Psy-war against the west

davod

The Jihadists were always ahead in the media technology war. A few years ago I sat in on a meeting where a British academic showed how Al Qaeda was hiding its communications inside porn sites.

We are not just talking about practical training and e-mails. The theological arguments for every action were also included.

This, at a time when the US and UK were still relying on Muslim Brotherhood fronts to tell them how to work with Muslims. Oh. my mistake. They still are.

Bob

Best Definition I have seen:

"A supremacist totalitarian ideology using its peaceful followers as a shield to exploit religious freedom for political ends.”

Derek BLADES

Pro-Jihadist Al-‘Amili says the Guantanamo prisoners are "brothers who had been in the rank of the enemy" but who have subsequently "embraced Islam, becoming the sincerest soldiers and most destructive against the enemy."

It is natural that many of the young men locked up for many years and sometimes tortured in a primitive military prison have turned against their captors. The surprise would be to find them in the ranks of the Tea Party.

The interesting bit is Al-‘Amili's claim that these brothers "had been in the rank of the enemy". Apparently he believes that some of them were innocent and even anti-Jihad until their incarceration. And he probably knows more than we do. Guantanamo was one among many of Bush's terrible decisions

Augustus

Derek Blades - It is one thing to show empathy with individuals
at Guantanamo who may be innocent of heinous crimes, and to hope that their individual cases will be addressed and resolved in an acceptable, logical, and security concience
manner, but quite another to be
sympathetic for the aberrant ideology that has consumed these men and led them to lead lives of destruction and terror.
Often those that have been cleared can't be returned to their home countries where they would be subjected to torture, and Gitmo is much more humane than what they would get from their own people. And as far as legal processes are concerned, they have more than any enemy in
history has ever been given. Look at the cases of how German saboteurs were handled in WW2.
Many have been released, and many have returned to the fight,
that is also an important fact.
Every detainee at Guantanamo is a Muslim, and many of the worst,
especially the Saudis and the
Yemenis, are members of a virulent sub-sect of Islam that is sworn to our destruction. That is a cold fact and ignoring or minimizing it will not make it go away. The problem remains, no matter where they are housed.

John.

When will our representatives stop burying their heads in the sand and actually take this very evident threat into account?

Derek BLADES

Augustus seems to be saying that I am "sympathetic for the aberrant ideology that has consumed [the Guantanamo prisoners] and led them to lead lives of destruction and terror". As many of the prisoners seem to be innocent that is perhaps slightly over the top even for Augustus.

As it happens, I am not at all in favour of the Al Quaeda view of life. But I do try to understand the motives behind their actions. Their not unreasonable, and possibly acheivable, aim is to rid the Midle East of Western influence and of the corrupt leaders in Saudi Arabia and eleswhere who connive in that influence. The principle motivation for young men to join Al Qaeda remains, as Augustus full well know unless he is exceptionally stupid, the festering Arab-Israeli conflict. A sore that is made daily and deliberately made worse by the actions of the Netanyahu government and the Israeli land-thieves in East Jerusalem and the occupied territories.

E.

Derek Blades:

I was sympathetic to your points until you made this statement:

"The principle motivation for young men to join Al Qaeda remains, as Augustus full well know unless he is exceptionally stupid, the festering Arab-Israeli conflict. A sore that is made daily and deliberately made worse by the actions of the Netanyahu government and the Israeli land-thieves in East Jerusalem and the occupied territories."

Please pick up and read a history book and read some serious literature on the background of modern day Islamic terrorism (I am not proposing you go off to read fundamentalist right wing websites before you start accusing me of being a right-wing nutter, simply that you read some serious scholarly work on the middle east). Once you have improved your knowledge of what is going on in the middle east and the history behind modern day Islamic terrorism and how Arabs view the West, then perhaps you are possible to have a reasonable discussion with.

Derek BLADES

E.

My statement that upsets you is based in Osama bin Laden's first caveman video after 9/11. He mentioned the Israeli/Arab conflict as the first of his three complaints against the West. "...[reading] some serious literature on the background of modern day Islamic terrorism..." - which you ask me to do - will not change that.

My suggestion that the Israeli Arab conflict is a major motivation for young men to join Al Qaeda is not exactly revolutionary. It is, for example, standard belief in the US State Department and in the foreign ministries of Western Europe.

Marilyn Sugar

Ddrek Blades, what is your solution to the middle-east situation? Would you like Israel to disappear into the sea or have you a more reasonable answer?

Augustus

Derek Blades - You talk of "the festering Arab-Israeli conflict"
for which you have, and do so again here, blame Israel and the Jews. The half million or so Jews living in the West Bank
are entitled to do so by virtue of the legal rights conferred on them under both the League of Nations and United Nations charters. The Arabs have had, (what?) ninety odd years to mature their views since a small part of Palestine was earmarked for the reconstitution
of a Jewish national home and severed from the (what?) other 99.99% of the land freed from the Ottoman Turks by the British and the French and designated for Arab self-determination.

Ian Hills

Derek BLADES says (echoing terrorist Abu Sa’d al-‘Amili) that the Guantanamo Bay prisoners only became jihadis after they were picked up. Really? I thought most of them were found in Afghanistan. It is true that some said they had only gone there to study (too true), and one even said he had gone there to come off drugs (sure) but the common, as opposed to bien pensant, perception is that they were all terrorists. What a shame that they were freed after a bit of waterboarding. Enough torture would have extracted enough information to enable whole networks to be rolled up. If you accord these people human rights, they take you for fools and redouble their efforts accordingly.

Derek BLADES

@ Marilyn Sugar

To answer your question, my preferred solution to the Israeli Arab dispute is that Israel should live within its 1967 borders after reaching a comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbours.

This may seem an outrageous proposition to you but you should note that it is also the solution preferred by the United States, the European Union, China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, etc, etc. (Off hand, I cannot think of any country that is against my preferred solution. Even Netanyahu says he wants it, although he is clearly lying.)

Perhaps you could tell me what your solution would be.