There was an article posted here a few weeks ago, written by a man who was held captive by ISIS for a long time. He said that he learned their ultimate goal has nothing to do with our culture or freedom. They believe armageddon is coming, that it is literaly going to be a big battle in a particular town in Syria near the Turkish border, and that the West is the enemy (descendants of the Roman empire) that their Moslem army must defeat. The terrorist acts are intended to force this battle to commence, which they are confident they will win.

If they really believe this, I'm stunned at how oblivious they are. If an all-out battle really took place, they wouldn't face an army. They'd face an airforce that'd be a lot more aggressive than the one they're currently facing. The US and Russia could turn Syria into a sheet of radioactive glass if they wanted to / had to in order to "win armageddon". The only reason ISIS is able to continue to exist is because of our tolerance and compassion.

Or Indifference?

IS never really threatened U.S. or Western interests, the Paris attacks were the first time they reached so far. They (along with the Syrian regime) have been butchering Syrians by the thousands.

Btw, the Daesh captive was Nicolas Henin, and he's actively campaigning against airstrikes [1] as that's exactly playing into their sick plans.

And he speaks that they're deluded enough to think they'll find support despite their inhumane acts. Muslims despise Daesh, heck the orthodox the individual their hatred for these individuals deepens.[2]

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/nicolas-henin-v...

[2] Source: My family and friends, I'm a Muslim born in the holy city of Makkah, no one I know doesn't actively despise Daesh and their kind. Most of us identify more with western values.

Do literally all Muslims despise the IS? After thousands of Turkish football fans starting chanting "allahu akbar" during the minute of silence for the Paris attacks, I would not agree. Who are the Muslims that support the IS?

A common misconception, further distorted by the Media.

http://www.101greatgoals.com/blog/an-explanation-for-why-tur...

TL;DR: Cultural difference. In Turkey, the "moment of silence" is used to chant for those who died in the attacks. They were not saying "Allahu Akbar", they were saying “Şehitler ölmez, vatan bölünmez”.

Translation: “Martyrs, they do not die (they are immortal), homeland (land, our land) is indivisible." Those who die in the attacks are considered martyrs, not those responsible. "Homeland" in this instance would be considered France.

Coming to your final point, every Muslim I know whether they practice or not hates terrorists. Earlier (those in rural regions) they had been fed propaganda that these were freedom fighters who had been discredited as terrorists since they were seen as fighting western aggression and invaders. Once they were shown instances of Marines/U.S. Army helping out/rescuing civilians in war-torn countries their entire perception is overturned, first it's disbelief that they would help the civilians, and later they understand that they're just humans looking for a better world as well and had only been doing their duty, and that countries & civilians pay the price for their leaders' arrogance & sins.

I am (white, Christian) French. I don't support the "minute" of silence. It means there is a full range of opinions which lead one to not recognizing the minute of silence. I'll detail my opinion for an example, but many other opinions must be respected too.

1. We don't do a minute of silence for 300 ppl per month who die in car accidents. Nor for 200 per fortnight for passive second hand smoking. The characteristics are the same: They're innocent, they're taken away suddenly in atrocious conditions, and they're taken at random.

2. A minute of silence, whether you like it or not, is a political gesture. The more we do a minute of silence, the less there will be opposition to repressive actions by the gouvernent. Look: the law says the Etat d'Urgence is limited to 15 days, they've extended it to 3 months and they want to extend it to a Permanent Etat d'Urgence.

3. We don't listen to terrorists. They may be protesting against very legitimate things with a very similar number of crimes. As a citizen of the occident, I am collectively responsible for Guantanamo and Irak and Palestine and all wars that have destroyed the future of youngsters in those countries. Who's to say I should do a minute of silence for the French and not for the Palestinians or Iraqis who have been subjected to torture?

4. A minute of silence will encourage France to perform war. Terrorism cannot be won with war. We're just destroying someone's land in a country where I don't know the cultural situation. 100% sure we are creating tomorrow's terrorists.

5. Those terrorists? They were born in France. It's a failure of our social system. We are racist, we don't give them enough future economically. I once was an Australian immigrant: When there's huge bucks to be made, there's no time for subversion.

6. France is in economic dismay. Hence the difficulty of the youth to earn enough for an optimistic living. Hence please don't send an aircraft carrier, we're digging our debt, if not or grave. With two billions, let's hire teachers and lower our taxes on wages so we can get more jobs.

