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ISIS Threatens Life of Twitter Founder After Thousands of Account Suspensions
Patrick O'Neill writes After a wave of account bannings that marks Twitter's most aggressive move ever against ISIS, new images circulated from militants shows founder Jack Dorsey in crosshairs with the caption "Twitter, you started this war." The famously tech-savy ISIS has met a number of defeats on American-built social media recently with sites like Twitter and YouTube banning the group's efforts in unprecedented numbers.
wonder if this is why YouTube never blocked or removed ISIS' videos.
if they aren't stopped now, you'll be fighting them in your streets someday
Precisely the argument used to rationalize the war in Vietnam.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually he had better fear for his life.
But it's nice of them to tell everyone it's hitting them where it hurts.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
And basically every military action from 9/11 to today.
Funny how short your memory is. The last 10 years of fighting in foreign countries has worked out real well for us, hasn't it.
I think we'd have a much better chance fighting ISIS on our own turf than invading yet another Arab country that we could never hold and win.
Probably not. His head is too far up Mohammed's ass to see the real world.
According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, as of "15 January 2015, it was reported that over 16,000 airstrikes had been carried out by the Coalition". Please note that this coalition consists of both a backbone of U.S. military power, and surrounding Islam-majority states like Jordan, which the Obama administration has coaxed into the war.
Let me repeat that, in case you appear to misread it. 16,000 airstrikes
I'm not exactly sure how anyone can say we're not "stopping them". Indeed, about the only thing they can really do at this point is make snuff videos of idiots who wander into the region.
But go back to watching your wall-to-wall CPAC coverage and FOX lies. That seems to be what you prefer. No actual facts seem likely to persuade you.
He says they just need a job, but a majority had jobs before becoming radicalized. They often have college too. So to come out and say it's not faith based, when clearly they tie everything to their perverted version of Islam, either means he thinks we are not paying attention, or he's not.
Or he is smarter and more strategic than you are. By refusing to acknowledge ISIS as 'real' Islam he takes away ISIS primary claim to legitimacy and hands that legitimacy to the moderate Muslims (ie Jordan) that will join in the fight against ISIS.
and the opposite argument was used to allow germany to take over poland. My guess is the right argument is somewhere in the middle
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The challenge is to defeat them without killing tons of people ...
Before we try to defeat them, maybe we should think about what will replace them. The reason we have ISIS is because we defeated Saddam Hussein without thinking much about what would come next. The rationale at the time was that whatever replaced him couldn't possibly be worse. Well, that was wrong.
The reason for the short term memory is that for the average voter the last two wars cost them personally _nothing_ and were if anything entertainment. Now if the president came out and said we are going to mobilize again to fight ISIS and a new 2015 tax of $200/person will be levied to pay for the war you would see a change of heart in minute.
Finally, someone uses their brain. Sure, we could send a big army over there and stomp them into the ground. But then what?
And if anyone thinks Saddam's dead-enders were a big headache, what do you suppose a bunch of religious zealots will be?
Cue Mencken on problems and solutions.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The reason we have ISIS is that we were in such a rush to leave IRAQ we didn't bother to finish stabilizing the situation.
Seeing as Vietnam has been mentioned, I'll point out the exact same thing happened there. The war was brought to an acceptable conclusion and we pulled out before stability had been achieved. The cost that time was 4million dead Vietnamese and Cambodians. What do you think it will be this time around ?
That's like saying the KKK, Westboro Baptist Church, Jehovah's Witnesses, (insert dangerous cult here) aren't "real" Christians. They still believe they are, it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks about them, as long as they believe they are doing the right thing.
The problem with Islam is that unlike Christianity they are loosely unified in their belief systems. They in large lines won't call each other out for the hypocrisy or violence. Most Islamists, even the 'moderates' will, if nothing else, quietly avert their eyes when it comes to their interpretation of the Prophet and the Koran. There are some pockets of progressive Islamists that will call out against the violence but they won't go as far as to say that the Koran is incorrect.
