Pan-Islamic merged mega thread

[cupper]

There are many weapons out there that can deliver the proper effect.  Don't limit yourself to one. 

Why don't we just use them all, and flatten the whole damned area. Nuke 'em till they glow.  :nod:

 

[cupper]

I am speechless.  The Muslim Bros. want to do the same in Egypt too.  Photos and video at the story link below.  :rage:

Its Bamiyan all over again.

 

[OldSolduer]

Why don't we just use them all, and flatten the whole damned area. Nuke 'em till they glow.  :nod:

Hot bacon grease on all of them.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

You know, a bacon grease bomb would be an interesting weapon on a bunch of levels....

 

[OldSolduer]

You know, a bacon grease bomb would be an interesting weapon on a bunch of levels....

How about a pig feces claymore mine?  :'(

 

[medicineman]

How about a pig feces claymore mine?  :'(

I remember reading Charlie Beckwith's account of how, when Delta Force was first tagged to try and rescue the hostages in the US Embassy in Tehran, the CIA actually floated the idea of parachuting pigs into the compound on the off chance the IRG would freak out and be too busy dealing with filthy four legged creatures that they wouldn't notice the cammed up two legged ones with guns breaking in...the SEALs jump with their dogs, I suppose someone could teach pigs to parachute too.

MM

 

[Remius]

Another article about why some people refuse to use the term "Islamic".  They even quote the article I linked earlier in the Atlantic.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/why-barack-obama-won-t-say-islamic-extremists-1.2969404

A good piece.

 

[a_majoor]

And on to Lebanon? This could be where things get very interesting, especially since Hezbollah, as Iran's proxy army in the region, will be directly targetted by ISIS. I can't imagine Israel having a comfortable feeling about this if it comes to pass either. The introduction of French arms and Saudi money is also interesting, although the idea of either Hezbollah or ISIS getting (more) access to modern arms is not a comforting thoght either. This is just one of those fights where you want everyone to lose:

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/isis-next-target

ISIS' Next Target
26 February 2015

ISIS has announced that Lebanon will be the next state to fall under the sway of its “caliphate.” According to Beirut's Daily Star newspaper, the only reason ISIS hasn't attacked yet in force is because they haven't decided on the mission's commander.

The Lebanese army is one of the least effective in the Middle East—and that's saying something in a region where the far more capable Syrian and Iraqi armies are utterly failing to safeguard what should be their own sovereign territory.

So France is going to send a three billion dollar package of weapons to Lebanon and the Saudis are going to pay for it. It won't solve the problem any more than a full-body cast will cure cancer, but it beats standing around and not even trying.

It may seem surprising at first that Riyadh is willing to fund a Lebanese Maginot Line. Saudi Arabia is the most culturally conservative Arab country and Lebanon is the most liberal, partly because of its one-third Christian minority, but also because Lebanon's Sunni Muslims are, for the most part, Mediterranean merchants rather than isolated desert-dwellers. They've been exposed to cosmopolitan ideas and culture for centuries while most Saudis outside the Hejaz region on the Red Sea have been hermetically sealed off from the wider world and its ways for millennia.

Despite the vast cultural differences between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, the Saudis want Beirut to remain exactly as it is—a freewheeling Arabic-speaking “Amsterdam” or “Hong Kong” on the Med. The Saudis vacation there in droves when they need a break from their fanatically conservative homeland. The country is like a pressure release valve. If they were to lose it, they'd have to holiday in France where they feel profoundly unwelcome.

But aside from all that, the Saudis feel just as uneasy about ISIS as everyone else. Never mind the ideological overlap between the upstart jihadists and the Wahhabi-backed monarchy. ISIS threatens every single government in the region. It would make permanent alliances with none and conquer all if it could.

