Explosion near Stadium in Paris, multiple shootings and hostage taking...

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

More likely, Facebook. Most of today's Internet writers have a stunningly lacking knowledge and understanding of significant world events history.

Well, no kidding, given the reference to the Afghanistan war. I wasn't aware CCCP was part of the "West".

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by taco.vidal

http://www.infowars.com/report-paris...ce-last-month/

Here is a more legit site with this info.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...de-France.html

[combustiblefuel]

Double post

[combustiblefuel]

Arrests made in Belgium linked to Paris attacks.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a6734666.html

[starseed]

The daily mail is on par with infowars in terms of credibility most of the time.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

I am not even sure what you are talking about. What century of wars? Which Afghanistan war? The Soviet? "West against the Middle East"? WTF does that mean? There is no Middle East. It's not like there is a united entity. The closest was the Arabs against Israel, and Israel took care of that by itself. The bloodiest war was Iran v Iraq. Right now it's Shia vs Sunni, and the "West" is kind of on the Sunni side, but then ISIS is Sunni, so that's a bit complicated...
The invasion of Iraq was certainly stupid. The "West" would have been much better off to have left Saddam in charge. The rest (the first Iraq war and Afghanistan) was sort of necessary, given invasion of Kuwait and 9/11, but could have been done differently. Bush Sr. was a lot smarter than his son, and Obama is just hopeless.
There hasn't been any century-long war of the West against Middle East. Maybe you've spent too much time reading ISIS literature.

I can see why you no longer work in history

There is essentially no nuance at all in this post. Some glossy statements, a couple of vague references and then a challenge of semantics over terminology of 'the west'.

Statements like the original gulf war was necessary because of the invasion of kuwait are just so starkly incorrect from a historiographical perspective that I'm left believing this post like many others from you has approached some sort of terminal velocity corrigendum.

[GirlySports]

Originally Posted by transplant99

Obviously it's a complicated matter and I am certainly bereft of the knowledge to have a definitive answer on this stuff.

I would like to think that as a group the UN and/or NATO could throw the smartest minds they have together and work with leaders from various areas of Syria and anywhere else that wants to work to a peaceful settlement. The biggest obstacles there would be Russia and China I would suggest but it doesn't seem impossible.

Maybe I am naïve but I believe that if an operation was allowed to start and finish and the above statement implemented, that other areas in that region and others would ask for the same sort of thing to happen in their countries.

I will say it one more time though....doing nothing is not a real option.

The target isn't Syria, it has to be Saudi Arabia.

The enemy at the root of 21st century Islamist terror is Saudi Arabia. When the West is ready to invade there, or otherwise effect regime change in Riyadh, that'll be real news. Saudi Arabia is on a path to self-destruction, between the rapidly shifting economics of oil demand and their intervention in the Yemeni civil war. Of course, what follows there could well be ISIS/Al Qaeda, but you have to get there first.

[kerriffic]

Yeah it seems like some of you honestly want to place all blame on western nations from over the past hundred years or so, in reality if you do some research you'll see this has been going on for thousands of years. Even before the crusades or the Muslim invasions if the 1500s. I strongly suggest giving Dan Carlin's hardcore history podcast a listen. He is able to really break down the history of the middle east.

Also do you guys realize that the first Iraq invasion was a UN sanctioned action after Saddam invaded Kuwait? Arguably Afghanistan was a necessary invasion too. The second Iraq war of course was completely unnecessary.

But I digress here is the sickening statement from Isis

[transplant99]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

The target isn't Syria, it has to be Saudi Arabia.

The enemy at the root of 21st century Islamist terror is Saudi Arabia. When the West is ready to invade there, or otherwise effect regime change in Riyadh, that'll be real news. Saudi Arabia is on a path to self-destruction, between the rapidly shifting economics of oil demand and their intervention in the Yemeni civil war. Of course, what follows there could well be ISIS/Al Qaeda, but you have to get there first.

That's fine but right now we know where ISIS is, and that's who you have to go after first. Stabalize just one country in that region by doing it with both UN and NATO forces all working for the same goal, and it will make changes easier in other areas.


Right now though? No one has a real reason to go after SA and get support from the UN security council nor the NATO alliance.

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

I can see why you no longer work in history

There is essentially no nuance at all in this post. Some glossy statements, a couple of vague references and then a challenge of semantics over terminology of 'the west'.

Statements like the original gulf war was necessary because of the invasion of kuwait are just so starkly incorrect from a historiographical perspective that I'm left believing this post like many others from you has approached some sort of terminal velocity corrigendum.

