Showing posts with label Islamic_State. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamic_State. Show all posts

20 November 2015

Russia to carpet-bomb ISIL out of Syria?

The Blog


What will the Russian Federation's new deployment of strategic bombers to the battlefields of Syria mean for the war?


Russia's fighter jets have already been rolling back territorial gains by terrorist groups including the so-called Islamic State (ISIL, ISIS). But these inflict only piecemeal losses on the militants, compared with the area-bombing capabilities of aircraft like the Tupolev Tu-95 and Tu-160. Such strategic bombers are capable of leveling entire towns and destroying whole armies single-handedly.

The efficiency of all airstrikes against ISIL has been suspect. The US-led coalition has been striking ISIL positions for over a year with almost no effect. In fact, the terrorist group has actually gained more territory throughout the US-led air campaign in Syria, as is demonstrated by maps of the conflict so far. The Russian-led airstrikes have been somewhat more effective, clearing key highways and fortifications for the advancing Syrian Army - a force the US refuses to acknowledge or work with, in the belief that it is not "legitimate".


However, the course of the war is still slow, and thousands continue to face torture, genocide and persecution at the hands of the many sectarian militias supported by the West to take control of the country. Russia has compared ISIL with Nazi Germany, with no illusions about how the group should be dealt with and the kind of firepower that might be necessary to defeat it.

In an analysis for the Beliefnet website all the way back in June, it is advocated that strategic bombers are used instead of mere fighter jets (although in that case it was supposing the US would be doing all the bombing). The bombers should be used with the aim of wiping entire ISIL-controlled towns off the map and making it clear that this so-called "state" will be destroyed at all costs by the most powerful weapons available.

The analysis noted that the goal of such bombing is to put the enemy on the run, making them reactive rather than active, which will enable them to be fought on better terms. They will be drastically weaker on the battlefield, as they will be unable to hold any base or position for long.

ISIL has made no secret of the fact that it is in a state of war with Russia, the US and other major powers. It's recent attacks on Paris, and on a Russian airliner over Sinai, have been described as acts of war. France and Russia now not only say ISIL is intolerable and must be destroyed at all costs, but that they will do it themselves if the US is not capable.

World powers accept that ISIL is a significant military opponent. They want to eliminate  ISIL's capacity to wage war, which means they won't hesitate to use their most powerful weapons. Such weapons will be determined by the size and nature of military targets, as they were in the Second World War, and not by moral concerns about how such strikes may later be perceived.

The more civilians are killed by ISIL, the more the case for 'pinpoint' strikes against ISIL weakens and the stronger the case for indiscriminate area-bombing of ISIL becomes. Russia's movement of strategic bombers to the battlefields of Syria might mean they are moving to apply exactly this ruthless approach to warfare.


If used to its greatest extent, such a weapon will batter ISIL's already ruined territory into craters, and demolish any semblance of "state" in the "Islamic State". If Russia and its allies intend to treat ISIL like Nazi Germany, the geopolitical analysts comparing Russia's involvement with the Soviet War in Afghanistan are far off the mark in their historical comparisons.


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11 August 2015

L'Ordre blog mocks US defeats in Syria

The Blog


The L'Ordre blog based at Beliefnet had the following commentary on the US's defeats and failure to train "rebels" in the Syrian Civil War.

Al-Nusra accused the US-backed rebels of trying to spread American influence and plotting against the other rebel groups. They were right. The other Syrian rebel factions are not as stupid as the American planners assumed. They know that the US-trained rebels are only in Syria to spread American influence, and will immediately hunt and kill them for this simple reason. The American-backed rebels will never get past their own Syrian rebel allies to begin attacking ISIL or Assad’s forces. The rampant paranoia that the CIA and US Military’s openly declared training program will cause among the already fratricidal and paranoid rebels will only cause them to kill each other at an even greater rate, increasing the likelihood that the war will end in defeat for the rebels. 
One wonders how the US government could make such an obvious error. It is hard to believe that they are really this stupid. One possibility is that Barack Obama is aware that the program to support Syrian rebels will fail, but that he is doing it anyway just to satisfy war-hawks like John McCain, who continues to promote senile delusions of toppling the Syrian (and even the Russian) government with American-made guns blazing.
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre#ixzz3iL0kTrkc 
Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre#ShrXKuioHhl0VHFM.99
The US trained less than 60 Syrian rebel fighters at a cost of around 250 million dollars. These fighters were intended to fight ISIL and the Assad regime. However, they were killed or captured and the rest of them soon begged the United States to stop bombing the al-Qaeda linked militants, denouncing the mission that the US had given them to fight against jihadist terrorists. Despite this, the United States intends to continue the failed training program at a further cost of nearly billions of dollars.


