quote:

"The court bans the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood organization and its non-governmental organization and all the activities that it participates in and any organization derived from it," said the presiding judge Mohammed al-Sayed.

The court ordered the government to seize the Brotherhood's funds and administer its frozen assets.

McDowell posted:

The problem with the Egyptian Election was that it became just another chapter in the Struggle between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Army.

Now some people can prop up Morsi and his cabinet* as Ideological Demons; like the rarely discussed 2006 Palestinian Elections; which just continued to be written in the blood of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle.

Completely Rational & Democratically Elected Benjamin Netanyahu will tell you the election of Hamas proves negotiations are futile.

Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert; reporting WND stories about the Muslim Brotherhood and giving condescending lectures to Egyptians; will tell you they are just as rational and virtuous.


*Note Morsi's cabinet was a mess - didn't they get leaked talking about getting into the CIA game and making trouble in Sudan over a Nile Dam?

Patrick Spens posted:

Iran and Saudi Arabia are right now fighting it out via dueling terror groups in Syria, and Saudi Arabia's response to Iran getting closer to Nuclear generation was to start buying their own nukes from Pakistan. If honestly think that Israel is more of a destabilizing influence then two nuclear powers fighting it out via Jihadists then you are real drat stupid.

Count Roland posted:

Good for them? It never seems to me like the Saudis have any real geostratigic plan, they just like backing religious assholes. I can't fathom what they stand to gain from this, or what they would do with said gains. Same with Qatar, which has done similar stuff but acts as a bit of a rival to the Saudis. I really don't get it.

suboptimal posted:

I know this may be considered mod sass, but why should I believe the unemployed Englishman over the Syrian President?

Kurt_Cobain posted:

Does anyone have a link or explanation for why congress passing Iran sanctions means war? I am not for the sanctions, I just am not making the connection or understanding how things would play out afterwards if a veto proof majority passed them.

Peel posted:

What advantage is it that the US supposedly gets from being the trading currency for oil? Low interest rates?

Brown Moses posted:

The Islamic Front as made this flashy promotional ad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcJYpnEElwA

Xandu posted:

That really sucks.

I question his judgement, but that's definitely brave.


Edit: he got shot first time around too

Willie Tomg posted:

trigger warning: i'm going to do something very dangerous for good ol' forumid=46 and talk about aesthetics and intertextuality in regards to explaining a PR campaign that is nakedly not targeted at the prototypical D&D poster, while also mentioning bad things the US did. I'm sure its a waste of breath to point out that I'm not saying nonstate actor X is justified because State Actor Y did bad stuff, but this is also a thread where a dude straight up said we should invade Turkey for Reasons and hasn't been drummed out yet so I'm not sure how serious y'all are being.

Americans in Iraq, with terrifyingly honest and good intentions, will slaughter a couple journalists and their entourage in cold blood, then beg for the chance to paste the good Samaritans who stop by to clean you off the street real quick.





ISIS, with terrifyingly honest and earnest intentions, will slaughter a couple journalists eye-to-eye in order to goad a superpower into doing something stupid in a place it doesn't understand and historically has a lot of trouble communicating to and within. Then they will kill three dudes in the street for smoking cigarettes while taking the lord's name in vain, again all in earnest. Earnesty is the key term there, coming off a decade of American occupation whose praxis can be conservatively described as "schizophrenic" where it can even be called "praxis".

This is juxtaposed against a peculiarly Victorian sensibility of Americans toward actual violence IRL considering the place violence occupies in our popular media, because let's be real here pretty much everyone wants to see these motherfuckers die. I'm a sexually flexibile leftist atheist feminist alcoholic, by rights I should be first in line baying for some goddamned salafi blood. But we, such as the Americans can be said to be a "we", cannot allow ourselves to enjoy it. Sure there are some risque photos and footage of questionable poo poo US soldiers do, but generally speaking for mainstream consumption the most vivd footage Americans see of war is a few carefully cut and curated pieces of stock footage where soldiers are firing into the horizon, maybe they're swearing, maybe a bomb goes off nearby, but mostly its dominated by the omnipresent grainy nightvision or IR footage with redacted timestamps. We'll get our blood from ISIS but it'll be mediated through a few kilometers and a digital optic, then through military censors, then through newsdesk editors, then through our TVs or computers. We'll blow you to bits with a TOW because your ideology doesn't jibe with our geopolitical vision, but we'll only celebrate your death in interlaced infrared SD. We'll assassinate Bin Laden, snap a deadpic, then dump him over the side of a ship. We'll capture Saddam and show off his dental exam for the world, but leave the retributive killing to those barbarous Shia. Anything more would be tasteless and brutal, you see.

