Has ISIS royally fucked itself?

[Photographer]

Paris, the Russian airliner, Mali... And threatening Rome, the USA and just about anyone else with a modern army? WTF are they thinking? They're embarrassing Muslims all over the world who aren't into their particular far fringe and have alienated any ally they could ever hope to have...

I really see no sanity at all in their actions. They're like the Tea Party on steroids.

[msongs]

1. when its filthy rich backers start losing $$ support will collapse nt

[maxsolomon]

11. who are they?

I seriously don't know. I've heard they get money from the Gulf States, but I don't understand how it's an "investment".

Are you saying those backers see a return on their money?

[msongs]

18. the return is power and influence which always leads to $$. that glitzy magazine of theirs is not

free. somebody is funding for it

[maxsolomon]

19. so, no one specific then

you made it sound like the financers were going to make money off Daesh.

a web magazine takes, like, a staff of 10.

[LittleBlue]

2. It's much more religious than DU wants you to believe

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

[CJCRANE]

3. It's the Sunni version of the Inquisition.

Religious nutters.

[4139]

24. ISIS, al-Qaeda and Boko Haram are all Wahhabi,

[KamaAina]

25. Wahhabi, you say? Gee, where have I heard of that sect before? Who else might be Wahhabi?

[Schema Thing]

4. They are following a modus that has worked (very well), and seems to be working this time.

Get westerners to persecute Muslims for-being-Muslim, and watch their (ISIS) recruitment numbers shoot up.

[whatthehey]

14. Was going to provide the answer. You already did

They WANT to start a religious war against the big bad west.

[annabanana]

21. Exactly like OUR fundies

(funny how that works)

[Shandris]

5. It's funny, because they've told everyone what the plan is.

For some reason, our Western journalists (and there's an oxymoron if one ever existed) seem to think its silly crap like name-calling and other tripe like that. "Th-they want you to r-reject refugees!"

No, it's simple. They believe that forcing the powers of the world to fight them in Syria is the End Time and that they're destined to win it so long as everyone shows up. That's why hiding won't work. It makes 'no sense' because you're not an apocalyptic idiot.

[CJCRANE]

6. It's kind of weird how the terrorists and the warmongers often have the same aims and results...

Remember how Bin Laden said he wanted to bankrupt America with pointless wars, and the neocons complied.

Now Isis wants to drag everyone into their sandbox and again the warmongers sing the same tune...

[magical thyme]

7. they're nothing like the Teaparty, which is a bunch of decrepit, white

oldsters (like my eldest sister, sadly) quasi-religious nutters, and maybe some kids dining on cheetos in mom's basement, who if they ever actually came into eye contact with a gun or anything more deadly than a big mac, would melt in panic like butter in the hot sun. My teaparty sister once fell down and broke her ankle in her front yard. She sat there for 3 hours at the end of her driveway waiting for a neighbor to skip work or school and come help her because crawling to the house was too much work.

ISIS are young, alienated, disenfranchised, war-hardened religious nutters who have nothing to live for, led by wealthy middle-aged alienated war-hardened religious nutters who have everything to live for but just love the warrior lifestyle and hate all things western.

[Agnosticsherbet]

8. They believe it is the end of days, and when the world attacks them, they will win and Allah

will rule in glory.

[annabanana]

22. Ben Carson also believes it is the end of days, and Jesus will

rule in Glory

[Agnosticsherbet]

23. Pddly, Carson an ISIS have things in common.

[maxsolomon]

9. they're not "thinking", they have "faith".

but they essentially hold a country-size chunk of Iraq and Syria.

if they get their "apocalyptic battle", they're going to be very disappointed in how it turns out for them.

[edhopper]

10. ISIS will be defeated

probably sooner rather than later.

It will not stop the Islamic/jihadist mentality.

And the Saudis will continue to export the fundamentalist form of Islam that breeds this.

[sibelian]

12. They are mentally ill. No, I'm not saying that as an insult...

I'm making a possibly unwarranted but, to my mind, increasingly compelling diagnosis: Their minds are actually damaged.

They've been driven into a corner by a colossal, racist aggressor whose power has crushed the remains of their civilisation into the dust and despises them. They are reacting from depression and identity loss.

The corner they have been backed into actually provides them with solace. They need to control *something* because they feel horrible so they lash out at anything anywhere that can reflect their own pain back at them in some physical way they can understand.