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31 July 2015

UK's Cameron regime tries to ban truth

The Blog


The ruling Cameron regime in the UK now sees telling the truth about British war crimes in the Middle East as a form of extremism.


Saying anything compatible with the rhetoric of terrorist groups such as ISIL (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant or Daesh as it's Arabic acronym goes) will now be considered extremist, including statements of fact. This was the analysis of antistatist writer Billy Christmas at C4SS (the Center for a Stateless Society), an antistatist think tank based in the United States.

The trend towards censorship and persecution of dissidents in the UK is especially worrying considering that UK subjects do not have any constitutional right to freedom of speech.

When asked what "extremist" speech is, Home Secretary Theresa May couldn't answer and suggested that it was vague and nebulous, left to regime officials to arbitrarily label anyone an extremist criminal and kill them if it doesn't like them. According to Christmas' analysis, this amounts to fascism, and it is all the more offensive because it is wrapped in rhetoric about "British values" while actively undermining the rule of law and even trying to erase people's inalienable rights.

The antistatist writer reminded his readers that the British government - like the US government - is hypocritical and responsible for atrocities in the Middle East. If Islamist extremists use this fact to justify their terrorism, that doesn't make it any less true:
According to Sean Gabb: “the British State is committed to an American-led campaign of war and destabilisation throughout the Islamic world, and shares responsibility for millions of civilian deaths and maimings there.” As Gabb says, the statement is not only reasonable, but “obviously true.” Yet to speak the obvious truth is now a heresy. We can soon expect to not be able to point out this simple truth, lest we offend “our British values.”
An even greater paradox lies in the fact that Cameron's desire to persecute dissidents is itself an extremist goal, and it is made all the more destructive because it has successfully captured control of the state machinery. Islamist fanatics may intend to kill people who criticize them, but the more apparent regime issuing such threats to the British people is Cameron's own government.

The Zionist parasite Cameron ranted in a paranoid speech that the millions of people, including academic bodies, who currently boycott and oppose the apartheid regime of Israel should be considered terrorists.


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14 July 2015

The state, not "terrorists", censors you

The Blog


Describing Islamist attacks on people who don't share their beliefs as if their actions represent a totalitarian suppression of free speech is an absurd analysis.


That is the view put forward at the L'Ordre blog based with Beliefnet. In an analysis from the weekend 11-12 July, the blog drew attention to the following problem with anti-Islamists' half-baked claims about a threat to the constitutional right of freedom of expression (highlighted part selected by The clubof.info Blog):
Anti-Islam campaigners try to argue that Islam threatens freedom of speech but in doing so they misunderstand what freedom of speech is. Freedom of speech doesn’t refer to a right granted by gunmen, soldiers and terrorists to the public, but to a right granted by the state to the public. 
Claiming that terrorists threaten our freedom of speech is bogus even if they kill cartoonists and people who mock Mohammed, because freedom of speech was never contingent on what terrorists do or don’t do anyway. Terrorists were always able to kill people for what they expressed in public, as were any other members of the public. Everyone is at risk of being killed for what they say at all times and freedom of speech has never been about providing any protection from that threat, but only from such threats that originate from the ruling power of the state.
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre#ixzz3fbrAHU00
Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre#9ocB0WywIkvyHk8L.99
Shouting or ultimately assassination by members of the public cannot endanger constitutional rights because no such acts have any effect on the law and the laws guaranteeing free speech still hold even if people are killed for such expression. On the other hand, far-right figures who advocate the elimination of Islam and the rolling back of civil liberties in order to attack Muslims are indeed attempting to alter the law to curtail constitutional freedoms.

In this sense, anti-Islam activists such as Pamela Geller can be more accurately classified as enemies of free speech than ISIS terrorists such as those who killed cartoonists for depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Similarly censorship refers to state actions and not actions taken, however violent, by members of the public who feel offended by an image. Killings of cartoonists who depict Mohammed are neither a form of censorship, nor a threat to the right of free speech, and are simply acts of premeditated murder that have no relevance to at all to freedom of speech.

