Pan-Islamic merged mega thread

[Colin Parkinson]

Hard to say how strong the secular side is with it's support in the army being whittled down by the current government. My read is that most of the secular support is in the big cities and the rural areas are quite traditional and conservative.

The corruption scandal, the clash on the trucks smuggling weapons to Syria show that there appears to be a "Civil Service War" between various branches of the government. 

 

[pbi]

Ok: you are better informed than I am. Still, I can't see any virtue whatsoever in the West acting out the very role the Islamists would like it to.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Kurds have a long history, strong connection to the area and strong ethnic identity, based on their current actions and recent past I suspect they will eventually create their own state regardless of our intervention or not. Helping the Kurds create that state create bonds and helping them manage their relationship to Turkey is important. Any Kurdistan is going to need relatively decent relationships with Turkey. Kurdistan could become the next Israel.

 

[Edward Campbell]

More, from Richard Haas on the potential for a new Thirty Years War in the Middle East in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Project Syndicate:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/richard-n--haass-argues-that-the-middle-east-is-less-a-problem-to-be-solved-than-a-condition-to-be-managed

The New Thirty Years’ War

Richard N Haas

July 21, 2014

NEW YORK – It is a region wracked by religious struggle between competing traditions of the faith. But the conflict is also between militants and moderates, fueled by neighboring rulers seeking to defend their interests and increase their influence. Conflicts take place within and between states; civil wars and proxy wars become impossible to distinguish. Governments often forfeit control to smaller groups – militias and the like – operating within and across borders. The loss of life is devastating, and millions are rendered homeless.

That could be a description of today’s Middle East. In fact, it describes Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century.

In the Middle East in 2011, change came after a humiliated Tunisian fruit vendor set himself alight in protest; in a matter of weeks, the region was aflame. In seventeenth-century Europe, a local religious uprising by Bohemian Protestants against the Catholic Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II triggered that era’s conflagration.

Protestants and Catholics alike turned for support to their co-religionists within the territories that would one day become Germany. Many of the era’s major powers, including Spain, France, Sweden, and Austria, were drawn in. The result was the Thirty Years’ War, the most violent and destructive episode in European history until the two world wars of the twentieth century.

There are obvious differences between the events of 1618-1648 in Europe and those of 2011-2014 in the Middle East. But the similarities are many – and sobering. Three and a half years after the dawn of the “Arab Spring,” there is a real possibility that we are witnessing the early phase of a prolonged, costly, and deadly struggle; as bad as things are, they could well become worse.

The region is ripe for unrest. Most of its people are politically impotent and poor in terms of both wealth and prospects. Islam never experienced something akin to the Reformation in Europe; the lines between the sacred and the secular are unclear and contested.

Moreover, national identities often compete with – and are increasingly overwhelmed by – those stemming from religion, sect, and tribe. Civil society is weak. In some countries, the presence of oil and gas discourages the emergence of a diversified economy and, with it, a middle class. Education emphasizes rote learning over critical thinking. In many cases, authoritarian rulers lack legitimacy.

Outside actors, by what they did and failed to do, added fuel to the fire. The 2003 Iraq war was highly consequential, for it exacerbated Sunni-Shia tensions in one of the region’s most important countries and, as a result, in many of the region’s other divided societies. Regime change in Libya has created a failing state; lukewarm support for regime change in Syria has set the stage for prolonged civil war.

The region’s trajectory is worrisome: weak states unable to police their territory; the few relatively strong states competing for primacy; militias and terrorist groups gaining greater influence; and the erasure of borders. The local political culture confuses democracy with majoritarianism, with elections used as vehicles to consolidate power, not share it.

Beyond the enormous human suffering and loss of life, the most immediate byproduct of the region’s turmoil is the potential for more severe and frequent terrorism – both in the Middle East and emanating from it. There is also the potential for disruption of energy production and shipping.

There are limits to what outsiders can do. Sometimes, policymakers need to focus on preventing things from getting worse, rather than on ambitious agendas for improvement; this is one of those times.

What this calls for, above all, is prevention of nuclear proliferation (beginning with Iran), whether through diplomacy and sanctions, or, if need be, through sabotage and military attacks. The alternative – a Middle East in which several governments and, through them, militias and terrorist groups have access to nuclear weapons and materials – is too horrific to contemplate.

