Oh Drummond!

[Kathianne]

I think you'll like this, though it does seem to avoid 'terrorism.' Evil and death cult do ring bells for me though:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/26/islamic-state-tunisia-kuwait-lyon-evil-sadism


After Tunisia, Kuwait and France we should not be afraid to call evil by its name

Jonathan Freedland (http://www.theguardian.com/profile/jonathanfreedland)

In France, in Tunisia, in Kuwait – horror upon horror, in a single day. It played out like some kind of gruesome auction, each atrocity bidding against the others for our appalled attention. The opening offer came near Lyon, where a factory was attacked (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/26/one-dead-in-attack-on-french-factory) and, more shocking, a severed head was found on top of a gate, and a decapitated body nearby. The French president said the corpse had been inscribed with a message.

From the Tunisian resort of Sousse (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/26/tunisia-tourist-hotel-reportedly-attacked), holidaymakers tweeted terrified pictures from their barricaded hotel rooms (https://twitter.com/johnyeo68/status/614395000726622208), describing how they had fled from the beach after sounds they had assumed were a daytime fireworks display turned out to be the opening gunshots of a massacre. From Kuwait City, as if to top the rival bids, a suicide bomber walked into a mosque packed with 2,000 people (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/26/islamic-state-claim-responsibility-deadly-blast-kuwait-city-mosque)and pressed the button that he hoped would send scores to their deaths.

Each of these acts pulled our gaze from the event its perpetrators had surely hoped would trump all others. On Tuesday an Isis video – “snuff movie” would be the more accurate term – showed five Muslim men, each wearing a Guantánamo-style red jumpsuit, packed into a cage and lowered into a swimming pool. State-of-the-art underwater cameras recorded the men’s dying minutes (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-decapitates-blows-up-and-drowns-16-men-accused-of-spying-in-iraq-10339255.html), the thrashing and flailing as they drowned. (I rely here on reports: my small stance against the so-called Islamic State’s propaganda war is to refuse to watch its propaganda.)

...

A simpler explanation is that the butchers of Islamic State are following an age-old military tactic, one that would have been recognised by Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun: terrify the enemy. Isis drowned those men to make us tremble.

It works too. Holidaymakers will abandon Sousse, at least for a while. But while these crimes sow fear, they also prompt revulsion. And that revulsion is shared. I spoke yesterday with Usama Hasan (http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/about/staff/usama-hasan/), an Islamic scholar and one-time jihadist. He spoke of his “disgust” at the evils committed this week, noting how alien they were to Islamic scripture which forbids, for example, the desecration of a corpse.

He said that a battle was under way for civilisation, one that should unite the great societies and religions of the world – Christianity, Islam (http://www.theguardian.com/world/islam), Hinduism, Judaism and more – against the vicious death cult that is violent jihadism. It would be a nonsense to speak of such a struggle as a war against evil. A war like that could never be won. Evil is within us and it is, apparently, perennial. But we must not be afraid to name it for what it truly is.

[Perianne]

Evil is within us and it is, apparently, perennial. But we must not be afraid to name it for what it truly is.


I have been doing that for years and years and I get called a racist for doing so. Meh.

[Drummond]

I think you'll like this, though it does seem to avoid 'terrorism.' Evil and death cult do ring bells for me though:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/26/islamic-state-tunisia-kuwait-lyon-evil-sadism

I'm wondering how many ways people here can start a thread with my monicker name in its title (.. not that I'm complaining ..).

Well .. I'm not completely sure 'like' quite covers it, Kathianne, though thanks for the thought. What I really see here is a bit of propagandising going on.

You have to remember that the Guardian is a LEFT WING British newspaper. Not the squalid rag that the Daily Mirror is, to be sure .. 'upmarket', even .. but Leftie in its biases and overall agenda, nonetheless. [Remember .. it was that very newspaper that, at the time of GW Bush's re-election, tried to get the voting in the 'swing State' of Clark County to change in the Dems' favour, by asking their readers to 'cold call' Clark County residents.]

-- So, not surprisingly, I'd expect some sort of 'message' to be included here, that'd play into preferred Leftie thinking.

With this in mind, let me requote part of the text ...


I spoke yesterday with Usama Hasan, an Islamic scholar and one-time jihadist. He spoke of his “disgust” at the evils committed this week, noting how alien they were to Islamic scripture which forbids, for example, the desecration of a corpse.
He said that a battle was under way for civilisation, one that should unite the great societies and religions of the world – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and more – against the vicious death cult that is violent jihadism.

For me, that's the real point at issue. What we have here is a sanitising of Islam .. actually, in its way, something akin to what our friend Jafar tried to achieve. The point here is to strive to separate Islam from any acts of terrorism committed in its name.

The 'death cult' phrase is gaining ground. It rightly describes ISIS, but at the same time, it concentrates thinking around its being 'a cult', to force thinking behind it to march in lockstep with the idea that it has no connection with mainstream Islam, that it's nothing more than a 'fringe body'.

Usama Hasan's intention was obviously to achieve precisely that effect. To which I say ... he has a great career waiting for him, at the BBC .. or at the Guardian, maybe ...

[Kathianne]

I'm wondering how many ways people here can start a thread with my monicker name in its title (.. not that I'm complaining ..).

Well .. I'm not completely sure 'like' quite covers it, Kathianne, though thanks for the thought. What I really see here is a bit of propagandising going on.

You have to remember that the Guardian is a LEFT WING British newspaper. Not the squalid rag that the Daily Mirror is, to be sure .. 'upmarket', even .. but Leftie in its biases and overall agenda, nonetheless. [Remember .. it was that very newspaper that, at the time of GW Bush's re-election, tried to get the voting in the 'swing State' of Clark County to change in the Dems' favour, by asking their readers to 'cold call' Clark County residents.]

-- So, not surprisingly, I'd expect some sort of 'message' to be included here, that'd play into preferred Leftie thinking.

With this in mind, let me requote part of the text ...



For me, that's the real point at issue. What we have here is a sanitising of Islam .. actually, in its way, something akin to what our friend Jafar tried to achieve. The point here is to strive to separate Islam from any acts of terrorism committed in its name.

The 'death cult' phrase is gaining ground. It rightly describes ISIS, but at the same time, it concentrates thinking around its being 'a cult', to force thinking behind it to march in lockstep with the idea that it has no connection with mainstream Islam, that it's nothing more than a 'fringe body'.

Usama Hasan's intention was obviously to achieve precisely that effect. To which I say ... he has a great career waiting for him, at the BBC .. or at the Guardian, maybe ...

I take your point, well made. I saw it as a bit of movement, such as you were looking for on BBC.