Christians have progressed far enough where the progressive Christians will say that the Bible is on occasion incorrect, moderates will say it's allegorical while all but the staunchest of conservatives will say that it's up to God or government to do the punishing. Doesn't mean that the Christian faith is any 'better', it's just slightly better adjusted so as not to upset the majority of people although they still want to take over the world as much as ISIS does (look at how much they have been pushing creationism and anti-science in the last decade)
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No, they can also continue kidnapping young women to hand out to their soldiers as sex slaves, which as near as I can tell is their primary recruiting tool. I appreciate the air strikes, but air strikes alone don't solve the problem. What is needed is a regional coalition to put boots on the ground. The country in the best position to put boots on the ground is Iran, which may be why we are currently attempting to cozy up to them -- we share a common enemy.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Appeasement? Where have they engaged in "appeasement"?
That's part of it. The other parts were talking tough about Assad in Syria (and not DOING anything), and killing Khadaffi in Libya.
Vietnam: Crashmarik is exactly correct. The United States _won_ the war in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese were powerless, and the US left. But then the Soviets spent 2 years giving the North everything they needed, and then the North attacked again. The Dems in the Senate banned any additional military aid to the South. The South fell to the communists.
That's one of the reasons why ISIS is so fierce now; they know that the US is an inconsistent ally, especially with this administration. We're not going to do anything about it. (Of course, that's what the Germans and the Japanese were counting in in 1940 and 1941.)
You've just made them even happier with their choices. You fundamentally misunderstand what makes them tick. They want you to hate them. They're banking on it. They need you to hate them, and they're willing to do things like roast people alive in order to make you hate them even more.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'd point out that you are almost certainly a chicken-hawk too, but that would be an insult to poultry.
Well then you must have missed the speeches and questions asked of the candidates at the recent CPAC.
BTW the Afghanistan and Iraq war price tag topped 6 Trillion dollars! Wars started by the last presidency. And the same crowd is now asking for another war! And you talk about deficits... LOL.
Great subversion of what was said. When I or others call out the KKK for not being Christian, it's not the KKK's opinion or believe I or others give a rat's ass about. The point is to public and loudly denounce them when others don't either out of fear, lack of a voice, or merely a disinterest in taking up the cause of denouncing the KKK.
But in the eyes of millions of other Muslims, when Obama calls what ISIS does as not an embrace of fundamental Islam, it makes it clear that Obama (and presumably plenty of other Americans) don't believe that that's what fundamental Islam is about any more than the KKK...etc. Honestly, you seem to be missing the point of who the audience is and what the real message is.
No shit. And by the same extension, when the PotUS acknowledges that ISIS is no more Islamic than the KKK is Christian, it's harder for the hard line Jordanians to rally against "the evil puppets of the US" in Jordan who would fight ISIS. Because the US has a bad habit of using other countries to proxy fight for them while outright condemning everyone involved as if they're all the same thing. It's just bad for morale.
Certainly if there was a bunch of "Jews" in Poland that we wanted to be fought and didn't want it to be seem as an attempt to repeat the Holocaust, sure as fuck we'd want Obama to be calling them out for not being really Jews. But, yea, great way to ignore the obvious implications of your own example. As for Brooklyn, are we fighting a [proxy] war there? And as for Israel, do you think anything we could say would really help by arguing over who's more or less Jewish? Last I checked, the major issue there wasn't per se the Jews or Jews-in-name-only. It was the hardliner Jews and the hardliner Palestinians and an unwillingness to act clearly as one or two separate countries--with even the discussion of moving to a one or two country system being off the table.
PS - But please, go on about how the PotUS demonstrating a better understanding of the situation and not being yet another ignorant fuck who embraces attacking allies and enemies alike in an area is somehow the way forward and not at all a concern for future peace or even short-term success.
