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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.
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
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)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
Because we are TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE!
Indeed, instead of containing them we should just go in guns blazing, because that's always the best way to counter problematic ideologies. It always works out so well. It's also easy for the armchair general to send soldiers to die for whatever cause they deem worthy.
The problem with groups like ISIS (and Vietnam for that matter) is simple. We cannot play by the rules and expect to win against an enemy that has no rules. ISIS exists because we destabilized Iraq by getting rid of Saddam. Yes he was a murderous dictator but that is the only way to keep that place in order. There are plenty of people who committed worse crimes than Saddam and yet we did nothing.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The area is fucked. It's been fucked for centuries and we aren't going to fix it in a decade or even two. We have to let go sometime because this isn't going to end with ISIS. After they are gone it'll be another batch of shitheads even crazier. I can see it ending with Israel tossing Nukes right and left. Armageddon anyone?
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.
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.
Airstrikes, anyone?
And let's be honest here--if we had boots on the ground and weren't merely dropping bombs on them, you'd be bitching about "not our fight" or similar because OMG OBAMA is BLACK OH NOEZ.
Cheers,
A pinko liberal socialist
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
because the bush administration did so well with the "jump in guns blazing" routine
which, btw, led to the creation of ISIS
much like the economic crisis of 2008, also miraculously blamed on obama, conservatives have this stunning routine where they fuck up, and liberals are at fault for it somehow with creative loopy psychological projection
btw, the economy was fixed under obama, much like he is also trying to fix the mess created by neocon chickenhawks in the middle east, like an adult
while all the hot headed children do their best to start a war, waste money and lives, and make things worse. you and those like you (hi, netanyu, you protocol disrespecting fuck, you've permanently damaged us-israeli relations for a little temporary macho chest thumping) think more war in the middle east will actually fix things. because you geniuses haven't learned from the last half dozen decades what messing around in the middle east actually leads to
oh, and a small tip for you:
"pinko" expired as an effective insult in the cold war era, which ended 25 years ago, which might be the last time you had a coherent thought on the topic you inject your ignorant belligerence into
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
...and Saddam existed because we put him there to fight a proxy cold war against Russian-backed Iran.
http://www.democraticundergrou...
ISIS exists because we need another set of boogeymen to stir shit up with neighboring Syria and Iran on our behalf.
http://scgnews.com/the-covert-...
We read a lot about how ISIS somehow keeps getting access to US-funded weapons sent to the region to help Libyan rebels topple Qaddafi or the Iraqi army "keep the peace". They'll get their Twitter feeds back again when we need them to resume looking evil to the rest of the world so we can justify going back in there to "clean the place up". That time just isn't now.
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.
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.
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.
Spot on. Bush had a hard-on for Sadam and Rumsfeld wanted to take a selfie with Sadam to complete his picture collection. This whole ISIS mess is "W"'s and Cheney's fault. They both need to be in the Hague standing trial for crimes against humanity and for general stupidity.
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?
oh i see, it's more of this "al gore flew on a gas guzzling jet airplane once, therefore he is a hypocrite, therefore climate change is not a problem" ignorant bullshit
moral ineptitude
"i knew a guy once who got away with a crime... therefore this guy right here should get away with murder too, it's only fair"
hey genius: "two wrongs don't make a right"
ever hear of it?
do you know what that means, morally?
it means that just because you can criticize democrats for something, anything, it doesn't mean suddenly all republican crimes now magically disappear
the fact that everyone fucks up doesn't mean actual criminal douchebags are immune. i jaywalk, you point out that horrible crime of mine, and now the fact you killed someone is excused because we both committed crimes? this is what you call right and wrong?
real morality: you criticize the democrats of what they *specifically* do wrong, and you criticize the republicans for what they *specifically* do wrong, and you keep your criticism proportional to the crime, and you don't equate minor bullshit with a major outrage
imagine fucking that: actual valid moral reasoning
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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...
I'm sorry but ISIS was not created by the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. ISIS was created by the "Arab Spring", when Obama supported the overthrow of stable governments in Libya and Egypt. He followed that up by encouraging the overthrow of Assad in Syria but not following through by actually bringing it about.
I will agree that Obama is doing the same thing to the Middle East that he did to the U.S. economy. And, if what Obama is doing is fixing these things I'll take broken.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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
The problem is that ones of those rules we follow is "go in guns blazing".
You want to stop ISIS? Fix the Middle-East's economy. Give people stable, productive jobs. That alone will slash recruitment simply by giving most of their local recruits a better option, one they currently *do* *not* *have*. Most of the local ISIS recruits are in ISIS simply because it pays. Not well, but better than nothing. Same goes for al-Shabaab and al-Quaeda and Boko Haram and pretty much every terrorist group operating from a third-world country.
