ISIS are branding Christians

[Skarekrow]

OK, glad you got it all figured out.

Good luck with that.

This is the point I am making…when you don’t like what people have to say, or it doesn’t have your own personal political viewpoint, you disregard it...because if anyone here thinks they have it figured out it would be you Lark.
Sorry, but the message you carry isn’t all that different from the next guy…and you may think that about me, and maybe that is true too.
I’m just saying that there is no need to be preemptively rude.

 

[Lark]

This is the point I am making…when you don’t like what people have to say, or it doesn’t have your own personal political viewpoint, you disregard it...because if anyone here thinks they have it figured out it would be you Lark.
Sorry, but the message you carry isn’t all that different from the next guy…and you may think that about me, and maybe that is true too.
I’m just saying that there is no need to be preemptively rude.

Read this over Skarecrow and then consider it a message to yourself because you're like every other religion hating, liberal pundit I've ever met and every single one has singularly failed to persuade me or anyone else, for that matter, of a single thing.

Although I suppose maybe that's not the point, it cant be because no one does the same thing over and over and over and expected different results. I thought for a bit you were about to have some sort of ephiphany or you'd begun thinking about things rather than regurgitating the standard party lines but now I see you genuinely believe you've got things figured out.

So.

That's grand. There's nothing left to talk about.

 

[Skarekrow]

Read this over Skarecrow and then consider it a message to yourself because you're like every other religion hating, liberal pundit I've ever met and every single one has singularly failed to persuade me or anyone else, for that matter, of a single thing.

Although I suppose maybe that's not the point, it cant be because no one does the same thing over and over and over and expected different results. I thought for a bit you were about to have some sort of ephiphany or you'd begun thinking about things rather than regurgitating the standard party lines but now I see you genuinely believe you've got things figured out.

So.

That's grand. There's nothing left to talk about.

I’m not trying to persuade you Lark.
I’m offering an alternative to the garbage you spew.
I can see you are nothing more than your run of the mill asshole who thinks he knows it all and everyone else is a fucking moron complex.
I’m okay with being done.

 

[Lark]

I’m not trying to persuade you Lark.
I’m offering an alternative to the garbage you spew.
I can see you are nothing more than your run of the mill asshole who thinks he knows it all and everyone else is a fucking moron complex.
I’m okay with being done.

Well, alright, I kind of believe there's never been a more apt time to deploy the old physican heal thyself but you're not for hearing it so you take care now.

 

[just me]

How I love this ignore list idea. Is there a way to ignore what people quote others saying?

It is starting to show us what the next war will be like and who it will be against, if we look.

 

[Lark]

How I love this ignore list idea. Is there a way to ignore what people quote others saying?

It is starting to show us what the next war will be like and who it will be against, if we look.

I'm interested in that last bit.

I sort of thought it was funny that this thread started out as one about the persecution of Christian communities elsewhere in the world, someplace that Christians actually have minority status and are far from being part of any ruling elite or history of persecuting others, but in less than four seperate pages it descended into a rant against Christians.

That's kind of illustrative I think, there's people who're interested in attacking oppression whatever shape it takes and whoever's the author or the victim, I count myself in that number, then there's people who're content playing cowboys and indians and when the strawmen dont match its not long before they make them match.

You can tell when someone seeks to challenge your thinking by repeatedly referencing older, earlier struggles, which there's usually a consensus about, and saying "this" is really the same as "that". Its an exercise in not really thinking, or not wanting to think, too hard about anything. Just all about getting back that sense of "us" and "them", the cowboys and injuns.

 

[just me]

If we look at nothing but what is actually happening.....

 

[Skarekrow]

I'm interested in that last bit.

I sort of thought it was funny that this thread started out as one about the persecution of Christian communities elsewhere in the world, someplace that Christians actually have minority status and are far from being part of any ruling elite or history of persecuting others, but in less than four seperate pages it descended into a rant against Christians.

That's kind of illustrative I think, there's people who're interested in attacking oppression whatever shape it takes and whoever's the author or the victim, I count myself in that number, then there's people who're content playing cowboys and indians and when the strawmen dont match its not long before they make them match.

You can tell when someone seeks to challenge your thinking by repeatedly referencing older, earlier struggles, which there's usually a consensus about, and saying "this" is really the same as "that". Its an exercise in not really thinking, or not wanting to think, too hard about anything. Just all about getting back that sense of "us" and "them", the cowboys and injuns.