The situation in Iraq could never be stabilised without essentially destroying part of the population. Successive decisions by external powers have weakened the various states that exist in that region. If the countries that surrounded Iraq had been strong enough to control their own borders and internationally integrated enough to not want to risk economic backlash by extending their borders we perhaps could have seen another Yugoslavia civil war and break up as a best possible outcome.
But instead Iraq was destabilised along with Afghanistan at the same time. This led to massive numbers of people moving around and their supporting infrastructure being destroyed. Pakistan then started to follow Afghanistan down the toilet as militant forces crossed the border causing even more people to join the fight. Then Syria started to collapse and support was given to the rebels meaning weapons and funds leaked into ever more radical hands.
At the moment the only things holding ISIS back is Asad in Syria and Iran.
The irony of this is so sad.
Attacking people who believe in free press and then threatening those that deny it to you on their own platform makes me both sad and happy at the same time.
What a confused, sad group of people.
What if he just dropped money, and the terrorists bought TVs and sat around getting high on all that good hash, watching cartoons, instead of terrorizing.
Oh, wait, did you mean the airstrikes were IMPROVING our safety? ROFL WAFL!
It has allowed the Kurds to take back some territory. Without it, ISIS would have continued to expand their territory, and become a greater threat.
Do you really think that an organization of many thousands of people which slaughters other Muslims for being insufficiently Muslim will give a rat's ass whether or not a politician in the US considers them to be sufficiently Muslim?
Probably not, but ISIS is not the audience. Everyone else is. Ponder it a bit more.
The reason we have ISIS is because we defeated Saddam Hussein without thinking much about what would come next.
Not true. There were people talking in front of the UN audience, warning exactly what would come next in 2003.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
As someone who has a lot of business interests in the Middle East and especially Jordan I think that you will find that the Jordanians hate what ISIS/IS/??? are doing.
They might have some internal tribal rivalries but they are united in wanting to keep their relatively liberal society out of the hands of the likes of IS/ISIS.
There is also a lot of belief that if IS attaches Jordan then Israel will see that as a direct threat to them and join in to fight alongside the Anti-IS fighters.
My friends in Kuwait are divided about 'would this be a good thing or not?'.
On one hand Yes because Israel are helping the Liberal Muslims fight the extremists
On the other hand, No because this is a conflict that is mostly Muslim on Muslim.
If you are commenting from the relative safety of the US then until you have lived and travelled around the Region as I have for the past 20+ years you can't even begin to understand how complex it is in terms of relationships etc.
They're perfectly free to express themselves. We're in no way obligated to provide them a platform.
Let them build their own Twitter, with blackjack and hookers.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Should I take it as an unflattering reflection of the true strength of The Caliphate(tm) that it is being actively butthurt about having its twitter privileges revoked? That's the sort of thing that is pretty pathetic among individuals, much less would-be nation states allegedly arranged allong deity-ordained lines.
I heard one theory that ISIS is really a creation of Bashar al-Assad. Before ISIS was around, the West was all for regime change in Syria. Now we are effectively supporting the dictatorship in Syria.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
He says they just need a job, but a majority had jobs before becoming radicalized. They often have college too.
Well, there's the leaders and then there's the followers. There are certainly cases where brutal leaders have come to power in the context of severe socioeconomic dysfunction and injustice - but where the leaders themselves were from an upper class and were not, themselves, direct victims of the dysfunction and injustice.
But what motivates someone to become a leader against (perceived) dysfunction and injustice? What motivates someone to associate with some larger cause - rather than simply living out of a life that is focused on their own personal comfort and security?
So to come out and say it's not faith based, when clearly...
OK, but suppose it is "faith based"? Is it possible to simply select some random person off the street, read then a few pages of religious text, and suddenly have them decide to devote their lives to a (misguided) struggle against socioeconomic dysfunction and injustice? Is the reason that Obama, and Clinton and Bush all sought the presidency because at some point in their past someone read them some passages of a religious text?
