I never knew that.
#1
Quote: the Earth does not rotate, and that the Sun orbits the Earth.

Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari, answering questions from students at a university in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, told his audience the Earth is "stationary and does not move".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...otate.html
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#2
He also said Islam is the religion of peace.
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#3
Unbelievable, If it wasn't for their oil where would people like this be today?
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#4
As long as they just kill each other, I'm cool.
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#5
(02-19-2015, 01:07 PM)bbqboy Wrote: As long as they just kill each other, I'm cool.

I think you nailed it. I don't like to feel I'm so hard-hearted I'd condone the killing of innocents, but at some point these folks are going to have to settle the ago old differences and make some kind of peace.
There are some billions of Muslims scattered across the globe. Most of them are not radical nut jobs who terrorize and wreck havoc. So, it's curious that of these billions of peace loving and devout Muslims, they can't scrape up an "army" to deal with the radicals who are giving their faith a bad name.

Simplistic? Probably. Embarrassed
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#6
(02-19-2015, 07:36 PM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(02-19-2015, 01:07 PM)bbqboy Wrote: As long as they just kill each other, I'm cool.

I think you nailed it. I don't like to feel I'm so hard-hearted I'd condone the killing of innocents, but at some point these folks are going to have to settle the ago old differences and make some kind of peace.
There are some billions of Muslims scattered across the globe. Most of them are not radical nut jobs who terrorize and wreck havoc. So, it's curious that of these billions of peace loving and devout Muslims, they can't scrape up an "army" to deal with the radicals who are giving their faith a bad name.

Simplistic? Probably. Embarrassed

Maybe you missed the news but they aren't just killing each other. Just ask the 21 Coptic Christians that were beheaded last week, or the cartoonists and Jews in the Paris massacres, or the Spain bombings, or the slaughter of Christian in Africa, or the people in the Twin Towers, or the Ft Hood soldiers, and on and on and on. They aren't killing just each other.

Simplistic? You betcha .
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#7
(02-20-2015, 02:51 PM)SFLiberal Wrote:
(02-19-2015, 07:36 PM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(02-19-2015, 01:07 PM)bbqboy Wrote: As long as they just kill each other, I'm cool.

I think you nailed it. I don't like to feel I'm so hard-hearted I'd condone the killing of innocents, but at some point these folks are going to have to settle the ago old differences and make some kind of peace.
There are some billions of Muslims scattered across the globe. Most of them are not radical nut jobs who terrorize and wreck havoc. So, it's curious that of these billions of peace loving and devout Muslims, they can't scrape up an "army" to deal with the radicals who are giving their faith a bad name.

Simplistic? Probably. Embarrassed

Maybe you missed the news but they aren't just killing each other. Just ask the 21 Coptic Christians that were beheaded last week, or the cartoonists and Jews in the Paris massacres, or the Spain bombings, or the slaughter of Christian in Africa, or the people in the Twin Towers, or the Ft Hood soldiers, and on and on and on. They aren't killing just each other.

Simplistic? You betcha .

Read it again.
I never suggested they were "killing each other".
It was suggested in the previous post that they are killing each other and that's a fact. But, as you correctly point out, they are not discriminating.
Whatever: I'm sure we can agree they are out of their gourds and the sooner they burn out the better.
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#8
(02-20-2015, 08:30 PM)Wonky3 Wrote: Read it again.
I never suggested they were "killing each other".
It was suggested in the previous post that they are killing each other and that's a fact. But, as you correctly point out, they are not discriminating.
Whatever: I'm sure we can agree they are out of their gourds and the sooner they burn out the better.

I keep hearing their mission is to bring about the apocalypse.

Quote:a·poc·a·lypse
??päk??lips/Submit
noun
noun: Apocalypse; noun: the Apocalypse; noun: apocalypse; plural noun: apocalypses
1.
the complete final destruction of the world, especially as described in the biblical book of Revelation.
(especially in the Vulgate Bible) the book of Revelation.
2.
an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale.

