Charlie Hebdo: Gun attack on French magazine kills 11

obv it isn't just one factor that is contributing to this landscape. pretending it is solely religious and that regional instability has no bearing is just as bind-sided.

region's been unstable since before the fall of the ottoman empire fyi

i largely agree w u here, is the thing.

i don't think you do. i'm not sure you understand that the history of political islam in the middle east and africa (and once upon a time in europe too) has not been a peaceful endeavor that only became radicalized with the involvement of the west. there have always been movements willing to commit genocide, or enslave, non-muslim (frequently black african) populations to further their theological agenda. as long as sadaam or gaddafi was willing to murder any challenge to their rule they were able to keep something of a lid on it, and by removing those (fyi fascist violent) dictators we let the genie out of the bottle. but the west did not radicalize islam. islam radicalized islam.

you can take them at their word that this is about their religious belief

as reported to me by the same US news media who helped pushed us into the iraq war. why would they ever lie....

have you read the graeme wood article? in addition to that ISIS has released a significant amount of material in English that describes their motivations and goals. you can hear it right from the horse's mouth. you don't have to touch a single piece of US news media.

there are links to every issue of their english language online magazine Dabiq here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabiq_(magazine)#Covers

i will have to read that thanks.

Yeah you can literally read their magazine online, watch their videos with subtitles, or even follow their tweets, direct from the source, unfiltered by US media -- or at least you could fairly recently, don't know to what extent that's still true.

of course now i am considering googling those things and maybe i dont want to be on a no-fly list

I went through a brief ISIS obsession some time last year. The videos are quite grim and incredibly well produced, some of the most "effective" propaganda I have ever seen.

it looks like wiki removed the links while i was posting that but they're all collected here as well:
http://www.clarionproject.org/news/islamic-state-isis-isil-propaganda-magazine-dabiq#

i'm sure i just got on a watchlist by pulling a pdf but holy shit at the "prisoner for sale" want ads at the back of Dabiq
how can you look at that and not condemn this level of insanity

and to hurting's point, the layout is slick and well arranged; don't know if that makes it more or less frightening

I wouldn't really recommend watching the videos, btw, because they're basically snuff films, like they literally show ISIS fighters gunning down civilians on the road (afaikt real, but who knows), setting up people for executions, etc. But at the same time I felt like I really understood what was going on better by seeing them. There's a lot of rhetoric about ending western imperialism and influence in the region, but the intent is very clearly to replace it with an empire governed by their particular extreme brand of Islam, in which not only other religions but Muslims of other brands will be subject to death or (maybe?) forced conversion or some kind of slavery. Sections are devoted to the specific reasons why Shia is heresy and to executions of Shia. Other targets shown appear to be Iraqi govt collaborators.

Guys its obvious what's happening on this thread, and I know that Mordy's links are to Wikipedia and an anti-extremist website, but nonetheless can you be very very careful about linking directly to ISIL propaganda here? Preferably not posting any other links at all? I know this stuff is all over the internet but still...

yeah i won't post anything else - all of this stuff is easily locatable w/ very minimal googling

yeah, i am never knowingly gonna watch anyone being killed, that shit is appalling and does not require eyes on. The magazine is not so gonzo but the moments when it leaps fully into the abyss are that much more depressing. they seem to have a good handle on message delivery.

"and the nazis massacred the jews because of the unfair treaty conditions imposed on germany at versailles and not anything to do w/ an ideology"

This is not an either/or thing. Outside forces influence a rise in radicalism; the shape the the radicalism takes has to do with the culture it takes place in. There would have been genocidal racists in Germany and Austria anyway -- it's not clear there would have been a Third Reich without Versailles.

see i want to read that stuff to have an educated view but i have read KSM's statement. propaganda is a key word too. a main point of propaganda is manipulation, lying or distorting in order to achieve an effect. this stuff could be created by the NSA or CIA or ISIL for all we know. it does not matter, in the end it was produced to make people think a certain way.

this is a violent and bad way of thinking so im going to not even give it that respect. they have already made their statement for me, and it is violent, and no justification would be enough.

and maybe the mossad was responsible for the paris attacks. i think we can assume these weren't written by the NSA or CIA.

it seems intellectually dishonest to take terrorists at face value when they talk about religion yet ignore them when they talk about arms sales, drones and regional CIA interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgCyDsvi84

xxp well to be clear I'm not looking at this stuff out of morbid fascination or a desire to be swayed but rather to better understand what the pitch is and how it's made
i don't think i expected it to be so glossy

goes well on the evening news before True Detective and Hannibal.