The Blog


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22 May 2015

Mohammed left Assyria's ruins alone

The #LOrdre Blog


Islamic State militants, also known by their Arabic acronym Daesh, believe they are superior to Islam's Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).


This is the assessment of the L'Ordre blog based at the top world religious website Beliefnet. Attention is drawn to the way Islamic State militants are ironically "assaulting lifeless monuments" dating to the ancient Assyrian civilization as a way of seeking attention for themselves. Such acts are ironically Pagan and idolatrous in themselves, the analysis claims, as these Muslims are "obsessing over lifeless monuments and self-indulgent beliefs, by a further demonstration of their own such stupidity".

The blog argues that Mohammed would feel ashamed of the Islamic State's self-indulgence and idiocy, and that Islamic State followers are doomed to "die like flies" before they realize they have deviated from their religion:
The Islamic State’s followers claim to idolize the Prophet Mohammed. They are lucky he isn’t alive to say what he would think of them. To the man who actually brought Islam to the world, the so-called Islamic State would appear filthy and deserve nothing but contempt. For the “Islamic State” to presume that Mohammed’s work was incomplete, and parade itself around and claim to finish his work, as if they are truer Muslims than their own Prophet, is the gravest possible offense that can be perpetrated against the memory of Islam’s founder. 
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2015/05/islamic-state-is-too-good-for-its-own-prophet.html#ixzz3aPE0xUfy 
Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2015/05/islamic-state-is-too-good-for-its-own-prophet.html#wQUgddfOCJykmVfY.99

The #LOrdre Blog


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10 April 2015

Britain's abortive authoritarianism

The Blog


British people are lucky their government is as incompetent and inefficient as it is, because anything less might result in rampant authoritarianism, the dissident website We Are Change explains.


From the article:
In a recent issue that has sparked controversy, civil society group Cage alleged that British security services harass Muslims disproportionately. This practice, the argument goes, contributed to the radicalization of Islamic State terrorist Mohammed Emwazi, more widely known as Jihadi John. Cage’s claims came to many people’s attention in the media when they were condemned by the British government as “reprehensible”. No matter what we may think of the analysis that the jihadist was motivated by state mistreatment of Muslims, the fact the comments provoked such a furious response from the government makes them only more worthy of attention. 
It should be noted that Cage has a history of criticizing indefinite detention, torture and extrajudicial killings, among other state practices in the so-called war on terror. Their profile of Mohammed Emwazi doesn’t defend the jihadist’s actions, or even claim that the security services’ guilt in helping to radicalize him is incontrovertible. Despite this, Cage has been condemned by the government as “apologists” for the Islamic State itself. Coupled with the Charity Commission taking action against Cage, this seems to only confirm that the British government seeks to censor Muslim voices speaking against the security services for the profiling and harassment of Muslims amidst the increasing climate of Islamophobia. 
The most inflammatory words condemning Cage seem to have come from Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who argued, “We are absolutely clear – the responsibility for acts of terror rests with those who commit them. But a huge burden of responsibility also lies with those who act as apologists for them.” Boris Johnson made similar comments.
The article refuted the idea of national security as archaic and counterproductive and labelled British security forces as illegitimate, asking the scathing questions "What kind of legitimacy can you find in a state that targets all the people it rules over as potential enemies, and cowers behind an iron curtain of secrecy and suspicion against the people? Further, what has the farce of national security become?"

Appealing to readers to consider the Flagless theses, the article rejected national security arguments as lies and argued that geography does not need to be protected, inviting all people to cast off their national identities to embrace the human family.

The clubof.info Blog


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3 April 2015

Credible: MI5 harasses British Muslims

The #LOrdre Blog


The claim by UK human rights group Cage that British security forces unduly harass Muslims and add to the radicalization of possible recruits to the Islamic State group (also called Daesh in its Arabic abbreviation) is "credible".


Commentating on the controversy surrounding Cage's claim last Friday, that was the analysis advanced by the L'Ordre blog based with the Fox-owned Beliefnet website in a post. Numerous UK politicians including Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and London Mayor Boris Johnson have condemned Cage's criticism of state security forces, calling it "reprehensible" and claiming that the security forces "keep us safe", respectively.

