Germany: Syrian refugees capture terrorist

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21 hours ago, CapTon said:

Highlighted comment #2 (italicized as well): They're the greatest thing to fear because they can get a hell of a lot of worse. And if we continue to just let them happen without properly going after them and ensuring our own safety, who's to say other countries or groups that hate us won't come after us because they know we're weak? Iran sure as hell wouldn't mind coming after us if given the chance and the assurance that we don't know how to protect ourselves. You're not thinking about the long-term threat of terrorism and the many treacherous paths it can lead us down.

CapTon, the war on terror is a sham and just a messy clean-up operation of a whole ton of mistakes made by God awful US foreign policy.

Who funded and trained the Taliban and Al-Qaeda during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan? The US. Heck Al-Qaeda was even used for CIA/Pentagon war games training until Al-Qaeda went rouge with the WTC bombing of 1993.

Who invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and imposed a no-fly zone on Libya? The US.

Who provided arms and training to Syrian rebels from 2009 and onwards? The US.

How did ISIS arise? From most of the same Syrian rebels who were receiving support by the US and the CIA. The whole "moderate" rebels thing is a complete farce. They're just another bunch of militant Wahhabi extremists. The patriarchal, head-chopping, death-to-the-infidels brigade.

If the US was not hell bent on removing the Syrian government then ISIS would never have formed.

Lastly, and this is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, why is the US, UK, Israel and the EU allies with Saudi Arabia? A patriarchal state who stones women for adultery, has gender segregation in public, beheads criminals and exports extreme Sharia law, and Wahhabism, to other Muslim countries.

Every Islamist terrorist group follows Wahhabism to the letter, it is the core of their beliefs: Taliban, Boko Haram, ISIS, Al Qaeda, the list goes on and on. When Dubya gave that first talk about countries on the axis of evil, by any moral logic, Saudi Arabia should have been number 1 on that list. The Wahhabi movement is a terrible stain to Islam, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammed.

And ultimately this war on terror has made things worse. Just like the war on drugs. Just like prohibition. I would fear more what the US government and its allies are going to do next in the war on terror because now God-awful consequences are arriving. The refugee crisis. The spontaneous terrorism with the knife attacks, random violence and all of that... Europe is now suffering because of this war on terror.

The US should sanction Saudi Arabia to force it to clean up its act. What about the oil shortfall? Go to Russia for that, or boost fracking.

Anyway, what the Middle East is going through is no different to what happened to Europe in WW1 and WW2- symptoms of a barbaric nationalism and racism. To date nothing has matched the savagery, brutality, death and destruction of those two wars

Finally Islam needs to both modernize and become more secularized. Until Sharia law is changed for the better and tweaked to reflect modern values, expect this Muslim world war to continue. That's what it is right now, it's akin to the Great European War (WW1), well that is what's happening in the Middle East right now. ISIS are just pawns to wage sectarian war.

/

Edit: And a bit about the Prophet Muhammed because ever since 9/11 there have been so many misconceptions and distortions of this Prophet. As a religious figure Muhammed is of the same importance as Moses and Jesus. Like Moses and Jesus, Muhammed was a source of moral and divine guidance. Those three figures all had a mission from the same God, which the Quran explains about. There is no such thing as the "Jewish" God or the "Christian" God or the "Muslim" God, they are the same God, in these big three religions this distinction is acknowledged. The source of dispute arises from claims of a false revelation which would not be of God. For instance Jews firmly believe that Jesus and Muhammed's revelations were false, they were not of God but it is recognized that, from the Jewish perspective, that Jesus and Muhammed made claims to be Messengers of God- the God, or Yahweh, which the Jews worship.

Now the Quran, a book revealed by Muhammed himself, devotes a large portion of its content to testifying to the truth of the miracles which happened in the New and Old Testament. It provides further insight into the actions of Moses and Jesus. Going even further, Christians talk about the return of Christ, well Muhammed was that return as he acknowledged the truth of all of Jesus' sayings and provided further religious truth and testimony. During Islam's origins, there were many Christians who turned to Muhammed and became Muslim.

Here is another amazing thing, the very act of designating Mecca as the Qibla, a point to turn in prayer, necessitated radical advances in science, cartography and mathematics about 1400 years ago. If one is several hundred miles away from Mecca, how does one accurately turn in the right direction? A BIG problem in the 7th century.

[_Michael 2,681]

@Ln X, you've summed the failing of the US Government very well up very nicely.

I'm not going to try and follow-on with the previous conversation, but I shall just air my views.

@CapTon , I'm going to use an analogy with you. From what I've read you're pretty against Syrian Refugees being allowed in the US, so please, just imagine the following. However unlikely, however unrealistic, please imagine the following.

"Your neighborhood has been bombed day after day for months, you have no job - your workplace is destroyed - there is no food in the shops, and there is no fuel for cars and no fuel for heating, and an unreliable clean running water, and practically no electricity. You are living in constant fear of death. You manage to gather enough money to flee, which I'll add is not easy. You make it to the Canadian Border. They have long and tedious checks and vetting. It will be months, maybe even a year or two before you can get in. And you're still not safe. You'll have to try elsewhere. Somehow, you make it across to Europe, But will they accept you? Will you be allowed to stay? Or will your safety be postponed for months and months because of unnecessary vetting and checks?" 

