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Pakistani attorney and author Rafia Zakaria wrote an op-ed in Al Jazeera America about the Islamic extremists' war on fun, including sports, music, even dining in a fine restaurant. Zakaria points out that this apparent obsession predates the existence of ISIS by several decades (at least); he suspects this is a big reason why the attackers chose Paris, renowned worldwide for its brilliant culture and joie de vivre.
Terrorism’s targeting of the merry is universal and indiscriminate, a division of the world between those who wish to live and laugh and hope and those who kill and destroy. The latter are deadly and relentless, and they have already squeezed out the mirth from too many of the world’s cities, from Karachi, Kabul and Baghdad to Nairobi and Beirut.
Zakaria experienced this aspect of terror firsthand. A high school friend had just passed a big exam, and was out celebrating with his family at a restaurant in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists struck.
Al Jazeera America provides a separate analysis warning that military action alone cannot defeat ISIS (aka ISIL), which of course is not a "nation" in the traditional sense, but more of a guerilla outfit like Al Qaeda, that opportunistically seized a stronghold in chaotic regions of Syria and Iraq. The piece's author, political scientist Rami G. Khouri, recommends that both the West and Muslim nations of the Middle East spend more resources on addressing economic and political problems facing impoverished youths who are potentially attracted by the ISIS' recruiting pitch:
If the underlying threats to ordinary citizens’ lives in autocratic Arab-Islamic societies remain unaddressed — from jobs, water and health insurance, to free elections, a credible justice system and corruption — the flow of recruits to movements like ISIL or something even worse will persist and even accelerate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday November 16 2015, @09:31PM
I'm sure that's what you'd like to believe. But there's a lot of evidence that it's not true:
- Based on what we US civilians know about the drone program, if, for example, we can take out somebody that we consider a Really Bad Guy, and it would also kill 15 other people who may or may not be Bad Guys, we do it and mark all the other military-aged men killed as being insurgents unless they are provably not (and rarely if ever do they bother figuring out if they weren't). This happens routinely in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and probably quite a few other countries that we don't hear about because it's all classified.
- Recently, the US military got into all sorts of hot water because they bombed a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Afghanistan. MSF had done everything they were supposed to do in a war zone: The hospital was well-marked from the air, the US military had the GPS coordinates of the hospital, when the attack came the hospital administrators called up the military and told them they had hit the wrong target, but the bombing continued for another 30 minutes. There is some evidence the pilots questioned the order and had it confirmed by their commanding officer, indicating that the pilots knew something was unusual.
- The Collateral Murder video, in which a helicopter crew guns down: A reporter. The reporters' camera crew. A bunch of civilians that happen to be nearby. A van that had pulled up to rescue the wounded (including 2 kids in the front seat of the van). The driver of the van (the gunner is encouraging the driver to touch something that looks like a weapon to give him a good excuse to pull the trigger). None of the people killed were armed. This was all, according to the US military, in accord with the rules of engagement at the time. Oh, and conveniently, this just happened to be a reporter who had opted to report outside of the "embedded" reporter program where the military decides where the reporter goes and what they would see.
The evidence is all over the place that what the US military is trying to guard against is not civilian casualties, but bad press in the US about civilian casualties. The reason for this is that the generals believe that the reason the US lost the Vietnam War was because those pansy liberals stabbed them in the back with all that video about what the soldiers were actually doing in 'nam. In other words, the problem with My Lai etc was not that they happened, but that they got caught. They mostly succeed at this, as evidenced by the fact that you didn't question the view that the US tries to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible.
Which "we"? Many soldiers have in fact shown up on camera celebrating kills and torture and other atrocities. And there is a large segment of the US population who believes that the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim, who see any death of any Muslim as cause for cheering.
There is a large segment of the US population for whom the plan for the Middle East is:
1. Kill all Muslims / Arabs (this segment of the population isn't smart enough to differentiate between those two groups).
2. Expand Israel to the borders promised by God to Abraham back in Genesis (from the Red Sea to the Euphrates).
3. Fight the battle of Armageddon against the forces of Evil, which are presumed to Muslim.
4. Jesus comes and saves the day for all the Good Guys.
Compare that to Obama's plan for ISIS, which looks something like:
1. Supply arms and air support for all the local factions who want to destroy ISIS.
2. Try to convince the Russians to attack ISIS rather than the non-ISIS rebel forces currently attacking Russia's ally Assad.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.