I really dont know how acts like this could be justified and what these radical groups are after,shooting/hanging is one thing,but burning alive ?
war is cruelty
These dudes are barbaric. It’s also alarming how many foreigners they have among their ranks now. British, French etc and the list just keeps growing.
That being said, it looks like the only card they’re playing is their ability to ‘shock and awe’. They seem unable to enter Kurd controlled territory , there is a concentrated effort by both the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah to stop them from entering Lebanon, Turkey’s borders are relatively secure and even if them do manage to topple Assad controlled Syrian areas they would face an impossible task trying to spread into Iran. They don’t have the backing that Al-Qaeda did (yet) and they aren’t sitting on the kind of weaponry that the Tamil Tigers commanded. Take away their ‘too extreme for Al-Qaeda’ hype which the general American public seems to lap up in their paranoia and they seem like small fry.
On a different note, I caught a show called Homeland by chance recently. It was the 4’th season I think, based in Pakistan and features the ISI. It’s always light comedic relief watching the Americans attempt at interpreting a world they are unable to understand but the show or at least the season was surprisingly average and accurate in bits and pieces. Good to know they seem aware of the ISI role in homegrowing these terrorists which begs the question why on earth did these people deal under the table with Pakistan supplying them with weapons throughout the years. You make the bed you lie in at the end of the day.
The story arc where the female lead seduces the 21 year old Pakistani medical student who’se family she was responsible for killing and then orders a drone strike as soon as she is led to Haqqani knowing that it would result in the death of anyone within a 50m radius was particularly cold though.
As an outsider looking in on this so called ‘war’ , both sides are as bad as each other.
I’m hoping they are stupid enough to make the jihadist marginalized by showing how crazy they are. I
Borris Johnson, mayor of London once made a comment - these guys are wankers. Whilst I’m obviously shaken and moved by this, I cannot help but think that maybe these guys do shit like this because they never had a decent life, but not everybody who doesn’t have a decent life goes on killing others like this.
We gotta give it a try anyway - crazy thought - open a pub/kickass nightclub in the middle of wherever the heck these ISIS jerks reside and get them drunk and show them a good time. What else can one really do!
some people just don’t deserve to live.
^ +1.
I’ve not seen the video but it’s been all over facebook and apparently is very grim. Burning people is totally forbidden by Islam.
IS have also taken to throwing suspected gaymen off the highest buildings in whatever hellhole they’re residing in and then stoning them to death if they survive.
But then, Iran’s MO for their huge number of executions each year is to hang people by stringing them up to slowly choke to death, none of this drop hanging, they just slowly choke people to death in front of baying mobs.
Saudi beheads people with a sword and it usually takes two blows. They give painkillers to people convicted of lesser crimes but don’t give them to people they deem to have committed the worst crimes.
The US still fries people using a method that can easily go wrong.
Indeed, not too different from how Saudi Arabia kills criminals, like many of their other Arab cousins, but they are “moderate US allies” so it’s ok.
Yeah these piece of sh!t just need to be wiped out like the parasites that they are.
On a side note and as someone mentioned, I am not sure if most Americans realise just how inbred and barbaric the electric chair is.
I thought the last season of Homeland was really good. To your point of both sides being as bad as the other: that is the intent of the show, to display this this is a violent conflict with high stakes and certain casualties are acceptable to either side. That was really the thread running through the season, the whole “How are we different from them?” question. I think Saul really self-awarely hits on this multiple times, even though he sees difference.
The real difference, though, is that a popular TV show that depicts the bad, not black and white side of what the CIA does is allowed to be produced. Homeland will probably do more to raise awareness and criticism about civilian deaths from drone strikes than any news coverage. Try making a TV show that criticizes the ISI, let alone Daish, under their juristiction and see how that works out for you. So, that’s a difference, not that it really matters in the end. Dead is dead.
No, we do. That’s why only inbred states use it. And Florida, that place is f’d.
As of 2014 [update], the only places in the world which still reserve the electric chair as an option for execution are the U.S. states of Alabama , Florida, South Carolina , Kentucky , and Virginia.
For the record–I’m not totally against the idea of burning people alive as a means of capital punishment. EG - the two thugs who tried to rob a woman, and when she said she didn’t have any money, they shot her 2-year old son in the face at point-blank range.
In psychology, often it is found that we like to blame personalities for behaving in certain ways when often there is a whole host of factors that can influence it including the situation/environment. Unless the group is an anamoly, I bet you’d be amazed how decent people still end up doing terrible things. I found the research around destructive groups fascinating in college and studied as much as I could being a finance major. Zimbardo has an interesting TED talk where he covers some of the really famous (and in retrospect likely unethical) studies quickly.
http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil?language=en
The problem is that if we respond, there will be collateral damage or mistakes made by us along with more street cred for their organizaiton. And that is then a success for the group, because that is how ultimately they get recruits.
Texas has a public page where they list every execution and describe the crime and evidence. For people against the death penalty I typically refer them to the page. When you see the severity of the crimes and the completeness of the evidence in death penalty cases, capital punishment is much more viable as a practical argument than the theoretical, “who are we to play god” discussions.
One thing I have to say for China and Jordan’s regime, sometimes its nice to have the ability to just be able to off someone that clearly deserves it. In China two Christian cult members, a father and daughter were in a MacDonalds and when a mother there wouldn’t give them her phone number they lead other church members in beating her to death with a chair. On video after his arrest the father said he was proud of it and would do it again as she was a demon and needed to be crushed. A few days later, China announced that he and his daughter had been executed. Efficiency.
ISIS burned Jordan’s pilot to get the suicide bomber freed. So Jordan executed her and one other within days. Very efficient. If I were the King of Jordan, I’d have ordered her released at ISIS’s request. Just fly her over Syria in a C130 at 20,000 ft and let her walk free out the back.
The freaky thing with ISIS is they dress and groom to intimidate,thats why I sense they are not as dangerous as say the Taliban,just my thought though
The question is not whether ISIS is evil but if it’s worth it for the rest of the world to spend trillions (that’s where it’s heading) to combat them in an unwinnable war. This isn’t Nazi Germany where the enemy was clearly visible. Fighting people scattered among civilian population is a lost cause. The more time, money and publicity wasted on them, the more recruitment and funds they get. Either you nuke or move on to other things.
Yeah, ISIS will piss themselves laughing at that , making a martyr out of someone who failed at that in the first place.
It was ok.
I don’t think any medical student on the verge of becoming a doctor is stupid enough to believe that a random American journalist can guarantee a place in the Royal College of Physicians. The language used by the tribal people was not the correct language and at times the show was all over the place. I don’t think anyone really cares about the personal life of a mentally ill, excessively foul mouthed American women or why her mother left her when she was a kid. There were also a few other instances where American cultural navel gazing was evident
The arcs where they introduced the Pakistani agents and the epsiodes around that were quite good though. The depth they gave the young general Aasar Khan and Tasneem were actually quite surprising, it’s quite rare for non-white and to a much lesser extent non-black characters to be given such depth on American telivision, though, I suppose in this case it was unavoidable.
I caught the headlines on ITV news (UK’s version of FOX) and they lead with ‘Convicted suicide bomber due to be executed’ and me and the missus both pissed ourselves laughing at how ridculous it sounded. They should at least have the word ‘attempted’ in there somewhere.