The day after James Foley’s beheading, President Obama paused his Martha’s Vineyard vacation—to express his condolences to the Foley family and inform Americans of the threat posed by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Listening to him as a Kurd, I had no reason to doubt his sincerity when he said, “Earlier today, I spoke to the Foleys and told them that we are all heartbroken at their loss, and join them in honoring Jim and all that he did.”
What troubled me was the way he qualified ISIS or failed to do. The man who hails from the “happiest” state, Hawaii, declared ISIS—the “angriest” wannabe state in the world — without a “religion.”
That’s like calling Hitler an internationalist or Lenin a capitalist!
Posing as an authority on Islam, he said, “No faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” Speaking for the 21st century, he went on, ISIS doesn’t belong to it.
And then this gem by way of reducing the threat to an understandable sound bite: ISIS is at war with the West “out of expediency,” but it really is at war with its neighbors and offers “nothing but an endless slavery to [its] empty vision.”
I will admit to my immediate reaction: my hand involuntarily went to scratch my head.
“Posing as an authority on Islam, ”
All Western politicians have just graduated summa cum laude Islamic scholars. Telling us just how moderate Islam is. While in the real world Islam teaches a grandmother in Edmonton a lesson or two about safety whilst deadheading her roses.
It is all here.
Good link Alisa, thanks. I have been saying much the same thing for years. There are only good Muslims are bad ones. The bad ones are having a drink and a toke from Turkey to Tottenham, the good ones are beheading people in Syria. But when push comes to shove the bad ones will be made to toe the line, or die just like us Kuffar.
Tsk tsk… and not are.
That’s not listening to him as a Kurd, it’s listening to him as a fool. At this late date, there is no reason to believe a word he says.
I think Mr Obama’s reaction to the killing was most likely not unlike that of Battery Sgt Major Williams in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.
Followed by a vague sense that this might be an embarrassing situation to be asked questions about, and that he should be seen to be doing something, if only to shut his aides up, and then finding an opportunity to subtly link ISIS to domestic ‘extremists’, like the Tea Party, another bunch of people who won’t go along with the ‘project’.
I think you might misunderstand both the article and a certain ilk of Kurdish commentator then.
Kani Xulam is indeed a Kurd, which means like most people outside the USA and anglosphere generally, he may not really spend that much time pondering the nature of the POTUS’ personality, particularly as 100% of US domestic policy does not even warrant 5 seconds of eye-time… thus he does not really understand Obama, and saying “listening to him as a Kurd” is his want of saying that actually he has no idea if he actually believes a word of what he is saying.
But I have been reading a lot of Kurdish journalism as of late and I am starting to learn how to parse it 😀 So actually I think it is a bit more subtle…
First thing to bear in mind is that he is writing in Rudaw, which is in essence the media wing of the Peshmerga (not technically but in reality). Thus you will never see an article saying “OMG you fucking Americans are so FUCKING stupid! What the FUCK were you thinking when you elected this ignorant arsehead???!!!” No, not going to see that on a Rudaw website.
Why? Because America and Americans are actually rather well liked in Kurdistan, at least the bits within the orbit of Erbil, particular these days. And they want the bombs to keep dropping on the Islamic nubjobs. And they want the promised weapons to arrive.
So… “listening as a Kurd, I had no reason to doubt his sincerity when he said…” is a polite precursor to an article that makes it clear he thinks Obama is indeed a total arsehead with no more brains than god gave grits, or as we say in Kurdistan, as wise as a cook who makes humus out of camel shit… but please note, oh glorious and wonderful US taxpayer-reader, I of course think he is a wonderful and sincere man, so please keep shipping the weapons we need to defeat these Islamic psychopaths on our god-damn doorstep.
“No faith teaches people to massacre innocents.”
Unfortunately, in Islam you are only “innocent” if you are a devout, practicing, Muslim sho submits to the will of Allah and acknowledges that Mohammad was his prophet. So, Jews and Christians are tolerated, somewhat, while everyone else gets the choice to either join the club or immediately go to have a personal meeting with Allah.
The Progressives in the west have Disneyfied Islam, the same way that they Disneyfy other cultures – “Oh, aren’t they wonderful musicians and dancers, with wonderful folk stories that we should all take to heart in the west; and don’t they make the most charming natural food?” But any talk about practices that would make westerners uncomfortable, from cannibalism to genital mutilation to funeral practices that spread disease, to polygamy are off limits – only the “extremists” practice them, and they are far from the mainstream, peaceful culture.