7. Let's not give the terrorists what they wanted: Everyone is impressed by the violence, so during the next 10 years well start to think it's normal that all concert halls have to have x-more entrances. Those will have a huge cost on culture. We'll say it's normal to implement stringent security measures, without looking at the cost. I bet people will even use it as an excuse for everything: "Because of security measure, you are required to ditch your bottle of water, pay per card, hire the official coach instead of walking there, ...". A minute of silence today, and during 15 years any objection to everyday security will be frowned upon.

I don't support the terrorists. But I don't support government-sponsored minutes of silence either. And I say this as a white, male, French, conservatist person.

> He said that he learned their ultimate goal has nothing to do with our culture or freedom. They believe armageddon is coming, that it is literaly going to be a big battle in a particular town in Syria near the Turkish border, and that the West is the enemy (descendants of the Roman empire) that their Moslem army must defeat.

While I don't doubt that that is what was revealed to him while he was captive, I will note that there are three potentially very different things that that could be, that can be very hard to distinguish:

1) The actual goals of the Daesh leadership,

2) The propaganda the Daesh leadership uses to motivate its foot soldiers,

3) Deliberate fabrications presented by captors to captives for propaganda, misinformation, or other purposes.

This view has also been put forward by Bernard Haykel who appears to be regarded as a notable secular authority on Islamic State. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Haykel

"What ISIS Really Wants" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...

I'll also submit that The Powers That Be have learned it sucks to create a power vacuum and deal with the fallout (see: Iraq, Afghanistan for examples)

The developed nations' abilities to crush a military opponent doesn't solve all problems, something we've been aware of for a long while and had recent reinforcing lessons.

I know the US had strong roles in rebuilding both Japanese and German governments post-WWII, but those were both circumstances that were dramatically different than this. (And, since HN has lots of informed people, some of whom are doubtless facepalming at my statements, I'd love to see some resources that describe those efforts with some depth and hopefully not a one-sided view of things, just for my own enlightenment)

During WWII, we engaged in all-out war against Japan and Germany, and devastated both countries to the limit of our technical ability. Had the Japanese government not surrendered after the atomic bombs, we would have continued dropping them until there was no one left. We were already fire-bombing cities at that point, despite the huge number of civilian casualties.

After the war, Japan still had a functioning government which the US had a stranglehold on for years during reconstruction. Germany's government was wiped out and replaced with two puppet states for a long time as well. We were truly imperialistic then, having invaded and taken control of those countries until they were stable enough to run themselves. (Or couldn't be held anymore, in the case of East Germany.)

We didn't do it that way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Years of bad outcomes with cold-war-era puppet governments got us away from that approach, and instead we tried to set up locally-run governments that were allies but not subservient. But that didn't work so well either. Maybe we let them go too soon, or maybe the population wasn't beaten down enough by the war, the way Germany and Japan were, to just accept any government so long as it stops the devastation.

Just to put numbers to this, sickening as that is...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War estimates between 150k and 1 million dead. That's out of a total population of 32 million or so according to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iraq>, so somewhere between 1 in 200 and 1 in 30 killed.

For comparison, the population of Germany in 1939 was about 70 million according to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Statis.... And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War... there were somewhere between 4.3 to 5.3 million military deaths, somewhere between 500k to 2 million civilian deaths due to some of the Soviet end-war and post-war shenanigans, another 350k to 600k civilian deaths due to Allied bombing. Let's call it 5 million all told on the low end. That's 1 in 14. And due to the fraction of this that were military, the resulting demographic distribution has some interesting features. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_sex_by_age_1950_1.... In particular, note the deep notch in the 30-35 demographic that would have been born during World War 1 and the large differences between numbers of males and females in all the 20-30 age group.

So one difference is that a larger fraction of the population was dead, and a significantly larger fraction of the "young male" demographic that tends to do things like fight back against the occupier as opposed to going on with life. People were just _tired_ of fighting, effectively.

Another difference was the massive aid/rebuilding program financed via the Marshall Plan.

And I suspect a final difference was a much smaller feeling of "us vs them" or "we're fundamentally different", on both sides....

I didn't read the article, but my gut instinct would be that the people this man was held captive by were foot soldiers. They are frequently illiterate people who are fed such "prophecies" as truth.

I do contend with your statement about ISIS continuing to exist because of western compassion. If the West had the means to destroy them (without harming millions of innocent civilians), the compassionate thing to do would be to do it ASAP.

