binners – Member
Curses! I agree with the Wopster! I hate it when that happens.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCbfMkh940Q[/video]

I think STW shows the great resilience of humanity where amongst a discussion on the murder of a fellow human by fire we can start kissing each other

Why do some locals call IS dash?
Bloke on R4 this morning repeatly used that term.

Deviant;One of the reasons that air strikes have taken So long to have an effect is because they are embedded right next to the schools,residential areas etc,people who didn’t really ask for IS to take their area over. So what is your plan B?

Ok first read this point of view

Then consider that the best way to destroy IS and their Caliphate is just to hem them in, ensure they can’t get supplies in and leave them to it… why? Because:
> the farmers have only managed to sow 30% of their normal crops
> they may have oil wells but can’t refine it in bulk
> low oil prices mean the bottom has dropped out of the black market for oil

So currently they have no money, soon they will have no food. Attacking them (and looking at their social media information) just fuels their extremist narrative.

At the same time the ruling classes need to take a long hard look at whether their wealth is trickling down to the masses.

jambalaya – Member
I think STW shows the great resilience of humanity where amongst a discussion on the murder of a fellow human by fire we can start kissing each other

😆

I wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole.

Why do some locals call IS dash?
Bloke on R4 this morning repeatly used that term.

deash is the Arabic name widely used for ISIS/ISIL

@DaRC – you cannot hem in the whole of Syria and what about the millions of innocent people who are caught in the middle of what 50,000 ISIS fighters ?

duckman, there is no plan-B….civilians are classed as collateral damage in instances such as this I believe.

I know no more or less than anybody else in this thread, everybody in here is getting 2nd hand information from TV news, Internet sites, radio news and published news….really unless we have some genuine Middle East experts in this forum who have worked or lived there then everybody is getting their information from the same sources….but it doesn’t stop some posters desperately trying to come over as more high-brow or informed than the next wannabe expert.

I’m happy to acknowledge my lack of expertise on the region.

It doesn’t change the fact that I’d still happily see a government acting on my behalf flatten the area, its inhabitants (innocent or otherwise) and treat the area afterwards as the worlds largest landfill site.

Insane.

So currently they have no money…

Assuming that rich arabs stop funding them too.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/11052919/How-Isil-is-funded-trained-and-operating-in-Iraq-and-Syria.html

“During the war in Afghanistan, Saudi supporters could donate money directly at their mosque with no government supervision.”

It doesn’t change the fact that I’d still happily see a government acting on my behalf flatten the area, its inhabitants (innocent or otherwise) and treat the area afterwards as the worlds largest landfill site.

Stalin – your cab’s here.

deviant – Member
but it doesn’t stop some posters desperately trying to come over as more high-brow or informed than the next wannabe expert.
.

not advocating genocide is not hi brow! 😆

Lifer – Member

Insane. Retarded or trolling

Fixed.

DaRC_L – Member

> they may have oil wells but can’t refine it in bulk
> low oil prices mean the bottom has dropped out of the black market for oil

So currently they have no money, soon they will have no food. Attacking them (and looking at their social media information) just fuels their extremist narrative.

According to the Brooking report linked earlier in the thread, IS are making $2 million a week smuggling oil from Iraq and Syria, and are worth approximately $2 billion.

Unfortunately funding doesn’t seem to be an issue for them.

“No money”

ISIL where widely rumoured to have been selling oil on the black market through / to Turks, that has stopped/slowed down from what I read.

When they took over Mosul the central bank allegedly had close to $1bn in cash.

jambalaya – Member
The Arabs invaded Europe and got as far as Tours in central France before being repelled. I have no doubt ISIS would dream of a re-run.

That’s a bit disingenuous as Europe and France didn’t exist, and the Umayyad’s didn’t stay above the Pyrenees during the winter or found any towns. It was more raiding parties interested in money, it’s thought they were heading towards Tours because of the wealth of the cathedral.

In Our Time – Battle of Tours

explains it well.

deviant
ISIS/ISIL or whatever they’re called this week are sub human, I suggest the authorities treat them as such.

Ironically, much the sort of blinkered evil nastiness that IS are such big fans of.

–

you cannot hem in the whole of Syria and what about the millions of innocent people who are caught in the middle of what 50,000 ISIS fighters ?

by ‘hem’ I mean control the expansion, limited support of local anti IS fighters (e.g. Kurds), air patrols of the borders.

