Anyone see 'The Jihadis Next Door' last night. Some charming stuff in there.

[Berni]

It was particularly good when they ate a takeaway and giggled at execution videos. :-

Although there was some light relief as a fat lad on the Edgware Road told the white convert to suck his mum.

[7evens]

WTF is that all about. Wasn't that deemed as treason in the old days. :shrug:

[Luis Anaconda]

Is Jack Smethurst still around?

[Dorset Gooner]

[Mo Britain less Europe]

[Berni]

http://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2015/05/26/11/4AbuHaleema2605a.jpg

[7evens]

He's probably playing Lago in Othello.

[Berni]

extremists in Britain. My solution is we fly them and their families off to Turkey, take their passports to ensure they never come back and let them get on with it. Judging by the intellectual calibre of the pond life on display last night, I can't think they'd be anything but a burden it ISIS.

[7evens]

No problem with letting back in but they should face mandatory prison sentences for treason.
The defence would presumably run rings around the prosecution trying to secure any proof..

[Berni]

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51sNkc4esDL._SX342_.jpg

[Brentwood]

[Classic Jorge]

Also, I imagine they'd probably be more useful here, in terms of intelligence.

I dont really get the treason argument, they arent committing crimes against the sovereign or state are they?

[Classic Jorge]

[Berni]

fighting against Crown forces, I'd say a charge of treason would be reasonable.

It is treason:



Quote:



to levy war against the sovereign "in order by force or constraint to compel her to change her measures or counsels, or in order to put any force or constraint upon or in order to intimidate or overawe both Houses or either House of Parliament", or
to "move or stir" any foreigner to invade the United Kingdom or any other country belonging to the sovereign.






Bang to motherf**king rights imo

[Berni]

It is to that that they give their allegiance.

[Classic Jorge]

They'd have to be one tall arsed allan to engage them in anything else but being blown to pieces.

[Berni]

But all they need to do is to fire an AK, an RPG or AA gun at our planes to be taking up arms against them. Indeed, if they commit to fight for ISIS, they are in effect taking up arms against Crown forces. That is treason.

[Classic Jorge]

So lets look through the practicalities of letting people back in then. When they get here do we just stick them onto the first plane from Gatwick back to ISISville, yeah?

Listen, I'm about as far from Jack Bauer as the next man but if I was being pragmatic about things I'd have them interrogated, everything logged and then have them watched and monitored. It makes no sense to refuse someone entry.

[Classic Jorge]

[Ashberto]

After all the hoo-ha of the debate I haven't seen or read anything about the specifics of any action taken.

As for the Allans, if they join IS they have joined a self-proclaimed country who wish to kill and enslave us all, so death's too good for 'em basically imo, whether they are fighting UK forces or not.

[Classic Jorge]

Anyone would think it was done just for show. I mean the americans didnt even mention us in their thank yous, instead mentioning germany, france, saudis and all sorts of other countries.

Still, preferable to indescriminately killing loads of poor *******s that just happen to live there.

[Berni]

in internment camps. However, you can't do that sort of thing over here, worse luck.

Much better, then, to keep them in the Middle East where attitudes to these matters are rather more lax and they can be quietly tortured or bumped off with nobody noticing.

[Classic Jorge]

Anyway, even after the frankly pisspoor conduct of the last 10-15 years in the region I'm sure we could find some friendly local puppet states to torture them and give us a load more useless information we can use to justify the next round of invasions.

[dingdong666]

[Berni]

I simply don't want these c**ts walking our streets and collecting their disability benefits (one of them last night has had 'Chronic Fatigue Syndrome' since his late teens and has never worked a day in his life, apparently :hehe: ). Better to solve the problem by doing them in.

[Classic Jorge]

You're no better than them

[Berni]

equals. My desire is to protect a diverse, democratic, liberal society by any means necessary, whereas their expressed aim is to enslave the world under a repressive, regressive, authoritarian, misogynistic and barbaric theocratic regime that would wipe out all the philosophical and societal advances of the Enlightenment at one stroke and drag us back to a Dark Age society.

To draw moral equivalence between those two positions is fatuous in the extreme. Sure, I want them dead just as much as they want us dead, but that doesn't make us morally equivalent.

[Classic Jorge]

Remember, we've been down this route before, several times, and this strategy yields little other than a new head on the hydra for us to spend yet more billions cutting off.

Ignore as many precedents as you want but dont act the outraged party when it comes back to smack you on the arse the next time.

[Ashberto]

Defending oneself against an existential threat to one's society by eliminating that threat is absolutely not the same thing as being that existential threat.

[Berni]

The Hydra (i.e. radical Islam) exists as a consequence of the centuries of declining power and influence in the Islamic world and is a petulant reaction to western, 'Christian' European global dominance, which flies in the face of everything Islam teaches about the superiority of its adherents to the rest of the world.

People trying to trace the roots of radical Islam to the end of the First or Second World Wars are thinking in a laughably short term way. We were fighting it in the Sudan in the second half of the 19th Century with the Mahdi - exactly the same principles. They believe that God has told them they will have hegemony over the world and yet everywhere they see that non-Muslim states are wealthier, more advanced and more powerful. This does not chime with what they believe, so they take up arms to change it and, as they see it, fulfil the promises of the Qu'ran.

Radical Islam is not a product of western foreign policy - no matter how often we like to beat ourselves up by telling us that it is. It is the logical result of the cognitive dissonance muslims feel between what they are told by their religion and the realities of the world around them. It's going to keep existing until either they win or they are persuaded by being on the wrong end of enough defeat to make them change their minds. That's why we have to keep cutting the heads off the Hydra.

[Classic Jorge]

And I'm pretty sure that the number one justification they would use is that we are an existential threat to them. So, using that justification automatically puts both sides level in a moral sense anyway, no?

