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Your mea culpa has been accepted. No need to beat yourself over it; just stop and think before you post next time.
grrr. woof.
i will. christ, generalizations like that are the root problems. i'm so, so sorry.
Active Member
Originally Posted by c0f3d
Don't delete it. Let every see that you said it, and then that you had your mind changed and apologised. There's not enough of that happening these days and it's good to see
grrr. woof.
i don't want to be an example. i'm so ashamed. i know better.
i just need to go to bed and forget this shit.
Behold the morning star
You know what pisses me off, people on social media calling everyone sheep for showing any remorse towards the victims of this tragedy.
Seriously? How the fuck ?
tempus est umbra in mente
it could be any religion. You can rally people around ideas, any idea. Any concept can be twisted to brainwash people and convince them to do terrible things. I used to think there was something inherently "powerful" about the way Islam seemed to be capable of fueling the capacity to do this sort of thing, but I realized it has nothing to do with it really.
These terror groups could self-identify as buddhist, and they could still use a twisted "interpretation" of that to accomplish the same ultimate goal. The only reason they're using Islam is because it's the predominant religion in the regions where these groups are recruiting.
Bite me
Last edited by allegro; 11-15-2015 at 10:46 PM.
Bite me
Because this is just scratching the surface. They are like cockroaches. You can't bomb one apartment and rid the whole building of bugs. The bugs are everywhere, and the bugs move to a new location.
Worse yet, word is that the U.S. and French governments had been warned by Iraq of a possible attack. This was a huge intelligence failure.
Last edited by allegro; 11-15-2015 at 11:34 PM.
Banned
tempus est umbra in mente
Ugh to that last comment response to Stephen King. It's not just "the atheists" who are stereotyping Muslims. The knee-jerk reaction is understandable... after all, it's the reaction the terrorists are trying to invoke.
Throbbing Member
Yeah that Stephen King thing is bullshit...its so much more complex....
Throbbing Member
This is a rather long article in The Atlantic, but it's a good overview of ISIS and its goals, as well as how it differs from Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda usually didn't go after soft targets in an effort to avoid killing other Muslims, while ISIS goes after soft targets in effort to terrorize them into submission. ISIS thinks that the apocalypse is coming, and they're going to do everything possible to set up the conditions for it to happen.
Throbbing Member
Khrz
Holy fuck, I'm sincerely so sorry for your loss.
Last edited by Rdm; 11-16-2015 at 04:19 AM.
Active Member
I think the "atheists" comment was in response to the Westboro=Christians part though.
But yeah, just because the guys are Muslims and manipulated via this ideology doesn't make them representative of the faith as a whole. They have a whole other bunch of issues, very little of which are addressed. Religion happens to be a prominent, well-established structure with a strong culture, "clear" guidelines, and in this case easy to twist into an immediate call for radical action. It could be anything.
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Stubby Member
http://www.thenation.com/article/wha...sis-prisoners/
I thought it was an interesting article on why those fighters join the ranks of terrorists in the first place and how it has less to do with radical Islamic ideas than you might think.
Administrator
Yeah, it's called blowback.
Meanwhile, Hollande is considering extending a state of emergency to three months. Not good.
God is an American
Precisely. In fact, that is exactly what's happened in Myanmar; the monk class became so twisted by anti-Muslim sentiment that they warped into murderous gangs. Daesh is preying on fears that they will become a global Islamic caliphate; other groups are pushing back in kind with viciously ignorant violence. We must take care in the West not to fall in that trap.
It's part of their plan.
Last edited by botley; 11-16-2015 at 08:26 AM.
Bite me
There is also Sunnis vs. Shiites.
See also thisThere are 1.6 billion Muslims across the world. Roughly 85% of them are Sunnis.
The division began after the death of the Prophet Mohammed some 1,400 years ago, as a disagreement about who should succeed him.
The Sunnis felt that Abu Bakr, a close friend of the prophet's, ought to be the next Muslim leader.
But the Shiites claimed that Mohammed had annointed his son-in-law, Ali, as his rightful successor.
The Sunnis won out, but a split was born, and that rift was cemented when Ali's son was later killed by the ruling Sunni's troops -- an event which the Shiites commemorate every year.
Fast-forward more than a thousand years, and the situation is worse than ever. According to a poll by Pew Research, some 40% of Sunnis don't even regard Shiites as real Muslims.
But there's more than theology at work here. Perhaps even more important is geography.
One hundred years ago, around the time of the First World War, the Middle East was carved up in a Franco-British pact called the Sykes-Picot Agreement. But the Europeans had little interest in understanding the religious and ethnic intricacies of the Middle East when they divided up the region. Still, these arbitrary borders became the blueprint for today's maps.
The Shiites were divided primarily among Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, with Alawites (an off-shoot of Shia Islam) in Syria. This area has come to be known as the Shia crescent.