The L'Ordre blog mocked Johnson's idea that the security forces keep British citizens safe, noting their inaction on freeing British hostages held by Islamic State militants, and asked if they were too busy keeping politicians like Johnson and British Prime Minister David Cameron "safe" instead:
I have a question about the determination of the security services to “keep us safe”. Why is it that they are so bad at this? MI5’s attempts to stop terrorism have been pathetic, and the British government has made no effort to save any British citizens from Islamic State. Cameron’s government had a chance to negotiate the release of British hostages David Haines and Alan Henning and didn’t do anything. Perhaps it was too busy protecting cowards like David Cameron and Boris Johnson from the repercussions of their foolish and selfish foreign policy. A duty that I demand security forces take less zeal in, in the future. 
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2015/03/cages-point-about-mi5-terrorizing-muslims-is-credible.html#ixzz3Vn956N00 
Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2015/03/cages-point-about-mi5-terrorizing-muslims-is-credible.html#CwgDWM4JutXELJ7P.99
The British government has consistently served a sycophantic and apologist role for US foreign policy, including indiscriminate domestic surveillance. According to its critics, the British government is more defensive of US foreign policy than the US government itself, and often takes the US government's ideas about surveillance and counterterrorism further than the US. This was an argument advanced by Edward Snowden concerning the British counterpart to the NSA, GCHQ, which he described as possessing an even more aggressive arm of the global surveillance program.

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27 March 2015

Tolerant Christians vis-à-vis Evil Islam?

Harry J. Bentham


For many professed critics of Islam, the so-called Islamic State's atrocities stand as an example of the exceptional evil said to be evident in Islam and absent in other religions. And throughout the traditionally Christian sector of the world, in both the West and Russia, we have bore witness to the increasing fantasy that latter-day Christian crusaders are our deliverance from the apparent evil of Islam.


The shocking credo of the latter-day crusaders in our midst became most apparent when Anders Behring Breivik committed his terrorist attack in Norway in 2011. We can add this to the mountain of evidence that "crusader" terror is as much alive as jihadist terror, but there are still abundant conservatives in both Britain (see UKIP) and the US who see a need to politicize Christianity as part of a cultural battle with political Islam.

Christian detractors of Islam are eager to point out violence in the Qur'an. There is indeed violence in that text, but they should take a closer look at their own Holy Book. Better yet, take a look at the modern-day Christian terrorist organizations and their atrocities. The most prominent examples lie in Africa, where Joseph Kony's evangelical terrorist group, The Lord's Resistance Army, perpetrated unspeakable horrors in the name of Christianity in Uganda before moving to South Sudan.

Most Christians know about and denounce the Crusades, but the atrocities I am talking about are realities from the 1990s or newer, and they are continuing to this day. Most of the violence in the Central African Republic has been perpetrated by Christian mobs against Muslims, but that inconvenient fact never made its way past the Islamophobic line of much of the media we hear.

We have to learn that reporting on so-called "Islamic terrorism", when Christians are almost as prone to terrorism of their own and equally ignorant of their religion's pacifist teachings, is a disgrace. Take the reporting on Nigeria, for example. Nigeria has been victim to two violent insurgencies, one "Muslim" (Boko Haram) and the other "Christian" (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Nile Delta or MEND). In this case, reporters seem alarmingly eager to highlight the Islamic elements of ideology behind any terrorist attack, but constantly reluctant to mention the equal role of Christianity in the ideology of other terrorists in the very same country.

We can also examine Sri Lanka as an example of the same kind of omission, although the Buddhist faith of extremists was being omitted. In the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009), much of the ethnic violence was pressured by Sinhalese Buddhist so-called "monks", who urged the ethnic cleansing of Tamils from Sri Lanka. Only a small number of Westerners, who have studied the Sri Lankan Civil War, had much awareness of that particular detail. The Western public was never alerted to the atrocities of Buddhist extremists, much less told by pundits that Buddhism is a violent and evil religion in the way Islam is often maligned now.

Many have claimed that the so-called Islamic State, or Daesh, in Iraq, has discredited Islam, and they point to its atrocities as an example of Islam in practice. But how, then, do they explain away the fact that all the forces fighting against IS and risking life and limb on the ground are themselves Muslim?

It seems strange for Islamophobes to protest the actions of IS at all, given that IS's military opponents are all Muslims and very nearly a hundred percent of IS's victims are Muslims. One could reason that there is a sectarian civil war on within Islam, but Christianity and every other religion has been plagued by the same sectarian problems in the past. So, to repeat Sam Harris' canard that Islam is inherently extreme or opposed to modernity maligns everyone involved in the campaign against IS and all the victims of IS.