Unfortunately, it is the extremists who drive cultures. In the West, in the East, everywhere. Without the extremists pushing hard, culture would be static. The Progressives themselves are example number 1.
You aren’t the only one, Kani. I read that and was “um… what?”
It’s like saying the SS weren’t representative of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.
I’ve said this before: we in the West decided not to fight about religious beliefs, in part because we realized that our religious differences were not worth fighting over – there was no substantive benefit or harm in them. Jefferson famously wrote that his neighbor’s religion “neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket.”
So we declared that religious belief is untouchable by society acting through the state. Even for private actors it is considered improper to say another’s beliefs are erroneous, and wholly unacceptable to say they are evil. This is especially true or leftists, who are heirs to the classical liberal tradition of freedom of and from religion.
We’ve tolerated a handful of religiously motivated criminals like the Scientologists or Jim Jones because the damage their followers have done seems trivial compared to the harm of reviving the Inquisition.
But now we are faced with massive crimes by religiously motivated actors. Western leaders (Bush as much as Obama) remain shackled by that tradition. To paraphrase Lincoln’s comment on freedom of speech, they are willing to shoot simple-minded Moslem boys who commit jihadist murder, but they dare not touch a hair of the wily clerics who induce them to kill – nor can they say a word about Islamic doctrine except generalities.
Doing so would open a really ugly can of worms. It may be necessary, but it won’t be easy.
Rich, why don’t we just admit that Islam is a death-cult and take it from there? There is nothing in it that is similar to a religion.
And the Koran is not a holy book. Most of it is unintelligible (this is not due to a problem with translation, it is just gobbledygook) and the rest is mind-numbingly violent.
The usual response — parts of the bible are like this too — doesn’t really work. Judaism changed over the centuries. At every point it moved one step ahead of others around it. Even the old rule of “eye-for-an-eye” was remarkably enlightened when compared to “your-life-and-the-life-of-your-family for an eye”.
Well, we had the 30 years war…
Yeah I think the decision it was totally not worth fighting over who has the best invisible-imaginary-friend came as a result of serious shit like the Thirty Years War 😉
This is especially true or leftists, who are heirs to the classical liberal tradition of freedom of and from
Even putting grammar/typos aside this seems to be nonsense. Modern leftism explicitly repudiates the classical liberal tradition.
‘…is a polite precursor to an article that makes it clear he thinks Obama is indeed a total arsehead…’
I agree but would hasten to add that you don’t actually need to know anything about Kurds or their culture or their journalism to come to that conclusion. It shouts at you from between Kani’s lines.
We have to begin from that point, otherwise we go against the principles our civilization is based on, which pretty much defeats the purpose of defending it in the first place. But we already have legal mechanisms for handling this kind of situation. We have law for dealing with organized crime and piracy that allows criminal organizations to be defined, giving broader authority to investigate and prosecute individuals associated with those organizations.
We have to find a way to make it politically possible to define some radical Islamic organizations as criminal under that kind of law. If something awful enough were to happen — a successful WMD attack, for example — I’m sure we would find the political will to do that. The hard part is finding that will before something like that happens.
Tedd – how about saying that any society in which it is permitted and encouraged to kill any who voluntarily choose to leave that society should itself be banned and it’s buildings bulldozed?
Jamess:
I’m not very knowledgeable about these laws, so I don’t know how feasible that would be, but it sounds reasonable. I note that the Wikipedia article on the U.S. RICO Act says the following.
That would seem to be a key success metric for anti-terror law, as well.
First of all, it’s pointless to listen to the front man for the current regime—he only says what his handlers tell him to say. Any time he drifts off the script he has practiced he quickly becomes incoherent, as he has no ideas of his own.
The key element with theocratic fascists is the same component any totalitarian ideology proclaims as an absolute necessity for success—total unanimity of belief.
The price to pay for this bunch’s phony utopia is the same as every other phony utopia, whatever they call it—surrender of a free and independent mind, and acceptance of the role of the fervent true believer, who drinks the Kool-Aid when he’s told.
Once again, this time in the name of religion, instead of class or race or tribal affiliation, the enemy is any person who dares to think and believe as their own mind and experience tell them.
But that is always the enemy for any of these tinpot dictators, regardless of what banner, or book, they wave around.
It is never surprising, therefore, that their activities always end up awash in blood.
The anti-mind is the anti-life.
