New Age Dementors
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"Saudi Support For Wahhabi Radicalism Is Taproot Of Islamic Terrorism"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/saudi-arabians-support-for-wahhabi.html
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"Needed Re-Definition Of Mid-East Chaos As Sunni-Shiite Religious War"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/necessary-re-definition-of-mid-east.html
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"ISIS' Harsh Brand Of Islam Is Rooted In Saudi Creed"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-harsh-brand-of-islam-is-rooted-in.html
ISIS Crisis***
"Saudi Support For Wahhabi Radicalism Is Taproot Of Islamic Terrorism"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/saudi-arabians-support-for-wahhabi.html
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"Needed Re-Definition Of Mid-East Chaos As Sunni-Shiite Religious War"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/necessary-re-definition-of-mid-east.html
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"ISIS' Harsh Brand Of Islam Is Rooted In Saudi Creed"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-harsh-brand-of-islam-is-rooted-in.html
SEPT. 23, 2014
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
There is a tension at the heart of President Obama’s campaign to confront the Islamic State, and
it explains a lot about why he has so much trouble articulating and implementing his strategy.
Quite simply, it is the tension between two vital goals—promoting the “soul-searching” that
ISIS’s emergence has triggered in the Arab-Muslim world and “searching and destroying” ISIS in
its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
Get used to it. This tension is not going away. Obama will have to lead through it.
The good news: The rise of the Islamic State, also known and ISIS, is triggering some long
overdue, brutally honest, soul-searching by Arabs and Muslims about how such a large,
murderous Sunni death cult could have emerged in their midst. Look at a few samples, starting
with “The Barbarians Within Our Gates,” written in Politico last week by Hisham Melhem, the
Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya, the Arabic satellite channel.
“With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President
Obama ... is stepping once again — and with understandably great reluctance — into the chaos
of an entire civilization that has broken down. Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but
gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism —
the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire a century ago.”
“Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed,” Melhem added. “The promise of
political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the
season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian
and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms.
... The jihadists of the Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed
out of a rotting, empty hulk —what was left of a broken-down civilization.”
The liberal Saudi analyst Turki al-Hamad responded in the London-based Al-Arab newspaper to
King Abdullah’s call for Saudi religious leaders to confront ISIS ideology: How can they? al-
Hamad asked. They all embrace the same anti-pluralistic, puritanical Wahhabi Sunni ideology
that Saudi Arabia diffused, at home and abroad, to the mosques that nurtured ISIS.
“They are unable to face the groups of violence, extremism and beheadings, not out of laziness
or procrastination, but because all of them share in that same ideology,” al-Hamad wrote. “How
can they confront an ideology that they themselves carry within them and within their mindset?”
The Lebanese Shiite writer Hanin Ghaddar in an essay in August on Lebanon’s Now website
wrote: “To fight the I.S. and other radical groups, and to prevent the rise of new autocratic
rulers, we need to assume responsibility for the collective failures that have produced all of
these awful tyrants and fanatics. Our media and education systems are liable for the monster
we helped create. ... We need to teach our children how to learn from our mistakes instead of
how to master the art of denial. When our educators and journalists start to understand the
significance of individual rights, and admit that we have failed to be citizens, then we can start
hoping for freedom, even if it is achieved slowly.”
Nurturing this soul-searching is a vital —and smart —part of the Obama strategy. In
committing America to an air-campaign-only against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, Obama has
declared that the ground war will have to be fought by Arabs and Muslims, not just because this
is their war and they should take the brunt of the casualties, but because the very act of their
organizing themselves across Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish lines —the very act of overcoming their
debilitating sectarian and political differences that would be required to defeat ISIS on the
ground—is the necessary ingredient for creating any kind of decent, consensual government
that could replace ISIS in any self-sustaining way.
The tension arises because ISIS is a killing machine, and it will take another killing machine to
search it out and destroy it on the ground. There is no way the “moderate” Syrians we’re
training can alone fight ISIS and the Syrian regime at the same time. Iraqis, Turkey and the
nearby Arab states will have to also field troops.
After all, this is a civil war for the future of both Sunni Islam and the Arab world.We can
degrade ISIS from the air—I’m glad we have hit these ISIS psychopaths in Syria—but only
Arabs and Turks can destroy ISIS on the ground. Right now, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, stands for authoritarianism, press intimidation, crony capitalism and quiet support for
Islamists, including ISIS. He won’t even let us use our base in Turkey to degrade ISIS from the air.
What’s in his soul? What’s in the soul of the Arab regimes who are ready to join us in bombing
ISIS in Syria, but rule out ground troops?
This is a civilization in distress, and unless it faces the pathologies that have given birth to an ISIS
monster its belly —any victory we achieve from the air or ground will be temporary.
Alan: At bedrock, Islamism is a kind of necrophilia in which the perceived Will of God wants infidels not only dead but damned. Since this is so, "true believers" should accelerate God's plans for damnation by killing unbelievers now.
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Pope Condemns Extremists For "Perverting" Religion
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Pope Francis Links
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