Contrast this with the ISIS releases which, cumulatively, are already as a collaborative effort the most comprehensive and brutal war documentary ever made in the history of film. I wont presume to know your leanings, but the poo poo in ISIS vids is why antiwar sentiment exists, because the real brutality of the fighting isn't in the field engagements but the structural violence visited upon the population, and if you want to get utterly stone-cold blooded using High Rational Process, then in absolute terms just as the Iraq War was a fraction as tragic on all fronts as the Vietnam War, the invasion and occupation of ISIS for all its attempted genocide and excess is a fraction as deadly as the American invasion (albeit a fraction as comprehensive as well). The key difference is that ISIS records every single event that under American occupation would be brushed under the rug or delgated to proxies with SLR's and lens adapters shooting 1080p with a paper-thin depth of field, and then puts it on the internet. ISIS will not bullshit with "debaathificiation" in liquidating the local government should they prove uncooperative, they'll kill you and put it on the internet. ISIS will not dicker around rolling up 50 men on a block who may or may not be conducting insurgent activities and send them to Abu Ghraib for torturequestioning because good golly gosh we're just Troops trying our best to keep the peace, upon suspicion they will find you and shoot you in the street and dump your body in a pit marked on Google Earth for everyone's convenience and put it on the internet. There is no shame to ISIS, there is no guilt, there are no ablative layers of genteel "oh goodness, how tragic it came to this surely these repeated incidents are just a few bad apples which I probably wouldn't say if I knew the second half of that aphorism" that pervade martial discourse in the West in general and the States in particular for the purposes of this discussion. ISIS is there to establish a sharia government in a place and time where nobody wants them there, and chew bubblegum, and bubblegum is haraam and against Allah, sooooo...

We watch in judgement. We watch because in adopting a pro-sumer production value, ISIS has done something very very profound which is adopting the hallmarks of a Serious News Documentary Program which we are conditioned to take seriously, far more so than the public access clownshow that is Zawahiri's Al Qaeda, and we watch because it shows an aspect of war that we usually only hear secondhand. "Forces in Ukraine have entered city X, Y dead on both sides, Z civilians thought killed or missing" etc. Adopting that visual taxonomy does a whole world of things to your brain and virtually none of them occur on the level of rational thought process! I'm sure you've noticed at some point in the last few years that in the Internet Age it is far, FAR easier to lie or obfuscate than it is to debunk a lie or establish the truth. Because of this, ISIS' decision to bypass the rational and traffic almost entirely in well-produced images is a Big loving Deal, because it signals that they're actually quite well equipped for the contemporary era because like most successful corporations they bypass your cortex and grab you straight by the damned brainstem, your limbic brain. Both individuals and groups get really really loving malleable when a PR campaign starts prodding you on the levels of sexual/aggressive/fear/hunger/safety instinct. So we watch in judgement, these videos showing acts that either Americans have done or have accomplished through proxies and say "we need to kill the people doing this, or something, just do something other than nothing to these monsters".

And that is very sad because every time an American says that, Sayyid Qutb reassembles an approximate corpus in the backyard mass grave of an Egyptian black site and gives a big ol' thumbs up, because those actions are straight-up Jahiliyyah in his definition, validating his ideology and embodying the dissonance between our ideals and how quickly we discard those ideals not out of malice but because we simply don't know poo poo and act erratically yet reliably when presented with new information penetrating a fortress of stable geopolitical and cultural ignorance. There's some pretty salty language that applies to ISIS, but "ignorant" ain't one of the terms. ISIS knows exactly what it is, what its doing and what it's trying to do.

Obama has cheesed me off for various reasons irrelevant to the scope of this thread, but if there's an upshot to his administration its the almost perfunctory and transactional way he's addressing this challenge, trying to stifle the blaze of oxygen and trying to get the thing burnt out of its own accord. He's also tremendously unpopular for it with 75% of the country opposing either because he's killing too many people or too few, which means he's probably hit a nice middle ground of just enough murder for the occasion. But as if to prove on some cosmic level that even if there isn't a God the Universe undeniably has a sense of poetry to it, just as Obama's administration has now defined the literal policies of Ronald Reagan as unconstitutional and mandatory gay national socialism and shifting the terms of "acceptable narrative" accordingly, so has ISIS affected the conversation in the Middle East to be one of breaking at last the borders of their colonial period and realignment along broadly religious and (sort of but not really relatedly) cultural grounds. I sincerely doubt, with their penchant for martyrdom, that ISIS has any real staying power as a territory beyond occupying the negative space between other countries but if the success of a nonstate actor can be judged on their ability to affect discourse then ISIS is running the table with their PR right now.