Then you ignored what I wrote when I talked about how no matter the side of history conservatives and liberals have been on, we are facing instances that no one has ever dealt with in the societies of the past.
In one moment you don’t wish to hear about the past…specifically the Christian past, of which many people refuse to acknowledge as historically significant because it suits their position now. Then on the other hand when I do bring up historically significant events that should not be disregarded…you roll your eyes because now I’m attacking your religion. I am not attacking anything, I am referencing the very REAL history, that has real meaning when discussing what is taking place in the Middle East right now.
If you are going to attack another religion like the Muslim faith, then don’t get pissed off when people throw stones back.
You are so arrogant that you only skim through what people actually write because you have already decided that no opinion is more intelligent than your own.
You may be well read and have a wonderful vocabulary Lark…you may even be a very nice guy IRL…but all that is for naught because you have decided that you are better than everyone else.

“I once knew a man who thought he was above me, and he was...until he had that thought."

 

[just me]

Dempsey suggested Islamic State would remain a danger until it could no longer count on safe havens in areas of Syria under militant control.
"This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of- days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated," Dempsey said.
"To your question, can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no. That will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a non-existent border."

 

[muir]

If we look at nothing but what is actually happening.....

What happened is that the neo-cons wrote a paper called 'the project for the new american century' which outlined a plan to conquer a number of oil rich countries in the middle east in order to ensure the hegemony of the US empire in the new century; this paper called for the need for a new pearl harbour in order to galvanise the will of the US public behind the moves that were to be made; a year later 911 occured providing the new pearl harbour from which they could launch their project (how convenient!)

General wesley clark can be heard talking about this plan to topple 7 countries in 5 years

We saw Iraq fall, then afghanistan, then libya, revolution in egypt and syria almost fell.

The ultimate goal was to isolate Iran and then suffocate her through sanctions and subversion from the inside (like the 1953 CIA coup)

This has failed

A follow up part of the plan has been to try and isolate russia with a staged coup in Ukraine used to cause destablilisation in the region followed by sanctions against russia

This policy too has failed as it has forced russia to diversify its economy and to make lucrative energy deals with Iran and China and to push forward with the BRICS project including a BRICS bank to challenge the US central bank system

Another aspect of the project for the new american century was africa with the US 'africom' division set upto manage that sphere. The CIA funded Boko Harem and Kony to be used as bogeymen to justify the introduction of US 'military advisors' on the ground (ie occupying forces). However the US policy of going into africa with the bomb and bullet has been rejected by the africans who prefer the chinese approach of investment in infrastructure such as ports and roads and dams

Almost to spite the africans laboratories funded by george soros and bill gates have been at the centre of an ebola outbreak which is reminiscent of the time the US having been defeeated by the guerilla forces of the vietcong then sprayed cancer causing 'agent orange' over large swathes of vietnam....much like how a dog who doesn't get their way will piss all over the carpet (this in turn was reminiscent of the dropping of two nuclear bombs on japan in world war 2 when the japanese were already seeking peace terms)...another example would be the littering of the iraqi desert with radioactive depleted uranium shells that have cause cancer for thousands of iraqis and has deformed many children. It seems whereever the US goes it has to poison the people....it seems to be policy

The US empire is crumbling but it is doing it messily. It is lashing out across the world

Most recently after it didn't get its way in syria it has funded ISIS to destabilise the middle east

One wonders when they will stop trying to visit death and destruction on other peoples? Everytime they do it they create more angry people...more enemies

If that is what american empire looks like then the world would be better without it

The next problem would be the spread of the chinese empire which has its own form of centrally controlled draconian power

At some point humanity is going to have to wake up and realise that it needs to stop allowing other people to make its decisions for it; we need power decentralsied down to the people ad out of the hands of the most insane in our societies

 

[Skarekrow]

We Aren't Trying to End Global Terror: We're After the Oil

Amid the conflict with ISIS, the bottom line is a reliable supply to the Middle East’s liquid gold.
By CJ Werleman


Thirteen years after the attacks of September 11, and with much said and written about ISIS and the gruesome beheading of James Foley, America continues to misunderstand the roots of Islamic terrorism.

We also fail to acknowledge that as long as we remain addicted to cheap oil we will be locked in a war in the Middle East.

You won’t hear Middle East oil mentioned on the cable news airwaves.

You will hear “clash of civilizations,”" religiously motivated terrorism,” and any number of similar phrases that are meant to distract and divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world: we are addicted to the oil beneath their feet, and we intend to dominate the land they stand on.

The Muslim world isn’t as ignorant as Christian crusaders, the military industrial complex and the vast know-nothing right wing would have you believe.

After all, what uncivilized, stupid people could produce algebra, geometry and our concept of the rule of law?

The Muslim world is smart enough to figure out that America has invested all of the past 70 years into dominating control of Middle East oil supplies.

We have propped despotic regimes and brutal dictators, overthrown democratically elected governments and waged three wars in two decades on Muslim soil.