Somewhere around 20,000 children die of poverty every day. So perhaps understanding the causes of poverty is a more pressing endeavor. But it is still interesting to ponder what it is that has motivated a small handful of individuals, out of all the teeming billions on the planet, to don the mantel of extraordinary leadership. From Gandhi to Hitler and Thomas Jefferson to Mao Zedong, what motivated them to eschew a quiet life of comfort and security for the immortal halls of fame and infamy?
We're all in ISIS' gunsights. It's just a question of who's first
That isn't entirely false, in that they'd be more than happy continue their merry little campaign unto victory or death; but it's a fairly shoddy version of true.
ISIS are a bunch of sociopathically bad neighbors; but their ambition to 'caliphate'(which implies and requires acquisition and effective control and administration of territory) makes them rather more locally focused than an outfit like Al Quaeda. As does their (admittedly gruesome) enthusiasm for settling local grudge matches with Shia and various other groups they deem heterodox. It doesn't make them nice; but it does make them more likely to spend their time on local bloodletting rather than international plotting, and it makes them so uncompromising that they aren't particularly good allies, even of the most cynical convenience, for anyone. They've made it fairly clear that anyone who isn't the correct flavor of muslim is definitely off the table, and they don't call their little strip of sand "The Islamic State" as a gesture of cooperation with other nominally-islamic states in the region, who are unlikely to take being called illegitimate very well.
"'You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,' said the American colonel. The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. 'That may be so,' he replied, 'but it is also irrelevant.'"
-- Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. and Colonel Tu, April 1975, described in the book On Strategy.
Maybe offer some charitable donation to an anti-ISIS charity. Make them stew in their feckless rage.
Good idea! My suggestion is to donate to charities involved in girls education and micro-loans to women. Hit Daesh right where it hurts: empower women.
Christians don't want to take over the world for the same reason that corporations don't want to take over the US, the same reason that Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to take over News Corp or Fox.
What if he just dropped money, and the terrorists bought TVs and sat around getting high on all that good hash, watching cartoons, instead of terrorizing.
A thought just occurred to me. It seems to me we may have been going at this all wrong. We keep on dropping bombs on them and they keep going more batshit insane with rage. What would happen if instead we started a black market to funnel liquor, cocaine, meth, and heroine into ISIS controlled territory? If we got their soldiers more interested in getting high and/or drunk would this effectively crush their will to fight?
We can counter their claims with arguments.
Religion is not a valid argument for anything.
Sadly though many westerners also depend on religion, so they don't make that argument.
So instead: oppression.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Terrorism builds on fear, but when one leaves out emotion and rationally looks at numbers, daily traffic is still far deadlier than these nincompoops. So any fear built has to be irrational for terrorism to work. Without fear, they have no power. Without media attention, they'd likely go mostly unnoticed. Social media are media too, but things aren't working their way there due to the terms and conditions (what a bummer!) ... hence the death threats. Which made the news. Aaaand presto! They got what they wanted.
People always bring up Neville Chamberlain and his "peace in our time" speech - let me ask you this: what would you have done in his stead?
Go to war? Kick Germany's butt? Yeah, lets put Nazi aggression in its place, teach them a lesson.
Ok. Go to war with what? in 1938 we didn't have an effective army or airforce, our only real might was in the Royal Navy. Which works wonders for stopping land based aggression. Our airforce was still largely made up of older designs, especially the Hawker Hurricane which was a design based on a biplane... It would be a few years yet until we had an airforce of any real capability.
So he tried a different approach - it was well recognised even back then that Germany had been royally screwed over by the agreements at the end of the first world war, so perhaps some appeasement was in order to try and placate that issue - was Germany just taking back what should never have been taken from it in the first place?
Of course we went to war anyway, and under Chamberlains watch - and guess what happened on our first outing? We got our butts kicked and sand kicked in our face. We lost 40,000 troops to German prison camps and got thrown off the continent at Dunkirk.