it seems intellectually dishonest to take terrorists at face value when they talk about religion yet ignore them when they talk about arms sales, drones and regional CIA interference.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, November 18, 2015 2:29 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Who is doing that? (for that matter, are drone strikes and CIA interference ISIS talking points? I haven't seen although I wouldn't be surprised either). I take both their wholesale rejection of any western influence in the region and their religious-ideological claims at "face value" to some extent. I take their desire to murder Shia muslims at face value when they put out videos of them literally murdering Shia muslims (or else doing a very good job faking the murders of Shia). I take at face value their stated desire to "end Sykes-Picot" and to create a "caliphate" in the entire middle east, north Africa, and all lands that were ever previously Muslim-controlled (including Spain, aka Al-Andalus).

I haven't yet heard a coherent theory for why the US/CIA (or Mossad or whatever) would create or back such a group, particularly considering the group has undone a lot of what we spent years and hundreds of billions trying to create in Iraq.

The videos I watched were of course "propaganda" and they were of course designed to "manipulate." But the aims of that manipulation were pretty clear -- to make themselves look like fearsome badasses, to encourage their sympathizers to join, and to encourage their enemies to abandon their posts and flee as soon as ISIS enters the area, a classic war propaganda strategy.

When did radical islamism begin? Mordy, do you say ever? And would you perhaps have a text backing that up? Because I don't know enough about it, but a Danish expert wanted to place it as the final of the four -isms developing in the twenties still standing. Apparantly, clerics begin to radicalize the tenets of Islam into a political movement. But I don't know, and I don't have any links backing me up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism

yeah it dates back before the 20s - it predates fascism and communism

Oh, sure. But are we talking radical Islam or political Islam? Oh, probably you're talking radical Islam, got it.

My bad, confused things.

It's a nebulous inquiry though, because what is meant by "radical Islam" and what is meant by "political Islam"? There have been Islamic movements with imperial ambitions, or if you prefer empires and would-be empires with Islamic bents at various times since the dawn of Islam. (There have also been huge Muslim populations living without any such ambitions for as long, to be clear).

yeah wahhabism and the House of Saud are intimately linked - and there's no "render unto caesar" moment in the Koran, Mohammad was p political, it's there from the outset.

Also probably important is the rise of pan-Arabism or Arab Nationalism in the early 20th century, which was not at all a "radical Islamic" movement but did pave the way for the idea of a post-colonial united ME region, a mantle that wahabbists have taken up with a very different spin.

i just take issue when US politicians pretend to have insight. they are Boeing sales representatives

i've read a bit about islamic history but i'm not an expert in it at all (and as you can imagine a lot of what i know are the places where islamic history and jewish history touch) but there are two different points here - one is wahhabism as a more contemporary phenomenon and the second is the currents of colonialism and violence that have existed at different times throughout islamic history. in either case i think it's a mistake to explain islamic fundamentalist violence as primarily a reaction to western interventions even though that certainly has played some role in its current manifestations.

the whole world has been effed for thousands of years. its not like the English tradition doesnt recently have tons of bloodshed on its hands. i dont see the point in morally judging when the whole world has always been a war hungry madhouse.

i just dont see the point in judging this vast group of people to all have something fundamentally different about them than the west. something about throwing stones if u live in a glass house.

uh nobody said any of that

I'm sure we're all plenty comfortable judging ISIS. no one's rendering judgment on Muslims as a whole

i'm not judging anyone and it should go without saying (but maybe i should say it anyway) that islam is a complex and rich tradition with many different beliefs and ideologies. right now i'm talking about a particular tradition within it and not saying in any way that all of islam is this or that which would be absurd in addition to bigoted.

muslim brotherhood dates back to the 20s if that's what the danish guy was talking about. a standard answer for people looking for an intellectual origin of anti-western fundamentalism is sayyid qutb. al-wahhab & ibn saud were late C18th, purist, revivalist & very conservative but not exactly political in the sense people are talking about here. a lot of arab nationalists were pro-western/influenced by e.g. french political thinkers

people are saying they are religiously motivated. i take that as a sort of judgement on islam as a whole.

why? two people read the same text and one is inspired to pacifism and the other is inspired to go to war. they're both religiously motivated.

half of KSM's official statement was praise for enlightenment radicals and american revolutionary heroes

as someone said on another thread: read better

xp

KSM not part of ISIS btw

if we are to stop terrorism we need to look at it as a dynamic system rather than isolated groups.

this is john kerry playing wack a mole