Say something useful. All I see is Obamaesque verbal diarrhea.
The first Iraqi war was brilliantly executed. Virtually no casualties and it left Saddam in charge.
What are you arguing exactly? I challenged a ridiculous, factually incorrect post. Excuse me if I was brief. This an Internet debate, not a Masters thesis. There is certainly a lot of room for debate about the need for/execution of the American Afghanistan war. Ditto about causes of the first Iraq War. The 2nd Iraq war was certainly idiotic - I think we agree there. Are you actually challenging my point about lumping the Soviets in with the "West"? What exactly is your point of view?

[Flash Walken]

Take a glance at what has come to pass in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A library has been built over the dwelling where the Prophet Mohamed was born in Mecca in AD570 – even this may now be replaced by skyscrapers – and the fine Bilal mosque, dating from this same period, has been bulldozed. Mohamed’s first wife, Khadijah, lived in a Mecca house which has been turned into toilets. The Mecca Hilton Hotel was erected over the house of Abu Bakr, Mohamed’s father-in-law, his closest companion and future Caliph. Hundreds of old Ottoman houses have been destroyed in Saudi Arabia and Ottoman architecture around the Great Mosque is being torn down for pilgrimage “expansion” projects. Five of the famous “Seven Mosques”, built by Mohamed’s daughter and four companions, were demolished 90 years ago. And, after the Lebanese (Christian) Professor Kamal Salibi published a book in 1985 suggesting that many Saudi villages bore biblical Jewish place names, the bulldozers arrived to erase them.

This grotesque destruction of Muslim history is directly linked to Isis’s own purgation of the past by the Wahhabi faith, which the Saudis adopted from the teachings of the 18th-century Mohamed ibn Abdul Wahhab – who preached that Islam should return to the purity of its earliest principles. From these ideas came the notion that almost any historical monument represents an excuse for idolatry, a precept adopted with ferocious enthusiasm by the Saudi tribes. When Abdul Aziz ibn Saud moved into Mecca in the 1920s, his first actions included the destruction of the graveyard in which Khadijah was buried, along with the tomb of one of the Prophet’s uncles. The same fate awaited the tombs of Mohamed’s daughter Fatima and his grandson Hasan ibn Ali.

Thus began the vandalism of graveyards, tombs, shrines and historic buildings across south-west Asia: from Shia shrines in Pakistan to the magnificent Buddhas of Bamiyan to the ancient libraries of Timbuktu; from the antiquities of Mecca to the churches of Mosul and the Roman ruins of Palmyra. Even beautiful – though war-damaged – Bosnian mosques hundreds of years old have been torn down in favour of the Saudi-funded concrete monstrosities that are now appearing in the Balkans. This hatred of history is part and parcel of the retrograde Wahhabi belief in which the past has only a spiritual presence, its physical remains a reminder only of imperfection.

It’s not that Saudi Arabia’s self-destruction of history is unknown – The Independent was one of the first Western newspapers to give it publicity in pre-Isis days. Nor, may the saints preserve us from such folly and the kingdom’s lawyers, must we ever suggest that the Saudi regime supports Isis. But if we are to understand just what Isis is – and what it represents and who admires it – then we must study much more carefully the frightening religious habits that connect Isis, the Taliban and al-Qaeda to the people of a country whose king calls himself the “Caretaker of the Two Noble Sanctuaries” of Mecca and Medina.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...-a6689931.html

Sir William Hunter was a senior British civil servant and in 1871 published a book which warned of “fanatic swarms” of Sunni Muslims who had “murdered our subjects”, financed by “men of ample fortune”, while a majority of Muslims were being forced to decide “once and for all, whether [they] should play the part of a devoted follower of Islam” or a “peaceable subject”.

Hunter identified a “hate preacher” as the cause of this “terror”, a man inspired on a visit to Arabia by an ascetic Muslim called Abdul Wahab whose violent “Wahabi” followers had formed an alliance with – you guessed it – the House of Saud. Hunter’s 140-year-old volume The Indian Musalmans – given a dusting of internet race hatred, murderous attacks by individual Sunni Muslims, cruel Wahabi-style punishments and all-too familiar proof of second-class citizenship for Muslims in a European-run state – might have been written today.

Even before Hunter’s day, the Wahabis captured the holy cities of Arabia and – Isis-style – massacred their inhabitants. Like Isis, they even overran Syria. Their punishments, and those of their Saudi military supporters, make the public lashing of today’s Saudi blogger Raif Badawi appear a minor misdemeanour. Hypocrisy was a theme of Arabian as well as European history.

In those days, of course, oil had no meaning. The Saudi ruler was dispatched to Constantinople in 1818 to have his head chopped off by the local superpower – the Ottoman Empire – and the European states made no complaint. A young British army captain later surveyed the destroyed Saudi capital of Diriya – close to modern-day Riyadh – with satisfaction. But successive campaigns of Saudi-Wahabi conquest, and then the swift transition of oil from the vile black naphtha, in which Arabian sheep regularly drowned, into the blood vessels of the Western world, meant that the purist Wahabi violence – which included the desecration of mosques, the destruction of ancient Muslim tombs and the murder of “infidels” – was conveniently separated from the House of Saud and ignored by Europeans and Americans alike.

