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ISIL isn't a doomsday cult, they are an extremist right-wing Islamic organisation that want to re-establish a Caliphate like that which existed in the early Middle Ages, and extend its reach ultimately all over the world.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
ISIL isn't a doomsday cult, they are an extremist right-wing Islamic organisation that want to re-establish a Caliphate like that which existed in the early Middle Ages, and extend its reach ultimately all over the world.

The problem is that they also believe that by reestablishing a Caliphate, they allow the arrival of the Mahdi, a messianic figure whose arrival is the Muslim equivalent of the second coming of Jesus and signals the end of days. Their colors are directly related to this, as certain hadiths reference black banners being unfurled after his arrival.

 Laughing Man wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
ISIL isn't a doomsday cult, they are an extremist right-wing Islamic organisation that want to re-establish a Caliphate like that which existed in the early Middle Ages, and extend its reach ultimately all over the world.

The problem is that they also believe that by reestablishing a Caliphate, they allow the arrival of the Mahdi, a messianic figure whose arrival is the Muslim equivalent of the second coming of Jesus and signals the end of days. Their colors are directly related to this, as certain hadiths reference black banners being unfurled after his arrival.

Just a slight nitpick: Islam teaches that the Second Coming of Jesus will occur during the wars of the Mahdi, whom Jesus will follow into battle to defeat the Dajjal. After the Mahdi dies, Jesus will rule in his stead for forty years, after which he will die and be buried in the empty grave next to Muhammad.

 LordofHats wrote:
I brought it up earlier in this thread as well that I think some people overemphasize the Doomsday Cult aspects of ISIS' theology

I'm not yet sure why you are downplaying the role of eschatology in ISIS' theology. They've made it abundantly clear that they're really serious about it. It isn't just lip service; the End of Days is one of their big selling points and what has set them apart from other Islamist extremists.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
I'm not yet sure why you are downplaying the role of eschatology in ISIS' theology.

There's a difference between downplaying and questioning if it's being over emphasized by outside observers. Especially to Westerners who have Christian Eschatology as part of out cultural background, the Islamic view on the 'end of days' can be a bit vexing. Eschatology plays a much smaller role in Islamic faith, particularly in Sunni Islam. Though it may surprise people with how violent Islamic Fundamentalists can be, Islam has a much more optimistic view of human nature than Christianity or Judaism. While Christianity portrays a humanity that is stepped in sin, Islam carries an underlying assumption that humans are fundamentally good. To this end, the end of the world is an event that is... less anticipated in general among Muslims.

The focus given to ISIS' eschatological views was puzzling to me, both because ISIS is Sunni and because some of their ideas seem lifted from Twelver Shia. It actually makes more sense to me that their views have been over emphasized by Western observers where our cultural background on the end of days is very different and.we might pay it much more heed than a Muslim might.

 LordofHats wrote:

There's a difference between downplaying and questioning if it's being over emphasized by outside observers.

I might give more credence to this idea if not for the fact they REALLY trumpet about this on their own. If this ISN'T what they're about, they need to behead their PR men.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

There's a difference between downplaying and questioning if it's being over emphasized by outside observers.

I might give more credence to this idea if not for the fact they REALLY trumpet about this on their own. If this ISN'T what they're about, they need to behead their PR men.

Yeah, I don't understand why he thinks this either. The Western media and government don't really talk about ISIS and their eschatology (or even their theology, other than to claim it's "not Islamic," which isn't true).

I mean, they make a big deal about it and they aren't just pretending either. It's pretty clear that they're pretty fething serious about... but let's go ahead and pretend they just want legitimacy and we'll just have to "accept" them as a state in the Middle East.

 BaronIveagh wrote:


I might give more credence to this idea if not for the fact they REALLY trumpet about this on their own. If this ISN'T what they're about, they need to behead their PR men.

The propaganda of a group is not always reflective of it's real aim. Syria (and a dictator/tyrant from that region) plays a big part in Eschatology, but if they were following that, they wouldn't have their little alliance with Assad. While they trumpet that part of their theology, the groups aims don't seem to be moving towards it outside of talk. The End of Days stuff could be integral to their beliefs, or it could just be an exploitation of current events to further more mundane goals.