You want to make sure ISIS doesn't come back the next time a depression hits? Build schools, staff them - an educated populace won't fall for the simple rhetoric of the mob-leader. Build mosques, staff them with liberal imams, to dilute the message of the bad ones. Build infrastructure so they can actually communicate with the rest of the world. Bring them up to a modern level, just to give them something to lose, if they fall again - most of them see ISIS as a viable cause because they don't really have anything to lose.
A military solution - ANY military solution, up to and including "nuke the entire subcontinent into glass" - is at best temporary. In a good solution, the military will only be used as a stopgap to make it safe enough to implement the real solution.
Because it was bush that set the terms for the Iraq pull out of newly independent and soverigen country of Iraq.
Obama wasn't stupid enough to force an issue where if he left troops in Iraq against the sovereign wishes of Iraq those troops would be subjected to Iraq and international war crime laws.
Of course republicans don't care about such issues as sovereign countries having rights too.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
> 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!
So I'm guessing that you're not aware that we've been bombing them since September.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Banks need heavy regulation put back on them. I also suggest we have a Bank police that goes around tazing executives at random if we even think they are thinking of anything "clever"
I would settle for not bailing them out.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
One thing is different this time though.
ISIS is dumb.
And because of that they are actually losing. No really. They are trying to use media and social media to prevent this image of them as this scary and violent group, but it's both backfiring, turning everyone against them, and a mask for for their losses.
They're aren't fighting an asymmetrical battle. They have essentially discarded or ignored the basic playbook of the past few decades. They are attempting to engage us in traditional and conventional methods, rather than an insurgency, which is why we, and the Jordanians and Kurds, are beating them back soundly. ISIS hasn't made or kept any gains since late September, when they lost their initial momentum the had built up through surprise and the time it took us to organize a response.
But then ISIS also isn't like the other militant groups in the past.
This is a group of True Believers.
They truly believe they are the inheritors of the caliphate, and that their victory is assured by God. And that belief has lead them to (so far) forgo an insurgency and instead fight conventional battles, conventional battles in the open in which they are getting stomped, because they are utterly assured of their eventual victory. And then there's the apocalyptic aspect of their beliefs. And that they are so violent and crazy that even Al Qaeda doesn't want anything to do with them; that they are alienating all their potential allies, turning friends into enemies (which is one BIG reason why we need to keep the RWNJ's from getting their way and turning this into a "war on islam" instead of a "war on extremists"...ISIS WANTS it to be a war on Islam).
This group may eventually realize that they are going to fall apart and be destroyed unless they change their tactics.
But again, as a group of True Believers who doesn't accept the potential to lose as a real possibility, that change may not happen.
http://www.vox.com/2015/2/23/8...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
If you really want to understand the connection between ISIS, Afghanistan and Saudi Wahabism that makes this all a little bit less mysterious, have a look at Adam Curtis' film "Bitter Lake". It's an bit of an eye opener to put it mildly.
The Saudis are the fount of all discontent in the middle east. And oil which is why the US lets them literally get away with murder.
Watch the film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As to the comments about the liberal left, keep in mind one of Curtis previous fils, "The Power of ightmares" explored the tight iterlatationshpi between the new American right and Islamist fundamentalists. They are in fact one in the same.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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
See what happened in Paris and Denmark. People from Europe travel to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS, get training and AK47s, and then come back to Europe to kill the infidels.
Omar El-Hussein, the Copenhagen shooter, never went to Syria nor Iraq, never received any terrorist training, and didn't use an AK47, nor is there any evidence he ever communicated with terrorist organisations.
He did use a C7 rifle stolen from a member of the Danish national guard, but apparently had no weapons training. He did spend a couple of years in the Middle East years ago, but his radicalization appears to have happened primarily while he was incarcerated in Denmark.
Good points. But I don't think they are "dumb" per se, they are just True Believers as you point out. Their early military successes against weak and disorganized opponents left them in the position of actually having to rule the areas they conquered, becoming the de facto government. And as nearly every rebel group that has achieved success has discovered, it's far easier to throw bombs (literally and figuratively) against the powers that be than to take up that mantle and actually be responsible for keeping the lights on and maintaining order.
Historically, the successful revolutionaries have been those who moderated their stances enough to comport with practical realities. Take for example the Soviets in the 1919-1922 period, who hired former Tsarist military specialists to run large parts of the Red Army because they knew they couldn't do it themselves. And while Lenin and Zinoviev loved to lob crazy policies out of the Kremlin at the countryside, they learned to temper some of the most radical ones to maintain the support of the peasant population which didn't really give a rip about the "workers' paradise."
Look at ISIS and the Taliban in Afghanistan in contrast - with their "we will stick to our crazy-ass policies no matter what" attitude - and you see the seeds planted for failure. ISIS is a destructive movement but is ultimately doomed to fail as a functioning state because they are True Believers. What we should all really worry about is if ISIS gets a charismatic leader who is willing to bend a bit to keep people happy - many in Iraq and Syria (except for the Kurds) might actually find that preferable to the dysfunctional governments they already have in their respective countries.
"95% of all Slashdot