Steps that reduce global dependence on the region’s energy supplies (including improvements in fuel efficiency and development of alternative sources) also make great sense. Economic assistance should go simultaneously to Jordan and Lebanon to help them cope with the flood of refugees. Democracy promotion in Turkey and Egypt should focus on strengthening civil society and creating robust constitutions that diffuse power.

Counter-terrorism against groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (which now calls itself simply the “Islamic State”) – whether by drones, small raids, or the training and arming of local partners – must become a staple of policy. It is time to recognize the inevitability of Iraq’s break-up (the country is now more a vehicle for Iran’s influence than a bulwark against it) and bolster an independent Kurdistan within Iraq’s former borders.

There is no room for illusions. Regime change is no panacea; it can be difficult to achieve and nearly impossible to consolidate. Negotiations cannot resolve all or even most conflicts.

That is certainly true, for the time being, of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Even if this changes, a comprehensive settlement would help the locals but not affect the dynamics of neighboring countries or conflicts. That said, a narrow ceasefire between Israel and Hamas should be pursued.

Likewise, diplomacy can work in Syria only if it accepts the reality on the ground (including the survival of the Assad regime for the foreseeable future), rather than seeking to transform it. The answer is not to be found in drawing new maps, though once populations have shifted and political stability has been restored, recognition of new borders might prove both desirable and viable.

Policymakers must recognize their limits. For now and for the foreseeable future – until a new local order emerges or exhaustion sets in – the Middle East will be less a problem to be solved than a condition to be managed.

 

[Kirkhill]

A "Thirty Years War" is perhaps optimistic.

Another reading of European history might suggest that the Dutch Rebellion (1566) predated the Thirty Years war as did the French Wars of Religion (1560).  There were other incidents across Europe going back to the 1500s.    Equally there were Protestant/Catholic overtones to the Seven Years War (1763) and even the US War of Independence.

That equates to a span of more than two centuries and a lot of international conflict that spanned the globe......it also gave ample scope to non-state actors like pirates, privateers, buccaneers and corsairs.

 

[wannabe SF member]

a)-the separation of religion from politics, such that political dissent can't be treated as an attack on God and thus worthy of all sorts of hideous treatment;

b)-a significant drop in the birth rate (admittedly a very long flash to bang on this one); and

c)-the widespread education and empowerment of women, which usually produces b) above

In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.
Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.

I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?

Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.

Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.

we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.

 

[Edward Campbell]

In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.
Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.

I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?

Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.

Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.

we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.

Bingo!

I thought George W Bush and the Project For A New American Century folks were wrong in so far as they thought they could wander about the world bringing liberal democracy to the masses. It took, arguably, 1,000 years for a few basic democratic elements to secure a real foothold in Northern Europe (500 CE to,say, 1500 CE) and 400 more years for something like real, liberal democracy to be relatively secure in most of Northern Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand.

(I did not think all of the PNAC aims were wrong, just the one about spreading democracy.)

There are, of course, other forms of democracy: conservative democracy which we find in e.g. Singapore, and, to a greater or lesser degree in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan; and illiberal democracy,* which is far more common than either or both of the other sorts.

_____
* See: The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, By Fareed Zakaria Fom the November/December 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs

 

[OldSolduer]

I agree .....to have liberal democracy take root it needs time...not years but centuries.

I'd like to sit on the sidelines and watch them kick the crap out of each other.

 

[a_majoor]

This could go into a number of threads, but the idea there is a pool of 14 million displaced people and refugees (and the knowledge that this crisis actually predates both the Syrian Civil War and the "Arab Spring"; notice there were displaced Syrian farmers surrounding the cities before either of the other two events) suggests there is basically an unstoppable pool of recruits for radicals to fish from.

While the author rightly suggests that Iran's desire for regional hegemony is behind much of the crisis, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia have done their share in spreading radical forms of Islam, pushing their own radicals out into the region and supplying and arming *some* radical groups as a way of fighting the Iranian influence.

This "thirty years war" is bound to spill out of the Middle East, and considering the current state of the world, with high levels of tension if not conflict in places that touch on the edges of the "Islamosphere" ranging from Sub Saharan Africa, Russia and China, this does not bode well for anyone:

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/09/08/14-million-refugees-make-the-levant-unmanageable/?print=1

14 Million Refugees Make the Levant Unmanageable
Posted By David P. Goldman On September 8, 2014 @ 9:33 pm In Uncategorized | 32 Comments

There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11 million Syrians, or half the country’s population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country’s population). When I wrote about the region’s refugee disaster at Tablet in July (“Between the Settlers and Unsettlers, the One State Solution is On Our Doorstep“) the going estimate was only 10 million. A new UN study, though, claims that half of Syrians are displaced. Many of them will have nothing to go back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others.