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 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
I mean, they make a big deal about it and they aren't just pretending either. It's pretty clear that they're pretty fething serious about... but let's go ahead and pretend they just want legitimacy and we'll just have to "accept" them as a state in the Middle East.

Closing the mind the moment we think we understand a situation is how Western foreign policy keeps fething up in Middle East in the first place (honestly kind of how US foreign policy keeps fething up period, like that whole Comunism Domino Effect thing, which we believed for a couple decades without fail despite having nothing to base it on but the formation of the Warsaw Pact and Communist China. How did that pan out? Did Communism sweep the world?).

 LordofHats wrote:
While they trumpet that part of their theology, the groups aims don't seem to be moving towards it outside of talk. The End of Days stuff could be integral to their beliefs, or it could just be an exploitation of current events to further more mundane goals.

The ransom value of the hostages they've been executing alone would finance a lot of mundane goals, but they've been instead going to the angle of causing as much anger and outrage as possible in an attempt to force other nations to make war on them. They've been demolishing farmlands, etc, so either they're absolute morons, which I doubt, or they're not interested in long term sustainability.

Based on both their actions and their propaganda, you're wrong, and they're very much about bringing about the end of the world.





Here's the thing with this sort of group: if the propaganda isn't what the group is about, the group becomes about it pretty quick because it attracts people who really believe the propaganda.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Based on both their actions and their propaganda, you're wrong, and they're very much about bringing about the end of the world.

I very well might be. It's not like asking the question inherently demands a radical change in how something is viewed. This is on my part a wariness born from continued failures on the part of the US and other Western States to accurately gauge Middle Eastern politics, often resulting in even worse things happening later down the line.

Here's the thing with this sort of group: if the propaganda isn't what the group is about, the group becomes about it pretty quick because it attracts people who really believe the propaganda.

No group of people is a hive mind. This sort of group especially rarely has as much control of itself as outside observers tend to think. ISIS itself began as a 'clique' inside Al Qaeda. There will certainly be multiple cliques inside ISIS. Which ones are doing what, and how much stock do they put into the party line? When you form a group of radicals, you don't have leaders so much as referees precisely because getting any group of radicals to agree on anything for very long is like balancing on a tight rope with no safety net.

 LordofHats wrote:
This is on my part a wariness born from continued failures on the part of the US and other Western States to accurately gauge Middle Eastern politics, often resulting in even worse things happening later down the line.

They fail because they lack the will to bring the region to heel. To really bring places like Syria and Iraq under control, you have to be willing to be brutal when necessary, because that's what politics has boiled down to there for a very long time; a contest of will.

ISIS, ironically, has been trying to instill in them that will to destroy. And they will keep piling horror on horror until someone is willing to come at them in a total war.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
They fail because they lack the will to bring the region to heel. To really bring places like Syria and Iraq under control, you have to be willing to be brutal when necessary, because that's what politics has boiled down to there for a very long time; a contest of will.

And how did bringing Iraq and Afghanistan to heel play out? Assad's attempt to bring his protesters down? We're living it right now.

We obviously can't let ISIS continue as it is (unless we want to just say screw it, but I doubt anyone is on board with that), but becoming everything they are is not going to resolve things in the ME. On top of that, the reality of the contest of wills is that the regional peoples almost always win, because no Western state that isn't a tyranny itself is going to be able to justify a contest of wills for very long.

 LordofHats wrote:

And how did bringing Iraq and Afghanistan to heel play out? Assad's attempt to bring his protesters down? We're living it right now.

No, we're living following the utter failure of the west to have any will at all, and the continuation of the American idea that non-Americans are just "Americans waiting to bust out" that's plagued US foreign policy since, oh, say, the Garfield administration.

 LordofHats wrote:
but becoming everything they are is not going to resolve things in the ME.

I dunno, they seem to be enjoying the one thing to elude the US on the ground: success in dealing the the local people in areas under their control.

 LordofHats wrote:
On top of that, the reality of the contest of wills is that the regional peoples almost always win, because no Western state that isn't a tyranny itself is going to be able to justify a contest of wills for very long.

