targets already. If he means boots on the ground, I don't think that's going to happen unless restricted to a small number of spec ops personnel, which for all I know is already happening.

wazoox 11y ago

This is spot on. I can't fathom how people can still pretend that more of the terrible, stupid, catastrophic policy that has been practiced since 2001 could be the response. ISIS is desperate. It needs a victory, a vivid show of force to bolster the morale of its supporters, attract new volunteers, and with luck, intimidate its foes. [...] This is why the response to ISIS is such a critical matter. A knee-jerk Islamophobic response that accuses Islam of violence will help ISIS by alienating Muslims and reinforcing the notion that the Islamic world is under siege and needs to be defended. Similarly, policies that will restrict Syrian refugees—themselves victims of ISIS—will only enhance the anti-Muslim image of the West. And military action might make matters worse, much worse.

obrero 11y ago

All through the last month, the French have been bombing their "former" colony, Syria, continually. Last week reports were coming about the French bombs ( http://www.france24.com/en/20151109-france-syria-strike-islamic-state-oil-facility-military http://www.france24.com/en/20151109-france-syria-strike-isla... ). Now the Syrians dodging French bombs have turned around and bombed the French. News reports say the bombers contained Syrians, and ISIS's statement makes the reason very clear - about the French's "strikes against Muslims in the land of the Caliphate with their jets". France's bullying and killing of Syrians didn't get much press...if it did it was celebrated. Of course, the corporate media doesn't mention at all that the French have been bombing the Syrians for a month - only that some Syrians finally retaliated. Insofar as ISIS being beyond the pale and such...ho-hum...US and EU leaders were saying that about Syria's secular leader over the past few years, that he was a monster gassing his own people. They've been trying to undermine his government for the past years (thus helping cause this over and above the bombings). It looks like the imperialist powers have finally found some people with the courage to bomb the bombers. When Syria was a French colony, Syrians marched in the streets at the end of World War II in 1945 to show their desire for independence. The French army shot into the crowds (as they did in Algeria etc.) That the French have been bombing the people who just bombed them is probably unknown to 99% of people, since the corporate press never mentions it. So anything I hear is just some Orwellian Two Minute Hate. It's kind of like 9/11...it was never mentioned the US had military bases in their puppet dictatorship "Saudi" Arabia for over a decade. Never mentioned most Arabians wanted them gone. Never mentioned that the US had armed and sent Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan, to overthrow a secular government, and replace it with an Islamic one. Even among the educated classes, everything that happened in history disappeared, just some people came out of the blue and decided to start bombing their cities.

acv20 11y ago
How uneducated do you have to be to equate ISIS with the Syrian people? Yes, the bombings are taking place in Syria, but they are targeting ISIS, whose fighters are in large parts non-Syrian foreigners (many of them from Europe). This is one of the reasons that, of all the insurgent groups in Syria, ISIS has the least support from the local population. From what we know right now, most of the Paris attackers were not from Syria, many of them were born and raised in Europe. It's also not the case that people do not know the history. US support for Bin Laden's faction against the soviets in Afhghanistan is well known. The same is true for Saudi Arabia. What is your point though, where's the connection to the current conflict? What should the West do? Sit back and let ISIS take over more and more uncontrolled territory?

NKCSS 11y ago

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 261900 bytes) in /home/content/83/12119383/html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 1247

rdancer 11y ago

I may be crazy, but it may have something to do with us waging a war on them. What are they supposed to do, take the bombings sitting down, and never retaliate?

arrrg 11y ago
I'm really struggling to see what's wrong with that … Priority number one should be to find those responsible and put them on trial. The second priority (connected to the first one – the organizers are probably still posing some danger) should be excellent police work aimed at preventing attacks like this in the future (with the knowledge that absolute security will be impossible and as such any kind of anything goes surveillance would be a bad idea). Looking at the wider context ending the conflict in Syria and Iraq should also be a goal, obviously, but that is not as simple as war, certainly not. That's and always will be a delicate operation, full of pitfalls and with no easy victories. I don't think you will be able to achieve anything there if you just view it as a war against Daesh.
- rdancer 11y ago
  > I'm really struggling to see what's wrong with that We've been bombing ISIS for some time. When they bomb us back, we post tricoloras on Facebook, in a solidarity with France, a target of this "hyenous", "unprovoked", act of "terrorism". The wilful inability to see the Paris attacks as a direct response to our military operation that is literally on the news at the same time, that's what is wrong with that. I hope cooler heads will prevail, and the response you outline will be implemented. If we fail to see what's really going on, the response will be something crazy, and potentially very harmful.
iofj 11y ago
What the Kurds ever did to provoke them ? The Yezidi ? The Shi'a ? The Iranians ? Iraqi Christians ? Assyrians ? Alawites ? Druze ? The Lebanese ? Even if I can sort-of understand that Israel, Turkey and Jordan did do a few attacks, it did not justify the response at all.
- 11y ago

MarcScott 11y ago

Cached as down for me http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://juergensmeyer.org/why-isis-attacked-paris/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

rrggrr 11y ago

ISIS attacked because their key financiers in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere aren't dead yet. Western intelligence knows who many of these people are. eg. http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl2605.aspx http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl... The mosques where operations are financed, recruiting done and plans laid are still standing. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11000794/Muslim-bank-accounts-closed-by-HSBC-in-wake-of-money-laundering-fine.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1... Terrorism viewed as overhead by some countries, encourages more of the same. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/08/italian-intelligence-lied-hostage-rescue-bruno-pelizzari-debbie-calitz http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/08/italian-intelli... I imagine much lip service will be paid and funds expended further analyzing and discussing the problem.

cm2187 11y ago
In wonder if we shouldn't treat Qatar gas and Saudi oil the same way as blood diamond.

UhUhUhUh 11y ago

Direct, low-level answer: because it begins to lose on the ground. High-level answer: because humiliated rage knows no bound.

ranjeethacker 11y ago

Convert Muslim to Christian.

rdancer 11y ago
Show the western intellectual tradition as superior. Once again become the beacon of civil liberties, human rights, and democracy. Most importantly, provide safe space for apostates.

d--b 11y ago

This conversation does not belong here...

cm2187 11y ago

I am not convinced ISIS is really the problem in Paris. It sure is the problem in the regions under its control in the middle east. But re Paris, it appears that all the terrorists identified so far were French (or from Belgium). In fact all the previous terrorist attempts in France were made by French nationals or residents. I hear people claiming it is still ISIS because they have been trained and armed by ISIS in Syria. That may be the case but they haven't gone to Syria to do some innocent tourism and came back terrorists. We are talking about home grown radicalised activists here. If there wouldn't be ISIS there would probably be another cause.

maxxxxx 11y ago
I have been thinking along the same line too. The same people would probably have associated with Al Qaeda when they were stronger years ago.
elthran 11y ago
I wonder how much of the "Frenchness" of the attacks that Paris has experienced is to do with Syria being post-WW1 French mandate? I suspect not much - but part of me does wonder why they're the main EU country involved in the conflict.
- cm2187 11y ago
  I am not a specialist but my intuition is that history does play a role in France's hostility to Al Assad. France has been traditionally close to Lebanon and the Syrian sponsored violence and terrorism didn't go well with the French diplomacy (Chirac in particular was personally outraged by the assassination of Hariri). But I doubt it has anything to do with ISIS. It's a relatively recent creation, and mostly a Saudi inspired organisation so I doubt there is much to do with France. I think France is mostly involved because they are the largest western contributor country to ISIS in term of jihadists.