SHOULD ISIS BE STOPED?

[RenewableCandy]

"Pathfinders" by Jim AlKalili.

The final chapter is interesting because he discusses why the Islamic scientific golden age came to an end. One of the largest contributing factors was apparently the popularity of one particular conservative figure. But they don't happen in isolation: perhaps people followed his ideas because they felt insecure somehow, because the region was under some other strain or threat.

[jonny2mad]

A lot of islamic science comes from the people they conquered and destroyed a lot from india and persia you could take a look at the statues in the kabul museum afghanistan wasnt the place it is today before islam .

Basically Islam did very well at conquering intelligent civilized tolerant people. what stopped islam in europe was people like Vlad the impaler and charles the hammer martel. At one time all of the near east, turkey north africa were christian those people lost .

Their psycho nasty northern near barbarian brothers didnt .

I fully imagine while southern christianity was falling you would have had the same sort of numptys who go on marches against ukip and the edl, talking about the need for more tolerance



http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mordec ... himmitude/

[mr brightside]

I don't agree.

Islam never had the same sort of head-on dispute with scientific orthodoxy that Christianity - or rather European Catholicism - did.

First thing to note: the Bible (Old Testament) contain a creation myth and a cosmology, and the Koran does not.

The scientific revolution happened in Christendom, not the muslim world. That meant that it was (Catholic) Christianity that was threatened, rather than Islam. The Catholic church, at that time, was also in a position of great political, financial and military strength, but this strength was not written into the scriptures. Islam is a political as well as a religious system, meaning that strict adherence to the scriptures results in real-world power being delivered to the religious authorities. We see this to this day everywhere Islam is stronger than any other religion. But the Catholic church ended up with all that extra-religious power through a quirk of historical fate, and thus when science started challenging its own religious doctrines - most of which were decided upon by the Catholic church itself rather than coming directly from the Bible - it (rightly) saw science as a direct threat to its political (and therefore financial and military) power. In short, if science could over-ride the absolute will/power of the Catholic authorities, then that power was compromised for good - for them it was the thin edge of a very threatening wedge. And the rest is history - the behaviour of the Catholic church in trying to retain absolute power ultimately resulted in both the Scientific and Protestant revolutions successfully challenging the authority of the Catholic church. And today the Catholic church holds power over the world's catholics but nobody else.

The modern-day Islamic clerics, on the other hand, have no such fear of science. They may disagree with it - there are some Islamic creationists, for example - but on the whole they are free to simply ignore it, because their political power is guaranteed in the very words of the Koran. So, IMO, it is not "the scientific age" that needs to, or can, catch up with them. Something obviously needs to catch up with them - reform is desperately needed in Islam - but I do not agree that science can do the job. It would have happened already if that was going to happen. What is required is something more like the Protestant revolution - a revolution within Islam where ordinary muslims stand up to the clergy and say that it is time for their power to be diminished, just as the Protestants declared that the priests were not required to stand between God and ordinary people. The problem is that this requires an explicit acceptance that the words of the Koran are open to interpretation, and not to be taken literally. Science can't force this change, not least because the Koran does not contain much in the way of claims that contradict science. So it has to be a socio-political change. Unfortunately, I see no evidence to suggest this is happening. Instead of trying to force reform of Islam, the mainstream "moderate" muslims are locked into a cycle of denial: the simply come out with claims like "Islam is a peaceful religion" or "ISIS have nothing to do with the real Islam". And even more unfortunately, politically-correct westerners and cowardly political leaders go along with the lies. If Islam is going to be reformed then the first step in this process is to admit, openly and bluntly, that it is in need of reform. Claiming that it needs no reform is counter-productive denialism, but that is all we're getting from the very people who we need to drive that reform.

You sound like you know what you're on about, and i agree with you about moderate muslims being locked in a cycle of denial and it annoys me when politicians and facebookers repeat it like parrots. It has to come to an end some time surely? People are being brainwashed and used like sock puppets, the penny has to drop at some point and some sort of reform has to result.

[biffvernon]

Should ISIS be stopped?
Well, yes, but then the question becomes stopped by whom?

Perhaps what we need to do is to say to Saudi Arabia that we will no longer sell them any arms and, here's what will shock them, we will no longer buy their oil, at least until they can demonstrate that ISIS is no longer a threat to anyone. But they'll call our bluff, you say. Ha! We need to be not bluffing. We need to be ready to use a hell of a lot less oil. Of course, we need to use a hell of a lot less oil to mitigate the up-coming catastrophic climate change so the exercise should kill two birds with one stone.

[UndercoverElephant]

It has to come to an end some time surely?

All things (almost...) have to come to end some time. Unfortunately I see no reason why Islam can't remain unreformed for a very long time to come. Especially if industrialised civilisation is doomed.

People are being brainwashed and used like sock puppets, the penny has to drop at some point and some sort of reform has to result.

Unfortunately there is no "has to" about this. Islam has proved itself to be almost impossible to reform since it was founded. It was designed to be unreformable, partly because of what happened to Christianity when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

[PS_RalphW]

I really do not know what to make of this report. It stretches credulity on so many levels

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 95485.html

1. Iraq under Saddam did have chemical weapons after all.

2. They were old stock from the 1990s, mostly mustard gas. Not the stuff the west claimed in the run up to invasion.

3. The weapons were found by US soldiers some of whom suffered injuries whilst handling them.

4. Their discovery was covered up because they were
a. designed in the US
b. shells built in Europe and
c. primed on production lines in Iraq built by Western countries.

