Join a jihadi group and get your throat slit by a friend

Yesterday, I mentioned briefly why it’s not a good idea to become friendly with fanatics or radical Muslim/Fundamentalists. Just because someone claims to be your brother/sister in Islam, it doesn’t mean you want to spend your time with the craziest. Don’t even acknowledge their stupidity by seriously considering anything they say. Just walk away.

Today, another video appear that shows a young kid from the ISIS/ISIL group shooting unarmed Palestinian guy –straight at his head.

A video released Tuesday showed Mohamed Musallam, 20, wearing the disturbingly familiar orange jumpsuit of an Islamic State captive. He was shown admitting under obvious duress that he was an informer for Israeli intelligence before he was shot in the head by a young boy. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, alleged that he had been sent to Syria “as an agent for the Israeli Mossad” to gather information on the group.

By now, you have probably realized that ISIS/ISIL doesn’t really conduct trial or call witnesses or have judges that look into the allegations. Even worse they don’t even have a proper executioner of law. As can be seen in this latest video, the executioner is a young kid, who’s very much on a fast track to become a sadistic animal when he grows-up.

Interestingly, Mohamed Musallam travelled to Syria to join this barbaric group.

Ahmed and his father suggested that Mohamed Musallam was most likely lured by Islamic State recruiters or brainwashed by other Palestinians in their East Jerusalem neighborhood who were loyal to the group’s philosophy.

“They promised him girls and money,” his father said.

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/world/middleeast/family-of-palestinian-man-killed-by-isis-say-he-wasnt-spying-for-israel.html

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/international/europe/2015/03/official_man_boy_in_is_killing_video_are_french_citizens

Radical Islam is not only bad for your health but also

The fanatics (radical Muslims/Islamic fundamentalists) are dangerous to your life, health and wellbeing because no matter how nice they appear to you initially, eventually they will turn vicious, if you still refuse to be convinced by their smart/stupid arguments/reasoning. Just like other human emotions, it’s very hard to control or curb it. When someone loses it, they tend to go overboard.

Recently, we have seen images of ISIS/ISIL destroying historical artifacts from ancient Iraqi cities.

On Friday, the group razed 3,000-year old Nimrud and on Saturday, they bulldozed 2,000-year old Hatra – both UNESCO world heritage sites. Isil currently controls about a third of Iraq and Syria. The Sunni extremist group has been campaigning to purge ancient relics they say promote idolatry that violates their fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law.

I generally don’t buy into this idea that as soon as you see a sculpture or painting or a strange looking historical artifacts, you will immediately start worshiping it. That’s purely a dumb speculation. What's even dumber is to think that a 4000 year old monuments or artifacts are even being used for any religious purposes when the ancient civilization no longer exists.

We are not only facing problems with people who subscribe to very extreme interpretation of Islam but even regular folks can't get away from many of Islam's small contradictions about which gods can be worship and which gods/goddesses cannot be worship.

According to Islam, Jesus son of God, and also god incarnate and his mother, Mary wife of God and mother of God, can be worship. So you can build your churches and put their images/pictures/idols or sculptures on altars and do whatever you see fit. Christianity is not the only religion that is protected under Islamic theology. Judaism, Zoroastrians, Sabeans, Mandeans and a few other ancient religions (which have not been named or clearly defined in literatures) have also earned the status of being a protected faith. Again, the status confers on these faiths are extremely arbitrary. It’s not based on deep analyses of religious dogma or anything of that nature. I’ve read some of the reasons and found them to be utterly unconvincing. I have posts on this here.


Reference

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11458343/Third-ancient-site-of-Khorsabad-attacked-by-Isil-as-coalition-strike-on-Syria-oil-refinery-kills-30.html

Debate: Islamic Terrorism or Extremism with no connection to Islam?

In the last couple of days, folks are having a conversation about radical groups professing their Islamic faith.
A large number of Muslim (let’s call them mainstream) believes that the terrorist group like ISIS/ISIL has nothing to do with Islam. These extremists may claim to be Muslims but their actions show otherwise.