Have you seen any of the videos on Youtube that ISIS didn't release, of their own soldiers being tortured by other forces? Or the handcuffed prisoners they've shot in the head? Or the other revolting things they're doing to their prisoners that the mainstream media doesn't show? They've abandoned all mercy, and they are the recipients of none.

They have no hope. Their plans cannot possibly be realised. They have no real military strategy of any kind beyond attacking other Muslims, imprisoning them and torturing them and sending tiny cells into the West to make gestures.

Yes, they are evil. That's what happens when you burn the concepts of forgiveness out of people by subjecting them to agonies that they can't escape.

They are a broken people. They've been crushed into insanity.

We've destroyed them.

[CJCRANE]

15. A lot of them are criminals who were released or busted out of various jails in the region.

Others are petty criminals and wannabe gangsters recruited from the west. The remainder are the cream of the extreme recruited from all over the world.

They also subject them to atrocity videos to desensitize them and put them on heavy drugs before they send them into battle.

[sibelian]

17. I have seen videos of ISIS terrorists being tortured that just make me weep.

It's so, so horrible. I've seen videos of captured ISIS guys and they're just these quiet, confused, hopeless guys that have no idea what's going on. Shy, gentle guys with soft voices... in tears. They only have their own people to tell them what's happening. Many of them haven't the faintest idea what their own history is, not the FAINTEST idea. A lot of them were far too young when the Iraq War started to know anything about what was happening and now all they have to teach them are the crushed remains of the Iraqi educational infrastructure which is now just a colossal brainwashing machine.

I know this is going to sound really weird, but I just feel so sorry for them. I've watched interviews with them in tears myself. They have no idea what's happening and they have the most ridiculous ideas about the West imaginable. It's like the whole universe has just rounded them all up and thrown them into a meatgrinder of torture, rage, violence and hatred and they can't get out. It's totally gut-wrenching. Yes, their acts are barbaric. The acts that are being perpetrated on them are just as barbaric. What else do they know? NOTHING.

I am so SICK of seeing humiliated, broken, exhausted, handcuffed Arab guys in prison jumpsuits. I'm SICK of it. I just think: "These poor guys. Who is going to help them, who is going to help these guys out of their hatred and their misery?"

Yeah, some of them are just evil guys, but a lot of them are just young, totally lost guys with nothing on their side. They are FUCKED.

I think some people need to go and have a look on Youtube. There's a whole other story there.

[CJCRANE]

20. Isis was formed out of deception, of its own people and its victims.

I stumbled across an Isis supporters' group page on Facebook about two or three years ago.

It wasn't known as Isis back then, just supporters of Al Qaeda / The Mujahideen / the Khilafa (Caliphate).

The posters on there were convinced that Assad was supported by America and Israel and that's why they had to topple him. Of course that's not a good motivation in itself, but that's what they were told and were convinced of.

Another thing I read elsewhere, was that Isis were welcomed into Mosul because people thought they were with the "Revolution" as in the "Arab Spring", they didn't realize they were total religious nutters, and why would they? It wasn't mentioned in the media anywhere at that time IIRC.

[sibelian]

30. Yeah.

A lot of these guys are just fucking clueless. I've seen loads of things posted now by ex-Muslims, all over the Internet describing how ridiculous the ME is. I've seen one video in particular, featuring the son of a Hamas leader who is now an apostate and has converted to Christianity, ex-president of the Islamic Youth Movement, this guy, who described Allah as a gangster. And he's been slap bang in the middle of the whole thing, grew up in Palestine and had to accept his parents disowning him and he goes to great lengths to explain how much work he had to do even to get to the simple idea that there might even be another perspective on Islam. And again, with this guy I was like OMFG, it's THAT bad? This 21st century and he doesn't quite get freedom of relgion, this is fucking horrible and again it was just sympathy and love I felt for him, I thought, who is going to take care of him? I am taken care of. My society does not abandon me. What could we have expected of him who had been, not so much lied to, but stuck in a sea of absences, absence of freedom of thought, absence of safety, absence of alternatives to his condition. I was also like fuck, this guy is BRAVE. He'll be getting death threats, he says.

Sorry, rambling.

I did think about finding and posting that video here, but the range of acceptable views here is so narrow and tendentious, I thought, why bother all I'll do is flush out a bunch of people calling me Islamophobic. They've no IDEA what these guys are facing on a daily basis, yes, the West behaves abominably towards the ME, but the ME treats people like SCUM.