No matter the arguments made against their proneness to create militants, the world's largest religions are not going to go away. We have to live with the inevitable, so we won't make ourselves more secure by painting terrorism as a religion, or a religion as terrorism. Instead, accepting diversity and reconciliation between these traditions is essential to peaceful or tolerant association.

By pairing the name of a religion with terrorism, as is all too common in reporting, Western secular states and media not only violate the parts of their constitutions requiring religion to be kept out of politics, but involve themselves in incitement to religious terrorism of their own. Anti-Islamic terrorism is equally religious as so-called Islamic terrorism, and this equally true whether it takes the form of a state-sanctioned attack on a country such as Iran or a lone-wolf attack such as Breivik's.

And what of the wars that state-approved Islamophobia already helped to create? Irrational fears have transformed Muslim civilians into military targets, and helped to motivate the doctrine that pre-emptive war is justified long before an apparent threat of terrorism can even be proven to exist. The reasoning that mosques or religious preachers therein should be targets of military action, detention or torture would be denounced, if practiced against other religious group, but Muslims are routinely accosted by states in this way.

It is also worth realizing that Islamophobes often show the same contempt for their compatriots as is demonstrated by the terrorists they claim to oppose. Their vision of the West as a pure and righteous civilization leads them to see most of their own society as treasonous and impure, as Breivik did when he chose to target not Muslims but regular citizens he believed were appeasing Islam. Such behavior has stark parallels to the way in which Islamist militants target not the West but their own communities, which they see as corrupt and impure.

Islamophobia kills, and is injurious not just to Islam but to the West. Having played a part in the warmongering that led to the Iraq War and the so-called war on terror, which was once described once by George W. Bush himself as a crusade, state-sanctioned Islamophobia is a severe extremist threat in itself. If we consider the wars and repression it has helped to incite around the globe, Islamophobia has a greater sum of blood on its own hands than it may attribute to Islam.

Harry J. Bentham


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20 March 2015

Islamophobia versus criticism of Islam

Harry J. Bentham


It is easy to conflate Islamophobia and legitimate criticism of Islam. But there's a big difference.


This post is motivated by my awareness that perhaps many people are critical of Islam itself, but that they see the term Islamophobia as an insult being hurled against them unfairly when they only meant to criticize a religious doctrine. If it is true, then the anatomy of Islamophobia itself deserves more attention before the word is used again.

It is not a secret that I am, in fact, an atheist. That fact has usually been of no importance, and didn't need to be stated. It's not a big part of what I am. I just don't practice a religion, as I never have. Religion is curious to me, as it was when I studied it at degree level in university, but my interest doesn't go beyond that particular neutral and scholarly fascination with it. I also wrote my dissertation on jihadist terrorism, and received a first class grade for it.

Since I studied terrorism, I have increasingly come to the realization that the real existential threat doesn't come from it at all, but from our own reactions to it, in particular in the domains of culture and religion. And that may be the very intention of those who practice terrorism. They desperately want the state to target the wrong people when it reacts to their violence - for that will cripple the state's legitimacy and recruit more people to the violent cause to dismantle the state itself.

Islamophobia and criticism of Islam: the difference


Here's the difference between Islamophobia and legitimate criticism of Islam. Criticism of Islam is expressed in stating that Islam is wrong. Islamophobia is the statement that Muslims are wrong. Further, that they should be systematically persecuted and murdered. One is intellectual, the other is hateful. One is open to criticizing everything - Islam included - while the other is obsessed with targeting a specific social group.

It is a factual observation that Islamophobia is a murderous idea, that it has killed people, and that every Islamophobe is a murderer. They are not murderers because they have killed anyone with their own hands, as terrorists have done, but because their agenda of hate has helped to manufacture excuses for states to wage war and assassination against a people. That hate has led to the deaths of countless children, in the so-called war on terror. He who passes over the corpses of children to achieve a political aim is worse than any of the people he is going after, even to "keep us safe".

The war on terror was never motivated by a factual analysis of a flaw in Islamic teaching, or because governments were of the view that Muslims are mistaken on some theological point, but because someone wanted to kill people. People. This, we must not forget. The fact they were Muslim makes their deaths no less tragic than if they were of any other faith.

