Another Head for Allah

[verte76]

I didn't think about the threats from terrorists to the families of people who denounce them, but that may be true. There are already jitters in Turkey over some bombings in Istanbul the other day, just ahead of the NATO meeting. The bombings didn't kill anyone, just mildly wounding a person. The bombs were the type the Turks are used to, bombs that make more noise than anything else, rather than the lethal ones associated with suicide bombers.

 

[pax]

"Finally," you all think, "a moderator!"



I'm not changing the thread title. I figure no one has killed anyone over it yet, and I'm surprised, in fact, at how well the discussion has stayed on track. I'm sure no one believes that ALL Muslims think Allah was all tickled over this beheading; in fact, I am SURE that we ALL know that the VAST MAJORITY of Muslims, here and elsewhere, were very grossed out and sad.

That said, BVS already put what I was going to say very well. The one thing we can all agree on is that it's really cruel and disgusting and wrong to behead someone. Let's start from there and forget the whole "thread title" discussion.

Thanks!

 

[LoveTown]

Just for clarification, I never suggested that the thread title be changed....I merely said that it bothers me a bit. To change it would be censorship and I would never speak out in favor of that.

 

[FizzingWhizzbees]

Just for clarification, I never suggested that the thread title be changed....I merely said that it bothers me a bit. To change it would be censorship and I would never speak out in favor of that.

Just for the record, I didn't suggest the thread title should be changed either. I said I disagreed with it, but I never suggested a moderator should change it.

 

[LoveTown]

I know where you are coming from Fiz, I think it's safe to say that we both feel pretty much the same on this

 

[AchtungBono]

It took 12 bloody years and many innocent victims from the time the Nazis came to power in 1933 till the time they were defeated in 1945.

These terrorist barbarians are the new Nazis and its going to take a long time to root them out and defeat them....BUT I know that they will ultimately be destroyed, Bin Laden will be caught or killed and the deaths of all their victims will at last be avenged.

Good WILL triumph over evil.

 

[A_Wanderer]

I agree, defeat the Islamofascists or die.

 

[Klaus]

AchtungBono:
I'm sorry it isn't obvious enough for me so i have to ask...
How can you compare Terrorists to Nazis?
The Nazis were a democratic elected government who changed the laws of their country to ensure that they staid in power, they created threats to the nation to ensure that they can claim that everyone who's against them must be a nonpatriotic or a jew - just as a example

 

[DrTeeth]

You cannot defeat terrorism you can only try and contain it just like we are containing fascism (there are still lots of fascist groups and I believe even fascist political parties).

The avenging part sounds like a Star Wars epilogue. If everybody keeps on 'avenging' their dead, we'll be busy for a while.

 

[verte76]

I think we'll always have terrorism, unfortunately. It can only be contained; it can't be completely stopped. We can do stuff like stop their money supplies and such, but terrorism is a very complex thing that most likely can't really be stopped. Of course I never thought they'd get rid of Communism, either, but they did.

 

[DrTeeth]

Of course I never thought they'd get rid of Communism, either, but they did.

Communism isn't gone, not unless you forget to count China, North-Korea and Cuba. I guess those countries will 'embrace' capitalism in the next few decades, but you'll still have communist groups and political parties.

 

[melon]

Bin Laden will be caught or killed and the deaths of all their victims will at last be avenged.

Good WILL triumph over evil.

Of course, bin Laden might already be long dead. The man was very sick around the time of 9/11, and, not coincidentally, we haven't seen definitive proof of his existence since around then.

Al Qaeda may merely be using his ghost to maintain unity, which, in that case, you'll never get bin Laden.

Melon

 

[verte76]

Communism isn't gone, not unless you forget to count China, North-Korea and Cuba. I guess those countries will 'embrace' capitalism in the next few decades, but you'll still have communist groups and political parties.

True, I guess I should have said I never thought they'd tear down the Berlin wall.

 

[DrTeeth]

They still have walls in Berlin

 

[verte76]

Walls, yes, but, *the* infamous Berlin wall was torn down, was it not?

 

[DrTeeth]

I know I was kidding

 

[deep]

Another Head for George W Bush

On the videotape the man cried in English, "Please get out of here. I don't want to die. ... Your life is important, but my life is important."

The South Korean Foreign Ministry confirmed that the man shown in the videotape is Kim Sun-il, 33, who works for a trading company. It was not known when or how he was taken hostage.

The Foreign Ministry planned an emergency meeting Monday morning to discuss Seoul's reaction to the development and steps to take toward Kim's release.

An official with the South Korean Embassy in Washington said South Korea has about 600 troops in the country and plans to send another 3,000.