And that was after we had stepped up our war footing. Imagine what it would have been like if we didn't have have Neville Chamberlains two years to get to a point where we were able to just about ensure that Nazi Germany didn't take the British Isles as well as the continent...
Now's the time for ISIS to launch their own TerrorTwitter© service. They can charge a subscription for the use of the service :)
@ShanghaiBill: "The reason we have ISIS is because we defeated Saddam Hussein without thinking much about what would come next."
@hcs_$reboot: "Not true. There were people talking in front of the UN audience, warning exactly what would come next in 2003."
I think what ShanghaiBill meant is that no one in the Bush administration did much thinking, if indeed they were capable of rational introspection.
No, the reason we have ISIS is because Obama tried to defeat Assad without actually fighting him. Obama empowered anyone who wanted to overthrow Assad in Syria to do so and provided them with some logistical support without paying any attention to what they wanted to put in his place. Further he did so without providing them sufficient support to actually overthrow Assad. He did the same thing in Libya, although there he provided sufficient support to overthrow a stable government. For that matter he attempted to do the same thing in Egypt, but it turned out that Egypt had not only a stable government, but a legitimate one (as in the people actually supported the government they had despite not supporting its head--Mubarak).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
But that was te phony war(Sep 1939-May 1940): the English helped the French man the Maginot line, but not anything else. In May, Hitler then really started the war and overran Belgium, Holland and France.
"Lost" and "Won" are very relative things when it comes to wars. The US bogged down and drained the communists in Vietnam. It did not achieve total military victory, no, but not did it did it lose the big-picture fight (the cold war) in the end either.
The heads of several other South East Asian states (Singapore, Malysia) have stated that US presence in Vietnam did state that US action in Vietnam did reduce communist influence. Eliminate, no. Reduce, yes. The US did win die Cold war without much of a shooting war too.
Wars do not have to end with military victory or loss. Nor do they have to be fought in the classic sense either. Witness peacekeeping forces in Africa. They do not (too often) get involved in shooting, nor is there much hope for something like total victory, but they do use the threat of force to limit more serious violence.
In the much larger context of the cold war the US intervention in Vietnam was something like this. A battle that showed other allies that the US was, in fact, prepared to put boots on the ground when it came down to it.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Actually France and the UK both had a better Army and Air Force than Germany in 1938. They were in even better position than in 1936 when the allowed Germany to re occupy the Rhineland. Of course WWII might have been avoided if the UK and France had listened to the US and tried to create a just peace. Instead they threatened to not pay back the loans they took out...
BTW France and the UK never did repay the loans for WWI. They thought that the US was being greedy. I guess 116,000 American lives plus the billions the US spent on a war that had nothing to do with the US was not enough.
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What I really can't understand is why young girls are leaving Europe to go and be with these guys in Syria. They don't get to fight, that is forbidden except in the most desperate of circumstances. Instead they get to be sex toys and baby factories for beaded losers with poor personal hygiene, who will eventually die and quickly forget about them while indulging in their 72 virgins.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nonsense. Germany was zero threat to the US. The Japanese threatened our naval power in the Pacific, but were never the slightest threat against the homeland. What should the US have done? Act as the hired mercenaries of Europe?
> Women are already empowered enough.
In the USA, it's gotten profoundly better in my lifetime, but even here it is hardly complete.
Empowering women also leads to lower birth rates and reduces poverty profoundly. One of the biggest reasons that ISIS, al Quaeda, and other fundamentalist groups grow is that they offer poor, disenfranchised people, especially unemployed young men. It's a vicious cycle of violence and poverty, and it _cannot break_ without control of birth rates, becuase there is _no work_ for these young men. Their only hope of prosperity, whether physical or spiritual, becomes the gang and tribal groups because if they do not join, the gangs and fanatics will _take_ their money, their turf, and eventually their lives.
Taking on the 1938 German army would have been a relative cakewalk. The problem with Dunkirk (wasn't that a great victory?) is that the British stayed on the defensive, and by definition it's impossible to win whilst playing defense.