That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time. The roots of the crisis were visible four years ago before the so-called Arab Spring beguiled the foreign policy wonks. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrian farmers already were living in tent camps around Syrian cities before the Syrian civil war began in April 2011. Israeli analysts knew this. In March 2011 Paul Rivlin of Tel Aviv University released a study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture, widely cited in Arab media but unmentioned in the English language press (except my essay on the topic). Most of what passes for political science treats peoples and politicians as if they were so many pieces on a fixed game board. This time the game board is shrinking and the pieces are falling off.

The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states and, if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant.

When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg. The international organizations, Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant (“moderate” is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine branch Hamas), will compete with the caliphate for the loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.

*strong language warning for video*

That is also why ISIS is overrated. A terrorist organization that beheads Americans and posts the video needs to be annihilated, but it is not particularly difficult. The late Sam Kinison’s monologue on world hunger is to the point: they live in a desert. They may be hard to flush out of towns they occupy, but they cannot move from one town to another in open ground if warplanes are hunting them. That is what America and its allies should do.

More dangerous is Iran, as Henry Kissinger emphasized in a recent interview with National Public Radio. Iran’s backing for the Assad regime’s ethnic cleansing of Syrian Sunnis set the refugee crisis in motion, while the Iraqi Shi’ites’ alliance with Iran persuaded elements of Saddam Hussein’s military to fight for ISIS. Iran can make nuclear weapons and missiles; ISIS cannot. If we had had the foresight to neutralize Iran years ago, the crisis could have been managed without the unspeakable humanitarian cost.

We cannot do the killing ourselves, except, of course, from the air. We are too squeamish under the best of circumstances, and we are too corrupted by cultural relativism (remember George W. Bush’s claim that Islam is “a religion of peace”?) to recognize utterly evil nihilism when it stares us in the face. In practice, a great deal of the killing will be done by Iran and its allies: the Iraqi Shi’a, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad regime in Syria. It will be one of the most disgusting and disheartening episodes in modern history and there isn’t much we can do to prevent it.

Article printed from Spengler: http://pjmedia.com/spengler

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/09/08/14-million-refugees-make-the-levant-unmanageable/

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Persians make up about 51% of the Iranian population. they have the Kurds in the North and the Balachs in the south, who sit on much of the oil reserves. Neither Pakistan or Iran can afford a successful Balach independence movement. While Iran would survive, Pakistan would lose a large amount of land and it would encourage the Pastuns in the NWF to declare independence and possibly cleave a chunk off of Afghanistan as well. At which point a fragmented afghanistan might even lose a chunk including Heret to Iran.

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting analogy that the Islamic radicals are more akin to the ancient horsemen from the Steppes than anything we are familiar with today:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-28/islamic-state-s-centuries-old-strategy

Islamic State's Centuries-Old Strategy
36 AUG 28, 2014 5:25 PM EDT
By Stephen L. Carter

The debate over how to think about Islamic State has mainly centered on important but abstruse questions -- is it evil or not? -- and on what combination of military and economic pressure might be necessary to prevent the establishment of a caliphate.

What the debate is lacking is a sense of history. And the historical antecedents do supply an early analogy to Islamic State -- a warrior people who came out of nowhere, defeated mightier forces in battle, accumulated wealth and, in their bloody ferocity, terrified every civilization with which they came into contact.

I refer to the steppe nomads.

The steppe nomads were fearsome horsemen of varying ethnicity who first encountered the great empires of antiquity around 700 B.C., and reappeared with regularity well into the Middle Ages. They lacked the sophisticated technology, wealth and professional bureaucracy of the great powers like Rome and China. Instead they had horses. Cavalry was something new, and the traditional empires had difficulty adjusting to the tactics of the unanticipated invaders, who although loosely organized slowly conquered vast swaths of territory.

Like Islamic State. As a matter of fact, back in the seventh century B.C., a group of steppe warriors, the Scythians, actually ruled a region roughly contiguous with the territory now controlled by Islamic State.

