Should U.S. remove the PKK from its terrorist list?
Syria may have hidden chemical arms, U.S. says
The New York Times reports: The United States expressed concern on Thursday that Syria’s government might be harboring undeclared chemical weapons, hidden from the internationally led operation to purge them over the past year, and that Islamist militant extremists now ensconced in that country could possibly seize control of them.
The assertions by Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations and current president of the Security Council, were made after the Council received a private briefing on the Syria chemical weapons disarmament effort from Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations official appointed last year to coordinate it. Under Ms. Kaag, 96 percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile, including all of the most lethal materials, have been destroyed.
But Ms. Kaag told reporters after the briefing that Syria had yet to address what she described as “some discrepancies or questions” about whether it had accounted for all of the chemical weapons in its arsenal. She also said Syria had yet to destroy seven hangars and five tunnels used for mixing and storing the weapons — which is required under the chemical weapons treaty that Syria has signed. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based group that collaborated with the United Nations in overseeing the Syrian chemical disarmament, is now responsible for ensuring that Syria honors its promise. [Continue reading…]
Israeli Arabs reported to have joined ISIS
Israel Hayom reports: Shin Bet security service officials believe that at least 10 Israeli Arabs have joined the Islamic State terrorist group and are currently fighting with the organization in Iraq and Syria, officials briefed Israeli leaders recently. The information has been discussed at length behind closed doors.
The Shin Bet assessment rests on the fact that since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in March 2011, dozens of Israeli Arabs have joined various rebel groups currently fighting the Syrian army. The Shin Bet’s intelligence suggests that since the beginning of the civil war at least 25 individuals — Israeli Arabs known to hold radical views — have left Israel to join the “jihad” or holy war.
Meanwhile Thursday, 18 foreign fighters from the Islamic State, including an American jihadist, were killed in a Syrian air raid on a town near the militant group’s main stronghold city of Raqqa in eastern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
The Syrian human rights group, which has tracked violence on all sides of the three-year-old conflict, said reliable sources reported that top Islamic State leaders who happened to be in the municipal building of Gharbiya at the time of the raid were among the foreign fighters killed. [Continue reading…]
How some Israeli leaders are promoting war crimes
Bethan Staton writes: Just over a week ago, a young Long Islander called Yochanan Gordon published a blog in the Times of Israel. It argued – poorly – that the only way to deal with the “enemy” facing the Israeli people was to “obliterate them completely.” The headline – “When genocide is permissible” – left little doubt over precisely what this meant.
The outcry that followed the publication – and the Times’ swift removal and apology – showed the sentiment was far from representative of wider society. Because the paper operates an open blog policy the piece hadn’t been seen by any editors before being uploaded. Gordon was a total unknown who in his pompous bio listed a family connection to journalism as his only professional qualification. For many reasons, Yochanan’s argument looked a lot like an aberration.
Except it wasn’t. In the heightened tension following the abduction and murder of three settler teenagers in the West Bank and the Gaza war that followed, Gordon’s blog was merely the crudest note in a chorus of calls for war crimes, of the grimmest hue, against the Palestinian people.
After the bodies of missing teens Gilad, Naftali and Eyal were found, the secretary general of the world’s largest youth Zionist movement, Rabbi Noam Perel, called for a murderous revenge that would “not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins.” At the end of July, Chief Rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement Dov Lior used religious texts to justify the potential “destruction of Gaza,” writing that in wartime a “nation under attack” could punish its adversaries in any way, including “taking crushing deterring steps to exterminate the enemy.”
Such words demand a response. “When it comes to language that incites to hatred and violence, it’s a human rights obligation on the state to take action,” explains Michael Kearney, a law lecturer at Sussex University who researches propaganda and incitement in international law. “Direct and public incitement to genocide is, in itself, what we’d call a crime in customary international law. Basically it’s binding on all states to live up to that obligation to prevent genocide and to deal with people who do explicitly incite to genocide.”
advertisementPrecisely how that obligation might manifest itself is up to the state in question: often symbolic steps to demonstrate that such incitement is not acceptable, Kearney says, might be appropriate.