All while we fund and are complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian land.

ISIS is the product of our own imagination and self-serving meddling.

After we removed Saddam and his Sunni quasi-government, ISIS was the response by those Sunnis blocked from enjoying economic participation in Iraq.

It’s time to face reality and the monster in the mirror:

we are not trying to end global terror, nor are we trying to promote Western secular democracy in the Middle East.
Our motivations and desires are no secret. We do everything to ensure that we, and our allies, particularly Japan, have a reliable supply to the region’s liquid gold.

​

With a total of 44 U.S. military bases in the Middle East and the Central Asia, we have the Muslim world completely surrounded.

From Turkey to Saudi Arabia, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, our bases serve as a constant reminder to Muslims that we control their economic future and we are here to stay.

And with an economic future that looks bleak for Muslims, the embers for Muslim rage are stoked.

“Terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease of life,”

writes Robert Pape in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

​

The U.S. State Department has announced that Westerners, mostly British Muslims, are being drawn to ISIS.
Media outlets everywhere ask why.

The answer is clear.
The UK has the greatest concentration of Muslims among Western democracies.

Muslims were pulled from former British colonies during the 1940s to provide cheap labor for the reconstruction of Britain in the aftermath of the second world war.
The textile and steel mills in the north of England were filled with Muslim migrants from Asia and Africa.

Industrial collapse turned these mills into dust heaps, and today Muslim urban ghettos in the UK now resemble the socio-economic conditions of predominately black urban ghettos in America.

For British Muslims, high unemployment is the norm, as is racial discrimination and anti-immigrant violence.
For many, economic and social oppression at home looks a whole lot like the social and economic oppression that is occurring in Muslim countries abroad.

The collapse of liberal democracies in the face of unfettered capitalism has failed minorities everywhere in the West.
Socio-economic insecurity is at the heart of all self-proclaimed religiously motivated extremism.

Where social justice prevails, and the state meets the economic needs of its people, hyper-religious ideologies lack appeal.

French political scholar Oliver Roy argues, “This notion of a globalized Islam is not the product of any specific ‘Islamist’ organization but a broad sociological trend that has developed across Europe as a result of racism, migration, and globalization.”

In Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, Muslims have been oppressed and had war waged upon them.
“In principle—all the struggles for Muslims around the world were to be regarded as equally important” in this global ummah, Roy writes.

This is why we now find Western Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

In returning to the Middle East, and its oil, our posture and actions promise to become even more aggressive, as oil reserves inevitably diminish.

In an in-depth look into Saudi oil production over the past 40 years, Matthew R. Simmons warns in his book Twilight in the Desert:

The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy that Saudi oil production is a far cry from the boastful claims long made by the kingdom regarding the robustness of its oilfields. ​

According to Simmons, Saudi oil production peaked at 10 million barrels a day in 1981.
Today it is 8 to 9 million barrels and falling.

No super giant oil fields have been found in the region since the 1950s.

The very reason U.S. military bases, which are the size of small cities, exist in Saudi Arabia is to ensure our access to this diminishing supply.
The oppressive Saudi regime wants us there to ensure neighboring countries don’t eye their oil.

The central and founding charter of Al Qaeda was to remove our bases from the Holy Land.
It was no coincidence that 17 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.

“We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly, and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both,” warns Chris Hedges.

With our addiction to Middle East oil supplies, we can expect the latter, which means 2001 was the start of our endless war with the Muslim world.

 

[Lark]

I wonder if the Christians being branded and murdered for their religious convictions were only able to explain that the liberals in the west understand that its all really about Oil to ISIS then they'd be left alone?

Do you think?

 

[just me]

The Shia have a state, had control over Iraq, and now the Sunni comes to fulfil their goal of an Islamic State under Sharia Law sanctioned by the Q'uran. Sunni generals are being used from Hussein's military. They took another airfield yesterday. Their actions are by their book. Blaming the West and oil is a ploy to try and get people to look the other way.

 

[Lark]

The Shia have a state, had control over Iraq, and now the Sunni comes to fulfil their goal of an Islamic State under Sharia Law sanctioned by the Q'uran. Sunni generals are being used from Hussein's military. They took another airfield yesterday. Their actions are by their book. Blaming the West and oil is a ploy to try and get people to look the other way.

It is but its a couple of other things too.

Its totally risk free and lame, its the same reason people attack christian fundamentalists rather than muslim fundamentalists, what's the worst that's going to happen? In the former they'll do something stupid, which will make them seem stupid in the eyes of anyone pretty much, like spout a lot of flat earth stuff or complain about prayers in schools, the in the case of the later you could end up with a dagger through you as that Dutch artist discovered to his detriment/death.