[Berni]

It may be true in one sense, but no-one in their right mind would argue that it made killing Nazis wrong.

[Classic Jorge]

Radical Islam might well not be a product of western foreign policy but it is now very much a reaction to it.

Also, and I cant stess the importance of this enough, ISIS are using US bought arms and armaments in Iraq and Syria and they are making most of their revenues through the western infrastructure put in place to transport their natural resources to market so this is very much our golem, even more so than Al Quaeda were a product of the US funding Mujahadeen fighters facing the soviets in afghanistan in the 80s.

[redgunamo]

There's really no need to bring morals into it though. Like the football, you just want your team to win.

[redgunamo]

[Classic Jorge]

[Ashberto]

I know it is in your AWIMB contract to always argue against the west, but you could actually do that by accusing the west of failling to stand up for its own enlightment ideas, rather than making excuses for barbarians who would destroy that enlightement.

In other words: Why not live in Raqqa if both sides are essentially the same?

[Berni]

dominate the world whatever their silly book says. Western foreign policy is just an excuse for radical Islam - as is Israel and pretty much everything else they use to justify their actions.

As for the argument that our need for oil is at the root of this, it's again rather simplistic thinking. Our need for oil is the only leverage these people have, so they use it. Had they been in Africa or somewhere equally useless, we'd simply have wiped them out wholesale. However, their control of vital energy resources has unfortunately meant we have to cosy up with them to some extent - however vile they are. That, I agree, is unfortunate, but since we do need oil, short of invading Saudi et al and operating them as colonies, I'd like to know what your alternative would have been.

[Berni]

[Classic Jorge]

Both sides use an existential threat from the other as justification of their actions, if it's a valid justification for one then it has to be for the other.

Do I believe in enlightenment values? Yes. Do I believe either side are acting in accordance with those values? No.

I'm not attempting to justify what they do, then again I'm also not attempting to justify what we do.

[redgunamo]

[Berni]

to behave in ways that are not peaceful, liberal or democratic in order to protect their people and their way of life?

[redgunamo]

living there :shrug:

[Classic Jorge]

My point was that we've essentially facilitated this whole business by a) flooding the region with up to date weaponry and b) buying the oil off of ISIS.

[Ashberto]

[Classic Jorge]

It doesnt really come down to rights.

I'm not pretending to have the answer here but I'm saying that using an answer which has yet to work, and seems to create a tougher question next time around, may not be the best way forward.

[Luis Anaconda]

The non-booze allowers, not the journalists --- well maybe also

[Classic Jorge]

Would we be best served doing so on a case by case basis or a blanket one?

[redgunamo]

It's nobody's place to worry overmuch about the who or why. What matters is that you get paid.

[Classic Jorge]

Bravo for that

[Berni]

US should leave Iraq before it was able to stand on its own feet and the Americans - being a rather squeamish and weak-willed lot in some ways - duly complied. That power vacuum was almost instantly filled by ISIS.

The point, then, is not whether we ought to have gone into Iraq, but that, once we had, we had a duty to stay there until the job was properly done.

So if you were to say to me that Western foreign policy failed in Iraq because it lacked the courage of its convictions, I would agree.

Oh, and I didn't say oil was at the root of anything. It is merely a complicating factor that unfortunately cannot be ignored.

[redgunamo]

Or, at least, what it does?

[Berni]

that never engage in war like Sweden. Switzerland, etc. An argument that rather falls down on the fact that they are only afforded that luxury by the existence of other liberal democracies that are prepared to go to war to defend them should the need arise. It is an essentially cowardly argument.

[redgunamo]

[Classic Jorge]

Though I do seem to remember the same cheerleaders for war thinking it was another fantastic idea to invade Iraq too, even though the job in Afghanistan - again a notion everyone seemed mystifyingly in favour of - wasnt even close to being done.

The main issue is that Oil has undeniably been the main source of ISIS' wealth, and subsequent power in the region. Well that and billions of dorra of US kit.

[redgunamo]

Or doesn't it count unless a Bush is in charge?

[Classic Jorge]

...peaceful or liberal though.

To suggest western powers like posess the arms and armies they do for defensive purposes is also utter ****, it's for defending their foreign interests generated by pursuing an aquisitive foreign policy.

[Berni]

will.

The same goes for Afghanistan, although Afghanistan is such a f**king basket case that it may resist any attempt to improve it until domesday. They just like killing each other - and the only thing they like more than killing each other is killing foreigners. :shrug:

We need oil. We have to buy it and unfortunately we have to buy it from whoever's got it. As for the kit, that's what countries who are having a failure of will do when they leave a country - they hand loads of weapons to the 'good guys' in the vain hope that this will make everything OK. It never does. And anyway, even the Americans weren't stupid enough to let them have the really good stuff.

[Berni]

[Classic Jorge]

What bit of the weak justifcations particularly appealed to you, was it the old WMD chestnut or the idea that it was a haven for our old friend "turr"? Perhaps it was the killing Saddam bit.

I have to say, putting the failure of the whole business down to pressure from "the left" is a peach. Only I thought the abject lack of strategy from the very start was the main reason the whole business failed. You know, the scattering of the Ba'ath party, the disbanding of the army and police, that sort of business.

[Classic Jorge]

[Ashberto]

it? You may disagree with the conduct of both sides but that does not make both sides the same. Eventually you must decide who your friends are, even if you don't entirely agree with them.

[Berni]

I saw it as an opportunity for the West to create a solid power base in the heart of the Middle East from which we could exert influence directly over the region and in which we could establish an effective democratic Arab state. Unfortunately, we bottled it.

[Classic Jorge]

[redgunamo]

money and jobs and Royal Marines and Sixth Fleets and stuff.