AS to the millions of innocents some will be supporters and some will be ex-supporters of IS. Barring on the ground military action, which for IMO is worse than pointless if it involves western troops, by limiting IS access (i.e. as much as possible) to munitions, money and food then (hopefully) IS will be torn apart. Or the millions of innocents who must outnumber IS will tear them apart.

To my mind, like Afghanistan (and to an extent NI), fighting extremism cannot be done with outside force. It has to be an internal change.

All the time the liberal west is meddling it fuels the fundamentalist message.

Bragg and the BBC rewriting history again. “We’d all be reading the Koran if Martel hadn’t won at Poitier” to start the programme (and speaking German if Hitler had caught a cold in the Winter of 41 obviously – not). Read Wiki or some other more reliable source. Martel.

The subdued sniggering on Radio 4 (or is it just heavy breathing) tells you not to take it seriously.

If you finish the program Edukator they completely debunk that point.

But it is the ‘accepted’ view that it Charles ‘the Hammer’ stopped the invasion of the Muslim hordes.

I know, Lifer, that’s why I said that’s how they “started” the programme.

They then talked about the middle age events as if they were Renaissance or more recent and imposing current political thinking on a marauding group wandering around France and those fighting them off. I’m sure those being attacked didn’t give a flying f who the legitimate parents of the boss were, they just didn’t fancy having their infidel heads cut off. The Romans invaded and occupied, the Moors ran around frightening people into truces until they annoyed so many people they got kicked out.

The historians seems to have spent a lot of time looking at eighteenth century romantic paintings and not enough time walking around northern Spain and southern France. You may have heard of the glorious Roland (mountaineers may know the brêche named after him). The better you get to know the places and events the less glorious and more desperate despot he becomes. His “glorious” death in battle coming because he seriously rattled some locals with a gratuitous attack rather than a betrayal.

Wahhabism has got a lot to answer for. That’s my take on the whole thing. If you look at who the Wahhabi and Salafi were, who they became, and what they’ve been preaching, funding and encouraging – either actively or covertly – for the last 250-odd years, you start to see how we’ve come to today’s atrocities. Tom Holland makes a valid point in his recent Spectator “diary”:

…the centrality of Mohammed to Islam may be the key to combatting jihadism. The Muslim prophet comes in many forms. There is the moral leader who inspires the community that gives more in charity than any other in Britain: the man who swallowed abuse peaceably, railed against the oppression of the weak, and cut off a portion of his cloak rather than disturb a cat. Then there is the war-leader: the man who fought battles, staged mass executions, and ordered people who had insulted him put to death. It is not hard to guess with which Mohammed the Charlie Hebdo killers identified — nor the many Muslims who have been flocking to join the Islamic State. The surest way to stop the growth of violent jihadism in the long term is not, I suspect, to de-radicalise the jihadis. Rather, it is to de-radicalise Mohammed.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/diary/9420082/tom-hollands-diary-fighting-jihadism-with-mohammed-and-bowling-the-crown-prince-of-udaipur/

The victors always write the history books
“El Suspiro de Moros” is another place named in a Brèche de Roland style

ISIS/ISIL or whatever they’re called this week are sub human

No, they are humans doing what humans do, namely killing each other in horrific ways. Labeling them as sub human means that you fail to understand the human condition.

Tom_W1987 – Member
ISIS/ISIL or whatever they’re called this week are sub human
No, they are humans doing what humans do, namely killing each other in horrific ways. Labeling them as sub human means that you fail to understand the human condition.

Or to understand that people don’t get radicalised in a vacuum(for right or wrong.)

It’s actually one of the things that baffles me about these conversation is alot of peoples inability to understand that people are affected by events that happened before yesterday! 😆

I certainly didn’t take that conclusion from the programme, Edukator. In fact I thought they treated the non-contemporary accounts of the battle in the same manner as you have with the stories of Roland.

I have a Lebanese and UAE business aquantices – I have known both of them for twenty odd years and the thing that absoloutley sets us apart is our views on long, short and medium timescales and how they view these timescales – in a nut shell we in the west view 25 years as the long term for them it’s 250 years – hence we try to solve our problems in a one tenth of the time they solve theirs, hence ISIS view all of this as a long term struggle they don’t believe they can win in 25 years but 250 is possible. So short term in their eyes was our occupation of Afghanistan they know we will give up and simply disappear leaving a vacum and this is our problem we think we can fix stuff in a few years (compounded by ww1 ww2 victories?)