And if Islamophobia sought to criticize Islam, whence cometh their theses against Islam? Where are the intellectual battles being fought by Islamophobia against the errors of Islam? In what lecture theaters are academics explaining where Islam is wrong, and how to non-violently correct its errors in the mind before one goes out to shoot these people or make drone strikes against them? Instead, all that we find are lobbyists, who know very little about Islam but a lot about making war against Islam.

Islamophobia isn't just a threat to Muslims. It is a threat to your very life.


It seeks to set us all at each other's throats. It not only preaches that followers of Islam should be killed, but that innocent bystanders who defend them or consort with them should be killed. It appeals to a fantasy, a fairy-tale about the so-called west as a righteous and pure civilization, in order to scorn another culture and portray it as subhuman.

As an intellectual I don't accept the supernatural claims of Islam, even if I admire its ability to make peace and enrich a community. But Islam is not, as Sam Harris once claimed, "the motherlode of bad ideas".

The motherlode of bad ideas is Islamophobia, and with it the war on terror. These are the Hitlerite impulses that we must kill people because of their community background, that we must treat them all as suspects and accuse them of sheltering extremists simply because of their faith. Such persecution goes against everything history has proven to be correct and enduring, and represents a graver threat to civilized life than the extremism of the violent self-declared Islamic groups that include most notably the so-called Islamic State (Daesh).

Hate has no place anywhere, under any pretext. When we reflect on the industrial-scale killings of the Holocaust and pronounce, never again, we say thus not for our own safety but for the good. We will never again allow ourselves to become monsters, to threaten the lives of infants because of claims about so-called national security. If they command us to do such evil, then we must prefer instead to seek out our own fascists and attack them instead.

Never again was an absolute, and cannot be dismissed simply because it is convenient to hate again. If evil prevails when good men do nothing, national security is worthless and people should stay true only to their own conscience.


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24 February 2015

Selective Hearing in the War on #Terror

@cnels43.


Territories that the so-called Islamic State group intends to conquer.

Watching Fox News’s recent coverage of the Islamic State’s Twitter-hack left me shaking my head in disbelief, as usual. The latest act alleged to have been carried out by IS is the group’s takeover of several Twitter accounts belonging to the wives of US military servicemen. Among the threatening tweets issued by IS through the hacked accounts were comments like: “You think you’re safe but you’re not,” “IS is already here,” and “We’re watching you” (issued specifically to Michelle Obama).


The IS tweet receiving the least attention from American media outlets appears to be the most substantive: “While your president and your husband are killing our brothers in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan we’re coming for you.” In fact, it is the only tweet in this series including content beyond ambiguous threats. Despicable as it is to those of us who abhor violence, the comment is revealing and deserves the close attention of American policymakers. Yet, it got no such attention from the American government or media. They preferred to speculate on whether IS really might be around the corner.

The tweet is crucial in that it reveals one of the Islamic State’s main motivations — their desire to drive American military forces from their positions in nearly every Arab country. It’s the latest in a long line of such declarations from various Islamic factions offering the same rationale.

Michael Scheuer, Former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden Unit, said about bin Laden: “[he] is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn’t like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions.” Bin Laden laid out his motivations directly to the American public in a letter. He cited, among other reasons for fighting, the US government’s continuing support of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the US government’s wars in Muslim lands like Somalia and Iraq, and the US government’s repression of Muslims via Middle East puppet regimes. Notice a recurring theme here? Bin Laden’s grievances were with the US government.

Yes, bin Laden does attribute some responsibility to American taxpayers for making “their” government’s actions possible. This should not come as a shocking revelation. In any government war, the enemy’s source of funding is a primary target. For this very reason, the US government has made it a crime to provide financial support to those it deems terrorists. So it should come as no surprise that al Qaeda or IS would play by the same rules of war, declaring the US government’s piggy bank fair game. Disturbing, yes. Surprising, no.

There is no denying that the American way of life also motivates the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and their brethren. In bin Laden’s letter, he also cites western culture’s repugnance to his perverted brand of Islam as a motivating factor. Unfortunately, in an effort to avoid blame, the US government and its mouthpiece media present only this factor. It is absolutely taboo to mention the murder and mayhem committed by US forces in Muslim lands as a contributing factor. As Scheuer said, trying to do so is like “yelling into a closet. The American people, God bless ‘em, are just so badly educated and unaware of how duplicitous their leaders are …” Time to listen and learn.
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