---

Sorry if that post ranged on a bit, but a picture really is worth a thousand words and ISIS has shot over a thousand hours of footage in at least 720p30, and nearly all their words address the subconscious limbic brain so a conversation about their PR aesthetics in a forum predominated by (mostly) rational written text is going to get a little janky.

Charliegrs posted:

Just tell him Iran is one of ISIS biggest enemy. If someone is called and speaking Farsi they most likely work for the Revolutionary guard, The Quds force, or Hezbollah but definitely not ISIS.

Charliegrs posted:

Yeah because I was totally being serious.

Rip Testes posted:

This Canadian guy says he wants to come back and destroy Canada and the USA, but then he rips up and burns his passport???

JeffersonClay posted:

He likely suffers from mental illness.

ReV VAdAUL posted:

Why is Turkey moving out of NATO's orbit, is it the neutering of the Turkish military's influence over the country and the end of the Cold War or something else?

kustomkarkommando posted:

MothraAttack posted:

Thanks for the great background, kkk. They actually run several charter schools in my hometown under the "Harmony School" moniker and most Americans are none the wiser. Reminds me a bit of the Dhammakaya Movement in Thailand as well.

Cerebral Bore posted:

I recall reading an article some time back claiming that ISIS takes the western wannabe jihadis and sends them on any suicide missions that need doing. If that's the case, they might even get some benefit from the dumb fuckers.

Best Friends posted:

Probably a lot of hateful little shits around the west with enough familiarity with Islam to be able to pass are hearing this and thinking "whoa I get to be in a COD game and buy slave girls? Sign me the gently caress up!"

Phlegmish posted:

ISIS about to release its own currency (source in Dutch).

Babby's first nation-state.

Flavahbeast posted:

BlitzkriegOfColour posted:

Israel very clearly is a contestant in Eurovision. Argument over.

e: btw, 1/3 of the world is Christian, but included in that are Syriacs, Coptics, Orthodox, Jehovah's, Mormons, etc, which quite evidently don't celebrate Christmas (or at least not at the same time as dumbshit Catholics and Protestants)

henpod posted:

The burning video has that Michael Bay, slow motion that they love so much. With them seriously pissing off Jordan and Japan now, I wonder how the international community is going to tackle these nutters. Japan is such a chill nation now, time for them to send in the robot armies.

CommieGIR posted:

Its already had an affect, however, the UAE has pulled out of air strikes as someone else has pointed out.

Al-Saqr posted:

or he'll hole up at home like a bitch and go beg America for assistance while cracking down on his society as an excuse and be hilariously awful at his job like every other Sandhurst-educated uniform swaggering royalty in the region.

Sheng-ji Yang posted:

lmao "Dude likes star trek, how can he be a bad person??"

V. Illych L. posted:

Tunisia had a relatively well-functioning civil state to take over, and a relatively weak military. Added to this, the revolution was very quick and, by all appearances, pretty thorough, and the reactionary forces didn't get time to mount a proper reaction before they fell. A perfect revolutionary storm, as it were

Cat Mattress posted:

ISIS goes for a rebranding:

Al-Saqr posted:

I found this article in the guardian, talking about Irans advances in the region, this section in particular gave me a hearty laugh.


Whhaaaat? governments that are immensely corrupt, incompetent and actively punish competent people and destroy any chance of improving their countries eat tremendous amounts of poo poo when confronted with a strong player? who knew?

The biggest contrast people can look at when seeing how much poo poo the arab dictatorships have put their people in is the difference between Egypt and Iran, with Egypt being a rather spectacular example of outside imposed incompetent leadership. Say what you will about Iran, they serve themselves and are vicious and ruthless in pursuit of their national interests. while the Egyptian dictatorship is only interested in repression and backwardness for its own sake.

speaking of competence, I've always found it fascinating that Pakistan is tremendously poverty ridden yet still somehow manages to pump out great scientists and breakthroughs and has a halfway decent military, they just managed to successfully test their own laser targeting missile drone today

karl fungus posted:

Silver2195 posted:

I'm confused about why the US is supporting Saudi Arabia here. The Houthis being pro-Iranian seems like a pretty weak reason at this point. Even more confused about why the UK, France, and Belgium are supporting it.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Hey so if the house of Saud gets deposed, what will the country be called then?

Zeroisanumber posted:

No one in the world can operate outside of their immediate neighborhood for longer than a few weeks without US logistics support. If Argentina decided to take the Falklands again there's a strong chance that England wouldn't be able to take them back.

FourLeaf posted:

Link?