The Lebanese, of course, are in far more immediate danger. They can feel ISIS' hot breath on their necks. The army has been scrapping with them along the Syrian border for some time now. A majority of Lebanon's population is either Christian, Shia, or Druze, and all three populations rightly see ISIS as a potentially genocidal threat to their very existence. Even the Sunnis, though, fear and loathe ISIS. Other than the nominal sectarian sameness—ISIS also is Sunni—Lebanon's culturally liberal Sunnis have little more in common with ISIS than the French or Italians do.

A serious invasion of Lebanon by ISIS could unleash a bloodbath that makes the civil war in Syria look like a bar fight with pool sticks and beer mugs. It would be tantamount to a Nazi invasion. Every family in Lebanon is armed to the gills thanks to the state being too weak and divided to provide basic security, but people anywhere in the world facing psychopathic mass-murderers will fight with kitchen knives and even their fingernails and teeth if they have to.

The only good thing that might emerge from an attempted ISIS invasion is that the eternally fractious Lebanese might finally realize they have enough in common with each other to band together for survival and kindle something that resembles a national identity for the first time in their history.

Foreign armies don't do well in Lebanon over the long term. The Israelis managed to invade and occupy a large part of the country during the civil war in 1982 and even exiled Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, but they ended up fighting a grinding counterinsurgency against Hezbollah until 2000. The Syrians invaded and dominated the rest of the country, but the biggest demonstrations in the history of the Middle East forced the Assad regime into a humiliating retreat in 2005. Those are just the most recent examples. At the mouth of the Dog River is a mural of sorts. Seventeen conquering armies carved inscriptions into the stone cliffs congratulating themselves for seizing new territory. All, Ozymandias-like, have been vanquished.

So ISIS will eventually lose if thrusts into Lebanon, but the cost could be unspeakable. Few of Lebanon's prior invaders murdered innocent people with such gleeful ferocity. If ISIS makes any headway at all in that country, the rest of us will see just how barbaric they really are when they violently encounter large numbers of people unlike themselves. And the odds that the West will get sucked even deeper into the great war of the Eastern Mediterranean will only loom larger.

 

[Eye In The Sky]

Why don't we just use them all, and flatten the whole damned area. Nuke 'em till they glow.  :nod:

I don't think you meant this literally but comments like this are or can be damaging even if said tongue in cheek.  Obviously there are many innocent people in the area who are the real victims in this. 

Aside from that, there is that lilttle "LOAC" aspect. 

 

[cupper]

I don't think you meant this literally but comments like this are or can be damaging even if said tongue in cheek.  Obviously there are many innocent people in the area who are the real victims in this. 

Aside from that, there is that lilttle "LOAC" aspect. 

It was meant in jest. But the fact that it raised the point you made shows the absurdity of doing anything in this shit storm. Because of the risk adverse nature of the Western Governments, and the potential for huge collateral damage resulting in damaging relations with "friendly" muslim populations, it has become a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Short of waiting for ISIS to reach the point where even the most tepid moderate has had enough and the people in Syria and Iraq rise up and stomp them, only a scorched earth policy will ensure a quick and decisive ending. But the cost would be too high a price for the West to pay, and exacerbate the problems we are trying to avoid in the home countries.

But with the latest statement of a possible move into Lebanon could accelerate their demise.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I remember reading Charlie Beckwith's account of how, when Delta Force was first tagged to try and rescue the hostages in the US Embassy in Tehran, the CIA actually floated the idea of parachuting pigs into the compound on the off chance the IRG would freak out and be too busy dealing with filthy four legged creatures that they wouldn't notice the cammed up two legged ones with guns breaking in...the SEALs jump with their dogs, I suppose someone could teach pigs to parachute too.

MM

Are you suggesting that pigs fly? We're all doomed.

 

[cupper]

Are you suggesting that pigs fly? We're all doomed.

I think he was suggesting that the fall gracefully. All is still well. ;D

 

[CougarKing]

Turkey and the Kurds making peace so they can focus on other threats?

Defense News

Turkey, Kurds Announce Landmark Deal for Peace

ANKARA — Turkey and its restive Kurdish population have announced a landmark deal that may soon end 31 years violence in the country.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) announced Feb. 28 at a joint press conference with senior cabinet ministers a call by the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) for a congress in spring to discuss disarmament.