> If the West had the means to destroy them (without harming millions of innocent civilians)

When the GP speaks of compassion, I think (s)he is referring to the millions of civilians there, not the fighters.

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. The cold-hearted decision would be to count those civilians as acceptable losses, and just carpet-bomb the whole area.

> without harming millions of innocent civilians

But that little caveat means putting a large number of our own people at risk and this is where we lack fortitude. That is what resulted in the Iraq mess, which in turn led to IS gaining a foothold.

> If the West had the means to destroy them (without harming millions of innocent civilians), the compassionate thing to do would be to do it ASAP.

That exactly what the west thought they could do in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it turned out that it is a lot more complex than, well, a lot of smart people expected.

That said, were western militaries not still smarting from those wars, there would probably have been boots on the ground a long time ago, in the hope of some sort of Balkan-war outcome.

That being their end game really isn't even a big secret, Cracked.com (of all people) did a really good piece on this after one of their journalists read the back issues of ISIS' official magazine.

ISIS and AlQaeda aren't the ones taking freedom from the west. Similar organizations have existed for hundreds of years without such impact. If it wasn't ISIS it would be something else. The source of erosion is internal. So too is the blame.

Good luck trying to fix the source of the problem when information spreads as quickly as it does today. Any attempt to put terrorist attacks in perspective, or to calm people's reactions, is met with knee-jerk "How dare you" responses.

That's why we have so many mechanisms to slow official reactions. We know that, as humans, we are prone to rash decisions in the face of crisis. Even the patriot act contains a sunset provision, an internal recognition that it was likely a knee-jerk reaction to fear. But the renewal of that provision is not a rash decision, nor is it taken by ISIS. The decision to keep the Patriot Act alive year after year is a cold political calculation divorced from any immediate crisis.

"Similar organizations have existed for hundreds of years"

So have done the internal source of erosion, is just they now have the technological capacities. In absence of a strong social movement against, this doesn't look well for the future.

Take a look at britain in the 50s, or the US in the 60s. Speech was more heavily stymied then than it is today. It cost more to do so, but governments then still tracked people's activity. If anything, today's technology allows us to recognize and react to such behaviour whereas previous generations remained unaware.

Al Qaeda was the excuse. We did it to ourselves.

They're not stunting out culture, they're convincing us to stunt our culture, and we're giving in.

It's trivial for us to say no, and yet we don't.

That's because those freedoms work great when members of a society are seeking freedom as an end goal. When the end goal of significant numbers is despotism, collectivism, or hegemonic religious rule, those very freedoms become exploitable weaknesses. As my mom said, "This is why we can't have nice things."

> When the end goal of significant numbers is despotism, collectivism, or hegemonic religious rule, those very freedoms become exploitable weaknesses

Few people hold "despotism, collectivism, or hegemonic religious rule" as end games. Instead, freedom is traded for safety and stability for one's way of life.

You could likewise say that no one holds "freedom" as an endgame, but instead they want things and sexual partners. Freedom is just shorthand for these and many other once-removed concepts.

There very much are people who want hegemonic religious rule as an end game. They spend a lot of time professing that desire and working toward it.

I think that's just a side effect. I don't think terrorists actually care that much about western society. They want to ultimately defeat the west at least ideologically, if not economically and ultimately militarily (in order they can further their own goals)

So it's beside the point to them. Let's say someone wants your money, so in fear, you stop spending your money, stop bringing your wallet with you, the thief doesn't care about that, what they want is to take your money, ultimately.

Noooo. We cannot win the "war on terrorism" while people still have this misconception. The Islamic terrorist don't care about the west at all, their goal is to gain ground in countries with Islamic population. The only reason west got dragged into this war was because AL Quaida were miserably failing at this in the 90s, and so tried to create a common enemy: the west.

I encourage everyone to read more on this topic and the background behind AL Quaida and Isis.

One of the ways they try to gain support among Muslims, is by ensuring that Muslims feel hated and excluded by us. They want to convince them that there's no future in moderate Islam, they want all Muslims to believe this is an existential battle for them.

So if we exclude Muslims, send refugees back, discriminate, harass and bomb them, we are making ISIS correct in that claim. What we should be doing, is demonstrating that there is a future in moderate Islam. That we accept them as equals, rather than treat them as subhuman.