We (the west) are simply transient in there eyes (I have been told this by an individual from the ME who was by no means a radical) this is partially why moderate ME nations do not come out that strongly against ISIS.

This is completely understood by western govs but they have no way of dealing with it other than fire fighting – no one is prepared to deploy troops on the ground for the next 25 years let alone 250 – some of this stuff is so f**king obvious that the media in the west has a full time job suppressing it.

This will continue and get very slowly worse – just not enough to force critical action as I pointed out earlier in a thread these horrific acts are testing the boundries of what individual states will stand – as an example what will Jordan actually do? **** all is the answer.

OK. Devils advocate.. Could this lead to a similar solution aka Sri Lanka government and the Tamil (Tigers)?

Depends who is the Tiger and who is the Government? And which is in the corner?

What on earth prompts anyone on here to actively seek out a video they know will show another human, being burnt alive?
You’ll be knitting next to the gallows next.

Haven’t. Won’t. Ever.
Satisfied?

Interesting article describing how America created IS

I don’t agree with it all, seems oversimplified in places but an interesting read.

Personally I think the best thing ‘The West’ could be doing right now is helping to strengthen the boarders betweek Turkey/Syria Jordan/Syria and anywhere else that would help to contain this lunacy.

If we could cut the flow of wannabes/money/supplies/munitions going in, and the flow of smuggled oil/radicalised wannabes getting out it would do more to degrade IS than a few air strikes.

Done smartly (with Turkey/Jordan taking the lead) it would look/feel more like the islamic world taking the lead.

Yep, I know this wouldn’t bode well for the innocent people trapped in this area, but sadly I think many are doomed anyway.

Long term I feel we need to distance ourselves politically and financially from the Middle East (ain’t going to happen I know) as ultimately this isn’t our problem, and we can do very little to sort it out.

It is our problem! And sending troops in, even to ‘help’ is understandably viewed with suspicion after all the times we’ve ‘helped’ in the past by blowing massive holes in the region.

From reading the paper this morning, it looks like those Jordanian F-16’s are about to get busy.

Which is surely progress. Its about time the powers in the region start sorting their own problems out. And if that means going to war with each other, then fine. Leave ’em to it.

Its not like we were shy of doing that with each other in Europe until recently

Its got to be better than whats (somewhat inevitably) coming out of parliament from our own glorious leaders at the moment. They’re saying we need to step up bombing raids. Why? WTF has it got to do with us? Its our catastrophic involvement in the region thats got us to where we are.

It is our problem! And sending troops in, even to ‘help’ is understandably viewed with suspicion after all the times we’ve ‘helped’ in the past by blowing massive holes in the region.

Recent events haven’t helped but the current problems stem from hundreds of years problems. I’d actually pinpoint the siege of Mecca in 1979 and the grand mosque seizure as being the key influence in recent problems. The Saudi government had to get permission from the Ulama to attack the insurgents in the mosque. The trade off for this permission was granting the Ulama far more power to preach a much more radical version of Islam. The changes they introduced were pretty grim and the influence remains today.

oldmanmtb – Member
I have a Lebanese and UAE business aquantices – I have known both of them for twenty odd years and the thing that absoloutley sets us apart is our views on long, short and medium timescales and how they view these timescales – in a nut shell we in the west view 25 years as the long term for them it’s 250 years – hence we try to solve our problems in a one tenth of the time they solve theirs, hence ISIS view all of this as a long term struggle they don’t believe they can win in 25 years but 250 is possible. So short term in their eyes was our occupation of Afghanistan they know we will give up and simply disappear leaving a vacum and this is our problem we think we can fix stuff in a few years (compounded by ww1 ww2 victories?)

We (the west) are simply transient in there eyes (I have been told this by an individual from the ME who was by no means a radical) this is partially why moderate ME nations do not come out that strongly against ISIS.

This is completely understood by western govs but they have no way of dealing with it other than fire fighting – no one is prepared to deploy troops on the ground for the next 25 years let alone 250 – some of this stuff is so f**king obvious that the media in the west has a full time job suppressing it.

This will continue and get very slowly worse – just not enough to force critical action as I pointed out earlier in a thread these horrific acts are testing the boundries of what individual states will stand – as an example what will Jordan actually do? **** all is the answer.

Wise words old man.

BoardinBob – Member
Recent events haven’t helped but the current problems stem from hundreds of years problems

For sure, and not even limited to the region. If Europe didn’t have 1000 year history of pogroms against the Jews would the State of Israel exist now?