Mindless terrorists? The truth about Isis is much worse

[uppityperson]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/15/terrorists-isis

It’s “the first of the storm”, says Islamic State. And little wonder. For the chaotic scenes on the streets of Paris and the fearful reaction those attacks provoked are precisely what Isis planned and prayed for. The greater the reaction against Muslims in Europe and the deeper the west becomes involved in military action in the Middle East, the happier Isis leaders will be. Because this is about the organisation’s key strategy: finding, creating and managing chaos.

There is a playbook, a manifesto: The Management of Savagery/Chaos, a tract written more than a decade ago under the name Abu Bakr Naji, for the Mesopotamian wing of al-Qaida that would become Isis. Think of the horror of Paris and then consider these, its principal axioms.

Hit soft targets. “Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.”

(Clip)

Simply treating Isis as a form of “terrorism” or “violent extremism” masks the menace. Merely dismissing it as “nihilistic” reflects a wilful and dangerous avoidance of trying to comprehend, and deal with, its profoundly alluring moral mission to change and save the world. And the constant refrain that Isis seeks to turn back history to the Middle Ages is no more compelling than a claim that the Tea Party movement wants everything the way it was in 1776. The truth is more complicated. As Abu Mousa, Isis’s press officer in Raqqa, put it: “We are not sending people back to the time of the carrier pigeon. On the contrary, we will benefit from development. But in a way that doesn’t contradict the religion.”..
.(more @ link)

[CJCRANE]

1. It's interesting that they're not allowing comments on this opinion piece

as they normally do.

I find the comments as illuminating as the articles.

[Bluenorthwest]

15. I see 2684 comments listed for this piece in the Guardian. Maybe you failed to look down the page

enough. It's right there, a long, long set of comments.

[leveymg]

2. The truth is even worse than that. Until recently, most mainstream political

discourse has described Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Gulf states as western "allies." That is for two reasons: they have been the primary funders of paramilitary operations against Russia and Iran. Second, they have enormous holdings of western corporations. Until now, those have been overriding considerations. I do not think that we can any longer overlook the fact that we are also the target of these same Saudi-funded groups.

Time to go after the bankers.

[CJCRANE]

4. That's probably why they're not allowing comments on the article.

I've noticed that with a lot of these newspaper sites, the readers' comments often refute the article or add missing information.

Even comments on the fairly staid NYT are getting more vociferous.

In fact there may even be more unpalatable truths uttered on mainstream website comments than on DU.

[Bluenorthwest]

16. I see 2684 comments listed for this piece in the Guardian.

Right there at the link. It says this 'Due to the large number of comments, they are being shown 100 per page. ' So there are pages of them.

[CJCRANE]

18. It looks like the article was posted Sunday evening and the comments switched on Monday morning

UK time (if you look at the first post).

I forgot that the Guardian switches off the commenting facility overnight. So they would have left off the comments until their moderators were at work on Monday morning.

[cantbeserious]

3. Iraq Explained -- ISIS, Syria and War

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017308271

[Martin Eden]

5. "in a way that doesn’t contradict the religion"

The slaughter of innocents doesn't contradict the religion of Islam?

[philosslayer]

6. It absolutely does

Islam is a religion of peace.

[Martin Eden]

7. ... then the Islamic State (ISIS) is not Islamic

Their adherents must be capable of some serious Orwellian doublethink.

[hunter]

11. Not unlike Christians.

Many religions have terrorist factions, absolutely certain their own violence is justified by some greater power.

My own ancestors fled violent religious extremism and oppression in Europe for the Americas, displaced by violence fully equivalent to the situation of today's Middle Easterners and North Africans, people seeking refuge from the violent fundamentalism, nationalism, and imperialism tearing apart their homelands.

Peaceful ordinary people want nothing so much as to live peaceful ordinary lives, and when everything in the place they are living goes to hell, they'll risk everything to find a place of peace.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

12. Go tell that to Mohammed.

Yes, it's possible to cherry-pick verses from the Quran to support that absurd position. But viewed as a whole, it very clearly mandates violence against a whole bunch of groups of innocents. And Mohammed's life story also makes it clear that he had no problem with murdering innocents.

[uppityperson]

14. Rather like the Bible.

And yes, primarily the old testament.

[hifiguy]

17. In the so-called holy books

the poetical prose always stands cheek-to-jowl with commands to annihilate/enslave/rape/torture the heathen unbelievers.

Always.

[grntuscarora]

8. Well, gee thanks Guardian.

I feel terrorized from all sides now. The media sure is doing its best to chase me under the bed. Am I to assume that, in the name of combating ISIS, the ptb are soon going to feel compelled to strip me of yet more civil liberties? That has been the trend the past decade and a half. And opinion pieces like Mr. Atran's certainly seem to be greasing the wheels.

Perhaps it's too soon after Paris to have reasoned discussions about responding to the Paris horror and ISIS. Essays such as Mr. Atran's, that compound the grief and create hysteria, are not helping.

[840high]

9. Actually I have read similar

essays in the past.

[Renew Deal]

10. You don't have to read it.

[niyad]

13. k and r and bookmarking, printing to respond to the nonsense I am going to be hearing later.