[TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] Britain's role as a chief exporter of terror was made horrifically clear this week. We examine the key failings of government and security forces that allowed home-grown jihadists to flourish
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Chief exporter? Those POMS are JV. I can't believe the release of Omari, Wasiq, Noori, Fazi, and Khaikwa didn't put us over the top. Oh well, sometimes you only hit a single, or a double.
#4
we have alot of unemployed brit born pakis and somalians looking for a purpose in life ie jihad as they dont like the idea of having to work for a living!
Posted by: Paul D ||
08/25/2014 6:44 Comments ||
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#5
The social welfare state offer the gray of state subsidized housing and food with limited opportunity in employment. The jihad offers legitimized pillaging, raping and looting. Get off that butt, couch potato. /sarc off
#6
The United Kingdom should take a lesson from the Magic Kingdom. Do your best to promote the Jihad-minded to leave the country and get killed somewhere else.
Charter a flight and get them to the middle east free of cost, they just have to turn over their passport.
Convince people that those preaching Jihad in Mosques are cowards for not sending their own children or going themselves.
We are not engaged in a religious war. The other side is, but we're not...
This is not a confrontation between Islam and the West. It's a confrontation between a number of Islamic sects and the West.
To start from that premise is to place Isil (which should not be called by its presumptive title "Islamic State") That's what's on its letterhead...
on precisely the ground it wishes to occupy. As the voices of what the media calls "moderate Moslems" -- who should actually just be described as "Moslems" -- Try identifying by sect. I'm guessing the writer doesn't know much about the gradations among turbans. Deobandis verge toward the immoderate. Salafists are immoderate, even though not every single one of them is a bloodthirsty lunatic. The several stripes of takfiri are the ones who've been carrying out warfare against us. The Moslem Brotherhood just wants to subvert us (and everyone else) from the inside. Hamas isn't Salafist but they're happy to shoot rockets at random into Israel. The Saudis are salafists but they try to be slick so people keep giving them money they can spend on holy war. The definition of "moderate" in the Moslem world is pretty greasy.
say repeatedly, the activities of these terrorist criminals hacking their way through northern Iraq have nothing to do with the Islamic faith. Except that it does have everything to do with the Islamic faith. It calls itself Islamic. It justifies its most horrible actions with verses from the Koran and the hadith. Those things she's wearing are called "blinders." Without Islam there would be no Islamic State.
Odd as it may seem at a time of death and destruction, it is important to pay attention to words. They're way cheaper than Tomahawk missiles...
To give the combatants the description they seize for themselves is to lose half the moral argument that must be won before effective action can be taken. When you're attacked you don't stand around having moral arguments. You kick your attacker in the cojones and let the UN worry about whether it was a war crime (it probably was, of course). So it is more important than ever to say that this is not a struggle between "our values" and those of medieval fundamentalism, or Islamist extremism. Except that's precisely what it is. It's a struggle with the modern equivalent of Vandals and Visigoths and Ostrogoths, against Avars and Huns.
The contest is not modern liberal democracy versus the Dark Ages. Coulda fooled the hell out of us.
This is to impose meaning on what is, in truth, meaningless. The meaning, dumb-dumb, is to reestablish a caliphate and conquer the world. If you don't believe that, Tinkerbelle dies and your grandchildren will wear burkas and have no external genitalia.
There is nothing coherent or comprehensible at the heart of the homicidal Isil frenzy. "Because I can't understand it, it's incomprehensible."
It is just what it looks like: psychopathic nihilism. It's a religious strain that's perfect for psychopaths and nihilists.
Indeed, it may be worse than counterproductive to deal with Isil as if it were a rational force with established roots and a comprehensible set of demands capable of political solution. Just as this is not about religion, it is also not about politics, which only comes into play if there is an agreement at the start that life itself is worth having. The politics they're engaging in consist of "surrender or die."
There is not even anything particularly Middle Eastern in the Isil mode of operation. Ohfergawdsake. In fact, the gratuitous violence and promiscuous mayhem of its onslaught resembles nothing so much as 19th-century European anarchism, whose objective was simply to create the maximum amount of indiscriminate chaos with the vague intention of undermining the existing order. It resembles nothing so much as the ugly eruption of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th Century, which imposed the same "surrender or die" options on everyone from the Pyrenees to the Indus. All those Arabic-speaking countries in North Africa had their own languages and cultures. Ask an Amazigh.