Ironies abound. For example, CNN has reported that the black robes and turban worn by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi intentionally “harken back” -- one assumes the writer meant “hark back” -- “to Arab rulers from 1,500 years ago." But if we go back that millennium and a half, to the era al-Baghdadi’s attire is meant to evoke, we find ourselves very close to the time when steppe warriors led by Attila the Hun came swarming into the remains of the Roman Empire, finally sacking the walled cities that had defied earlier invaders, because they had mastered the Roman technology. The Huns used battering rams and scaling ladders to take the fortified cities, and Attila spent his plunder wisely, hiring the finest engineers (many of them Romans) to figure out how to outwit the defensive technologies of the supposedly more advanced cultures of the West.

The story of the battle against the steppe nomads is powerfully told in Ian Morris’s excellent if controversial book, "War! What Is It Good For?" Morris, a historian and archeologist at Stanford, argues that there are two kinds of wars: productive wars that bring about greater prosperity and safety, and unproductive ones that are destructive to both. The wars with the steppe nomads were mostly unproductive. And although the territorial empires ultimately prevailed, the wars against the nomads were long and enormously costly.

By the 13th century, when Mongols under Genghis Khan successfully invaded what is now Iran, the technological sophistication of the steppe nomads had advanced considerably. Khan “employed a permanent corps of Chinese engineers,” writes Morris, and the engineers in turn forced prisoners to “dig tunnels; divert rivers; build catapults, rams, and towers; and rain burning gunpowder onto defenders." The Mongols’ use of technology helped them take Baghdad, “Islam’s richest city,” in 1258. A few years later, following a lengthy siege, the Mongols conquered Xiangyang in central China, “possibly the greatest fortress on earth.”

All of this was possible because the Mongols -- who began as classic mounted steppe warriors -- were far-sighted enough to see the advantage of using their accumulated wealth to hire the experts they needed to defeat the cultures of the West.

The Huns, another fearsome nomadic people, had earlier learned the same lesson. For the Hunnic Empire, writes the historian Peter Heather in "Empire and Barbarians," the “path to political triumph” was to take charge “of distributing the combined profits flowing from a potent mixture of raiding, mercenary service, and diplomatic subsidy.”

Islamic State has effectively checked off each of these boxes. The group has accumulated a great deal of wealth, and is spending a good deal of it on advanced technology, just as the Huns and Mongols did. Recent news reports suggest not only that the group now flies surveillance drones, but that the drones were used to study a military base recently captured by its fighters.

Islamic State has also captured a lot of sophisticated military hardware from the Iraqi army. Many experts are skeptical about the group’s ability to maintain or even learn how to use the equipment. Perhaps. But Islamic State doesn’t necessarily need to do maintenance and training on its own; it need only spend some of its wealth to hire outside experts interested in making a buck. It worked for the steppe warriors for centuries. There is no reason to think it wouldn’t work for Islamic State.

The steppe warriors lost in the end, of course. It cost the traditional empires of Europe and Asia dearly in blood and treasure, but they won. How? Morris lists several reasons, and all of them have relevance to the current threat of Islamic State.

Advancing technology -- particularly the discovery of military uses for gunpowder -- helped turn the tide of battle. So did constant and often massive attacks on the nomad territory, as well as simple bribery. Most important, perhaps, was a change in attitude. Not until they finally accepted their enemy for what it was, not a crowd of mindless barbarians but a powerful military and economic force that had to be fought with all the weapons and wealth at their command, did the great empires of history defeat the warriors of the steppes.

To contact the writer of this article: Stephen L. Carter at stephen.carter@yale.edu.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net.

 

[Marchog]

I'd like to put my 2 cents in and say that a "30 Years War" is exactly the opposite of what the Middle East needs. That would open up exactly the same Pandora's box as it did in Western society (materialism, related revolutionary bloodbaths in search of earthly utopia and mass secular ideologies far more bloodthirsty than anything that had preceded them), the effects of which we still haven't managed to shove back inside despite a breathtakingly naive assumption of success following a half century of secure democracy (a mere heartbeat in history). What the Middle East (especially Iraq and Libya) needs is a return to the only thing that kept them even remotely stable in anything approaching recent memory, that is to say, highly reactionary monarchies wielding an iron fist, whose absence allowed a power vacuum in which Islamic extremism (or pan-Arabist pseudo-fascism itself influenced by post "enlightenment" Western ethnic statehood) could thrive in the first place. Iraq and Libya don't need 1789. They need "l'état c'est moi".

Of course, such a thing would be ideologically unthinkable for modern Europe or the United States, who seem hell-bent on establishing a political and social order which has barely been tested in the West, let alone elsewhere.