Add the Czechs and their surprisingly good army, and the Little Maginot Line (the Germans tested the fortifications after invading and found them shockingly sound) , and 1938 Germany has big problems. Its army gets bogged down in Czechoslovakia while the British drive for Berlin.
People always bring up this "educated, balanced" riposte to Chamberlain's infamous act. It's bullshit. Let's put the dagger in the back of this theory once and for all: you know who Chamberlain saw fit NOT to invite to the Munich conference? The Czechs! He gave them the middle finger and handed them a fait accompli. Don't even get me started about the great betrayal of Poland, a nation Britain was pledged to defend and yet did fuck-all to help. Fuck Chamberlain and fuck appeasement.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Muslims have a lot of ninjas though. A lot of their women run around dressed as such.
This is how out of touch a growing number of RWNJs are:
"Growing Number Of Conservatives Seem Utterly Unaware That Obama Is Attacking ISIS"
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I always thought about this. What if in all these war torn areas instead of becoming militarily involved we just started doing massive aerial drops of food, water, possibly some simple tech for getting online, maybe some power generators. Everything dropped would have the american flag plastered all over it. Over time imagine the amount of good will that would begin to foster with local populations. If you did it long enough and on a large enough scale, whenever some fundamentalist comes along and starts spouting about America being the great Satan how many would get behind him then. And I bet it would cost a lot less than direct military action anyway.
Yes, he has a point, a point which is wrong, but a point.
While it is true that if Saddam Hussein was still in power in Iraq ISIS would not have arisen, it is also true that Obama would probably have done the same thing to Saddam which he did to Gaddafi, Mubarak, and attempted to do to Assad. That is, he would have attempted to overthrow Saddam and replace him with instability.
His failure to create instability in Egypt is a reflection of the desires of the Egyptian people rather than any indication of positive action by the Obama Administration. BTW, I am not arguing that the Obama Administration INTENDED to destabilize the Middle East, just that their policies directly resulted in that happening. I do not know what the Obama Administration intended, but I cannot imagine what they would have done differently if they intended to disable the Middle East.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There is a difference between censorship and refusing to allow a private forum to be a venue for objectionable speech. Free speech means you can set up a soapbox, a printing press, or your own website and say whatever crazy things you want without interference. It does NOT mean that I have to let you use MY private space, printing press, or website to say things I think are objectionable.
And the even bigger concern that an independent Kurdistan would also include a sizeable chunk of NATO ally Turkey? That is a bigger concern than Iraq. I'd bet we would have carved out an independent Kurdistan in a heartbeat if not for Turkey.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
What you mean is he should have imperialistically intervened in a grassroots campaign to overthrow a dictator and helped that dictator suppress the wants and needs of the people. Neocons like you are disgusting people.
It's time America stopped trying to play the worlds cops. These conflicts have LONG been simmering. It only ends badly when we get involved. Freedom isn't free, if these countries and people really want freedom they are going to have to shed blood and kill the fuckers that are in the way. Only then will they truly appreciate freedom and it's costs.
What you mean is he should have imperialistically intervened in a grassroots campaign to overthrow a dictator and helped that dictator suppress the wants and needs of the people.
So, it was OK for him to imperialistically intervene to bomb that dictator's security forces in order to allow a group inimical to U.S. interests to overthrow said dictator and suppress the wants and needs of the people. If we had stayed out of Libya, Gaddafi would still be in power there and ISIS would likely have never acquired the weapons it needed to rise to power.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Not likely. It isn't like simply making that stuff available makes a user out of you.
These guys are brainwashed into killing people with rusty, dull knives, they can certainly be brainwashed into not buying some smack.
What will actually happen is that the "targets" will collect the drugs and then sell them back to the West to make more money to kill more people.
These guys are already high on something completely different.
No. We need to send sugar. Everyone knows, first you get the sugar...
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs