We Know All Too Much About the Cruelty of Isis – But All Too Little about who they are--Robert Fisk
For centuries, governments told their soldiers and their people to Know Your Enemy. The problem with the Isis Caliphate and it is a big problem for President Obama after journalist James Foleys murder is that we dont know who it is. We are told of its butchery, cruelty, its kidnapping of women, its burying alive, its viciousness towards Christians and Yazidis and its public beheadings, but that is all. Even the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, comes across as a mad combination of the Mahdi who murdered Gordon of Khartoum, the assassinated Osama bin Laden and Oliver Cromwell, who did to the civilians of Drogheda what the Muslim Lord Protector al-Baghdadi has done to his enemies.
Foleys ritual slaughter is enough to dissuade even the most foolhardy of journalists from seeking an interview with al-Baghdadi. Never before in the Middle East has so much land been out of bounds to the Western media. So ignorant are we of this Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant a dark land in which the reports we see of it are their own phone videos that the Obamas, Camerons and Hammonds can only gnash their teeth at this unspeakable enemy. Easy reaction but not much to go on. Yet Isis knows how to do one thing: confront Obama with his very own hostage problem, the same conundrum Tony Blair faced when Ken Bigley appeared before the video lens. Do you ignore the warnings, thus proving that you dont care about your individual citizens when undertaking military operations which is the truth or do you turn into Jimmy Carter, curtsy to every whim of your enemies, go down on one knee and tell the Pentagon to Hold it right there?
Now Obama has seen the next American reporter threatened with beheading. Will he blink? He cant, can he?
So I suspect the answer will be what presidents and prime ministers have always done best in the Middle East, and announce that Foleys murder shows not only just how awful Isis is but how important it is to go on bombing it in order to destroy the wretched institution. In other words, turn the sadistic Isis reaction to the air strikes into the reason why America is carrying out the air strikes. After all, we were bombarding Isis because it was killing Yazidis and dispossessing Christians and threatening Kurds. And Iraq. Now we have another reason to bomb al-Baghdadis Caliphate.
For journalists, yesterday was a fearful day. Thirty years ago, Arabs would acknowledge our special role as neutral observers. As the years have gone by and as journalists have been killed by American military forces and Israeli soldiers and Iraqi rebels (and Arab militias), so our vulnerability has grown infinitely greater. When our chum, the Egyptian Field Marshal Abdol Fottah al-Sissi, locks up journalists for months, precious little do Western governments care about them. When our own masters show so little concern for our fate, is it any surprise that Isis or Isil or whatever are prepared to kill them. Sure, we dont execute them. But thats not a significance Isis is going to take much interest in.
There are two truths that the West is going to have to face about al-Baghdadis savage and dotty Caliphate: these executioners began their careers or their predecessors did in the video-murderers of the anti-American resistance in Iraq; and however disgusting their activities, there are hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims who live in the area of the Caliphate and who have NOT fled for their lives. This, of course, makes unhappy reading. If the Caliphate is so revolting, disgusting, gruesome in its purity-driven brutality, how come all these people Iraqis and Syrians did not flee along with their Christian brothers? Are a few thousand armed fighters really able to coerce so many people over such a vast tract of the Middle East?
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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/middle-east-crisis-we-know-all-too-much-about-the-cruelty-of-isis--but-all-too-little-about-who-they-are-9681873.html
DonViejo
(60,536 posts)during their report that the ISIS member who beheaded Foley was beheaded by a British citizen (http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014876158). During the report it was revealed the British government is aware that at least 500 British citizens have left the country to go and fight for ISIS. They also had an interview with a former Jihadist who said he left the movement because "I grew up and realized the issues facing the world aren't black and white."
KoKo
(84,711 posts)I was thinking of the grisly display of Saddam dragged out of his hidey hole and then in prison being subjected to mouth swabs & inspections for all the world to see. And the report of his sons hunted down, captured and killed. The brutal gang Rape of the young girl by our soldiers and murder of her family in Fallujah. The Gitmo Scenes or torture and cruelty and their Koran's destroyed or defiled. The nakedness and leading the captured around on dog leashes.
Gaddafi's brutal murder and sodomizing (we don't know who was responsible) but it was viewed here in America as "pay back" for a brutal dictator and generally applauded in MSM. The force feeding indignities of the remaining prisoners in GITMO who were not found guilty of anything...but, can't be let out...because ???? So much brutality has gone on since we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. And...now there's Gaza...
"Blow Back"