"There's no such thing as radical Islam," Awad said. "There's no violent extremist ideology within Islam. Islam is one. Some people become extremists, but it's not because of the religion — it's because of themselves as individuals. I think people get entangled in terminology when, in fact, we are dealing with criminality. Criminals are criminals." [1]

Obviously the terrorist group ISIS/ISIL would disagree. According to ISIS/ISIL, most of the mainstreams Muslim are not really Islamic based to their own interpretation and legal judgment (theology). Only the ones who join their cause and accept their hardcore version of Islam can truly be considered a true believer of Islam.

The main dilemma is that both sides think they have the correct version of Islam worthy of representing all Muslim while the other sides are misguided.

Yesterday, I was watching this discussion on TV [2]. David Brooks get invited to a lot of these programs. You cannot always believe what he says because a lot of time his opinions are flatly wrong, but sometimes he makes an interesting point, like yesterday

DAVID BROOKS: Well, are we allowed to called the Islamic State Islamic?

They are. In some sense, it’s a stupid debate, because is it true Islam, is it perverted Islam? The fact is, religion is all interpretation. God doesn’t come down here and tell us exactly what he means. We have interpretations within Christianity, within Judaism and within Islam. If you call yourself a Muslim, you’re a Muslim.

They have different interpretations, but it’s all interpretations. So, one is a perverted or a sick form of Islam. A lot of people fortunately have a much more peaceful form of Islam, but it’s all an interpretation of a faith. What’s the real one? It’s all a matter of interpretation.

I think they should probably call it Islamic extremism. It is Islamic extremism. The second, I think, and more important issue is how we diagnose the problem. And there are three elements to this sort of terrorism, as we just saw in the segment about that Egyptian young man.

First, there’s economic and political dysfunction. So that young man wanted to be a personal trainer and he couldn’t. So he was alienated from that and marginalized from society.

But, second, there’s a spiritual ardor. A guy wants to be a hero. The guy wants to be seen as strong and a hero, like that young man.

And, third, there’s theological conviction. And Islamic State has theology to it, real, substantive theology. We’re comfortable talking about the economics and the politics because we live in a secular society and we’re comfortable talking about that stuff.
But if we don’t talk about the spiritual call that they feel and the theological content, then we’re missing the core of the thing. And if we’re going to fight it, you can’t just say we’re going to give you a higher standard of living. You don’t need to go to the Islamic State. That isn’t going to work. You have to have a spiritual, better alternative. [2]

References
[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/02/20/387611455/more-muslim-groups-voice-willingness-to-combat-extremism-in-their-faith
[2] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-brooks-fighting-islamic-extremism-giuliani-obama/

End of the Islamic State?

Nowadays, the whole world is very much focused on the militant radical Islamic organization called the Islamic state; tracking the growth of the organization, the source of funding, their immediate and also long term goals, group movements, their supporters, the key players (internal and external to the organization) and the fights against them.

Many of the arm-chair supporters of the Islamic state on social media have gone quietly in recent times; perhaps some have lost interest after realizing that the much-hyped concept of a glorified worldwide ‘caliphate’ may not materialize in their lifetimes.

I’m reading this article about the demise of the Islamic State.

Suddenly, Islamic State just can’t fall fast enough. All summer, the press has been saying IS will soon be accepting the keys to every city on earth, an unstoppable jihadi juggernaut.

And now, after six weeks stalled out against a local militia in Kobane and going exactly nowhere in the over-hyped drive on Baghdad, even the mainstream press, represented by America’s paper of record, the New York Times, is saying what I said months ago: IS is just a Sunni Arab militia that will never take serious turf from the other powerful groups in the region, the Kurds of the north or the Shia of the south.