Erased, too, is history; including the fact that Mohamed Ibn Saud, the leader of the Nejd, even married Abdul Wahab’s daughter.

Our disregard of present-day Saudi-Wahabi cruelties and venality might astonish Sir William Hunter; the Wahabi Indian Muslims in his British Empire were led by an insurrectionist prelate called Sayyid Ahmed whose followers regarded him as the next Prophet and whose own pilgrimage to Arabia turned him into a life-long purger of promiscuity. His believers came from Afghanistan as well as India where his power lay in what is now Pakistan. In fact, he was proclaimed “Commander of the Faithful” in Peshawar. His men might have been the Taliban.

Britain’s wars against the Wahabis were as ferocious as Europe’s today, though far more costly in lives. And if Hunter rightly identified the second-class status, lack of employment and poor education of the Sunni Muslims of India as a cause of insurrection – France, please take note – he also understood that India’s Muslims were being asked to choose between pure Islam and Queen Victoria. The Hindus of India and the British rulers were at war with those whom Hunter, mindful of medieval Christian missions to Jerusalem, caricatured as the “Crescentaders”.

Ensaf Haidar, centre, wife of the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, holds a vigil in Montreal, Quebec, urging Saudi Arabia to free her husband (Getty)
Today, the Americans and Europeans – and of course, our own Prime Minister – like to draw a line between the “moderate”, friendly, pro-Western, oil-wealthy Saudi Arabians who are praised for denouncing the “cowardly terrorist attack” in Paris, and their Crescentader Wahabi friends who behead thieves and drug dealers after grossly unfair trials, torture their Shia Muslim minorities and lash their own recalcitrant journalists. The Wahabi Saudis – for they are, of course, the same – cry crocodile tears over the murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who lampoon their religion, while sympathising with the purists in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who slaughter journalists and aid workers, destroy ancient monuments and enslave women.

All in all, a pretty pass. The Saudis are special, aren’t they? Fifteen of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudis – and George W Bush immediately arranged for leading Saudis (including some from the House of Bin Laden) to be freighted out of America to safety. Osama was himself a Saudi (later de-citizened). The Taliban were financed and armed by the Saudis; the Taliban’s Organisation for the “Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice” was identical to the Saudi-Wahabi religious police in Riyadh and Jeddah. So precious are the Saudis to us, that Tony Blair was able to close down a British police inquiry into Anglo-Saudi bribery. “National interest” was at stake. Ours, of course, not theirs.

And we ignore, amid all this tomfoolery, the spread of Saudi money through the institutions of Sunni Islam in Asia, in the Balkans – take a look at the new Saudi-designed mosques that mock the wonderful old Ottoman institutions in Bosnia – and in Western Europe. Suggest that the Saudi authorities – not, of course, to be confused with their Wahabi fraternity – are supporting Isis, and journalists will be confronted not by sympathy for their oppressed colleagues, but by threatening letters from lawyers on behalf of the Saudi government. Even in the Levant, aid workers are frightened of the school-teaching in Saudi-funded refugee camps for Syrians.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...e-9978493.html

[AcGold]

Originally Posted by starseed

The daily mail is on par with infowars in terms of credibility most of the time.

Infowars is like a parody of a parody. They'll be mid fanatic rant and stop for an orange juice and testosterone pill ad then go back to yelling. Even if there was some truth to be conveyed it's lost among the histrionics and ridiculous advertising.

[CaptainYooh]

LOL FlashWalken likes to flood the discussion with huge sheets of quotations from sources he likes expecting everyone to read them in full and gracefully acknowledge defeat by the respecting the power of Internet text. I mean, it's OK to read and be aware of things, but man, sometimes, just state your own thought on the subject.

I believe that any thinking person understand the religious evil emanating from Saudi Arabia. But it is their fundamental and sovereign right to believe their own crap for as long as they don't attack the rest of the world as a country. The fact that many extremists have Saudi nationality or origin is irrelevant.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Say something useful. All I see is Obamaesque verbal diarrhea.
The first Iraqi war was brilliantly executed. Virtually no casualties and it left Saddam in charge.
What are you arguing exactly? I challenged a ridiculous, factually incorrect post. Excuse me if I was brief. This an Internet debate, not a Masters thesis. There is certainly a lot of room for debate about the need for/execution of the American Afghanistan war. Ditto about causes of the first Iraq War. The 2nd Iraq war was certainly idiotic - I think we agree there. Are you actually challenging my point about lumping the Soviets in with the "West"? What exactly is your point of view?

My point of view is that it is certainly easy to dismiss the role of 'The West' in the middle east like you did above.

