Anonymous Vows Revenge For ISIS Paris Attacks

An anonymous reader writes: As usual, Anonymous members are quicker to respond to threats than investigators and have announced #OpParis as revenge for the Paris attacks. Their action is similar to #OpISIS from this spring, launched after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Previously Anonymous ousted thousands of ISIS Twitter accounts in #OpISIS. In a more conventional response, the government of France has been bombarding ISIS positions in Syria with airstrikes, and hunting for suspect Salah Abdeslam in connection with Friday's killings.

Comments

The best approach for Anonymous

[Applehu Akbar]

Anonymous could do the most good by hacking into and diverting - or simply revealing, if nothing else is possible - the finances of ISIS. Is there any hackable digital money stream involved, or is at all greasy piles of cash?

A kind of "Nous sommes des Inconnus" ..

[niks42]

IS is one of the largest threats to our way of life in the west, but we are thinking too small when we think of ways to combat it. They believe they are on a mission from God, bringing about the final reckoning between good and evil - the Apocalypse. We think of them as trouble-makers that need to be sorted out as painlessly as possible, a short-term problem that can be solved with conventional weaponry, with relatively small losses. They aren't.

How we respond to them is difficult to work out. Maybe the Anon approach of hacking and defacing their web sites - cutting off the oxygen of publicity - would be a Good Idea. It may be better than trying to pick the right targets out of the desert with smart bombs and drones. It might be better than turning the entire region into green, glowing glass.

Dear Anonymous...

[Lumpy]

One thing you can do is screw with their social media, make it look as if ISIS hates Allah and Mohammed, not in big ways that are obvious, but smaller that makes recruits stand back and second guess. Undermine their ability to recruit anyone and recruit money and they will crumble faster than 10,000 bombs can hurt them.

Sever their income, destroy their ability to recruit and communicate. and please do it decently instead of carpet bombing that gets a lot of innocents as well. redirect their bank accounts to supporting Israel or other groups they hate.

Reveal all their financial supporters, and feel free to drain their accounts as well.

Re:Quicker

[PapayaSF]

Maybe you could start by opening your home to a Syrian refugee. People fleeing the "death cult" are precisely the sort of people who could do with your help.

That's very idealistic and glib, except that one survey has shown that 13% of Syrian refugees support ISIS. Would you take a 1 in 8 chance that your houseguest wants to kill you? And even the ones who aren't terror-supporters now are still Muslims (mostly), which means they carry the same memetic infection that produced ISIS (and all the other Islamic radical groups). There's a good chance that some of their kids and grandkids will be radicals, as France has learned: many of their "home-grown" radical Islamists are from Algerian families that came to France generations ago.

In short, just because they are refugees doesn't necessarily make them good people.

Sorry, but you and much of the West are being played for suckers. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have plenty of money and room for their co-religionists. They're all part of the ummah, right? But they don't want a bunch of poor and semi-skilled people with a heavy sprinkling of terror-supporters. Why burden their welfare rolls and strain their societies? Better to fob off the refugees on Europe (and the US), where they can spread Islam and soak up Western welfare money. It is a core Muslim belief that the entire Earth will one day be Muslim. The Muslim world is taking advantage of the Syrian war to spread Islam. We are fools to go along with it.

Re:Quicker

[Pseudonym]

[...] except that one survey has shown that 13% of Syrian refugees support ISIS. Would you take a 1 in 8 chance that your houseguest wants to kill you?

No, it didn't.

The question was "In general, do you have a postitive or negative view of ISIL?" 4% of Syrian refugees answered "positive", and 9% said "positive to some extent". That is not the same as 13% expressing "support" for ISIS.

Moreover:

Further seeking to understand respondents’ views of ISIL, the survey included questions which asked participants to identify the factors that contributed the most to the group’s popularity amongst, and influence on, its supporters. Respondents were asked to consider such arguments regardless of whether or not they themselves accepted their validity. When asked to identify such reasons and factors, 15% of respondents cited ISIL’s “military achievements”, with the highest proportions of those citing this factor coming from Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and amongst the Syrian refugee population.

The survey didn't expand on "military achievements", but it wouldn't surprise me if the most common reason for a Syrian refugee holding a positive (or mildly positive) view of ISIS is that nobody else is trying to oust the Ba'athist regime.