5. Not all the stocks were destroyed

6. The main repository was recently overrun and looted by IS.

I can see next week's headline

"IS has weapons of Mass Destruction. We must nuke 'em before they kill us all"

[vtsnowedin]

I really do not know what to make of this report. It stretches credulity on so many levels

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 95485.html

1. Iraq under Saddam did have chemical weapons after all.

2. They were old stock from the 1990s, mostly mustard gas. Not the stuff the west claimed in the run up to invasion.

3. The weapons were found by US soldiers some of whom suffered injuries whilst handling them.

4. Their discovery was covered up because they were
a. designed in the US
b. shells built in Europe and
c. primed on production lines in Iraq built by Western countries.

5. Not all the stocks were destroyed

6. The main repository was recently overrun and looted by IS.

I can see next week's headline

"IS has weapons of Mass Destruction. We must nuke 'em before they kill us all"

I'm not buying this one. The Bush administration wanted desperately to be right on the WMD claim and had made no bones about the fact that we had sold some of them to Saddam. Even one good sized pile of mustard gas shells would have been paraded in front of the imbedded journalists to prove the righteousness of the war.
Why this fairy tail now and by whom is the question.

[UndercoverElephant]

Sounds entirely believable to me. Lies, with lies on top, all served on a bed of rank hypocrisy, and garnished with some more lies.

[vtsnowedin]

Sounds entirely believable to me. Lies, with lies on top, all served on a bed of rank hypocrisy, and garnished with some more lies.

Oh have you dined at this restaurant before?

[UndercoverElephant]

I really do not know what to make of this report. It stretches credulity on so many levels

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 95485.html

1. Iraq under Saddam did have chemical weapons after all.

2. They were old stock from the 1990s, mostly mustard gas. Not the stuff the west claimed in the run up to invasion.

3. The weapons were found by US soldiers some of whom suffered injuries whilst handling them.

4. Their discovery was covered up because they were
a. designed in the US
b. shells built in Europe and
c. primed on production lines in Iraq built by Western countries.

5. Not all the stocks were destroyed

6. The main repository was recently overrun and looted by IS.

I can see next week's headline

"IS has weapons of Mass Destruction. We must nuke 'em before they kill us all"

I'm not buying this one. The Bush administration wanted desperately to be right on the WMD claim and had made no bones about the fact that we had sold some of them to Saddam. Even one good sized pile of mustard gas shells would have been paraded in front of the imbedded journalists to prove the righteousness of the war.
Why this fairy tail now and by whom is the question.

So you don't believe for one second that the US officials who are now exposing the lies might just be telling the truth? The whole thing sounds not only credible to me, but very probably true.

At least British people don't just swallow all the nonsense our government comes out with.

[vtsnowedin]

So you don't believe for one second that the US officials who are now exposing the lies might just be telling the truth? The whole thing sounds not only credible to me, but very probably true.

At least British people don't just swallow all the nonsense our government comes out with.

I certainly don't believe everything I read in the NY times. Follow the links back to the FOI reply and you see that more then 55 pages were not released in their entirety and the Expose consists of trying to fill in huge gaps between the lines. Nothing in the federal documents released indicates that any munitions discovered were left in place or stored elsewhere. Much of what was found (in the released portions of the documents) were unfilled shells and these too were destroyed.
I have a veteran in the family that served in this war and the idea that a trained US soldier would jump down into a hole and causally pick up an unexploded piece of ordinance rings hollow.
The whole story reeks of Dan Rather itis.

[biffvernon]

I think the time has come for the USA, the UK, France and any other nation that has ever sent a soldier abroad or exported a gun or a bullet, to pack up and go home and leave world policing to some untarnished nation. Bhutan perhaps?

And stop buying foreign oil too, in case that implicates us in bad stuff.

[vtsnowedin]

I think the time has come for the USA, the UK, France and any other nation that has ever sent a soldier abroad or exported a gun or a bullet, to pack up and go home and leave world policing to some untarnished nation. Bhutan perhaps?

And stop buying foreign oil too, in case that implicates us in bad stuff.

I have often felt that way and I'm willing to live in an America that uses just it's own oil and other resources. It is considering the innocent civilian deaths that would occur within a short while after we leave these countries that gives me pause.

[mr brightside]

4. Their discovery was covered up because they were
a. designed in the US
b. shells built in Europe and
c. primed on production lines in Iraq built by Western countries.

I'm not sure that's enough to warrant a cover-up, they'd save a lot of face by showing the world why it was right to go in. In any case, isn't it relatively normal for armaments of various manufacturing origin to make their way to most corners of the globe?

[jonny2mad]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... laves.html I know its the daily mail but Ive talked to people in favour of sex slavery real people in the uk, its a bit like very fundermentalist christians they look at a document 2000 years old and think well thats the ideal .

These guys ideal is how people acted around the time of mohammed

http://lawandfreedomfoundation.org/2014 ... ing-gangs/ pdf at the bottom of the page explaining whats been happening in the uk, this is linked to whats happening in syria read that pdf especially at the scale of the problem its 10,000s of thousands of girls in the the report actually doesnt go far enough back because Ive seen reports it was happening in the 1970s . The average gang makes £300,000 per year from each schoolgirl and all the main partys have totally covered up whats going on