It's not like the way we think about religion at all. Westerners are constantly assuming subconsciously that Islam has a similar status in the ME as it does here, one of many religions, it's not the same at all. In the ME it's being used to excuse EVERYTHING.

[CJCRANE]

31. But the west supports fundamentalist regimes and islamist rebels.

Saddam, Mubarak and Gadaffi weren't saints but at least they accepted christians and kept a lid on the fundies. The same goes for Assad.

All the western interventions in the region starting with the Mujahideen in the 80s have only served to increase religious fundamentalism and destroy secularism. Our main allies are religious monarchies ruling by sharia law. They are our allies spreading "democracy" in Syria. The west is not innocent in all of this.

[sibelian]

32. Yeah yeah I totally get that but I think that's pretty much a problem with racism.

I think there's this perpetually half-finished substrata of thought in the West about Islam, basically "the poor little brown people they can't know any better" which intersects with our own ideas about freedom of religion which help us to abandon responsibility for dealing with the Islamic belief structure as if it's a real system of thought that people actually believe. There are 1.4 billion Muslims on the planet. That is a CHUNK of humanity. The West either ignores them completely or thinks they're all terrorists or they're all victims. No other major religion is treated this way, Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism...

I don't know. Maybe I'm making that up. It's just that that's what it smells like.

But yeah, we're not innocent at all. I do think there's also a big problem in political thinking in the West where responsibilty isn't very well understood, I think you can create the context within which things can flourish and be responsible for creating that context while those taking advantage of that context are responsible for taking advantage and the West is TERRIBLE at understanding that geopolitical processes can have more than one contributing factor, or that responsibility can be given to both parties in a destructive process like war. We always want heroes, never people. I have to say I've had far better conversations about war in general with MUSLIMS than Westerners, Westerners are always playing guessing games and looking for the One Big Monolithic Cause that we can point a finger at and it just makes everything even more obscure.

[CJCRANE]

33. I think it's far simpler than that. Western leaders mislead us

and didn't actually want to implement liberal democracy in the ME, as they claimed.

You have to look at their actions and the results of their actions, not the rhetoric and excuses.

Our leaders don't even want *us* to have liberal democracy, they're doing everything they can to dismantle it via austerity, emergency war powers, surveillance, open borders, free trade zones, corporate socialism etc.

[snagglepuss]

34. Depressed and loss of identity? Bollocks. More like arrogant malignant narcissists.

Campbells’ Psychiatric Dictionary defines malignant narcissism as a mix of narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, aggression and sadism.

[sibelian]

35. *Some* of them, yeah, ok.

But I think you're talking about the motivators and ringleaders. A lot of guys getting caught up in gangs get absorbed into gangs for completely different reasons.

[snagglepuss]

36. Fair enough however a psychiatrist told me a number of years ago that

most depressives are narcissistic. I was surprised to hear that but it then made sense. With that in mind those who are attracted to gangs could well be depressed and what make gangs so attractive is that they meet their narcissistic needs of being the most powerful, the most feared, the most respected.

[NickB79]

13. They're banking on a massive response from said militaries, with the ensuing civilian casualties

Just like the US invasion of Iraq: we decimated their cities, installed a puppet government and killed 100,000 civilians, which gave ISIS millions of individuals either sympathetic to their cause, or who viewed them as the lesser of two evils.

What ISIS is doing isn't insanity. They're a fucking Hydra, sprouting two new heads every time we cut one off.

[Rex]

16. They are a death cult so death follows them around like a puppy dog.

They are irrational people with no rhyme or reason...just straight up carnage for carnage's sake. Cruelty, torture and death are their religion. Has nothing to do with some nebulous deity or glory.

IMO.

[LiberalArkie]

26. They have said that they want to bring about the end times with the great battle.

Just like our fundies want to do also.

[The2ndWheel]

27. They want a fight

[BeyondGeography]

28. They must be running low on new content ideas for their video and social media platforms

[Lizzie Poppet]

29. Their quasi-military branch probably has.

But I think Daesh already realized its little pissant "caliphate" was doomed, at least for the time being. With increasing intervention by several genuine military powers, there was no way they are going to be able to occupy and hold territory. They're already making the switch to more "conventional" terrorist activities. Those will be harder to eradicate...but the people they're currently victimizing in the areas they control may not give a damn about that.