Why would anyone wish that?
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#9
(02-20-2015, 09:40 PM)Valuesize Wrote:
(02-20-2015, 08:30 PM)Wonky3 Wrote: Read it again.
I never suggested they were "killing each other".
It was suggested in the previous post that they are killing each other and that's a fact. But, as you correctly point out, they are not discriminating.
Whatever: I'm sure we can agree they are out of their gourds and the sooner they burn out the better.

I keep hearing their mission is to bring about the apocalypse.

Quote:a·poc·a·lypse
??päk??lips/Submit
noun
noun: Apocalypse; noun: the Apocalypse; noun: apocalypse; plural noun: apocalypses
1.
the complete final destruction of the world, especially as described in the biblical book of Revelation.
(especially in the Vulgate Bible) the book of Revelation.
2.
an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale.

Why would anyone wish that?

Psychotic belief in 72 virgins in their afterlife? To prove their version of reality is the correct one? Or if the President is correct... they just want a good minimum wage job...
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#10
72 virgins in their afterlife, screw that, I want it now.
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#11
(02-20-2015, 11:11 PM)chuck white Wrote: 72 virgins in their afterlife, screw that, I want it now.

What the hell would you do with 72 14 year old boys? Wait. Don't answer that.
Reply
#12
(02-20-2015, 09:40 PM)Valuesize Wrote:
(02-20-2015, 08:30 PM)Wonky3 Wrote: Read it again.
I never suggested they were "killing each other".
It was suggested in the previous post that they are killing each other and that's a fact. But, as you correctly point out, they are not discriminating.
Whatever: I'm sure we can agree they are out of their gourds and the sooner they burn out the better.

I keep hearing their mission is to bring about the apocalypse.

Quote:a·poc·a·lypse
??päk??lips/Submit
noun
noun: Apocalypse; noun: the Apocalypse; noun: apocalypse; plural noun: apocalypses
1.
the complete final destruction of the world, especially as described in the biblical book of Revelation.
(especially in the Vulgate Bible) the book of Revelation.
2.
an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale.

Why would anyone wish that?