There has been much outcry among Israeli, Jewish and American communities over statements like these: After widespread condemnation, indeed, Rabbi Perel retracted his statements and apologized. But few measures have been taken against the writers and commentators in question here. Worse, incitement from Israeli politicians hasn’t resulted in serious consequences. At the beginning of July, Knesset member Ayelet Shaked posted an extract from an article by Uri Elitzur on her Facebook page. It defined the “enemy” as the “entire Palestinian people,” and wrote that the “mothers of terrorists” should be destroyed, “as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes.” Aside from the condemnation of commentators, Shaked received no official censure: a day after, three Israeli men kidnapped 16-year-old Mohamed Abu Khdeir and burned him to death. [Continue reading…]
Your brain on metaphors
The player kicked the ball.
The patient kicked the habit.
The villain kicked the bucket.The verbs are the same. The syntax is identical. Does the brain notice, or care, that the first is literal, the second
metaphorical, the third idiomatic?It sounds like a question that only a linguist could love. But neuroscientists have been trying to answer it using exotic brain-scanning technologies. Their findings have varied wildly, in some cases contradicting one another. If they make progress, the payoff will be big. Their findings will enrich a theory that aims to explain how wet masses of neurons can understand anything at all. And they may drive a stake into the widespread assumption that computers will inevitably become conscious in a humanlike way.
The hypothesis driving their work is that metaphor is central to language. Metaphor used to be thought of as merely poetic ornamentation, aesthetically pretty but otherwise irrelevant. “Love is a rose, but you better not pick it,” sang Neil Young in 1977, riffing on the timeworn comparison between a sexual partner and a pollinating perennial. For centuries, metaphor was just the place where poets went to show off.
But in their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, the linguist George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon) revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in the seemingly literal statement “He’s out of sight,” the visual field is metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out.
From such examples they argued that ordinary language is saturated with metaphors. Our eyes point to where we’re going, so we tend to speak of future time as being “ahead” of us. When things increase, they tend to go up relative to us, so we tend to speak of stocks “rising” instead of getting more expensive. “Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature,” they wrote. [Continue reading…]
Music: Robert Wyatt — ‘Speechless’
ISIS is a disgrace to true fundamentalism
Slavoj Zizek writes: Long ago Friedrich Nietzsche perceived how Western civilization was moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security: “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Men, and they blink.”
It may appear that the split between the permissive First World and the fundamentalist reaction to it runs more and more along the lines of the opposition between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent cause. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism? We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their self-destruction. William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able fully to engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.
But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers. Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism. [Continue reading…]
Iraq: ISIS executions in Tikrit
Human Rights Watch: New evidence about executions carried out by the Islamic State (IS) in Tikrit after it seized the city in June 2014 triples the estimated death toll and shows additional execution sites, Human Rights Watch said today.
Information from a survivor and analysis of videos and satellite imagery has confirmed the existence of three more mass execution sites, bringing the total to five, and the number of dead to between 560 and 770 men, all or most of them apparently captured Iraqi army soldiers.
“Another piece of this gruesome puzzle has come into place, with many more executions now confirmed,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. “The barbarity of the Islamic State violates the law and grossly offends the conscience.” [Continue reading…]
ISIS gains in Syria alarm some Assad allies
Reuters reports: A mounting death toll in President Bashar al-Assad’s armed forces is causing alarm among some government loyalists who are worried about Islamic State’s territorial gains and are turning their anger on the authorities in Damascus.
The execution of scores of Syrian soldiers taken captive by Islamic State at an air base in Raqqa province has triggered unusually harsh social media criticism of the Damascus government by people who have taken its side in the civil war.
Some, including one of Assad’s cousins, have called for the resignation of the defense minister, blaming him for the loss of the Tabqa air base that represented the government’s last foothold in a province otherwise controlled by Islamic State.
With the flow of information from Syria greatly restricted, it is not possible to gauge how widely such sentiment is felt. And it is not the first time the Syrian government has faced criticism from its supporters during the three-year conflict.
But it points to a potential pressure point for Assad, who draws support from minority groups including his own Alawite community for whom Islamic State is an existential threat.