Sunni Muslims make up the bulk of the population of other countries in the region, with pockets of Shiites scattered among them.
As you might expect, problems arise in countries where both sects are vying for power, or one feels oppressed. In Syria, for example, a Sunni majority has been ruled for the last 45 years by an Alawite minority.
In Iraq, a Sunni minority ruled over the Shiite majority for decades. After the U.S. invasion, Saddam Hussein -- a Sunni -- was overthrown, and a Shiite government took over. That government proceeded to marginalize the Sunnis, and now some of those disenfranchised Sunnis have gone on to form the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS.
Let's do a quick who's-who in the Middle East: Al Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni Muslim groups. Hezbollah is Shiite.
Osama bin Laden was a Sunni. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite. And the Iranian mullahs are Shiites as well, which helps explain why Iran has gotten involved in the conflict in Syria.
See this re Iraq and Iran and Shias
The Sunni-Shia divide is nearly 1,400 years old, dating back to a dispute over the succession of leadership in the Muslim community following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632.
Despite periods of open conflict between Sunnis and Shias in countries such as Lebanon and Iraq, the two groups are not all that different in terms of religious beliefs and commitment. In Iraq, for example, both groups express virtually universal belief in God and the Prophet Muhammad, and similar percentages (82% of Shias and 83% of Sunnis) say religion is very important in their lives. More than nine-in-ten Iraqi Shias (93%) and Sunnis (96%) say they fast during the holy month of Ramadan.
In some countries, significant shares of Muslims don’t even see the distinction between Sunni and Shia Islam as relevant. A survey of Muslims in 39 countries that we conducted in 2011 and 2012 found, for example, that 74% of Muslims in Kazakhstan and 56% of Muslims in Indonesia identified themselves as neither Sunni nor Shia, but “just a Muslim.” In Iraq, however, only 5% answered “just a Muslim.”
On some religious issues, including whether it is acceptable to visit the shrines of Muslim saints, the differences between the sects are more apparent. For some, the divide is even exclusionary. In late 2011, 14% of Iraqi Sunnis said they do not consider Shias to be Muslims. (By contrast, only 1% of Shias in Iraq said that Sunnis are not Muslims.) Even higher percentages of Sunnis in other countries, such as Sunni-dominated Egypt (53%), say that Shias are not Muslims.
Last edited by allegro; 11-16-2015 at 01:57 PM.
tempus est umbra in mente
so now it's apparently come out that the attackers coordinated and communicated via Playstation 4s?
Active Member
Link?
I know there was a story on that a while back about terrorists, in general, using it. There are loads of communication methods they use though. All this "Snowden has blood on his hands and we should further impede privacy" rhetoric is ridiculous.
Bite me
This is a really really fascinating article, I wish everybody would read this.
But then we also have to look at something called Wahhabism.I. Devotion
In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video tracing its origins to bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi, the brutal head of al‑Qaeda in Iraq from roughly 2003 until his killing in 2006, as a more immediate progenitor, followed sequentially by two other guerrilla leaders before Baghdadi [ISIL's leader], the caliph. Notably unmentioned: bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, the owlish Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads al‑Qaeda. Zawahiri has not pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, and he is increasingly hated by his fellow jihadists. His isolation is not helped by his lack of charisma; in videos he comes across as squinty and annoyed. But the split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the making, and begins to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust of the latter.
Zawahiri’s companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda’s intellectual architect and the most important jihadist unknown to the average American newspaper reader. On most matters of doctrine, Maqdisi and the Islamic State agree. Both are closely identified with the jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, the “pious forefathers.” These forefathers are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.
Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man’s advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi’s penchant for bloody spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred of other Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous. “If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ ” the Prophet said, “then one of them is right.” If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi heedlessly expanded the range of behavior that could make Muslims infidels.
Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution and “not issue sweeping proclamations of takfir” or “proclaim people to be apostates because of their sins.” The distinction between apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.
Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.
Wahhabism to ISIS: how Saudi Arabia exported the main source of global terrorism "Although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century."
So the 18th-century reformers were convinced that if Muslims were to regain lost power and prestige, they must return to the fundamentals of their faith, ensuring that God – rather than materialism or worldly ambition – dominated the political order. There was nothing militant about this “fundamentalism”; rather, it was a grass-roots attempt to reorient society and did not involve jihad. One of the most influential of these revivalists was Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-91), a learned scholar of Najd in central Arabia, whose teachings still inspire Muslim reformers and extremists today. He was especially concerned about the popular cult of saints and the idolatrous rituals at their tombs, which, he believed, attributed divinity to mere mortals. He insisted that every single man and woman should concentrate instead on the study of the Quran and the “traditions” (hadith) about the customary practice (Sunnah) of the Prophet and his companions. Like Luther, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab wanted to return to the earliest teachings of his faith and eject all later medieval accretions. He therefore opposed Sufism and Shiaism as heretical innovations (bidah), and he urged all Muslims to reject the learned exegesis developed over the centuries by the ulema (“scholars”) and interpret the texts for themselves.