You just might be surprised. Confused

http://www.religionnewsblog.com/15024/en...lypse-soon
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#13
Quote:An Administration Adrift on Denial
Why won’t the president think clearly about the nature of the Islamic State?
Great essays tell big truths. A deeply reported piece in next month’s Atlantic magazine does precisely that, and in a way devastating to the Obama administration’s thinking on ISIS.
“What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor Graeme Wood, is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.)
Mr. Wood describes a dynamic, savage and so far successful organization whose members mean business. Their mettle should not be doubted. ISIS controls an area larger than the United Kingdom and intends to restore, and expand, the caliphate. Mr. Wood interviewed Anjem Choudary of the banned London-based Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, who characterized ISIS’ laws of war as policies of mercy, not brutality. “He told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies,” Mr. Wood writes, “because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.”
ISIS has allure: Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are believed to have joined. The organization is clear in its objectives: “We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change . . . that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. . . . The Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.”
The scale of the savagery is difficult to comprehend and not precisely known. Regional social media posts “suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks.” Most, not all, of the victims are Muslims.
The West, Mr. Wood argues, has been misled “by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. . . . The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers,” drawn largely from the disaffected. “But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” Its actions reflect “a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bring about the apocalypse.”
Mr. Wood acknowledges that ISIS reflects only one, minority strain within Islam. “Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”
He quotes Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on ISIS’ theology. The group’s fighters, Mr. Haykel says, “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition,” and denials of its religious nature spring from embarrassment, political correctness and an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
The Islamic State is different from al Qaeda and almost all other jihadist movements, according to Mr. Wood, “in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character.” Its spokesman has vowed: “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.” They believe we are in the End of Days. They speak of how “the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria.” The battle will be Rome’s Waterloo. After that, a countdown to the apocalypse.
Who exactly is “Rome”? That’s unclear. Maybe Turkey, maybe any infidel army. Maybe America.
What should the West do to meet the challenge? Here Mr. Wood’s tone turns more tentative. We should help the Islamic State “self-immolate.”
Those urging America to commit tens of thousand of troops “should not be dismissed too quickly.” ISIS is, after all, an avowedly genocidal and expansionist organization, and its mystique can be damaged if it loses its grip on the territory it holds. Al Qaeda, from which ISIS is estranged and which it has eclipsed, can operate as an underground network. ISIS cannot, “because territorial authority is a requirement.”
But ISIS wants to draw America into the fight. A U.S. invasion and occupation, Mr. Wood argues, would be a propaganda victory for them, because they’ve long said the U.S. has always intended to embark on a modern-day crusade against Islam. And if a U.S. ground invasion launched and failed, it would be a disaster.
The best of bad options, Mr. Wood believes, is to “slowly bleed” ISIS through air strikes and proxy warfare. The Kurds and the Shiites cannot vanquish them, but they can “keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand.” That would make it look less like “the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammed. ” As time passed ISIS could “stagnate” and begin to sink. Word of its cruelties would spread; it could become another failed state.
But that death, as Mr. Wood notes, “is unlikely to be quick,” and any number of things could go wrong, including a dangerous rapprochement with al Qaeda.
Mr. Wood’s piece is bracing because it is fearless—he is apparently not afraid of being called a bigot or an Islamophobe. It is important because it gives people, especially political leaders, information they need to understand a phenomenon that may urgently shape U.S. foreign policy for the next 10 years.
In sorry contrast, of course, are the Obama administration’s willful delusions and dodges. They reached their height this week when State Department spokesman Marie Harf talked on MSNBC of the “root causes” that drive jihadists, such as “lack of opportunity for jobs.” She later went on CNN to explain: “Where there’s a lack of governance, you’ve had young men attracted to this terrorist cause where there aren’t other opportunities. . . . So how do you get at that root causes?” She admitted her view “might be too nuanced of an argument for some.”
Yes, it might.
It isn’t about getting a job. They have a job: waging jihad.
The president famously cannot even name the ISIS threat forthrightly, and that is a criticism not of semantics but of his thinking. ISIS isn’t the only terrorist group, he says, Christians have committed their own sins over history, what about the Crusades, don’t get on your high horse. It’s all so evasive. Each speech comes across as an attempt to make up for the previous speech’s mistakes in tone and substance. At the “violent extremism” summit this week he emphasized Islamic “legitimate grievances” and lectured America on the need for tolerance toward American Muslims.
Of extremists he said: “They say they are religious leaders—they are not religious leaders, they are terrorists.” But ISIS and its followers believe they are religious leaders, prophets who use terrorism to achieve aims they find in religious texts.
On the closing day of the summit the president said, “When people are oppressed and human rights are denied . . . when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism.” Yes, sure. But isn’t ISIS oppressing people, denying their human rights and silencing dissent?
“When peaceful democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only available answer.” Yes, sure. But the young men and women ISIS recruits from Western nations already live in peaceful democracies.
It’s not enough. They want something else. It is, ironically, disrespectful not to name what they are, and what they are about.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-administr...50?tesla=y
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#14
(02-21-2015, 01:51 PM)Big Rock Wrote:
Quote:An Administration Adrift on Denial
Why won’t the president think clearly about the nature of the Islamic State?
