Isis and kali

Intellect is the ability to avoid belaboring the obvious.
Alfred Bester

Isis, Philae temple

I am optimistic enough to think that most people are thoroughly revulsed and horrified by the actions of Isis terrorists in France last night, as I am. While the six coordinated attacks on innocent westerners were immediately celebrated on social media by Isil supporters, those people have to be a small minority of our fellow humans, or so we hope anyway.

Babe calling his shot in Chicago

The fact that at least one of the perpetrators was a recent refugee with a purported Syrian passport is horrifying although I should admit that I did in fact call it and was and am worried about the export of such atrocities from a region where they seem to be performed routinely for pure sport.

I emailed a friend who shall remain anonymous, while things were playing out in realtime last night. I got this response:

No such thing as a religion of peace.

Killing in the name of one's God seems to be in the nature of humans.

Remember we invaded Iraq killing ten of thousands.

I emailed him back that I saw, if nothing else, a qualitative difference in what we do versus what they do. And got another note:

Yes, they are monsters.

How many theater and school killings have we had here, and when you find out about the killers they usually have been radicalized by some religious or racist groups.

Disenfranchise, desperation, add a little god and boom. 

Or, just carpet bomb and napalm the shit out of little brown people. How about "Shock and Awe" who are the monsters, what is the religion of the monsters, they are of all religions given sick leadership.  

When one group, one country dehumanizes another group it's easy to get people to kill people. 

Do you feel good when you see the bombs we drop on our "enemies" think about it? 

I didn't answer him. I didn't have the energy. The standard liberal response. We're as bad as they are. Are we? Do we deliberately set out to hurt, maim and murder civilians?

While I was against the invasion of Iraq in the first place I still don't feel that the United States has militarily assaulted foreign countries willy nilly, there is usually some provocation or rationality involved in the decision making, while some sorties have certainly proven unwise and ill considered and the calculus for the drone strike casualty figures is beyond self serving. 

I don't accept that terroristic behavior is ever justified, by any rationale and I am one of the apparent few that don't think that our government are terrorists, although our hands are not sparkling clean either by any means.

Some people like to think that Islamic militancy started at 9-11 but we were victims of many unprovoked assaults long before that time. There's a list that looks pretty accurate here but they miss many like the Feb. 26 incident in New York City, when a bomb exploded in the basement garage of World Trade Center, killing 6 and injuring at least 1,040 others. In 1995, militant Islamist Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 9 others were convicted of conspiracy charges, and in 1998, Ramzi Yousef, believed to have been the mastermind, was convicted of the bombing. These people like to give the world a constant ration of shit.

Anyway my friend, who we shall call M sounds a lot like my liberal friend W. Here are a few of many similarly written emails:

I always felt who ever owns the actual and approved vocabulary controls the debate......The sole word Terrorism immediately precludes any true debate or critical analysis of 9/11 and is a literal Shibbolith that sanctions every thing from shredding the Bill of Rights to murdering people 10,000 miles away who upon even the most cursory examination have no military capacity except IEDs and K47s.....best...w

I know of "no other" culture besides America that dropped more bombs on 3 of the world's poorest countries 10,000 miles from its borders killing  1,000,000 people than made it into  pop adventure movies like Rambo starring a campy muscle bound "hero......than followed it up with Operation Just Cause (Because) into Panama killing 5,000....followed by the invasion of a veritable dot in the  ocean labeled Grenada... and topped this off with a "video game slaughter labeled"Shock and Awe" killing 1,000s and in the process literally decimating a 3000 year old culture and accompanied with a "play by play" by Wolf Blitzer; all this somewhat  predicated on   $600,000,000 in profits......."one must enter a court of opinion with clean hands"!  ..this in no manner rationalizes  the terrorism and fanaticism of what one   must categorically admit is an iota of the 0ne  and half billion of the Muslims in the world...

I have a tough time with this sort of reasoning from my friends. Not exactly defending terrorism but engaging in an equivalence argument and basically taking the position that whatever the west gets they have coming. I can't come to grips with a group that methodically kills 129 people and injures hundreds more, in order to avenge and/or establish the new caliphate.

It would be certainly ridiculous to maintain that United States and Israeli rockets and bombs don't incur collateral damage. They do. But the general aim is not to take out innocents and civilians. The Israelis even go to the trouble of asking people to vacate certain buildings before they disappear. (The buildings, not the people.) But taking out people one by one at a concert, soccer game or jewish delicatessen in France, burning people in cages, cutting their throats, engaging in this kind of indiscriminate barbarism, I do think there is a difference, at least in initial intention. 

I do think there is a difference between what we do and they do. I don't think the French had it coming, I think it was very noble for Europe to invite these people to live in their respective countries  and they don't deserve this sort of hospitality from the new guests. 

I also ask my liberal friends to consider, as hard a concept as it admittedly is, that some of the bombing campaigns against Isis, Al Qaeda and the Taliban were actually undertaken by the evil americans to help free the islamic miscreant's countrymen from their barbarity and reign of terror. And while religion is certainly pernicious here at times, I haven't heard about any southern baptists strapping on suicide vests yet.

President Obama said the usual things, condemning the attacks without uttering the dreaded i or m words. What he said was interesting if you feel like parsing such utterances; the attacks were an "outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians."

More than an attempt, Barack. I'd say they delivered.

Jihadi John prepares to cut off Alan Henning's head

The British group CAGE, which is a total front for non repenting terrorists, had this to say regarding the recent targeting of Jihadi John, Emwazi;

CAGE reaffirms its opposition to extrajudicial killing of any kind. State sponsored targeted assassinations undercut the judicial processes that provide the lessons by which spirals of violence can be stopped. Emwazi should have been tried as a war criminal.
Dr Adnan Siddiqui, Director of CAGE, said:  “Killing Emwazi is evidence that the US and UK do not consider the families of hostages in their actions. This is backed up by reports that US authorities threatened families if they negotiated payment of ransom money.” “Emwazi’s execution of defenceless hostages was inexcusable. But all avenues that led him to that point need to be investigated.” “CAGE’s repeated efforts and offers to negotiate for the release of Alan Henning were obstructed and squandered by the UK government and serious questions remain regarding these failures.” “CAGE has acknowledged mistakes were made in our handling of the Emwazi affair, but we reiterate our call for a full inquiry into what caused Emwazi to feel so alienated in the UK that he felt his only option was to leave. Such an enquiry is essential if we are to understand and put an end to individuals being drawn into political violence.”

So Jihadi John should get a trial but none of the people whose heads he cut off deserved to get one? And we need to find out what drove all these poor boys to seed, what was the motivation for their heinous crimes? Hire a bunch of shrinks? It's the United States fault because they didn't pay a ransom? These people have surrendered their humanity, I think they have relinquished the right to have us worrying about their motivations.

Sick fuckers. Die soon.

I was thinking about gods, well at least the ones I am familiar with, and with only a few exceptions, can't think of many omnipotent deities that are so weak and insecure that they require their followers to mortally avenge any real or imagined slights to their reputation. Maybe Mictlantecuhtli, Yama, Erebus, that crowd. You would think that absolute powers would be above that sort of thing.

Darkseid - Jack Kirby's New gods