Its also kind of irrelevent too, who cares what oil has to do about it? If it actually leads to an intervention and saves some christians and minorities, ie non-combatants in any sense of the word, from ending up in the latest mass grave atrocity pit then that's just great in my book.

The standard liberal or conspiracy theorising responses to real world terror are sort of sweet and naive if you ask me, most of the hold out the hope in one shape or another that there's an economic, rational, almost ordered and calculated thing going on, adopting the right policy will sort it all out, in reality there's no logic or rhymn or reason to sectarianism, people just want to hate and fight for the tribe, they could give a shit about what rational concessions or appeasement you're considering to answer their grievances, if could ever satisfy them they'd have others.

 

[Skarekrow]

No one is discounting the deaths of the innocents…I wasn’t, are you? Or do they need to be Christian to be mourned and for us to care enough to do something about it?
I am not attacking Christian or Muslim here…if you act like a terrorist then you are a terrorist…no matter the religious convictions. I am only pointing out once again that your moral high ground is subjective at best.

 

[Skarekrow]

Also, if you choose to ignore something that contributed to, and plays a gigantic factor in this conflict (such as the oil and our insatiable greed for it) is to read in the dark.

 

[Lark]

No one is discounting the deaths of the innocents…I wasn’t, are you? Or do they need to be Christian to be mourned and for us to care enough to do something about it?
I am not attacking Christian or Muslim here…if you act like a terrorist then you are a terrorist…no matter the religious convictions. I am only pointing out once again that your moral high ground is subjective at best.

I was trying to keep the thread on topic, instead of, you know, allowing it to descend into the usual liberal nonsense response to issues they'd rather not see.

I very much doubt that its another vindication of moral subjectivity as you suggest.

 

[Lark]

Also, if you choose to ignore something that contributed to, and plays a gigantic factor in this conflict (such as the oil and our insatiable greed for it) is to read in the dark.

Really?

I very much doubt that its a feature of the motivations of jihadists at all, is it a feature of their leadership's thinking? I dont know and it definitely wasnt framed that way, it was the usual, tired "western greedy capitalists" response to an issue, any issue, which threatens to change that script.

 

[Skarekrow]

Really?

I very much doubt that its a feature of the motivations of jihadists at all, is it a feature of their leadership's thinking? I dont know and it definitely wasnt framed that way, it was the usual, tired "western greedy capitalists" response to an issue, any issue, which threatens to change that script.

The problem is though…it is true…we are a greedy western capitalist nation that is holding a lot of the world under it’s thumb to gain and maintain leverage.

 

[Skarekrow]

BREAKING: Suspect Identified in James Foley Beheading Is Failed Rapper

British Intelligence is actively hunting this 23-year-old former Londoner.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, identified as James Foley's beheader, rapped under the name L Jinny.
Photo Credit: via YouTube

August 25, 2014 |

This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Read the entire article with video here.

British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 have identified the man suspected of the horrific beheading of American journalist James Foley, according to British media reports.

The hooded man with an English accent is believed to be 23-year-old Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, known to fellow Islamic State militants as Jihadi John.
The former rapper left his family home in an affluent west London suburb last year to fight in the civil war in Syria.

In early August he tweeted a photo of himself wearing military camouflage and a black hood, while holding a severed head in his left hand.
British SAS forces are hunting Foley's killer, using a range of high-tech equipment to track him down and potentially free other hostages.

The Mail on Sunday is reporting that a "significant force" of SAS personnel has been deployed to northern Iraq over the past two days, joining local units fighting the Islamic State. They have fanned out into four-man teams, accompanying Iraqi and Kurdish troops in an effort to find British jihadists.

The Sunday Times reports that Bary is the key focus of the manhunt. He is one of the British jihadists referred to by former hostages as the Beatles because of their British accents. The two others were called "George" and "Ringo".

The two other Britons suspected of involvement in the crime are Aine Davis, a former drug dealer who converted to Islam, and Razul Islam, who is believed to have joined the terrorist group that murdered Foley.

Bary is the son of an Egyptian-born militant who is awaiting trial on terrorism charges in Manhattan, due to his alleged involvement in the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Before leaving the family home to fight in Syria, Bary was an aspiring rapper known as L Jinny whose music was played on one of Britain's most popular radio stations, BBC Radio 1.

Recordings of his songs will prove vital to the investigating team, with experts using voice recognition technology to match his voice with that of the man who brutally decapitated Mr Foley.

Bary made a number of music videos for his songs, with titles such as Flying High, Dreamer and Overdose.

It is believed he was indoctrinated by an Islamic preacher named Anjem Choudary who persuaded him to join the fight in Syria.