This naturally incensed the clergy and threatened local rulers, who believed that interfering with these popular devotions would cause social unrest. Eventually, however, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab found a patron in Muhammad Ibn Saud, a chieftain of Najd who adopted his ideas. But tension soon developed between the two because Ibn Abd al-Wahhab refused to endorse Ibn Saud’s military campaigns for plunder and territory, insisting that jihad could not be waged for personal profit but was permissible only when the umma was attacked militarily. He also forbade the Arab custom of killing prisoners of war, the deliberate destruction of property and the slaughter of civilians, including women and children. Nor did he ever claim that those who fell in battle were martyrs who would be rewarded with a high place in heaven, because a desire for such self-aggrandisement was incompatible with jihad. Two forms of Wahhabism were emerging: where Ibn Saud was happy to enforce Wahhabi Islam with the sword to enhance his political position, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab insisted that education, study and debate were the only legitimate means of spreading the one true faith.
Yet although scripture was so central to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s ideology, by insisting that his version of Islam alone had validity, he had distorted the Quranic message. The Quran firmly stated that “There must be no coercion in matters of faith” (2:256), ruled that Muslims must believe in the revelations of all the great prophets (3:84) and that religious pluralism was God’s will (5:48). Muslims had, therefore, been traditionally wary of takfir, the practice of declaring a fellow Muslim to be an unbeliever (kafir). Hitherto Sufism, which had developed an outstanding appreciation of other faith traditions, had been the most popular form of Islam and had played an important role in both social and religious life. “Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest,” urged the great mystic Ibn al-Arabi (d.1240). “God the omniscient and omnipresent cannot be confined to any one creed.” It was common for a Sufi to claim that he was a neither a Jew nor a Christian, nor even a Muslim, because once you glimpsed the divine, you left these man-made distinctions behind.
Despite his rejection of other forms of Islam, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself refrained from takfir, arguing that God alone could read the heart, but after his death Wahhabis cast this inhibition aside and the generous pluralism of Sufism became increasingly suspect in the Muslim world.
After his death, too, Wahhabism became more violent, an instrument of state terror. As he sought to establish an independent kingdom, Abd al-Aziz Ibn Muhammad, Ibn Saud’s son and successor, used takfir to justify the wholesale slaughter of resistant populations. In 1801, his army sacked the holy Shia city of Karbala in what is now Iraq, plundered the tomb of Imam Husain, and slaughtered thousands of Shias, including women and children; in 1803, in fear and panic, the holy city of Mecca surrendered to the Saudi leader.
Eventually, in 1815, the Ottomans despatched Muhammad Ali Pasha, governor of Egypt, to crush the Wahhabi forces and destroy their capital. But Wahhabism became a political force once again during the First World War when the Saudi chieftain – another Abd al-Aziz – made a new push for statehood and began to carve out a large kingdom for himself in the Middle East with his devout Bedouin army, known as the Ikhwan, the “Brotherhood”.
In the Ikhwan we see the roots of IS. To break up the tribes and wean them from the nomadic life, which was deemed incompatible with Islam, the Wahhabi clergy had settled the Bedouin in oases, where they learned farming and the crafts of sedentary life and were indoctrinated in Wahhabi Islam. Once they exchanged the time-honoured ghazu raid, which typically resulted in the plunder of livestock, for the jihad, these Bedouin fighters became more violent and extreme, covering their faces when they encountered Europeans and non-Saudi Arabs and fighting with lances and swords because they disdained weaponry not used by the Prophet. In the old ghazu raids, the Bedouin had always kept casualties to a minimum and did not attack non-combatants. Now the Ikhwan routinely massacred “apostate” unarmed villagers in their thousands, thought nothing of slaughtering women and children, and routinely slit the throats of all male captives.
In 1915, Abd al-Aziz planned to conquer the Hijaz (an area in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia that includes the cities of Mecca and Medina), the Persian Gulf to the east of Najd, and the land that is now Syria and Jordan in the north, but during the 1920s he tempered his ambitions in order to acquire diplomatic standing as a nation state with Britain and the United States. The Ikhwan, however, continued to raid the British protectorates of Iraq, Transjordan and Kuwait, insisting that no limits could be placed on jihad. Regarding all modernisation as bidah, the Ikhwan also attacked Abd al-Aziz for permitting telephones, cars, the telegraph, music and smoking – indeed, anything unknown in Muhammad’s time – until finally Abd al-Aziz quashed their rebellion in 1930.
...
