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"Doing something" about IS is exactly what they (the leadership of IS) want. They want the West — and particularly the US — to engage militarily with them, to g

by rosser 11y ago

"Doing something" about IS is exactly what they (the leadership of IS) want. They want the West — and particularly the US — to engage militarily with them, to give credence to their particular, perverse brand of apocalyptic Islam. Letting them continue to alienate themselves amongst all the other Muslims on the planet by the way they treat their fellows (if you're Muslim, but don't believe in IS's specific notions of the caliphate, you're an apostate, and must be killed) will, in the long run, do more to destroy them than even nuking all of Syria ever could. EDIT: re your edit: if the West engages militarily with IS, that becomes an even bigger recruiting tool for them than did the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine how many villages will be raped and killed and sold into sex slavery when IS has three times as many crazy fucknuts who all believe their heinous idiocy? So, yes, by all means. Let's just go ahead and print their recruiting posters too, while we're at it. This is long, but it's well worth the read. The Atlantic's article, titled "What ISIS Really Wants": http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isi... Don't mistake me. I think IS and what they're doing are heinous and disgusting. But to react to what they're doing and try to stop them with force of arms will be massively counter-productive. Sometimes, blowing shit up just makes it worse. I mean, IS wouldn't even be a thing if the US hadn't blown up Iraq. How, exactly, is doubling down a good idea, again? In the days immediately after 9/11, I said in an online forum to some friends that I really didn't want the US to spend the next several decades playing Whack-a-Mole with the jihad-inclined parts of Islam. Guess what we've done, and what you seem to be calling for doing...

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> Letting them continue to alienate themselves amongst all the other Muslims on the planet by the way they treat their fellows (if you're Muslim, but don't believe in IS's specific notions of the caliphate, you're an apostate, and must be killed) will, in the long run, do more to destroy them than even nuking all of Syria ever could. Waiting it out is not an option. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-burns-woman-alive-for-refusing-to-engage-in-extreme-sex-act-un-says-10272832.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-bur... "Amid all the atrocities carried out by Isis — its massacres of civilians, its beheading of hostages, its pillaging of antiquities — the systematic violence the jihadists have carried out against countless enslaved women and girls never fails to shock. For months now, we've heard appalling testimony from women who escaped Isis's clutches, many of whom endured rape and other hideous acts of violence." "Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold." "We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his 'property'." "Estimates vary, but there are believed to be somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 women enslaved by the Islamic State. Many are Yazidis, a persecuted minority sect that the extremist Islamic State considers to be apostate "devil-worshippers," in part because of the Yazidis' ancient connection to the region's pre-Islamic past. The jihadists' treatment of Yazidi women, in particular, has been marked out by its contempt and savagery." Here's Bangura again: "They commit rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality. We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act. We learned of many other sadistic sexual acts. We struggled to understand the mentality of people who commit such crimes."
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- robertfw 11y ago
  > Waiting it out is not an option. This is where I am torn. The short term is horrific, but by engaging militarily it seems that we ensure that we have the same problems in the future. How do we break the cycle? How can we use the resources and technology at our disposal to protect the innocent, without adding more fuel to the fire? An open ended question. I'm not sure what the answer is. We look at it in terms of "non violent intervention" vs "military operation" and I can't help but wonder what options in the middle we are leaving out due to the myopic nature of our society.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >"Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness." So, like what Australians did to their indigenous population right until the 70's for example: >The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals occurred in the period between approximately 1909 and 1969, although in some places children were still being taken until the 1970s. The children were placed in concentration camps, forced into servitude for white families, and often raped. >The report said that among the 502 inquiry witnesses, 17% of female witnesses and 7.7% of male witnesses reported experiencing a sexual assault while in an institution, at work, or with a foster or adoptive family. The main idea was to "white out" their population (sometimes decorated with some racist BS about protecting the children from their savage parents that were unfit to parent them etc, but other times spelled out clearly). Or how about what the current "allies", and highly sophisticated people, the Germans did, less than a century ago, to several million jews, gays, gypsies and commies... Or how about the ever popular torture, rape, sexual assalts etc. perpetuated by armies wherever they ventured to bring "democracy" to (it's not like the pictures from that prison in Iraq were that far back). I'm giving those examples to put what's happening there in some perspective, because some people just see "them, uncivilized subhumans" and "us, sophisticated democrats", whereas it's more like the pot calling the kettle black, with the exception that the pot has better PR and pisses far away from where he lives, so the stink doesn't come as easily...

by rosser 11y ago

toomuchtodo 11y ago

> Letting them continue to alienate themselves amongst all the other Muslims on the planet by the way they treat their fellows (if you're Muslim, but don't believe in IS's specific notions of the caliphate, you're an apostate, and must be killed) will, in the long run, do more to destroy them than even nuking all of Syria ever could. Waiting it out is not an option. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-burns-woman-alive-for-refusing-to-engage-in-extreme-sex-act-un-says-10272832.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-bur... "Amid all the atrocities carried out by Isis — its massacres of civilians, its beheading of hostages, its pillaging of antiquities — the systematic violence the jihadists have carried out against countless enslaved women and girls never fails to shock. For months now, we've heard appalling testimony from women who escaped Isis's clutches, many of whom endured rape and other hideous acts of violence." "Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold." "We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his 'property'." "Estimates vary, but there are believed to be somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 women enslaved by the Islamic State. Many are Yazidis, a persecuted minority sect that the extremist Islamic State considers to be apostate "devil-worshippers," in part because of the Yazidis' ancient connection to the region's pre-Islamic past. The jihadists' treatment of Yazidi women, in particular, has been marked out by its contempt and savagery." Here's Bangura again: "They commit rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality. We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act. We learned of many other sadistic sexual acts. We struggled to understand the mentality of people who commit such crimes."

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
robertfw 11y ago
> Waiting it out is not an option. This is where I am torn. The short term is horrific, but by engaging militarily it seems that we ensure that we have the same problems in the future. How do we break the cycle? How can we use the resources and technology at our disposal to protect the innocent, without adding more fuel to the fire? An open ended question. I'm not sure what the answer is. We look at it in terms of "non violent intervention" vs "military operation" and I can't help but wonder what options in the middle we are leaving out due to the myopic nature of our society.
coldtea 11y ago
>"Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness." So, like what Australians did to their indigenous population right until the 70's for example: >The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals occurred in the period between approximately 1909 and 1969, although in some places children were still being taken until the 1970s. The children were placed in concentration camps, forced into servitude for white families, and often raped. >The report said that among the 502 inquiry witnesses, 17% of female witnesses and 7.7% of male witnesses reported experiencing a sexual assault while in an institution, at work, or with a foster or adoptive family. The main idea was to "white out" their population (sometimes decorated with some racist BS about protecting the children from their savage parents that were unfit to parent them etc, but other times spelled out clearly). Or how about what the current "allies", and highly sophisticated people, the Germans did, less than a century ago, to several million jews, gays, gypsies and commies... Or how about the ever popular torture, rape, sexual assalts etc. perpetuated by armies wherever they ventured to bring "democracy" to (it's not like the pictures from that prison in Iraq were that far back). I'm giving those examples to put what's happening there in some perspective, because some people just see "them, uncivilized subhumans" and "us, sophisticated democrats", whereas it's more like the pot calling the kettle black, with the exception that the pot has better PR and pisses far away from where he lives, so the stink doesn't come as easily...