“I demand the resignation of the minister of defense, the chief of staff, the air force commander, the minister of information, and whoever is responsible for the fall of the Tabqa military airport,” Duraid al-Assad, the cousin of Bashar al-Assad, wrote on his Facebook page.
Duraid is a son of Rifat al-Assad, who left Syria after being accused of attempting a coup in the 1980s against the late president Hafez al-Assad. Contacted by Reuters via his Facebook page, Duraid said he currently lives in Syria.
His status was endorsed more than a thousand times. Dozens of people wrote comments expressing their agreement. [Continue reading…]
Path to jihad: from upscale Cairo to ISIS beheadings
Reuters reports: After leaving his upscale Cairo neighborhood to fight with the Islamic State militant group in Syria and Iraq, Younes says he learned how to work as a sniper, fire heavy weaponry and behead prisoners using the proper technique.
One year later he harbors the kind of ambition that could create a security nightmare for Egyptian authorities: to return home and hoist the Islamic State’s black flag in Egypt as his comrades have over large swathes of Iraq and Syria.
Eventually, says Younes, he and other Egyptian fighters in Islamic State intend to topple Egypt’s U.S.-backed government and extend their caliphate to the biggest Arab nation.
“We will not be able to change the situation in Egypt from inside, but Egypt is to be opened from abroad,” Younes, who asked that his last name be withheld, told Reuters in an interview conducted by Facebook.
Reuters reached Younes by contacting supporters of Islamic State on social media networks. Another Islamic State fighter identified him as a militant in the group. Location tags on his Facebook messages placed him in Syria.
Egypt is well aware of the risks posed by its citizens going abroad for jihadist causes and then returning. Egyptians who fought Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s eventually took up holy war at home, training their weapons on Egyptian security forces and carrying out bombings.
The chances of Islamic State militants establishing a caliphate in Egypt are slim: the Egyptian state has crushed one militant group after another.
But the return of fighters with experience in Iraq and Syria could certainly bring more violence and complicate efforts to stabilize a country that has suffered from political turmoil, with two presidents toppled since 2011. [Continue reading…]
Michael Klare: Oil rush in America
Whatever you may imagine, “peak oil” has not been discredited as a concept, a statement no less true for “peak fossil fuels.” Think of them instead as postponed. We are, after all, on a finite planet that, by definition, holds a finite amount of oil, natural gas, and coal. Sooner or later, as such deposits get used up (no matter the new techniques that might be invented to extract more of the ever tougher stuff from the earth), we will reach a “peak” of production from which it will be all downhill.
That’s a simple fact to which, as it happens, there’s a catch. Here, according to the New York Times, is the key finding from the latest leaked 127-page draft report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which manages to use the word “risk” 351 times, “vulnerable” or “vulnerability” 61 times, and “irreversible” 48 times: “The report found that companies and governments had identified reserves of these [fossil] fuels at least four times larger than could safely be burned if global warming is to be kept to a tolerable level.”
In other words, while “peak oil” may be a perfectly on-target concept, “peak existence” turns out to precede it by decades and from that far more consequential “peak” we are, unlike “peak oil,” already on the downhill slide. The scientists who produced the IPCC’s draft report expect the average global temperature to increase by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century and at least 6.7 degrees by its end, which will leave humanity on a staggeringly less habitable planet.
The damage, including the melting of the Greenland ice shield, which alone could raise global sea levels by an average of 23 feet, will be irreversible (at least on a historical — that is, human — timescale). Faced with this relatively straightforward reality, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, the author of The Race for What’s Left, reports today, oil companies are using remarkable ingenuity and spending billions of dollars to reach ever deeper, ever more difficult to extract, and ever more environmentally treacherous deposits of fossil fuels. No less strikingly, the Obama administration has been working energetically to pave the way for them to do so — to, that is, make real headway in removing those deposits four times larger than will be even faintly comfortable for our future. Not only is it doing so in a thoroughly drill-baby-drill spirit of cooperation with the globe’s largest and most avaricious energy outfits, but it’s bragging about it, too.