If you actually needed a living, breathing example right there, strutting around waving their swords in your face this very minute, in order to grasp the existential meaning of this conflict, there it is.
I watched this last night via the SKY.
I knew it was bad but…
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/pakistans-hidden-shame/4od
The only line that comes to me is from Tolkien, “What can men do against such reckless hate?”
It shocked even me. Someone who was interviewed was essentially prepared to let.require his brother pre-teen brother to be buggered for a few rupees but if his sister had a boyfriend he’d burn her to death. In the name of “honour”. Twisted, fucked-up bastards.
Watch the whole thing. Please because I couldn’t. All the time I was thinking of my nice house in Cheshire and (it was on late) going to bed with my wife and looking at the sheer material and moral depravity of Peshawar bus station.
Horrific. I ould write more but I’m tired and a bit Brahms und Liszt but any society which (at least tacitly) believes flirting or something is evil but is OK with the systematic embuggeration of 8 year olds is beyond my understanding.
And it was always boys. Girls, of course had to remain saleable as baby-mommas or something.
Evil exists. That is an example.
The extremist Islam we see was created by Abn Saud and is the pet project of the Saudi Princes, its origin is Saudi Arabia, the most dangerous state on Earth.
Destroy Saudi Arabia and its oligarchs who fund this terror and you kill the heart of the beast. Anything other than taking down Saudi is urinating into the wind and a total waste of time and money.
This would require turning Saudi into a permanent protectorate and simply occupying the oil fields for the next fifty of so year I imagine. Not convinced there is much appetite that.
Perry, I thought that you advocated marching in, destroying the State that annoys and dealing with the responsible leaders in a forthright but judicial manner au Albert Pierrepoint should that be the verdict and walking out again leaving a note saying “Make sure we don’t come back”. So why should the oil fields of not Saudi any more Arabia be different to Afghanistan or Iraq?
To state the bleedin’ obvious, all the oil 😉 Take Saudi off-line for more than a few days and goodbye global economy.
Not really, there’s always Venezuela, which has more oil than Saudi Arabia (or so it seems) and a SNP-type administration. All we need is to offer them lots of toilet paper in exchange for oil and they’ll be pumping it out to cover for any deficiency and their backsides.
Anyway, the folks left behind after the fall of the House of Saud would have every reason to get the wells working and to sell the stuff and no reason to fund any dodgy people if they had the example of their predecessors to remember.
I’ve always advocated the Windex solution to Saudi Arabia:
Turn it into radioactive green glass and then polish it with Windex.
Sorta kinda the way it worked in Iraq, Ed? 😛
But Alisa, they didn’t take Perry’s approach in Iraq, go in, remove the dangerous one, get out and leave a warning. They messed around, tried to make friends and then left. The Shia minority in Saudi might end up with a lot of the oil, but there’s less scope for fratricide and there would be every reason to learn a lesson.
Good point, Ed – dunno, maybe.
Whereas I too would love to see an end to the Saudi and Wahhabi aspect of Arabia, but I cannot see what would be replacing them be other than some non-dynastic Salafists, and what are the Salafists if not Wahhabis by another name?
In Afghanistan, the Taliban have plenty of locals who hate them and have a long history of fighting them. So get out and let them get on with it.
In Iraq, we have the Sunni areas (which are actually fairly irrelevant), the oily Kurdish area around Kirkuk (which is back in Kurdish hands probably forever since the Iraqi army simply ran away and the Peshmerga took it before the Islamopsychos could), and the oily Shi’ite south, who may be buddies with Iran but… so what? A partitioned Iraq should be more stable and therefore oil supplies should keep glugging just fine.
In the case Arabia… is there any *any* non-Salafist alternative to the dynastic Wahhabis? Because if not, I cannot see how applying what seems logical in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan as making much sense in Arabia. I would be *delighted* to be wrong about that however.
Perhaps, but it’s a much bigger problem for some countries than for others.
Not really. Our old chum Mr. Fungibility says that remove Saudi Arabian oil for more than the blink of an eye and global prices for everyone goes though the roof.
Give a few hours notice of the West’s intention to nuke Mecca so the population can leave. Allah will either intervene, in which case mass conversion becomes inevitable or you’ve knocked out one of the five pillars of Islam and can take out the rest from the disillusioned RoPers.
Dom:
Western armies occupying the Arabian peninsula? The offense that Muslims worldwide would take to that would be unmanageable. We merely had a few bases there, and it was enough to prompt Osama bin Laden to attack us. 9/11 was a win for him, in the respect that we bugged out and reestablished bases in Qatar instead.