While there may not be something that we can refer to as a hundred year war between the middle east and the west, there has most definitely been 80 years of stark intrusive militarization of that area from the West.

The Iran/Iraq war you mentioned as the bloodiest in the region in the last century is easily shown to be a proxy war from western nations, as was the rise of Khomeini in Iran, the original securing of Saddam in Iraq and the continued protection of the regions monarchical despots.

There was no necessity to invade Iraq due to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. We know now that the information presented for that war was just as dubious as the pretenses for the second invasion of Iraq.

I don't place all the blame at the feet of western nations for the ongoing schism of Islam, but it's utterly disingenuous to downplay it in anyway.

It's factually inaccurate, is terrible historiography and serves no purpose other than to absolve ourselves of any conscious or unconscious contributions we've made to the region as citizens of Western powers.

If people are offended that many are blaming the involvement of the West for these sorts of occurrences, well, they should be, because as citizens of western society, we are accomplices.

As a nation, we signed a military arms deal worth $15 billion dollars just a few months ago with the globes leading exporter of terrorism. That should be embarassing and something we should all keep in mind during this discussion.

Pretending like that isn't the case isn't doing anyone any favours.

[VladtheImpaler]

Ironically, FW, there is a lot of room for conspiracy theory here. A friend of mine, whom I consider very smart, laid it out for me...
How does ISIS suddenly seize this or that city? It's a bunch of guys in pick up trucks operating in the DESERT. Given the American surveillance capability and strike capability, this seems incongruous.
How is it that ISIS is operating literally miles from the hated Jews, yet there have been no ISIS attacks on Israel or any Israeli strikes on ISIS?
The theory put forward is that the Americans have chosen to back the Sunni side against Iran/Hizbullah/proxies and have tolerated the Saudi protégés (ISIS). There is a tacit understanding the Americans/Israelis will leave ISIS alone as long as ISIS does not attack Israel or the American homeland. There is a bit more to it...

How is that for a conspiracy theory? Thoughts?

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Ironically, FW, there is a lot of room for conspiracy theory here. A friend of mine, whom I consider very smart, laid it out for me...
How does ISIS suddenly seize this or that city? It's a bunch of guys in pick up trucks operating in the DESERT. Given the American surveillance capability and strike capability, this seems incongruous.
How is it that ISIS is operating literally miles from the hated Jews, yet there have been no ISIS attacks on Israel or any Israeli strikes on ISIS?
The theory put forward is that the Americans have chosen to back the Sunni side against Iran/Hizbullah/proxies and have tolerated the Saudi protégés (ISIS). There is a tacit understanding the Americans/Israelis will leave ISIS alone as long as ISIS does not attack Israel or the American homeland. There is a bit more to it...

How is that for a conspiracy theory? Thoughts?

I don't think that is conspiratorial at all. It reads exactly like the same power politics that have plagued the region for decades.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

reading makes my head hurt.

Good to know.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Ironically, FW, there is a lot of room for conspiracy theory here. A friend of mine, whom I consider very smart, laid it out for me...
How does ISIS suddenly seize this or that city? It's a bunch of guys in pick up trucks operating in the DESERT. Given the American surveillance capability and strike capability, this seems incongruous.
How is it that ISIS is operating literally miles from the hated Jews, yet there have been no ISIS attacks on Israel or any Israeli strikes on ISIS?
The theory put forward is that the Americans have chosen to back the Sunni side against Iran/Hizbullah/proxies and have tolerated the Saudi protégés (ISIS). There is a tacit understanding the Americans/Israelis will leave ISIS alone as long as ISIS does not attack Israel or the American homeland. There is a bit more to it...

How is that for a conspiracy theory? Thoughts?

ISIS affiliated groups operating in the Sinai dessert have attempted attacks on Israel. Israel has gotten good at intelligence gathering and terrorism prevention. ISIS is also at odds with groups like the Palestinian Authority. It would be very difficult for ISIS to set up a terror cell in Israel or the West Bank. It's much easier to attack "soft targets" like Paris.

[Swift]

On the topic of the economics of accepting refugees vs. not accepting them, there was a radio piece on CBC a couple of months ago.

"Economist Don DeVoretz of Simon Fraser University has studied the economic experiences of refugees in Canada, and thinks it makes economic sense, in the long run, to accept more refugees. - http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2674997351 "

It's 9 mins long, but if you don't feel like listening to it, he states that there is no strong economic benefit to accepting refugees, nor is there a strong economic argument against accepting refugees. (Essentially, the cost is paid off by the tax the refugee will pay in later years) However, when those refugees who stay, have children, those children become workers and taxpayers as adults and the country benefits in the end.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32169080

Important to remember that these events happen with unfortunate frequency in locations where major media coverage is not deemed as necessary. I would really like to figure out how this can be stopped. I guess there are better tactical minds than mine trying to do that; or I hope there are, at least.