In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.
Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.

I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?

Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.

Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.

we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.

I largely agree with this sentiment, and again I think the best solution to achieve these things (stability, a lid on jihadism and safety from an unwanted liberal society) would be the aforementioned reactionary monarchies. Complain all you want about the currently existing monarchies over there (not always cuddly teddy bears), but if all of the Middle East was a collection of UAEs and Saudi Arabias, we'd have a lot less to worry about.

 

[YZT580]

Guess again.  Al Quaeda was a product of Saudi Arabia.  Iran is hardly a breeding ground for democracy but it is certainly a sponsor of anti-west terrorism and it has a stable dictatorship.  ISIS did not emerge simply to combat Assad.  These guys truly believe that the future belongs to Allah and you WILL bow or you will pay or you will die.  The idea of religious freedom or the freedom to have no religion doesn't exist over there.  Now that it ISIS has been let out of hell, we aren't going to find it so easy to push it back in again nor is it going to be easy to keep it in the Middle East.  I would suggest that they have declared war on us and we need to come to grips with that thought and do something about it and now, while they are still squabbling amongst themselves would be the ideal time to act before they get their s***t together.

 

[Marchog]

Guess again.  Al Quaeda was a product of Saudi Arabia.  Iran is hardly a breeding ground for democracy but it is certainly a sponsor of anti-west terrorism and it has a stable dictatorship.

I would say Al Qaeda is operating in spite of, rather than because of, the Saudi monarchy. Iran is a republican dictatorship, not a monarchy, and it just so happens to be an Islamic republic that appeared after the Shah was deposed, so hardly the thing I am advocating (in fact, pretty close to the opposite).

I would suggest that they have declared war on us and we need to come to grips with that thought and do something about it and now, while they are still squabbling amongst themselves would be the ideal time to act before they get their s***t together.

I'm not sure if you are addressing me directly with this, but I in no way implied that ISIS shouldn't be fought, in fact I think they should. I was simply arguing that trying to establish post 17th-century western society there is not the way to go, and not the thing ISIS should theoretically be replaced with once eliminated.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Actually I would say more like the Taliban, the forces that help create the ISIS had no idea of the success they would have and eventually the dog will bite the masters hands when it tries to control it. I am not sure how much technical help they will get in the long run, these guys are the like the scorpion on the fox crossing the river, they will kill the fox because it's their nature and will poison their own well with their nuttiness. In fact spreading lies and suspicion so they eat their own is a good way to fight them. 

 

[George Wallace]

It appears that the barbarianism of ISIS / ISIL is spreading outside of Iraq and Syria. 

A French mountain guide while on a hiking tour, was captured and has been beheaded in Algeria by ISIS allies.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

Hervé Gourdel, French hostage, beheaded by ISIS allies

CBC NEWS WORLD
The Associated Press Posted: Sep 24, 2014 11:59 AM ET Last Updated: Sep 24, 2014 2:18 PM ET

Gourdel was a 55-year-old mountaineering guide seized in northern Algeria

Algerian extremists allied with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group have decapitated a French hostage after France carried out airstrikes in Iraq, according to a video that appeared online Wednesday.

French President Francois Hollande condemned the killing of Herve Gourdel and said France would continue its fight against ISIS group, which are Sunni militants that have taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

"Herve Gourdel is dead because he is the representative of a people — ours — that defends human dignity against barbarity," Hollande said, speaking along the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. "My determination is total and this attack only reinforces it. We will continue to fight terrorism everywhere."

A group calling itself Jund al-Khilafah, or Soldiers of the Caliphate, had said they would kill the French mountaineer after abducting him Sunday unless France ended its airstrikes against ISIS fighters in Iraq within 24 hours.

France started airstrikes in Iraq on Friday, the first country to join the U.S. military campaign against ISIS fighters there.

France a special target for Islamic extremists

The killing of a hostage represents a departure for radical Islamic groups in Algeria, which in the past decade have made millions off ransoming hostages. France is also known for paying ransoms, though several hostages have died in the past at the hands of their captors.

In the video, masked gunmen from the newly formed group that split away from al-Qaeda's North Africa branch stood over a kneeling Gourdel. They pledged their allegiance to the leader of the ISIS group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and said they were fighting his enemies. They added they were following his instructions to attack the French.

The video showed the captive pushed to the ground and blindfolded before he was beheaded.