Around 40,000 people have lost their lives since 1984 when the PKK launched an armed struggle for a Kurdish homeland.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[Kat Stevens]

If I were the Kurdish authorities I'd trust Turkey about as far as I could blow it down a brass tube.

 

[Jed]

If I were the Kurdish authorities I'd trust Turkey about as far as I could blow it down a brass tube.

You're thinkin' what I'm thinkin'.

 

[OldSolduer]

If I were the Kurdish authorities I'd trust Turkey about as far as I could blow it down a brass tube.

If I were Kurdish I wouldn't trust anyone.

 

[Old Sweat]

And the other way around too. One can only assume the long term objectives of both sides are unchanged.

 

[CougarKing]

Egypt taking its war against ISIS beyond mere air strikes in retaliation for the Egyptian Christian hostages killed by ISIS recently:

Debka.com

Egypt goes to war on ISIS, masses troops against Islamist Libyan stronghold at Darnah

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report February 28, 2015, 8:51 AM (IDT)

Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi has deployed his troops for all-out war on ISIS strongholds in Libya, the first Arab ruler to challenge the Islamists in a fellow Arab country.

His intiative dramatizes the spillover of the Islamist State’s threat across the Middle East, and the fading impetus of the US-led coalition effort to reverse Islamic State gains in Iraq and Syria.

Our Washington sources report that the Obama administration’s planned spring campaign to free Iraqi Mosul from the Islamic State’s occupation is stuck in the sand. Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike accuse the president of having no clear war strategy and of holding back from the US-led coalition the fighting manpower necessary for a successful operation.

Answering questions in the Senate WEdnesday, Feb. 25, the coalition commander, retired Gen. John Allen, said he had no hard-and-fast timeline for the war. The influential Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California responded angrily: Your answers show one thing about the timeline defined by the White House as an enduring ground operation: “There is none.”

(...SNIPPED)

He is also considering aerial bombardments of the Gaza Strip to target Hamas’ military arm whose active collaboration with the jihadis has been confirmed by intelligence.

Some of the militias which have divided Darnah, a town of app. 50,000, among themselves, have declared their territories provinces of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s Islamic Caliphate.

According to our military sources, Egyptian forces will be assigned to attack the town from the north after a beach landing. They plan to link up with allied Libyan militias commanded by the former Qaddafi regime general Khalifa Hifter, who will come from Benghazi to strike the town from the south. Khalif and his armed men have been pursuing a relentless war on the inroads made by al Qaeda in Libya, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, with quiet backing from Cairo.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[CougarKing]

More young women lost to ISIS recruiting:

Reuters

CCTV shows British schoolgirls at Istanbul bus station on way to Syria: media

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Security footage appears to show three British schoolgirls, believed to be on their way to join Islamic State militants, waiting for hours at a bus station in Turkey before traveling to a city near the Syrian border, media reported on Sunday.

British police and the girls' families have issued urgent appeals for their daughters to return home after they flew to Istanbul from London on Feb. 17. Friends Amira Abase, 15, Shamima Begum, 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16, are thought to have since entered Syria, British police have said.

European governments have called on Turkey to stem the flow of foreign fighters to Syria, and British Prime Minister David Cameron has urged social media firms to do more to deal with online extremism, saying the girls appeared to have been radicalized "in their bedrooms."

(...SNIPPED)

 

[a_majoor]

While this is sad for the parents, at this point in time if we are not willing to provide the social, political and cultural milieu to bring and keep people into western society, then probably the best way to cut our losses is to allow these radicalized people to leave and let them take their chances in the "hard rain" over Syria.

A lot of the blame for this does have to go to the sorts of people here in the West who have done everything possible to downgrade Western culture via Multiculturalism, relativism, "political correctness" and so on. If people who come to live or grow up in the West have no strong culture to identify with, then the rootless people will go to whoever promises to fill the vacuum.