In my childhood, I remember ads that fascinated me. I’m not sure what they were selling or promoting, but they showed scenes of multiple error, including, if I remember rightly, five-legged cows floating through clouds. They were always tagged with some question like: What’s wrong with this picture? Today, as in those ads, Klare offers us a picture filled with the energy exploitation and global-warming equivalent of those five-legged cows in the clouds and asks the same question. Tom Engelhardt
Oil is back!
A global warming president presides over a drill-baby-drill America
By Michael T. KlareConsidering all the talk about global warming, peak oil, carbon divestment, and renewable energy, you’d think that oil consumption in the United States would be on a downward path. By now, we should certainly be witnessing real progress toward a post-petroleum economy. As it happens, the opposite is occurring. U.S. oil consumption is on an upward trajectory, climbing by 400,000 barrels per day in 2013 alone — and, if current trends persist, it should rise again both this year and next.
In other words, oil is back. Big time. Signs of its resurgence abound. Despite what you may think, Americans, on average, are driving more miles every day, not fewer, filling ever more fuel tanks with ever more gasoline, and evidently feeling ever less bad about it. The stigma of buying new gas-guzzling SUVs, for instance, seems to have vanished; according to CNN Money, nearly one out of three vehicles sold today is an SUV. As a result of all this, America’s demand for oil grew more than China’s in 2013, the first time that’s happened since 1999.
Humans are wired for bad news
Jacob Burak writes: I have good news and bad news. Which would you like first? If it’s bad news, you’re in good company – that’s what most people pick. But why?
Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial losses and even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path. The staggering human ability to adapt ensures that joy over a salary hike will abate within months, leaving only a benchmark for future raises. We feel pain, but not the absence of it.
Hundreds of scientific studies from around the world confirm our negativity bias: while a good day has no lasting effect on the following day, a bad day carries over. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly than positive data, and they affect us longer. Socially, we invest more in avoiding a bad reputation than in building a good one. Emotionally, we go to greater lengths to avoid a bad mood than to experience a good one. Pessimists tend to assess their health more accurately than optimists. In our era of political correctness, negative remarks stand out and seem more authentic. People – even babies as young as six months old – are quick to spot an angry face in a crowd, but slower to pick out a happy one; in fact, no matter how many smiles we see in that crowd, we will always spot the angry face first. [Continue reading…]
Music: Robert Wyatt — ‘Maryan’
How #ISIS wants to exploit anti-interventionist sentiment in the West
#ISIS kills thousands of Syrians, not worthy of news, #ISIS kills an American, the world goes beserk
— Danny Makki (@Dannymakkisyria) September 2, 2014
Like any organization that takes messaging seriously, ISIS has to study its audience while crafting its messages.
In its “second message to America,” the blunt warning from the militant group boiled down to this:
… just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people… We take this opportunity to warn those governments that enter this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State to back off and leave our people alone.
Beheading Americans — first James Foley and now Steven Sotloff — might seem like a counterproductive way of influencing American public opinion, but ISIS isn’t interested in gaining American sympathy. It just wants the U.S. to back off.
After several months in which it has enjoyed success after success during its often unopposed advance across Iraq, U.S. airstrikes have thrown an unwelcome obstacle in the progress of this would-be Islamic state.
ISIS’s victories have been its biggest recruiting asset and the promise of life in the new caliphate is much more appealing than the prospect of getting bombed by Americans.
ISIS had four American prisoners and now it has just two. Despite its flagrant disregard for the value of human life, there should be no doubt that ISIS applies a brutal but careful calculus in deciding when to sacrifice an American life, given that it has power over so few.
The killing of Foley and Sotloff seems much less like “an announcement of global jihad” than an indication that ISIS feels threatened.
No one inside or outside ISIS can have had any illusions that President Obama — his expressed determination to protect American lives notwithstanding — would base his decisions solely on the need to protect the lives of four American captives. For that reason, neither the death of Foley two weeks ago nor that of Sotloff now, could be expected to manipulate U.S. policy.
Even so, ISIS is surely well aware that America as a country has lost most of its appetite for war and “back off” is a demand that harmonizes with the anti-interventionist sentiment to which everyone in Washington is well attuned.