 

[LoveTown]

terrorism will never be eradicated as long as we insist upon using might with which to defeat it. The use of brute force will only serve to breed more hatred towards the United States. We should be employing diplomacy not additional violence to solve this challenge.

 

[Moonlit_Angel]

terrorism will never be eradicated as long as we insist upon using might with which to defeat it. The use of brute force will only serve to breed more hatred towards the United States. We should be employing diplomacy not additional violence to solve this challenge.

.

Angela

 

[A_Wanderer]

I strongly disagree, muslim terrorists want all who are not Muslim Arabs dead, they will not stop to chat and be reasoned with. As long as you exist (provided you are not a Muslim Arab) you are an abomination on god's earth to them and must be exterminated. Terrorists cannot be reasoned with and by using diplomacy you are only going to give them more chances to attack you. We must fight these bastards and we must win, failure to win will result in the total destruction of humanity. They have no grievance with the west they are fighters for an ideology, they are the Nazi's of the modern world, Islamofascists if you will. Saying that we have to deal with the root causes of terrorism and help to make ammends with them is no different from saying that the Nazi's were entitled to invade Poland because they suffered because of the treaty of Versaille, they must be fought and we must spread liberal democracy into the middle east to destroy the indoctrination that continues to produce Jihadists.

Historically look at what diplomacy has done in the fight against terrorism, in 1979 you have the Iranian hostage crisis and we do not fight, we delay - this failure shows the terrorists that the west is weak against terrorism. This is repeated in the 80's in Lebanon where terrorists strike and manage to remove the US presence. Bin Laden knows this and uses it knowing that every attack against the west will not warrant a full scale millitary response, they kill with impunity and know how to use diplomacy to their advantage. The classice example is Israel - the Israelis offer a solid peace deal in 2000 Arafat refuses and in return they get a 2nd Intafada (which because Israel didn't back down and cut deals but fought with millitary prowess is now over). Terrorism has had a lot of sucess in forcing the west to back down but today we say no, we will fight it and Islamism and its entire sick fucking ideology will be wiped from the face of the planet.

 

[hiphop]

and Islamism and its entire sick fucking ideology will be wiped from the face of the planet.

There you go.

Hate is surely gonna stop terrorism.

The sad thing is that this mindset is the same as practised by the terrorists. It just seems to me that there?s not such a big difference in saying

"Islamism and its entire sick fucking ideology will be wiped from the face of the planet" and in saying "Christianity and its entire sick fucking ideology will be wiped from the face of the planet".

Problem is, you can?t just wipe terrorism out. There are terrorists spread all over the world. There is no way to track them all down, unless you want to vaporize all the planet. But then, everybody?s gonna die. I?ll say it again for the people who didn?t get it. You can?t wipe terrorism out. No Way. The whole idea is ridiculous. Its a good idea to catch as many terrorists as you can.

It would make me happy if those stupid comparisons between Nazis and Terrorists stopped. I can understand where it comes from, it seems to me it stems from a blue-eyed American mindset where "Nazi" is another word for "the worst people on this planet".

There?s a difference between Fascists and Nazis, there?s a difference between Communists and Nazis, there?s a difference between the Vietcong and Nazis, there is a difference between the U.S. Army and Nazis, and there?s a difference between Terrorists and Nazis. I know we all tend to generalize, but it would be a good thing to let the most ineffective generalizations go. Like Klaus has pointed out, there are lots of differences.

 

[A_Wanderer]

I was skeptical about the simmilarities between Nazism and Islamism but if you look at the facts it is an apt comparison.

They are each authoritarian ideologies that will entail the state controlling all aspects of your life, in the case of Nazism it was clearly the state but in the case of Islamism it is the implementation of Islamic Law and Governance as the state.

Each is a political ideology that involves uniting a collective against its enemys. They stress the importance of the Nation above the individual and remove individual rights.

Each uses violence against those not deemed to be part of the colective.

Each one has a strong-man leader context where you have one person commanding the subservance of the rest.

There are historical links between the Islamists and the Nazi's, we forget that the Mufti of Jerusalem was a staunch supporter of Adolf Hitler in the '40's and gave him an SS division comprised of Bosnian muslims.

The ultimate worldview of these terrorists is to either annihilate the west or to make it a subserviant caliphate too them where those that live there become dhimmi's. This is not very different from Adolf hitler's view of a greater Germania where those in conquered eastern europe would become serfs to their aryan masters.

I was highly skeptical of the concept of Islamofascism at first but the more I looked at the facts the more apt it seemed. It is not a carbon copy of fascism but it is certainly very simmilar in construction and goals.

 

[AcrobatMan]

And now a Korean head

 

[hiphop]

I was skeptical about the simmilarities between Nazism and Islamism but if you look at the facts it is an apt comparison.