That scenario is somewhat similar to what Syrian refugees are facing. Can you imagine facing that? You have to remember - they are human. 

In Europe, where tens, possibly even hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees have resulted, I have no heard of, nor expect a single terrorism-related incident caused by Syrian Refugees. Neither have I heard of one in the US. Ther real danger is home-grown terrorists (I refrain from the term 'Islamist Militant' - they are not following the religion of Islam). I understand the attackers in San Bernadino were US Citizens, and if I'm not mistaken, they weren't refugees or illegal immigrants.

Combatting extremism at home is they key. The refugees do not bring the terror with them, I'm afraid it is already here.

[matias93 7,535]

1 hour ago, Ln X said:

And ultimately this war on terror has made things worse. Just like the war on drugs. Just like prohibition.

I'm going to hook with this issue. Do you know what happens when a country decides it has a problem with some violent enemy that didn't exist before? The country creates a violent State force to take charge of that threat, giving violent bureaucrats weapons and training to seek and destroy this hidden enemy. They can be, as any bureaucracy, more or less effective, but what is sure is they become very attached to their mission, at the point of believing theirs is the most important task the State has to dedicate to, the task that deserves the most budget and the one that justifies the most scandalous breaches of the rule of law.

As the threats those kinds of forces are meant to fight don't simply dissapear, but are politically defined as not-threats on a point, the warring bureaucracies, the military polices, the DEAs, the special forces, etc. end their days falling from grace, from national heroes to just another obsolete bureau to get rid off. And they don't like it that way, so take action against their discard: either construct a new threat to justify their continued existence (as the enforcers of the US prohibition did when constructing the War on Drugs), or rebel against their former authorities and use their training and expertise on the other side (as the mexican Zetas drug cartel did, being them former army troops originally dispatched against narcotrafficking).

With the antiterrorism forces, there's no reason to see another story: the Mujahidins did their part on expelling the soviets from Afghanistan and discarded, they became Al-Qaeda; the sunni freedom fighters on Iraq and Lybia did their job topping Saddam and Ghadafi and were discarded, so they became ISIS; now the moderate syrian rebels are being used to avoid Putin and Assad to get full control of the country, but soon they will be useless, and a new terrorist threat will be born.

And frankly, I don't want to know what will happen with the US soldiers sent to do the dirty job on the middle east, or the mercenaries paid to do so.

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The US Department of Defence's budget received massive increases after 9/11. It was 308 billion dollars in 2000 and reached a maximum of 721 billion dollars in 2010, right now it was 637 billion dollars in 2015. Given the ISIS threat that figure is sure to increase. All because of the war on terror.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

There are phrases for that kind of spending: the spice must flow...

Combine exorbitant military spending with banking bailouts and US government debt has surged awfully. It wasn't like the WW2 government debt surge where there was a clear enemy to beat: the Nazis and the Japanese. This time it is an assortment of Islamic militants and guerilla armies.

I hate to say this but Al Qaeda and the Taliban are probably gleeful that the US, their sworn enemies, have wasted so many trillions of dollars fighting terror.

Opium and poppy fields are the main source of money for the Taliban. The war on terror has been great for the Taliban. It is a big WTF? The war on drugs has been a miserable FAILURE given this graph. Why the US don't napalm and burn down every poppy field in Afghanistan is beyond me. Interestingly the Taliban cracked down on opium and that was why 2001's production was so small, I kid you not. It was the most successful anti-drug crackdown in a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan#Drug_trafficking

Then 9/11 happened and suddenly opium and them poppies were worth their weight in gold for the Taliban. Right now most of the worlds opiates supply comes from Afghanistan. So chances are all those people high on heroin and other opiates, well those people have helped the Taliban earn a lot of money.

If the US, NATO and Afghan government were serious about defeating the Taliban, they would burn all those poppy fields and issue a lot of money to Afghan farmers to grow other crops.

[Fantozzi 4,067]

59 minutes ago, Ln X said:

The war on drugs has been a miserable FAILURE given this graph.

I don't know much about this - put perhaps the strategy is to put all those petty crooks - who run around in the street at home, shooting people and selling drugs and who are the backbone of the global drug industries - into an uniform and send them far away to foreign countries? So it isn't about to win this war but to have it to be continued - otherwise they came back home, hanging around in your streets again? It's not to clear out the problem - it's just to move it from your hometown to someone others hometown.

You know we germans hate weapons and we have most rigid laws - german women aren't even allowed to carry a taser. But we love to sell weapons.

You know - germany takes part in this war too - by helping iraqi and peshmerga (kurd) with weapons.

70 tons of material they sent to peshmerga: 1500 G36 automatic rifles, 100 milan missle and so on.

Recently they discovered, a great part of this stuff got lost - guess who stole it. It was a little cumbersome, but at the end germany has given away to ISIS some weapons for free.

Selling weapons is like selling problems. Now, basically - those problems once sold, tend to return back home. The weapons given to peshmerga and now in the hands of ISIS may come back and focus on the seller.

So now we have to keep them away from ourself - so we start to fight them in foreign countries. But business continues - it's not you can fight them once and for all, as meanwhile we're fighting weapons are produced and moved and sold and stolen and so again - changing their owners. So practically we are supporting the war to keep it away from us, to keep it in the middle east.