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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.