Saudi Arabia. Its swords, covered faces and cut-throat executions all recall the original Brotherhood. But it is unlikely that the IS hordes consist entirely of diehard jihadists. A substantial number are probably secularists who resent the status quo in Iraq: Ba’athists from Saddam Hussein’s regime and former soldiers of his disbanded army. This would explain IS’s strong performance against professional military forces. In all likelihood, few of the young recruits are motivated either by Wahhabism or by more traditional Muslim ideals. In 2008, MI5’s behavioural science unit noted that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.” A significant proportion of those convicted of terrorism offences since the 9/11 attacks have been non-observant, or are self-taught, or, like the gunman in the recent attack on the Canadian parliament, are converts to Islam. They may claim to be acting in the name of Islam, but when an untalented beginner tells us that he is playing a Beethoven sonata, we hear only cacophony. Two wannabe jihadists who set out from Birmingham for Syria last May had ordered Islam for Dummies from Amazon.
It would be a mistake to see IS as a throwback; it is, as the British philosopher John Gray has argued, a thoroughly modern movement that has become an efficient, self-financing business with assets estimated at $2bn. Its looting, theft of gold bullion from banks, kidnapping, siphoning of oil in the conquered territories and extortion have made it the wealthiest jihadist group in the world. There is nothing random or irrational about IS violence. The execution videos are carefully and strategically planned to inspire terror, deter dissent and sow chaos in the greater population.
Mass killing is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. During the French Revolution, which led to the emergence of the first secular state in Europe, the Jacobins publicly beheaded about 17,000 men, women and children. In the First World War, the Young Turks slaughtered over a million Armenians, including women, children and the elderly, to create a pure Turkic nation. The Soviet Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge and the Red Guard all used systematic terrorism to purge humanity of corruption. Similarly, IS uses violence to achieve a single, limited and clearly defined objective that would be impossible without such slaughter. As such, it is another expression of the dark side of modernity.
Last edited by allegro; 11-16-2015 at 12:03 PM.
Active Member
A word of caution using this to the point we miss an important component of the situation.
"Not all Catholics are pedophiles" in response to several of that church's scandals. It's true, but kind of dismissive.
"Mormons are not true Christians" would be even more questionable considering how subjective religion is. Mormon's differ from other Christians a lot more than ISIS differs from other Muslims. The Mormons invented their own religious texts. There really isn't any hard line for who is and who isn't a part of a certain religion.
Bite me
Here is one of many links. Note that it says this:
Correction: This post has been edited as it has not been confirmed that a [Playstation 4] console was found as a result of these specific Belgian terror raids. Minister Jambon was speaking about tactics he knows ISIS to be using generally. Evidence gathered in recent raids has not been publicly listed.
Administrator
CIA Director Brennan, whose agency has virtually an unlimited budget, extraordinary powers with little oversight, says the attacks happened because privacy advocates have undermined the ability of spies to monitor terrorists.
she/her/hers
can an entire person be face-palmed? because seriously. are you fucking kidding? what a moron -_-
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Bite me
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The US govt had just started backing off their position of mandated backdoors in encrypted communications. They are going to milk any terrorist attack in hopes of getting some more privacy invasive shit passed. No matter what they say, nothing will force evil-doers to use weakened crypto systems. It will only be the law abiding citizens stuck with it. There is plenty of strong crypto out there that isn't going to vanish. Some of the strongest is from the 90's!
It's a really good time to show people this commentary on the evil automobile from the 1922 Michigan Supreme Court:
"The automobile is a swift and powerful vehicle of recent development, which has multiplied by quantity production and taken possession of our highways in battalions, until the slower, animal-drawn vehicles, with their easily noted individuality, are rare. Constructed as covered vehicles to standard form in immense quantities, and with a capacity for speed rivaling express trains, they furnish for successful commission of crime a disguising means of silent approach and swift escape unknown in the history of the world before their advent. The question of their police control and reasonable search on highways or other public places is a serious question far deeper and broader than their use in so-called 'bootlegging' or 'rumrunning,' which in itself is no small matter. While a possession in the sense of private ownership, they are but a vehicle constructed for travel and transportation on highways. Their active use is not in homes nor on private premises, the privacy of which the law especially guards from search and seizure without process. The baffling extent to which they are successfully utilized to facilitate commission of crime of all degrees, from those against morality, chastity, and decency to robbery, rape, burglary, and murder, is a matter of common knowledge. Upon that problem a condition and not a theory confronts proper administration of our criminal laws. Whether search of and seizure from an automobile upon a highway or other public place without a search warrant is unreasonable is in its final analysis to be determined as a judicial question in view of all the circumstances under which it is made."
Active Member
ok, apparently we can get even more ridiculous.
wtf is forbes smoking?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertco...-plan-attacks/
"An ISIS agent could spell out an attack plan in Super Mario Maker’s coins and share it privately with a friend, or two Call of Duty players could write messages to each other on a wall in a disappearing spray of bullets. "
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