That's an interesting valid point, still, the terrorists don't actually care how we deal with things internally. In other words they are not concerned with our behavioral changes and whether they lead to an erosion of liberty or not. Their only concern is to further their own goals, whatever they be.

> Their only concern is to further their own goals, whatever they be.

Yes, but we don't actually have to help them to further their goals.

If they only care about their world and to further their own goals in the middle east and don't actually care about the west directly (we are a pretext), and don't plan to extend their power beyond their historic influence, how would anything happening in the west be to their benefit?

They already have all their lines of reason to collectively paint the west as an enemy, the west can't be made "double enemy". It's already the enemy, so what benefit is it to them we have self inflicted wounds, unless they have sights on expanding their dominion to the west?

> They already have all their lines of reason to collectively paint the west as an enemy, the west can't be made "double enemy".

Oh, we absolutely can. See, we could be a passive enemy and that would be good for them, but not as good as an enemy that actually engages. That's what drives the spiral of polarization and demonization. Without the spiral it stops at the first level and their recruiting power is reduced accordingly.

But would being a passive enemy simply allow them to run roughshod all over the middle east, consolidate power, disrupt energy resources, cause mass exuduses, unrest, power imbalances, civil factional wars, etc. which one might consider a sizable loss to the west?

I guess it depends what you mean by passive.

> But would being a passive enemy simply allow them to run roughshod all over the middle east, consolidate power, disrupt energy resources, cause mass exuduses, unrest, power imbalances, civil factional wars, etc. which one might consider a sizable loss to the west?

Collectively, the west is what did the destabilizing of the region to begin with. That is what caused them to gain the power that they have now. We created a huge power vacuum because collectively we're not prepared to pay the price for maintaining the structural integrity of the region. Starting this is easy, maintaining an orderly society in a 'western' way that does not want to be an orderly society is a lost cause.

So now we have an entirely new situation. We can choose to escalate but this will - in due course - again require that we commit ourselves to putting large numbers of people in harms way for an extended period, probably on the level that will make the Iraq wars look like Sunday outings on the beach.

> I guess it depends what you mean by passive.

Passive to me means defense, so defend our own turf, let the 'locals' work things out as much as possible without interference other than to accept refugees from the region and to actively aid refugees in leaving these regimes behind.

Leave them their oil wells and weapons but don't buy their oil, don't sell them more weapons (and serious sanctions against those that violate embargoes). Close the borders outbound. And deal with the rotten apples that make it in with the refugees as the criminals that they are.

That's not an easy path, it would lead to a ton of trouble but I believe strongly that it would lead to less trouble than the alternatives.

I agree with you that it's a side-effect and not an intentional thing on their part, but that side-effect is helping them far more with their aim in destroying us ideologically than anything else they've done.

Yep, its like poisons that kill you by triggering an overreactive histamine response. The body's zealous desire to protect itself is precisely what kills it.

I like that analogy. Can you give an example of a specific poison that does that?

Basically any severe allergic reaction is a histamine response, AFAIK (IANAD). Bee stings, rotten fish, nut allergies, etc. Additionally, there are a large number of ailments that trick the body into attacking itself, like some forms of arthritis, and of course AIDS.

Nice try, terrorist.

Peanuts for some people.

Oh. Right. Hmm.

Autoimmune diseases like Lupus trigger something similar.

Erosion of privacy and freedom is inevitable. Mass human breeding on earth puts so much pressure on all aspects of our existence. I believe this will necessarily lead to reduced freedom as mere survival becomes more important. Small groups of people or even individuals have so much power and can inflict terrifying damage. How else do you solve such a problem? At the end of the day, people will demand the problem is solved.

Raising the lowest education level and the lowest happiness level would go a long way. i.e. a society that genuinely looks after and educates everyone. Easier said than done though.

You're absolutely right. I'm kind of pessimistic these days about the future.. Education the critical thing we need to even start moving in the right direction.

But so many of the terrorists were well educated. They don't suffer lack of money or education, they suffer from a lack of meaning in their lives.

I've heard this claim as well, and that's why I say happiness as well. But that's even harder than education to both define and achieve.

I have always found it rather hard to believe that Islamists would dedicate their entire lives to eroding your privacy. It always seemed like #1 an extremely egocentric worldview and #2 completely not in fitting with their style.

effectively playing a similar game as being played out on college campuses, forcing the establish of safe spaces. Safe from freedom and rarely anything else.

And they are achieving what the USSR failed to achieve with far less means.