Nor are the utterances that the West has come to regard as characteristic of this contemporary terrorist threat uniquely "Islamist". The infamous taunt of al-Qaeda, which it boasted would always guarantee its victory " "You love life, we love death" " was a widely held sentiment in the anarchist movement. Except that we're not talking about anarchists but about religious totalitarians. Want to see something gaudy and pointless and unlikely? Watch Conan the Barbarian, the Arnold Schwarzeneggar classic. Keep an eye out for the part where Thulsa Doom points a finger at one of his henchmen at random and the guy obediently jumps off a cliff. That's not anarchy. That's the Prophet (PTUI!) in person.
In Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, about London anarchists in the 1890s, a chief instigator and bomb expert derides the enemy in precisely these terms: "They depend on life [which is] open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident." Good idea. Let's go to novels for our historical perspective. Lessee.... What's a good one?... How about "Saint Martin's Summer" by Sabatini? The part where M. de Garnache says "Move so much as a finger, my pretty fellow, and I'll crush the life from you as from a toad." You can be perfectly fearless about death, but it takes a certain kind of pervert to get into pain.
So, no, there is nothing original or unprecedented about this. The world has dealt with mass psychosis before " or rather, failed to deal with it. Ask Jim Jones about that...
It would be unforgiveable to make the same fatal mistake again: to treat what is really a form of mindlessness as if it were a rational programme that could somehow be accommodated in the global debat The time for debating has long since flown. Actually it flew into the side of the World Trade Center thirteen years ago, if not before...
"We love death" is not a negotiable demand. Murdering a Western journalist who had been reporting outrages of the kind which Isil itself condemned is not an intelligible move in any campaign that is susceptible to argument. Far from being a homogeneous, principled force, there is no common root of grievance among the Isil ranks: the British Pak recruits will be more concerned about Kashmire than Gazoo or Iraq. The "grievance" is other religions. But if you wear blinders you can't see that. The fact that religion's not very important to you doesn't mean it's not mind-rottingly important to someone else. And some of them seem to have had relatively little understanding of the religious cause to which they were ostensibly committed, like Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar, who ordered Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies from Amazon before they departed for their terrorist sojourn in Syria. As long as "religion" has all the answers, why should they worry about the details? If you've ever seen the movie "Chapaev," the commissar (I forget his name) asks Chapaev which International he adheres to. Chapaev's visibly confused and eventually answers "Whichever one Lenin adheres to." Hitler had all the answers for the Germans, Mussolini for the Italians, Stalin for the Russians. Who needed to think? Just do.
The next obvious question: how do you fight a dream that is without identifiable substance or consistent objectives? If the demands are so wild, so mercurial, so fantastic that there cannot even be a common language for discussing them -- what then? What do you say to someone who's frothing at the mouth?
First, by recognising it for what it is: this is a fantasy of invincibility. Any possibility of eliminating it as a threat will have to treat it as a delusion which must be undermined, not a lucid plan that can be defeated by diplomatic strategy. Tomahawks will give a good demonstration of one's lack of invincibility. What follows from this is that every withdrawal from confrontation, every backward step -- such as Barack Obama My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it... 's retreat from his "red line" in Syria -- is catastrophic. Each time the West (or the Iraqi government) has a failure of nerve, it reinforces the myth of invulnerability -- and another tranche of baby-faced malcontents flies out to sign up for global jihad. In other words, dealing with them will take utter ruthlessness. You have to make them afraid to pick up the turbans and automatic weapons. You have to handle them like Sri Lanka did the Tamil Tigers. When you do this you've got to be aware that the "Human Rights" establishment is going to come howling for your blood when it's all over as they never came howling for the blood of civilization's enemy.
This illusion of world-beating power, there for the taking if you kill everybody in the way, must be extirpated. ...by killing its adherents.
As the American government seems to be beginning to understand, it can only be broken by unflinching resolve and intimidating force. Barack Obama -- the president who never wanted to deal with foreign policy at all, and who appears frighteningly out of his depth -- may have to come to terms with the fact that the world cannot just be told to go away and leave the only remaining superpower in peace. I think B.O. plans to spend the next year and a half golfing. If it's not race-related and he can't wear a tux he's not interested. What does this mean in practice? Take away the success and the glamour will go too, until eventually the delusion cannot be maintained except by a rump of fanatics who can be isolated. Make the defeats as ignominious and mortifying, and as visible, as possible. That's the way to handle B.O. What do we do about the Islamic State?