Even the most gung-ho hawks nowadays always feel obliged to qualify their war-making recommendations with an obligatory promise: no boots on the ground. The Pentagon and the American public collude with each other in sustaining the deceit that military action only becomes war after American soldiers start getting killed. Thus, no boots on the ground supposedly means no war.
Post 9/11, post the war in Iraq and as we approach the end of America’s longest war — the one in Afghanistan that is generally recognized as having accomplished nothing — Americans express less a sense of defeat than an easy resignation that “the problem” is really the nature of the Middle East. “The solution” thus appears patently obvious: have nothing to do with the region.
Yes, ISIS is a monster and we helped create it, but it doesn’t operate in the U.S. And even if we did try to defeat it, we’d more likely make the problem worse and turn the U.S. into a direct target for ISIS attacks.
For many Americans, there’s clearly something comforting in this perspective, but it leaves me wondering: what happened to everyone’s sense of humanity?
We each have many layers of identity, but doesn’t the sense of being human matter more than all the others? Or does being human matter less than being American?
Some commentators argue that the alarm calls about ISIS are being driven by Empire’s insatiable lust for war — suggesting that ISIS is in some sense a manufactured threat.
That’s a view that easily finds traction on the internet, but each time I hear this I have the same reaction: who would have the audacity to make this argument directly to this Yazidi girl?
#Iraq, Becoming an almost iconic picture, #Yazidi girl with an #AK47 to protect her family against #ISIS. pic.twitter.com/CScIaBXAvM
— Danny Makki (@Dannymakkisyria) August 18, 2014
Here is a child who has to carry a gun to defend herself and her family from ISIS because there is no one else she can rely on. She has been let down by humanity.
Perversely, we now inhabit a world in which the concept of humanity seems to have gradually fallen out of circulation even among people who would have once dubbed themselves humanists.
Supposedly, the only arbiter which can be applied to determine whether the threat posed by ISIS concerns Americans is ISIS’s ability or intention to kill Americans or harm American interests.
In an interview Obama gave in January he said:
[H]ow we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology is a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.
In other words, America should only concern itself with terrorism if and when it poses a threat to America.
It’s easy to understand what has led Obama to this conclusion — it’s part of his measured effort to wind down the war on terrorism.
Yet Obama lacks the political courage, moral conviction, or imagination to propose a new paradigm through which Americans can view the world.
The terrorism paradigm has become so entrenched in the American zeitgeist that this president has done little more than make minor modifications. Indeed, he had done so while expanding the national security state.
Ironically, the failure of the terrorism paradigm is becoming particularly evident in the debate about how the U.S. should respond to ISIS.
As war-weary Americans view the Middle East, it’s worth remembering what happened in South-East Asia after the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. Within two years the Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia had embarked on the worst genocide since the Holocaust.
Kenneth M. Quinn who later served as U.S. ambassador to Cambodia wrote:
[T]he explanation for the terror and violence that swept Cambodia during the 1970s is that a small group of alienated intellectuals, enraged by their perception of a totally corrupt society and imbued with a Maoist plan to create a pure socialist order in the shortest possible time, recruited extremely young, poor, and envious cadres, instructed them in harsh and brutal methods learned from Stalinist mentors, and used them to destroy physically the cultural underpinnings of the Khmer civilization and to impose a new society through purges, executions, and violence.
As the writer Sean Thomas has noted, the parallels between ISIS and the Khmer Rouge are striking.
In many ways Isis are the Khmer Rouge with prayer mats. Both wear, or wore, black, as if to emphasise their nihilism. Both expanded – even exploded – from stupid wars engendered by the West. Both ruthlessly murdered any rival factions, ensuring that they became the sole standard-bearer for fellow travellers.
The parallels go on. The Khmer Rouge used hallucinatory violence as a technique and leitmotif – ripping foetuses from living women, smashing babies against trees – as do Isis, beheading anyone they fancy and tweeting the result, burying women and kids alive. Just as Isis are fiercely, fundamentally religious – slaughtering the infidels, the heathens, the Christians, the Shia, or even tribes of Sunnis who don’t cut the jihadi mustard, so the Khmer Rouge were fiercely, fundamentally atheist – promising to tear down every temple, and throw every single monk into the sea. Which they did.