Great essays tell big truths. A deeply reported piece in next month’s Atlantic magazine does precisely that, and in a way devastating to the Obama administration’s thinking on ISIS.
“What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor Graeme Wood, is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.)
Mr. Wood describes a dynamic, savage and so far successful organization whose members mean business. Their mettle should not be doubted. ISIS controls an area larger than the United Kingdom and intends to restore, and expand, the caliphate. Mr. Wood interviewed Anjem Choudary of the banned London-based Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, who characterized ISIS’ laws of war as policies of mercy, not brutality. “He told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies,” Mr. Wood writes, “because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.”
ISIS has allure: Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are believed to have joined. The organization is clear in its objectives: “We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change . . . that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. . . . The Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.”
The scale of the savagery is difficult to comprehend and not precisely known. Regional social media posts “suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks.” Most, not all, of the victims are Muslims.
The West, Mr. Wood argues, has been misled “by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. . . . The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers,” drawn largely from the disaffected. “But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” Its actions reflect “a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bring about the apocalypse.”
Mr. Wood acknowledges that ISIS reflects only one, minority strain within Islam. “Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”
He quotes Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on ISIS’ theology. The group’s fighters, Mr. Haykel says, “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition,” and denials of its religious nature spring from embarrassment, political correctness and an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
The Islamic State is different from al Qaeda and almost all other jihadist movements, according to Mr. Wood, “in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character.” Its spokesman has vowed: “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.” They believe we are in the End of Days. They speak of how “the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria.” The battle will be Rome’s Waterloo. After that, a countdown to the apocalypse.
Who exactly is “Rome”? That’s unclear. Maybe Turkey, maybe any infidel army. Maybe America.
What should the West do to meet the challenge? Here Mr. Wood’s tone turns more tentative. We should help the Islamic State “self-immolate.”
Those urging America to commit tens of thousand of troops “should not be dismissed too quickly.” ISIS is, after all, an avowedly genocidal and expansionist organization, and its mystique can be damaged if it loses its grip on the territory it holds. Al Qaeda, from which ISIS is estranged and which it has eclipsed, can operate as an underground network. ISIS cannot, “because territorial authority is a requirement.”
But ISIS wants to draw America into the fight. A U.S. invasion and occupation, Mr. Wood argues, would be a propaganda victory for them, because they’ve long said the U.S. has always intended to embark on a modern-day crusade against Islam. And if a U.S. ground invasion launched and failed, it would be a disaster.
The best of bad options, Mr. Wood believes, is to “slowly bleed” ISIS through air strikes and proxy warfare. The Kurds and the Shiites cannot vanquish them, but they can “keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand.” That would make it look less like “the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammed. ” As time passed ISIS could “stagnate” and begin to sink. Word of its cruelties would spread; it could become another failed state.
But that death, as Mr. Wood notes, “is unlikely to be quick,” and any number of things could go wrong, including a dangerous rapprochement with al Qaeda.
Mr. Wood’s piece is bracing because it is fearless—he is apparently not afraid of being called a bigot or an Islamophobe. It is important because it gives people, especially political leaders, information they need to understand a phenomenon that may urgently shape U.S. foreign policy for the next 10 years.
In sorry contrast, of course, are the Obama administration’s willful delusions and dodges. They reached their height this week when State Department spokesman Marie Harf talked on MSNBC of the “root causes” that drive jihadists, such as “lack of opportunity for jobs.” She later went on CNN to explain: “Where there’s a lack of governance, you’ve had young men attracted to this terrorist cause where there aren’t other opportunities. . . . So how do you get at that root causes?” She admitted her view “might be too nuanced of an argument for some.”
Yes, it might.
It isn’t about getting a job. They have a job: waging jihad.
The president famously cannot even name the ISIS threat forthrightly, and that is a criticism not of semantics but of his thinking. ISIS isn’t the only terrorist group, he says, Christians have committed their own sins over history, what about the Crusades, don’t get on your high horse. It’s all so evasive. Each speech comes across as an attempt to make up for the previous speech’s mistakes in tone and substance. At the “violent extremism” summit this week he emphasized Islamic “legitimate grievances” and lectured America on the need for tolerance toward American Muslims.
Of extremists he said: “They say they are religious leaders—they are not religious leaders, they are terrorists.” But ISIS and its followers believe they are religious leaders, prophets who use terrorism to achieve aims they find in religious texts.
On the closing day of the summit the president said, “When people are oppressed and human rights are denied . . . when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism.” Yes, sure. But isn’t ISIS oppressing people, denying their human rights and silencing dissent?
“When peaceful democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only available answer.” Yes, sure. But the young men and women ISIS recruits from Western nations already live in peaceful democracies.
It’s not enough. They want something else. It is, ironically, disrespectful not to name what they are, and what they are about.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-administr...50?tesla=y

Well...
So say's the folks at the WSJ.
I've posted the full article on a new Thread and I think it's a lot more objective than "And administration adrift".
But they did get one thing right: “What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor Graeme Wood, is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.)

PS: I started a "new thread" because I wanted to get away from the political and editorial slant of this issue. Wood (The Atlantic) gives us facts minus all the political posturing.
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