Forums

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Yeh, lots of bad shit. Of course, there's other bad shit in the world. Ask yourself, would you rather go out at Abu Gharib or with a beheading?

One of the things you are seeing with ISIS in terms of military strategy is a fundamentalist version of shock and awe, a policy we carried out behind a ton of armor and often from the safety of drone control rooms. A key goal for IS is to absolutely terrify people so they will surrender or run, making the military conquests much easier.

Similar approaches were used by Christians in the Balkan ethnic cleansing and the Ugandan genocide, though things like gang rapes (including of children) and mutilation were the Christians' preferred weapons of choice, and in each of those cases the places to run was much more limited so the death toll considerably higher. If they had our armor and our weaponry, more of their killing would be civilized like ours - you know, blowing people's limbs off so they bleed to death at a wedding, bombs filled with shrapnel so they shred a lot of flesh, whether they kill or maim. But we like to be smug and say we're civilized. It's an old story.

Once again, not denying that lots of bad stuff happens in countries that are Islamic, but I fail to see Islam as intrinsically or particularly evil. The reason to care about the debate has nothing to do with some smarmy asshole of a comic's ratings or whether a two-bit Hollywood pretty boy gets excited on TV. The reason to care is that ultimately Islam is goingto be one component of the various solutions in the Middle Eastern countries dealing with radical Islam, and the mix of bigotry and phobia that characterizes American's dealing with Islam is a barrier to that.

Also, if we really looked hard at what fuels political Islam, we would be dealing very, very differently with our good friends in Saudi Arabia, who are at the very root of the problems and always have been, and also very differently with many people in places like Lebanon, Turkey, and even Iran, where there are Islamic groups we could work with who would be a more effective alternative to some of the bad guys.

Salaam.

Gang rapes and mutilation are as much a part of the ISIS arsenal as anyone else's. They are practicing savagery on a massive scale and that is a big component of their strategy. They are inhuman savages undeserving of any quarter, much as they offer none to their opponents.

Don't let a good point get dragged down by offering any sort of support for those assholes.