Islamic extremists have long singled out France as a special target for multiple reasons: the French military campaign against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Mali, the French involvement in the NATO force in Afghanistan and French laws banning the Muslim face veil anywhere in public and banning Muslim headscarves in public buildings.

Nearly 1,000 French radicals have joined or are trying to join ISIS in Syria and in Iraq — more than the number of fighters from any other Western country. French authorities are particularly concerned that they will return and stage attacks at home.

The video resembled those showing the beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker in recent weeks, but instead of starting with clips of U.S. President Barack Obama speaking, it showed Hollande.

The terrorism watchdog SITE Intelligence Group said the video had been posted on the social networking site Twitter. It was briefly available on YouTube before being taken down.

"Our values are at stake," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Wednesday after hearing about the video.

Taken during hiking trip in Algeria

Gourdel — a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice — was seized in the Djura Djura mountains of northern Algeria on Sunday during a hiking trip. His Algerian companions were released. On his Facebook page he had expressed his excitement about his camping trip and said he was looking forward to being shown around for a change, instead of being the guide.

The remote mountainous region, riddled with steep valleys and deep caves, however, is also one of the last strongholds of Islamist extremists in northern Algeria.

Algerian forces unleashed a massive search for Gourdel, sending in helicopters and special forces to comb the region.

According to a presidential aide, Hollande has spoken with his family. Gourdel's hometown in southern France is planning a vigil Thursday at the mountaineering office where he worked.

The head of a leading French Muslim group, Dalil Boubakeur expressed horror at the "this barbaric crime," condemning it "with the utmost energy." The group has called for imams to denounce the practices of ISIS.

Algeria has been fighting Islamic extremists since the 1990s. In recent years, they had been largely confined to a few mountainous areas, where they have concentrated on attacking soldiers and police while leaving civilians alone.

© The Associated Press, 2014

More on LINK.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

There was some very nasty stuff going on in the early 2000 there as I recall. So not inspired. Also in the Philippines the Muslims extremists there have been threatening to behead captives. 

 

[CougarKing]

:facepalm: Will there be anything left of her to interview within a year?

Turks leave for "family-friendly" IS group

ISTANBUL (AP) — Asiya Ummi Abdullah doesn't share the view that the Islamic State group rules over a terrorist dystopia and she isn't scared by the American bombs falling on Raqqa, its power center in Syria.

As far as she's concerned, it's the ideal place to raise a family.

In interviews with The Associated Press, the 24-year-old Muslim convert explained her decision to move with her toddler to the territory controlled by the militant group, saying it offers them protection from the sex, crime, drugs and alcohol that she sees as rampant in largely secular Turkey.

"The children of that country see all this and become either murderers or delinquents or homosexuals or thieves," Umi Abdullah wrote in one of several Facebook messages exchanged in recent days. She said that living under Shariah, the Islamic legal code, means that her 3-year-old boy's spiritual life is secure.

"He will know God and live under his rules," she said. As for the American bombs being dropped on the Islamic State group, she said: "I only fear God."

(...SNIPPED)

More at the source:
http://news.msn.com/world/turks-leave-for-family-friendly-is-group

 

[George Wallace]

:facepalm: Will there be anything left of her to interview within a year?

More at the source:
http://news.msn.com/world/turks-leave-for-family-friendly-is-group

We will see then if she is a recipient of the Darwin Award.

 

[George Wallace]

From the Huffinton Post, a report on over 120 Muslim scholars gathered in Washington, DC and their open letter to the Islamic State.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

Muslim Scholars Release Open Letter To Islamic State Meticulously Blasting Its Ideology
Religion News Service | By Lauren Markoe
Posted: 09/24/2014 5:37 pm EDT Updated: 09/25/2014 10:59 am EDT

WASHINGTON (RNS) More than 120 Muslim scholars from around the world joined an open letter to the “fighters and followers” of the Islamic State, denouncing them as un-Islamic by using the most Islamic of terms.

Relying heavily on the Quran, the 18-page letter released Wednesday (Sept. 24) picks apart the extremist ideology of the militants who have left a wake of brutal death and destruction in their bid to establish a transnational Islamic state in Iraq and Syria.

Even translated into English, the letter will still sound alien to most Americans, said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, who released it in Washington with 10 other American Muslim religious and civil rights leaders.

“The letter is written in Arabic. It is using heavy classical religious texts and classical religious scholars that ISIS has used to mobilize young people to join its forces,” said Awad, using one of the acronyms for the group. “This letter is not meant for a liberal audience.”