The two forces are likewise similar in their aims and accomplishments. The Khmer Rouge managed to kill 2 million Cambodians (a third of the nation’s population), Isis will aim to kill many more than that, and they may well succeed, if they manage to get hold of chemical weapons, dirty bombs, nukes, and/or the lost souls of lonely young men in London, Paris, Moscow, and Detroit. As the KR despised and feared anyone outside their core, Isis believe we – by which I mean everyone on the entire planet who does not submit to their ideals, or convert to their deviant form of Islam – are at once a threat and an abomination, worthy of nothing but death, or grotesque servitude.
There is plenty of evidence that ISIS has committed genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity — as has the Syrian government. These are crimes that should concern all humanity however far removed some of us might be from the carnage.
If we reassure ourselves that these horrors are occurring somewhere else but not here, we are in a methodical and dispassionate way allowing our own humanity to slowly dissipate. As we gradually become less humane we slowly succumb to a pervasive indifference. If we might once imagined we could feel safe by standing apart from the rest of the world, in the end we will feel nothing.
In Raqqa’s training camps, ISIS teaches children how to behead
Omar Abdullah reports: This summer, in his hometown of Raqqa, 13-year-old Mohammad was forced to attend a children’s training camp established by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). When his father opposed his son’s conscription, ISIS fighters threatened to kill him. Mohammad left for camp, which his father describes as a form of “brainwashing the children.” After his return, his mother says she was surprised to find in his bag a blond, blue-eyed doll – along with a large knife given to her son by his ISIS supervisors. When she confronted Mohammad, he told her that the camp manager had distributed the dolls and asked that the children decapitate them using the knife, and that they were asked to cover the dolls’ faces when they performed the decapitation. It was his homework: practice beheading a toy likeness of a blond, white Westerner.
Mohammad’s father says the other camp parents corroborated his son’s story – their children had all been given dolls and knives, too. In Raqqa, ISIS’s Syrian stronghold, residents say children are slowly being forced into lives under the Sunni militant group’s notoriously brutal interpretation of Sharia law.
Those living in the eastern city say ISIS has instituted rules banning traditional children’s games and forcibly conscripting children to ISIS. They say ISIS is recruiting children under 15 to special ISIS camps established to introduce minors to the foundations of their brand of Islam.
Some of the male children are then transferred to an adult military camp, where they are trained to use arms and fight. Sources familiar with activity inside the camp say in order to teach the children how to use knives, ISIS has distributed dolls with blond hair and blue eyes, like many Europeans and Americans, dressed in orange prison uniforms like those worn by prisoners in Guantanamo. The children are given large knives and told to decapitate the dolls.
Mohammed said that older kids were asked to show the rest of the group how to decapitate dolls. Anyone who failed to perform the task was punished. [Continue reading…]
How Obama’s half-hearted support for Syria’s rebels has empowered ISIS
McClatchy reports: North of Aleppo, the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army is battling the Islamic State terror group over a vital supply route.
In Washington, the Obama administration is groping for a strategy to deal with a force that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says is “beyond anything we have ever seen.”
But in this south Turkish city, in the office of the chief of staff of the rebel force, not much is astir, and the atmosphere is funereal.
This should be the hour of coordination and brainstorming between the U.S.., its allies in Europe and the Middle East and the leadership of the appointed western-backed fighters. But according to Gen. Abdul-Ilah al Bashir, the FSA’s embittered chief of staff, they just aren’t talking.
Since December, when Islamist fighters overran the arms warehouses of the moderate rebel group. the covert U.S. program has been working directly with individual commanders, leaving the leadership structure here high and dry. Some 12 to 14 commanders receive military and non-lethal aid this way in northern Syria and some 60 smaller groups are recipients in southern Syria, al Bashir said. They report to the CIA.