Arm the honourable combatants, such as the Kurds, and intervene on their behalf when necessary. Ummm... Okay. Sounds good...
Above all, avoid any alliance of convenience with a regime such as Assad's in Syria, whose criminal attacks on its own population helped to create the Isil phenomenon. Even if such an arrangement were to bring temporary relief, a victory on such terms would inevitably spawn another terrorist incarnation: Isil under a new name would be up and running again within a year. The caliphate is an outgrowth of Zarqawi, not of Pencilneck. They moved in on the Syrian rebels because they thrive on state failure like flies thrive in poop. At some point the world is going to have to kiss and make up with Pencilneck. He's going to have his own problems when he can't scrape Hezbollah off his jackboot.
Francois Hollande is (unusually) right to say that, if one year ago we had reacted to the use of chemical weapons in Syria "we wouldn't have had this terrible choice between a dictator and a terrorist group". The chem weapons are irrelevant for this discussion. As Pencilneck waned, so ISIL waxed. But we are where we are. The consequences of last year's cowardice must be a lesson learnt. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, has, thank goodness, ruled out any such rapprochement with Assad, but keep an eye on Washington, which may be in the market for easy (or easier) answers. The rapprochement with Pencilneck will come, even to the UK. Assad, if he doesn't go under to ISIL, will reestablish his "legitimacy." The non-IS rebel groups will come around, those that don't break off to al-Baghdadi.
Even now, the B.O. regime is talking about "smart power" as an alternative to "boots on the ground". What is the force of this distinction? Probably letting the French take the lead (and therefore any blame for less than optimal results)...
There is only one kind of power that can demoralise and eventually destroy a movement that is beyond reason. This may come as a shock to a White House that seems to have so much faith in the magical power of language, but if military intervention is categorically ruled out, then no amount of smart talk will be any use.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2014 00:00 ||
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#3
This psychosis may come to us whether we want it to or not. Do we want to be proactive or reactive (as in 911)? It would seem that the first shot has already been fired with regards to Foley's death.
There are approximately 1.5 Billion people practicing Islam. The DSM-IV states approximately 4% of the general population are seriously mentally disturbed, i.e., crazy as a loon, so that's about 60 million mentally ill who are Moslem.
So its not mass psychosis, its just numbers.
Also its Islam's fatal flaw of allowing any tin hat illiterate goat herder to go to Mekkah, declare himself an Imam, and issue fatwahs on everything from Bugs Bunny to sexually abusing stray cats. The closest thing to a central authority they have is the Grand Imam in Mekkah and Sistani in Najaf leading their particular sects of Islam...and they have no authority other than to trump other fatwas with their fatwas...
I'd say ISIL/ISIS is a collection of the worst nuts with a pure psychopath leading them. I agree they go back to Zaqarwi, who obviously was a serial killer practicing on a grand scale. This Mohammed wanabee with the Rolex leading ISIL is obviously a drooling raving madman.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
08/25/2014 11:14 Comments ||
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#5
This writer would like us to put anti-roach warnings on the roach motel. I say no, let the more violently minded be drawn together. We can warn them about dire consequences and all but eventually they need to be together for arc light and Puff the Magic Dragon to do their work.
In the early days of the war against the Taliban we hit them so damned hard that Pakistanis were returning to Pakistan and beating up the Mullah's who convinced them to go. That's exactly the tone we should be aiming for.
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We are not engaged in a religious war. 
So it is more important than ever to say that this is not a struggle between "our values" and those of medieval fundamentalism, or Islamist extremism.
In fact, the gratuitous violence and promiscuous mayhem of its onslaught resembles nothing so much as 19th-century European anarchism, whose objective was simply to create the maximum amount of indiscriminate chaos with the vague intention of undermining the existing order.
And some of them seem to have had relatively little understanding of the religious cause to which they were ostensibly committed, like Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar, who ordered Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies from Amazon before they departed for their terrorist sojourn in Syria.
What follows from this is that every withdrawal from confrontation, every backward step -- such as 
What does this mean in practice? Take away the success and the glamour will go too, until eventually the delusion cannot be maintained except by a rump of fanatics who can be isolated. Make the defeats as ignominious and mortifying, and as visible, as possible. 
But we are where we are. The consequences of last year's cowardice must be a lesson learnt. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, has, thank goodness, ruled out any such rapprochement with Assad, but keep an eye on Washington, which may be in the market for easy (or easier) answers.
