Terrible, horrible attack in Paris

Quote: AZDuffman

I understand that islam is incompatible with modern western values and is in fact at war with the west. .

Quote: the Atlantic

Before the caliphate, “maybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,” Choudary told me. “These laws are in abeyance until we have khilafa”—a caliphate—“and now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example, individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the territory where the caliph is applying these laws....

In return, the caliph commands obedience—and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are considered apostates

Quote: Atlantic

Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading...

After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth, but Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus. An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.

Quote: Atlantic

The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group’s actions...

In London, Choudary and his students provided detailed descriptions of how the Islamic State must conduct its foreign policy, now that it is a caliphate. It has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as “offensive jihad,” the forcible expansion into countries that are ruled by non-Muslims. “Hitherto, we were just defending ourselves,” Choudary said; without a caliphate, offensive jihad is an inapplicable concept. But the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential duty of the caliph.

It’s hard to overstate how hamstrung the Islamic State will be by its radicalism....

The United States and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State belatedly and in an apparent daze.... If we had identified the Islamic State’s intentions early, and realized that the vacuum in Syria and Iraq would give it ample space to carry them out, we might, at a minimum, have pushed Iraq to harden its border with Syria and preemptively make deals with its Sunnis. That would at least have avoided the electrifying propaganda effect created by the declaration of a caliphate just after the conquest of Iraq’s third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama told The New Yorker that he considered ISIS to be al-Qaeda’s weaker partner. “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” the president said....

Quote: Atlantic

Some observers have called for escalation, including several predictable voices from the interventionist right (Max Boot, Frederick Kagan), who have urged the deployment of tens of thousands of American soldiers. These calls should not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly genocidal organization is on its potential victims’ front lawn, and it is committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls... If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding.

Quote: Atlantic

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.

The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest. Al-Qaeda’s core is rare among jihadist groups for its focus on the “far enemy” (the West); most jihadist groups’ main concerns lie closer to home. That’s especially true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its ideology. It sees enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the expansion to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much directly: in November he told his Saudi agents to “deal with the rafida [Shia] first … then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] … before the crusaders and their bases.”

The foreign fighters (and their wives and children) have been traveling to the caliphate on one-way tickets: they want to live under true Sharia, and many want martyrdom. Doctrine, recall, requires believers to reside in the caliphate if it is at all possible for them to do so....

Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.

Quote: boymimbo

Most Muslims are not a problem and the reason why neighborhoods of Muslims are "ghettoized" is the same reason that black neighborhoods are "ghettoized". When you congregate people into an area and they aren't making much money, you will get a poor looking neighborhood. You think that because you know of a neighborhood that has been ghettoized that Muslims are bad. There are bad neighborhoods all over the US that are not concentrations of Muslims.

Quote:

Islam is a peaceful religion like Christianity and is not at war with the west. You think that 14 dead people in terrorist attacks in the last year is a reason to mark Muslims as bad. You must then think that lightning, guns, and cars are bad as they kill far more people every year than Muslims ever could. Extremist Islam is at war with the West.

I look at the big picture. You think that because there have been 41 terrorist attacks/attempted attacks on US soil so far this century in the past 16 years, 14 of them related to Muslims, with a total of about 40 perpetrators (and this includes 9/11) killing about 3,030 people that Muslims are bad people.

The rate of Muslim attackers/Muslim ratio in the USA is about one attacker per million US Muslims per year. (2.5 Muslim attackers per year in a population of 2.5 million Muslims).

Yet you're looking at the big picture?

Quote: terapined

You don't understand Islam
We are not at war with Dearborn MI

Quote: terapined

You don't understand Islam
We are not at war with Dearborn MI

Quote: AZDuffman

Yeah, Dearborn is a real great, tolerant place.

Quote: terapined

Its meaningless

Quote: terapined

Its meaningless

Quote: terapined

The difference between you and me is that I believe the majority of Muslims are peaceful