“The leadership of the FSA is American,” says the veteran officer, who defected from the Syrian army two years ago and won respect for leading rebel forces in southern Syria. “The Americans are completely marginalizing the military staff. Not even non-lethal aid comes through this office.”
U.S. officials acknowledge the dysfunction, but blame al Bashir for keeping too low a profile among commanders and for not fully staffing his office. They say his title is a “business card.” Yet the failure to establish a good working relationship also reflects an ambivalence within the U.S. government that goes straight to the top.
President Barack Obama received the opposition leadership in May, and renewed his commitment to the removal of Syrian President Bashar Assad. But in an interview last month, he disparaged the fighters as “doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth” and said it was a “fantasy” that they could overthrow Assad.
The issue of who hands out the weapons and funds provided by the FSA’s international backers isn’t just a turf battle between the Syrian opposition military leadership and the CIA, which runs the covert supply and training program.
According to al Bashir, the lack of communication and the CIA’s “tactical” approach to Syria prevented a timely response when the Islamic State, using weapons looted from Iraqi bases, rampaged through eastern Syria in July and seized almost the entire region bordering Iraq. One commander told McClatchy that 2,000 rebel troops were killed, along with hundreds of civilians in the fighting. Another 750 members of the Shueitat tribe were executed last month after a tribal revolt against the extremists, al Bashir said.
He said that if military aid had been distributed through the institution of the rebel Supreme Military Council, which stays in touch with all fighting fronts in the country, “the situation would be different. Terrorism and Daash” — a pejorative for the Islamic State — “would not have spread as they have today. “
“So I put the responsibility on the Americans for the spread of terrorism now on a larger scale than before,” he said. “And now the Americans are trying to combat terrorism and forget the regime at a time the regime itself is the source of this terrorism.” [Continue reading…]
Indiscriminate bombing of civilians by Iraqi gov’t has helped ISIS recruit supporters
Is translating jihadist texts on the internet a crime?
Mark Joseph Stern writes: In the spring of 2005, Tarek Mehanna began translating radical Arabic books and videos into English for the website At Tibyan. The materials had an undeniable flavor of terrorism, encouraging readers to join al-Qaida and kill American soldiers in Iraq. But even the government acknowledges that Mehanna never translated anything at the direct behest of al-Qaida operatives—which is why it’s rather surprising that the government successfully prosecuted him for providing “material support” to a terrorist organization and sentenced him to 210 months in prison.
Everybody agrees that Mehanna supported al-Qaida’s cause; At Tibyan is a fairly popular terrorist forum, and Mehanna translated its content with the clear intention of swaying opinion toward the jihadist cause. But translating, publishing, and praising ideological texts, no matter how morally vile, is generally considered to be a basic free speech activity. Everyone knows that the First Amendment protects translations of Mein Kampf. Why did Mehanna’s translation of jihadist hosannas land him behind bars?
That’s the question Mehanna is asking the Supreme Court, which will decide whether to take his case later in September. If the justices do agree to review Mehanna’s conviction, it’ll be wading into a constitutional controversy at once timeless and novel. The court has long recognized that cheerleading for terrorism may eventually cross the line from free speech to a criminal act. But the Internet’s ability to spread ideas and connect like-minded people may now force the justices to reconsider that boundary. And if the court lets Mehanna’s conviction stand, it may wind up drawing the line dangerously close to the kind of Internet activity some of us engage in without a second thought.
The Supreme Court has been grappling with the question of dangerous speech for as long as America has been attempting to suppress dissent in the name of national security — that is, pretty much forever. For our first century or so, nobody thought that criminalizing anti-American speech raised a real First Amendment concern. But in a 1919 case called Abrams v. United States, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, joined by Justice Louis Brandeis, cracked the orthodoxy wide open, issuing a stunning dissent from the conviction of a revolutionary anarchist who advocated a violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Holmes described a constitutional command to tolerate anti-government speech, explaining that censorship of “opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death” is unacceptable unless those opinions “imminently threaten” the country’s safety.
Today, Holmes’ view is more or less the law. But that hasn’t kept Congress from passing censorship laws on the theory that a certain group’s speech qualifies as a clear and present danger to the country. [Continue reading…]