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from the when-you-DO-NOT-want-them-to-"think-of-the-children!" dept.
A couple of weeks ago this story was reported by The Daily Beast :
Members of an American-backed rebel group in Syria beheaded a young child in a grisly execution video.
The footage surfaced early Tuesday of members of Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki and a captured child in Handarat, near Aleppo. The young boy, who appears to be prepubescent, is then executed on the back of a pickup truck.
The gruesome videotaped murder of a child drew outrage on social media and the promise of an inquiry from the group's leadership, which has previously received U.S.-made weapons and American funding. The group no longer gets such backing. But it's also renewed questions about which rebels the American government has supported in Syria's ongoing civil war.
[...] State Department spokesperson John Kirby told The Daily Beast. "We strongly condemn this type of barbaric action, no matter what group is responsible. We encourage al-Zenki to investigate the incident and expect all parties to comply with their obligations under the law of armed conflict."
[...] the group's leadership issued a statement condemning the beheading. It said it formed a committee to investigate how such a crime could have happened.
More video from the incident has been released:
The victim is seen among a group of fighters from the US and Turkish backed militant group, in the same red pick-up truck that features in their video of his execution. In a chilling exchange the jihadist militants can be seen taunting the child, taking selfies, and threatening him with 'slaughter'.
When asked about his final wish, the child asks to be shot rather than slaughtered. Their shocking answer? "Slaughter. We are even worse than ISIS"
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 01 2016, @09:48PM
You and Runway are both wrong.
Rebuilding Germany and Japan worked because both of those were advanced cultures that were not bound by a backwards religion. The problem is that both of them attempted to form empires and brutalize their neighbors (in Germany's case because they blamed everyone else for their problems, and they were partly right since they had a crappy punitive treaty forced on them at the end of WWI). Both nations were already extremely modern and technological societies at the time, with advanced economies, which is why they were such formidable opponents. And in neither nation was religious fundamentalism a real problem, nor did their societies have any tribalism left; Germans and Japanese of 1945 were just as mentally invested in the nation-state concept as we are now, if not more so.
In the middle eastern nations, the reason the stable countries (for a while) have or had dictators is because that was what was necessary to keep the religious fundamentalists from taking over, and also because the societies there are tribal in nature, rather than based on nationalism. In Iraq, the civilian government has had a terrible time trying to keep the place united because all the tribes are always fighting each other, and one group basically invites ISIS in because they haven't bought into the multi-ethnic civilian government. And in Syria, all the rebels are actually a bunch of religious crazies who want to set up a theocracy. In Egypt, they overthrew their dictator and promptly elected a bunch of wacky Islamists.
The simple fact is that these societies are simply not capable of running modern democratic republican forms of government; their people don't really understand the whole idea of nations, there's too much internal strife, and there's too much backwards religious thought. Any attempts at nation-building will fail there. The only things that'll work are indefinite occupation and foreign administration (with a rather brutal hand), or just GettingTFO. The first option both makes you look like a bully, as every colonizing country does, plus it invites a lot of blow-back in the form of terrorist attacks. So the second option is the only sensible one. These cultures need another half-millennia or so to get their acts together, just as the European cultures did to get from burning heretics at the stake to having modern tolerant societies.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:20AM
It was Brzezinski [counterpunch.org] who brought religion to the forefront. And almost all your "crazies" are only in it for the money [express.co.uk]. I don't know why everybody has to keep repeating government press releases presented to the mass media, a lot of it is plain old bigotry. This is a war nobody is fighting to win. It's all about keeping it going. And the worst "failure", as it were, is that of containment, which has its own propaganda value as well. Please, leave all the religious/tribal mumbo-jumbo outside. The same operating principles operate worldwide. Unconditional surrender and rebuilding(and yes, indefinite occupation, we can even use the same Russians as the same convenient pretext we use for Europe and Japan) are achievable, but nobody can stomach the necessary brutality. Killing people more slowly and steadily seems more palatable for some reason. Peace is bad for business.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:37AM
Damn, this just caught my eye:
These cultures need another half-millennia or so to get their acts together, just as the European cultures did to get from burning heretics at the stake to having modern tolerant societies.
Europe did not have modern tolerant society until after World War 2. Never once before then was the entire continent at peace. Every minute of every day since breaks the old record. It is unprecedented. And I can guarantee you that it would revert back to its old ways if that irresistible force ever bugged out. Even now their old right wing nationalism is on the rise. And if it wasn't for that little slap down in the Balkans, the whole continent would once again have been engulfed. So excuse me if I don't agree that they have modern tolerant societies anywhere outside all the fashionable spots, and even inside there are still doubts. Their "tolerance" is very superficial and brittle.
Sorry, but what you said there reeks of bigotry.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:40AM
And you've forgotten Francoist Spain.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 03 2016, @03:49AM
I sure wish I could show you what would happen to Europe if the US withdrew, or even more so if they sold weapons to the various religious groups and incited them in the same fashion they do in the Middle East.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..