They are each authoritarian ideologies that will entail the state controlling all aspects of your life, in the case of Nazism it was clearly the state but in the case of Islamism it is the implementation of Islamic Law and Governance as the state.

Each is a political ideology that involves uniting a collective against its enemys. They stress the importance of the Nation above the individual and remove individual rights.

Each uses violence against those not deemed to be part of the colective.

Each one has a strong-man leader context where you have one person commanding the subservance of the rest.

There are historical links between the Islamists and the Nazi's, we forget that the Mufti of Jerusalem was a staunch supporter of Adolf Hitler in the '40's and gave him an SS division comprised of Bosnian muslims.

The ultimate worldview of these terrorists is to either annihilate the west or to make it a subserviant caliphate too them where those that live there become dhimmi's. This is not very different from Adolf hitler's view of a greater Germania where those in conquered eastern europe would become serfs to their aryan masters.

I was highly skeptical of the concept of Islamofascism at first but the more I looked at the facts the more apt it seemed. It is not a carbon copy of fascism but it is certainly very simmilar in construction and goals.

Anyway, you can?t compare the two.

National Socialism was a political concept, Islam is a religion spread worldwide - not a political ideology.

The Nazis were legally elected leaders, terrorists are not.

The Germans who fought against the Nazis in their own country were marked as terrorists and were executed.

Western democracies also have strong-man leader contexts where you have one person commanding the subservance of the rest.

For me, the interesting question is not whether you can compare this to that or that to whatever, but rather:

What do you want to reach by comparing National Socialism and the Islam? What are your motives behind comparing those two? Just comparing without any motive seems a little senseless, just like comparing Caesar to Ataturk.

Please explain why you want Nazism and Islamism to be compared. If we?re at it, explain how you think terrorism in itself, terrorism as a phemomenon, the idea of terrorism, can be stopped.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Two Clarifiers:
1) Terrorism cannot be stopped as it is merely a method of warfare but the terrorists themselves can be.

1.5) Islamism is not Islam, I want to make sure that you understand the difference here, Islam is a religion but Islamism is a Political Ideology (not a religion) that entails using the Quaran and Sharia law as the rules of the state and to create a theocratic regime just like the Taliban in afghanistan. It is very similar to Fascism, one could see it as a global form of fascism in a globalised world.

2) I wanted to draw attention to parallells between Fascism and Islamism because they share simmilarites and Islamism can aptly be described as Islamofascism, it is not some sort of right wing nutter lunar conspiracy term without any base in reality rather a legitmate statement about the true nature of fundamentalist islam and the way it operates in the world.

The Islamism (which entails having the state become a religous entity and all peple are subservient to is) is what I am talking about, we can stop Islamism but it takes a lot of work and it must be fought on every front.

Millitary action is a critical element of this, look at what happens when you don't meet them with a strong response, Since the 1960's and particularly in the 1990's you had a string of related terrorist atttacks all of growing magnitude that did not illicit a strong millitary response. By not fighting them and instead waiting for the terrorists to strike again emboldened them and it culminated in September 11. When you don't react it is seen as a sign of weakness and will only encourage them to take another inch, this in what we saw on September 11, the natural progression from Leaving Somalia in discrace to the Trade Center Car Bombing in '93 to the aborted Operation Bojinka in '95 to the Embassy Bombings in '98 to the USS Cole in 2000. Each time there was an attack the US response was piss weak and it the terrorists were essentially allowed to continue to build a support base and escelate without the threat of retribution or intervention. If the US was to have taken a stronger millitary action against Al Qaeda in the 1990's I am certain the September 11 would never have occured, this is all of course hypothetical however I am just making the point that the terrorists see any capitulation or lack of will as a sign of weakness and they will sieze upon it as another example of the weakness of the west and the sucess they have in fighting us. By choosing to fight the terrorists on our terms in a so called "war on terror" Bush has no doubt prevented another escelation of attack. which would probably have involved CBR weapons. If it wasnt for this agressive campaign of fighting the terrorists with all tools at our disposal then we would not be sitting here in mid 2004 without having experienced a major terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11.

Millitary might is not the only way to fight the terrorists though as it must be coupled with a very strong intelligence service, here is where you need to have your echelon programs that can take in massive ammounts of sigint (Signals Intelligence) and locate any potential terrorist threats as well as key Al Qaeda members. This is equally as important as being able to take millitary action against terrorists.