As a Native American, I find this notion laughable. The west is perfectly capable of the most appalling acts to gain victory. They just like to pretend they'd never do such a thing. The trick is to get them angry enough. Hence ISIS actions to incite them.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
No, we're living following the utter failure of the west to have any will at all, and the continuation of the American idea that non-Americans are just "Americans waiting to bust out" that's plagued US foreign policy since, oh, say, the Garfield administration.

Don't disagree. The whole "let's give them a democracy! it'll all work out!" notion in Afghanistan and Iraq was laughable even before the situation reached this point. We really should have learned that lesson ages ago. At least during the Vietnam War. Excuses for obliviousness kind of dried up around 1970.

I dunno, they seem to be enjoying the one thing to elude the US on the ground: success in dealing the the local people in areas under their control.

? We've had plenty of success in that area. The question is "Which people?" Much of ISIS current smuggling network is built on the old ones they had in their Al Qaeda days. Much of the information we get on them, feeds down to us from the network we built during the Iraq War and Occupation.

As a Native American, I find this notion laughable.

All respect, that's is conflating two different situations that are only superficially similar. Native American groups never launched an insurgency, or anything similar (they had no framework to even understand how the tactics of such a thing would work). What Native American groups did was try to match colonial powers and the US on conventional terms, which ended very badly. Attempting to compare that to what is currently faced in the Middle East is a false equivalency. Modern technology (namely, advancements in communications, explosives, and fire arms) has fundamentally altered the ways regional groups can oppose occupation. A democratic state, rarely wins the contest of wills, and we've seen that time and time again. The electorate will only tolerate such action for so long*, and I don't think the electorate is automatically wrong in that. The Israeli and Algerian Wars of Independence completely altered the state of things. Even before all that, bringing a region to heel was difficult. The Ottoman's were in a constant struggle to hold the Middle East under thumb for long even at their height and they lived right there!

Further, why the hell would we want to go back to that? I've always argued that what the United States did to Native American groups is just a step away from genocide, if not genocide straight up. Seriously man XD

*EDIT: And it's not about good will. People gradually grow tired of friends and family dying in conflicts of questionable utility. We already see a lot of that right now in the US.

 LordofHats wrote:

? We've had plenty of success in that area. The question is "Which people?" Much of ISIS current smuggling network is built on the old ones they had in their Al Qaeda days. Much of the information we get on them, feeds down to us from the network we built during the Iraq War and Occupation.

And you sort of underline my point when you ask 'which people'. ISIS has not generally had this issue. Their policy of slaughtering rebels, despite it's barbarism, has been effective.

http://time.com/4003049/isis-sirte-rebellion/

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/israel-middle-east/isis-brutally-subdues-rebellion-in-syria-beheading-tribesmen-who-resisted-their-rule

Notice the very small numbers of people joining the rebellions.

 LordofHats wrote:

Further, why the hell would we want to go back to that? I've always argued that what the United States did to Native American groups is just a step away from genocide, if not genocide straight up. Seriously man XD

It was genocide straight up, by any definition. But it worked. A very large hostile population was brought to heel by a western democracy through having the will to commit otherwise unimaginable acts to achieve victory.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Notice the very small numbers of people joining the rebellions.

A lack of armed resistance is not a sign of being on someone's side. To take a related event, the Kurds are treated like absolute crap in Turkey (absolute crap!). Yet, very few if any have taken up armed resistance against the Turkish government. Even fewer did against Saddam when he was using chemical weapons on them. Same with the Armenians, German Jews, Cossacks and Tartars in Russia, the numerous other groups. This is another myth of American foreign policy that we really need to drop; that people who don't fight their oppressors are okay with being oppressed (or worse, deserve to be oppressed). It's lead us to making a lot of really stupid assumptions and decisions in the past (particularly in Vietnam where we completely misjudged the state the South Vietnamese government was in)

It was genocide straight up, by any definition. But it worked. A very large hostile population was brought to heel by a western democracy through having the will to commit otherwise unimaginable acts to achieve victory.

Though surely, 'kill um all' is one way to deal with people who are certainly not on your side, we'll just have to disagree on the viability of genociding the Middle East as a solution...

 BaronIveagh wrote:
A very large hostile population was brought to heel by a western democracy through having the will to commit otherwise unimaginable acts to achieve victory.