The Kurds are not necessarily united. There are several militias. I recently saw a video in which one militia thanked a second for saving them from ISIS, while blaming a third for leaving them in the lurch. I suspect they will crumble to bits if we don’t get them effective help soon.
And of course it is only prudent to reject the national security advice of people who are forbidden by political correctness from even naming our enemy.
Indeed, it is a terrible idea. Sadly. But it really is.
They never have been. Pretty much the only thing they agree on is that there should be an independent Kurdistan
The three that are significant are the Peshmerga (HQ secular and centrist Erbil, i.e. northern Iraq), the PKK (secular paleo-Marxist Kurds in Turkey) and the YPG (secular socialist Kurds in Syria). The Iranian Kurds are not significant in any military way.
This was the incident around Mt. Sinjar and it is not hard to parse what happened. Taken by surprise by the ISIS surge, the Peshmerga pulled back to defend the parts of Iraqi Kuristan that really matter and thereby left the Yazidis in the lurch (they are also more or less Kurdish). The Syrian Kurdish YPG crossed the border and saved most of them (sorry Obama, that is who really saved those people on that mountain even if I am sure the air strikes helped).
We should indeed support ‘the Kurds’ but in reality there is only one faction that actually matters and that is the Peshmerga (and if we expect Turkey to be on-board, we can *only* support the Peshmerga), and they are already starting to take back territory, even if they are clearly not yet capable of ‘sweeping offensives’.
To put it bluntly, the Syrian Kurds will probably not achieve meaningful independence in any post-war deals, though it is *possible*… the Kurds in Turkey sure as hell won’t, but the Iraqi Kurds (and their army the Peshmerga) almost certainly will either gain actual or at least de facto independence.
And they, unlike their Syrian or Turkish fellow Kurds, have lots and lots of oil. And they have taken Kirkuk after the Iraqi army bugged out and left it undefended, and the Kurds are NEVER going to give it back. Under article 140, the Kurds are entitled to a referendum to see if Kirkuk wants to become part of the Kurdish regional government, but Baghdad has always found some excuse to not hold that referendum as they know what the result would be.
Well now the Peshmerga are in physical occupation of Kirkuk (and all the oil it represents), they most certainly *will* hold the referendum… and they will win it. And moreover their conditions for joining the new Iraqi government yesterday are that within 3 months they get exclusive control of all the oil in the Kurdish region and air traffic control of their airspace.
And that, to all intents and purposes, makes them an independent nation. Look at all the news reports from the north of “Iraq” and look at the flags you see. None of them are the flag of Iraq, they are the sun emblazoned flag of Kurdistan (or the Black Flag of ISIS).
And that is why the Iraqi Kurds, Masoud Barzani and the Pergmerga are the only Kurds who *really* matter in the overall scheme of things, because they have the basis for a proper state and army to prevent a power vacuum of the sort the Islamopsychos exploited. Arm them and the problem largely goes away. Even Turkey seems to be seeing things that way, which is quite a change.
Perry:
Thanks for the backgrounder.
Perry, not ‘Islamopsychos’, ‘Islamaniacs’ is shorter, and says the same thing.
Mr Ed @September 9, 2014 at 10:42 am:
Not really, there’s always Venezuela, which has more oil than Saudi Arabia (or so it seems) and a SNP-type administration.
Venezuela has enormous nominal reserves, but most of that is “heavy crude” which is very difficult to produce and hard to refine. (Venezuela is importing light crude to mix with it.)
Venezuela’s current production is less than 1/3 of Saudi Arabia’s, and has been dropping, due to gross mismanagement and underinvestment by the Chavez government. Chavez broke an oilworkers’ strike by firing nearly all of them, replaced by party stooges; Venezuela owes tens of billions of dollars to oil field service and supply companies.
And comparing Venezuela to the SNP is a gross libel of the SNP. Chavez and his successor Maduro have essentially ruled by decree, ignoring the law and constitution. The oil bonanza of the last decade has mostly been squandered or stolen. There is an entire class of “boliburguese” (“Bolivarian” bourgeois) millionaires and billionaires. At the other end, most poor neighborhoods are controlled by colectivos (gangs of armed radicals). Prominent opposition leaders have been arrested on invented charges.
The SNP are fools and liars, but not as bad as that (though it may change if they are unleashed by sovereignty).