After being shown up in Kobane, IS has now been truly humiliated by US airstrikes that hit a meeting on the Syria/Iraq border and a big convoy near Mosu

Even without nonstop decimation via air attack, a universal caliphate is a doomed, dumb idea. Remember what Al Baghdadi said: “Syria does not belong to the Syrians, and Iraq does not belong to the Iraqis”? You know who would beg to differ? The Syrians. And the Iraqis. And it’s not even that simple, because the territories in which this war is being fought are fractal as sci-fi dream scenes, which means that “Syrians” devolves into dozens, maybe hundreds, of groups that hate each other and will fight to the death for their local turf. Kobane is a part of one turf, “Rojava” or Syrian Kurdistan; but it’s also a local turf on its own, and you can bet that the Kobane people have a few stereotypes of their Kurdish neighbors in the other evolving cantons like Afrin. You can bet that not all of Assad’s Alawites are fond of each other, either, even if they’re forced to stick together now against the Sunni who want to annihilate them. And those Sunni have never managed to make common cause for any length of time, even against a common enemy.

The rest of the article is also equally interesting, so please consider reading all.

Another related article is this" Study: Westerners join Islamic State because of peer pressure, not social media "

Today, the Guardian reports on an upcoming study from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Science (ICSR) which finds that British Muslims who join Islamic State fighters in Syria do so more often because of peer pressure than social media propaganda.

“While online recruitment plays a role, people go because they know people who are in Syria,” ICSR director Peter Neumann told the Guardian. “It’s all about networks in the real world.”

References

http://pando.com/2014/11/10/the-war-nerd-farewell-islamic-state-we-hardly-knew-ye/
http://pando.com/2014/11/06/study-westerners-join-islamic-state-because-of-peer-pressure-not-social-media/

Religious Fundamentalism is a Mental Disorder

I'm reading this news

Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder.

Even before reading this article, I've always considered such people, who are radicalized and deeply influenced by the harmful aspect of religions, as very unstable and highly detached from reality. Religion promotes blind faith most of time. Once you voluntary/involuntary give up on thinking because of your affiliation to that religion/group/sect, then you are probably no different than someone with an impaired mental conditions.

Also, she is pushing for classifying extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals. I disagree since people with mental illness can be annoying sometimes but they are not violent.

Dzhokhar (Jahar) Tsarnaev

Jahar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, scrawled a note at the wall of the boat while hiding at WaterTown, MA before he was captured by the authorities.

His message was

"When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims." He also penned that he was not mourning the death of his brother because he (Tamerlan) was a "martyr in paradise."

His message is pretty standard; something you would expect from someone who has been radicalized with Jihadism.

There also seems to be a new entry about Islamic terrorism on Wikipedia.

A few days ago, I was reading this interesting blog entry about Tsarnaev brothers global Jihad against what they perceive as Islam's enemy.

Tsarnaev's quote seems to be based on the idea of a global Muslim community, called the ummah, that has always been aspirational. The Tsarnaev brothers clearly felt that they were being marginalized, and the fact that they did not belong to an American Muslim community further reinforced that belief. So the brothers turned to the idea of the ummah, a historical fiction that has not existed in practice in all of Muslim history. Muslims are too varied to connect to one way of being a community.

What we are witnessing in Syria, what we saw in Egypt or in Iran during the Green Revolution, is that Muslims kill other Muslims for political gain, and the idea of the ummah is broken. There is no sense from the brothers that they would have been able to understand or choose sides in these conflicts.

Not only does the Muslim Ummah not exist in the current time, but it also has never existed in the past/historical. And then, it gets really interesting.

There is no universal, binding legal command for all Muslims to support each other at all times. Even if there were, throughout Islamic history, it has been observed in its breach rather than in practice. Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law, Ali, was assassinated while praying, and Mohammed’s favorite grandson, Husayn, was murdered after being denied food and water for days. Both of these acts were committed by people who considered themselves Muslim.

The above are just some examples. Of course you can view all the wars that Muslim fought against each other in the past and also at the establishment of unjust governments (kings or sultans via dynastic rulers/monarchy). This just goes to show how corrupt the Muslim society have been throughout the ages. Not much different than what you have now.