The same happened in WW2 in West Germany and Japan. Western democracies certainly are capable of atrocious acts to gain victory. Just ask Hiroshima and Dresden.

 LordofHats wrote:

A lack of armed resistance is not a sign of being on someone's side. To take a related event, the Kurds are treated like absolute crap in Turkey (absolute crap!). Yet, very few if any have taken up armed resistance against the Turkish government.

15,000 by last count.

 LordofHats wrote:

Even fewer did against Saddam when he was using chemical weapons on them. Same with the Armenians, German Jews, Cossacks and Tartars in Russia, the numerous other groups.

Saddam gassed people who were in a town that had just fallen to Iran and the Kurds as part of a counter attack to drive Iran back out of Iraq. The German Jews were killed for well known political reasons. Not quite the same thing. Not that Saddam was adverse to crimes against humanity, but put things in context.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The same happened in WW2 in West Germany and Japan. Western democracies certainly are capable of atrocious acts to gain victory. Just ask Hiroshima and Dresden.

Or the 2 million Russians that fled or defected only to be handed back over to Stalin for execution.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
15,000 by last count.

Out of a population of at least 12,000,000 (that's .00125%).

The German Jews were killed for well known political reasons.

Don't take things out of context. I'm not talking about why people were killed, I'm talking about how it's extremely common for people to offer little to no opposition in light of their own oppression.

 LordofHats wrote:

Out of a population of at least 12,000,000 (that's .00125%).
.

That's just PKK. Peshmerga makes up another quarter million, and there are several other groups as well. I numbered PKK because it was Turkey specific whereas others tend to be more wide ranging.

Pretty sure 15,000 out of 12,000,000 is .125%

 Ashiraya wrote:
Pretty sure 15,000 out of 12,000,000 is .125%

You would be correct. He forgot to slide the decimal over twice.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
That's just PKK. Peshmerga makes up another quarter million, and there are several other groups as well. I numbered PKK because it was Turkey specific whereas others tend to be more wide ranging.

And? No matter how you cut it, the actual number of armed Kurds in Kurdistan (Bits of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq) is quite small. It's not like they have a standing Army Murica style or anything, and to be fair the vast number of Kurds currently fighting have been pulled into Iraq and Syria where the fighting is more intense. None of that is really the point though.

Pretty sure 15,000 out of 12,000,000 is .125%

Yes I forgot to slide my decimals XD I am really bad at math

 LordofHats wrote:
It's not like they have a standing Army Murica style or anything,

Note: this peshmerga trooper is clearly not in the 'Murcian style, with his M16 and raybans. Or a part of a standing army, apparently.


Actually, yes, the Kurds do. and have even had one legally since the end of the Iraq war, when the regular Iraqi army was forbidden to enter those portions of Iraq dubbed Kurdistan.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Note: this peshmerga trooper is clearly not in the 'Murcian style, with his M16 and raybans. Or a part of a standing army, apparently.

You complain about context and then you keep changing context. The Peshmerga are Iraqi, not PKK. EDIT: Though on the other hand, maybe I set that up with my habit of putting off comments in parenthesis... EDIT EDIT: Also keep putting KPP when I mean PKK.

 LordofHats wrote:

You complain about context and then you keep changing context. The Peshmerga are Iraqi, not PKK. EDIT: Though on the other hand, maybe I set that up with my habit of putting off comments in parenthesis... EDIT EDIT: Also keep putting KPP when I mean PKK.

Yeah, because I didn't, you did, when you wrote....

 LordofHats wrote:
No matter how you cut it, the actual number of armed Kurds in Kurdistan (Bits of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq) is quite small. It's not like they have a standing Army Murica style or anything,

Because yes, you included Iraq and Syria in that.

Yeah that one's my bad.

Hooo boy...


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34970121

Putin claims that the Russian jet was downed to protect Turkey's deal with IS for oil.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Hooo boy...


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34970121

Putin claims that the Russian jet was downed to protect Turkey's deal with IS for oil.

I saw this on Imgur the other day, and I couldn't help but think "Yeah, that about sums it up."



Iraq pointing a gun at its own head is particularly funny

It's funny 'cause it's true...

UK just joined the fight in syria. Vote passed to allow strikes in syria.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34989302?post_id=10153391840878013_10153876534318013#_=_