Thirdly we must remove the hate filled ideology that comes out of the ME and stop it from producing Jihadists, Saudi Arabia is a classic example of a Gulf State that has too much money, is totally corrupt and sends its children off to wage holy war all over the world in the name of spreading its islamist version of Islam known as wahhabism. If we could get these countries to embrace concepts such as secularism and education, reason and cultural openness then they would inevitably stop producing terrorists and terrorist sympathisers. As a whole Islam the religion and culture needs to be brought into the modern world and when it does the hate filled fascist concepts of Islamism will be left in the past where they should remain.

An article on Islamic Fascism is here.
http://www.dki.antifa.net/inipa/inipa.php?p=islamofascism

 

[U2Kitten]

terrorism will never be eradicated as long as we insist upon using might with which to defeat it. The use of brute force will only serve to breed more hatred towards the United States.

They hate us anway. But I don't believe terrorism itself as an idealology can ever be defeated.

We should be employing diplomacy not additional violence to solve this challenge.

Please explain how you negotiate with people who have such ridiculous demands, people who believe if they die killing 'infidels' (westerners, Jews, apparently now far easterners as well) they will be glorified? If you can't buy someone with money, or threaten them with fear for their own life, there is no way diplomacy is going to work. You really see them sitting down at a table with a bunch of our military guys or politicians and compromising? That works sometimes with rational, civilized people, but this is not a gang that believes in being fair or give and take. It's a pretty dream, but it's not realistic considering the source. You're living in Never Never land.

 

[nbcrusader]

Islamism is not Islam, I want to make sure that you understand the difference here, Islam is a religion but Islamism is a Political Ideology (not a religion) that entails using the Quaran and Sharia law as the rules of the state and to create a theocratic regime just like the Taliban in afghanistan. It is very similar to Fascism, one could see it as a global form of fascism in a globalised world.

I appreciate how you distinguish the two to clarify the discussion.

In the US, for example, it would be easy to see the two separate concepts given the number of Muslims living peacefully in a democratic society.

In the Middle East, the concepts are blurred. It seems clear that the majority accepts Islamism.

 

[Moonlit_Angel]

I don't think LoveTown was necessarily saying we should sit down and talk with the terrorists themselves. We're all fully aware they're probably not likely to listen to us anytime soon.

Basically, I think what LoveTown was saying was that we should just start finding other ways besides war to try and stop these terrorists, ways that can allow the country's innocent people to stand behind us and gladly help us in our search for the terrorists out there and stuff like that. That'd be much more diplomatic than just bombing the entire country back to the Stone Age. By bombing an entire country instead of finding ways to just go after the terrorists themselves, that makes it look as though we're punishing all the people over there, when we really only intend on punishing a select few. And if your country was being destroyed, even though you yourself had done nothing wrong, wouldn't you start getting a little upset with those people who are bombing the place and not be nearly as willing to help them find who it is they want to find?

Sorry, but I just don't see how more wars are going to help the situation any. As a person my mom talks to pointed out recently, war is a form of terror as it is, so to have a war to defeat terrorism doesn't quite make much sense.

Angela

 

[melon]

Islamism is not Islam, I want to make sure that you understand the difference here, Islam is a religion but Islamism is a Political Ideology (not a religion) that entails using the Quaran and Sharia law as the rules of the state and to create a theocratic regime just like the Taliban in afghanistan. It is very similar to Fascism, one could see it as a global form of fascism in a globalised world.

2) I wanted to draw attention to parallells between Fascism and Islamism because they share simmilarites and Islamism can aptly be described as Islamofascism, it is not some sort of right wing nutter lunar conspiracy term without any base in reality rather a legitmate statement about the true nature of fundamentalist islam and the way it operates in the world.

The Islamism (which entails having the state become a religous entity and all peple are subservient to is) is what I am talking about, we can stop Islamism but it takes a lot of work and it must be fought on every front.

Great idea. Now I'll make sure to call the Christian Coalition "Christianism," because they certainly aren't deserving of being called "Christian." It perverts an otherwise peaceful religion.

Melon

 

[hiphop]

Two Clarifiers:


....with a very strong intelligence service, here is where you need to have your echelon programs that can take in massive ammounts of sigint (Signals Intelligence) and locate any potential terrorist threats as well as key Al Qaeda members. This is equally as important as being able to take millitary action against terrorists.

Thx for the clarifications. Anyway, like Angela pointed out, war against a country is not the way to prevent the spreading of terrorist cells.

It also would be unfair to bomb f.e. Somalia, you can?t make the country responsible for the terrorists who are networking hiding there. If so, the U.S. also had to bomb Germany where many Al Q Members lived.

btw... what do you know about Echelon? Confirmation that its called Magistrand nowadays? Got a newer list of keywords? Mine mustve been written in the 70s or something... heh

If we?re at it, talking about SIGINT, how come those programs weren?t able to track down Osama after recording the cellphone calls after 911?