Even mainstream Muslims, he said, may find it difficult to understand.

Awad said its aim is to offer a comprehensive Islamic refutation, “point-by-point,” to the philosophy of the Islamic State and the violence it has perpetrated. The letter’s authors include well-known religious and scholarly figures in the Muslim world, including Sheikh Shawqi Allam, the grand mufti of Egypt, and Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem and All Palestine.

A translated 24-point summary of the letter includes the following: “It is forbidden in Islam to torture”; “It is forbidden in Islam to attribute evil acts to God”; and “It is forbidden in Islam to declare people non-Muslims until he (or she) openly declares disbelief.”

This is not the first time Muslim leaders have joined to condemn the Islamic State. The chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, for example, last week told the nation’s Muslims that they should speak out against the “terrorist and murderers” who fight for the Islamic State and who have dragged Islam “through the mud.”

But the Muslim leaders who endorsed Wednesday’s letter called it an unprecedented refutation of the Islamic State ideology from a collaboration of religious scholars. It is addressed to the group’s self-anointed leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and “the fighters and followers of the self-declared ‘Islamic State.’”

But the words “Islamic State” are in quotes, and the Muslim leaders who released the letter asked people to stop using the term, arguing that it plays into the group’s unfounded logic that it is protecting Muslim lands from non-Muslims and is resurrecting the caliphate — a state governed by a Muslim leader that once controlled vast swaths of the Middle East.

“Please stop calling them the ‘Islamic State,’ because they are not a state and they are not a religion,” said Ahmed Bedier, a Muslim and the president of United Voices of America, a nonprofit that encourages minority groups to engage in civic life.

President Obama has made a similar point, referring to the Islamic State by one of its acronyms — “the group known as ISIL” — in his speech to the United Nations earlier Wednesday. In that speech, Obama also disconnected the group from Islam.

Enumerating its atrocities — the mass rape of women, the gunning down of children, the starvation of religious minorities — Obama concluded: “No God condones this terror.”

Here is the executive summary of their letter:

1. It is forbidden in Islam to issue fatwas without all the necessary learning requirements. Even then fatwas must follow Islamic legal theory as defined in the Classical texts. It is also forbidden to cite a portion of a verse from the Qur’an—or part of a verse—to derive a ruling without looking at everything that the Qur’an and Hadith teach related to that matter. In other words, there are strict subjective and objective prerequisites for fatwas, and one cannot ‘cherry-pick’ Qur’anic verses for legal arguments without considering the entire Qur’an and Hadith.

2. It is forbidden in Islam to issue legal rulings about anything without mastery of the Arabic language.

3. It is forbidden in Islam to oversimplify Shari’ah matters and ignore established Islamic sciences.

4. It is permissible in Islam [for scholars] to differ on any matter, except those fundamentals of religion that all Muslims must know.

5. It is forbidden in Islam to ignore the reality of contemporary times when deriving legal rulings.

6. It is forbidden in Islam to kill the innocent.

7. It is forbidden in Islam to kill emissaries, ambassadors, and diplomats; hence it is forbidden to kill journalists and aid workers.

8. Jihad in Islam is defensive war. It is not permissible without the right cause, the right purpose and without the right rules of conduct.

9. It is forbidden in Islam to declare people non-Muslim unless he (or she) openly declares disbelief.

10. It is forbidden in Islam to harm or mistreat—in any way—Christians or any ‘People of the Scripture’.

11. It is obligatory to consider Yazidis as People of the Scripture.

12. The re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam. It was abolished by universal consensus.

13. It is forbidden in Islam to force people to convert.

14. It is forbidden in Islam to deny women their rights.

15. It is forbidden in Islam to deny children their rights.

16. It is forbidden in Islam to enact legal punishments (hudud) without following the correct
procedures that ensure justice and mercy.

17. It is forbidden in Islam to torture people.

18. It is forbidden in Islam to disfigure the dead.

19. It is forbidden in Islam to attribute evil acts to God.

20. It is forbidden in Islam to destroy the graves and shrines of Prophets and Companions.

21. Armed insurrection is forbidden in Islam for any reason other than clear disbelief by the ruler and not allowing people to pray.

22. It is forbidden in Islam to declare a caliphate without consensus from all Muslims.

23. Loyalty to one’s nation is permissible in Islam.

24. After the death of the Prophet, Islam does not require anyone to emigrate anywhere.

Read the full letter here.

More on LINK.