ISIS

[think positive]

Funny I put in an antidote about a friend of mine, who happens to be a 25% Muslim, in the way I'm 25% Christian, (ie I don't go to church now the kids have finished school!) and yet deleted it cos when ever I put something personal on in a thread like this I cop it! Pam is a wonderful friend, she recently went home to Croatia as her dad took in, and sadly passed there. Her opinion on the treatment of woman by hard core Muslims is the same, and the reason she is raising her daughters here.

We share "merry Christmases" and I offer greetings on her "other Christmas" as she calls it! Like wise the Hindu couple across the road. I'm pretty hopeful most folks can say the same thing. I guess I just assume most people on a forum would assume one was talking about hard ore religionists. But hey I've been called crazy already! Cheers

[HAL]

I'm sure she would like to hear about that.

[watt price tully]

[David]

Not sure you can blame Bush for Syria at all. That's an at least three way conflict between a ruthless government, Islamist groups and progressive revolutionaries, all of whom would have quite capably existed without US intervention in the region.

Iraq, however, and any further spread of IS? I blame that squarely on the "Coalition of the Drilling".

[watt price tully]

[David]

While there's probably some truth to that, we can't just point the finger at the US for every Middle Eastern conflict. What about Russia? Iran? Israel? Saudi Arabia? The Assad regime? The progressive protestors in North Africa? Al-Qaeda? All the smaller factions and interest groups?

By being too US-centric in these discussions, we actually risk denying agency to other groups of people, in the end caricaturing them as being a lot more helpless and passive than they are. America could disappear tomorrow (or have never existed) and the world would still be 95% as violent as it is now.

[think positive]

[watt price tully]

[Wokko]

Almost everything that went wrong can be laid at the feet of whoever decided it would be a good idea to disband the Iraqi army post war. It's those guys who ran the insurgency because there were no jobs for young Sunnis and being a fighter at least supported them and their families. Those same Sunnis are now fighting for IS in Iraq. Of course there would still be a jihadist movement and Islamist agitation I'm sure, but a trained, effective, happy Iraqi army would've gone a long way to preventing or stopping this kind of thing.

It's my biggest gripe with the whole Iraq conflict. To so easily win a war with so much local and international goodwill then throw it all away with such a ridiculous and obvious **** up still amazes me. It's not just hindsight either, there were plenty of commentators at the time just astounded at that decision.

[pietillidie]

And, if I may, I only think imperialism is wholly responsible for one thing: Our now direct moral responsibility for what is an interrelated complex of chaos. I have already offered an organic explanation for the causality of this kind of scenario, so it is odd to be told I believe something I simply don't believe.

If you interfere in a region whose sectarian issues were explained to me well enough at the age of 15 in high school, you sure as hell are morally responsible for the ensuing carnage. Moreover, to keep using other people's moral struggles as justification for your own role is just immature deflection; I don't vote in Iraq and Syria, I vote in Australia, meaning the sphere of Australia's actions in the world, notably through its tight foreign policy coupling with the US is my primary moral responsibility. Dealing with *my* moral responsibility as a matter of priority has nothing to do with my technical apportioning of causal factors (would you like me to whip up a quick pathway analysis for you? )

Moreover, not only are we first and above all morally responsible for our own sphere of actions, we are charged with trying to assess them honestly. The overtly negligent, compromised and outright corrupt failures of Iraq demonstrate two critical things when attempting to analyse a world which includes our own subjective selves:

1. It demonstrates the fallacy that we are somehow less capable of violence at a mass scale than Others

2. Its perpetual understatement demonstrates the reflexive ease with which we justify our own actions, and demonize the actions of others, despite our knowledge of our own grossly compromised and outright corrupt actions being matters of clear public record, and the actions of others being hidden beneath, ahem, a veil of distance and layers of paid public relations and sponsored media interests.

If you think you can play a role in an organic complex without taking on responsibility for that role and all of the connective nodes it entails, then you're living in an immature bubble of denial. Even worse when it was trumpeted as a self-appointed "leadership" role of the "willing", no less.

[Mugwump]

^ WPT, I don't live in Australia and I was writing more generally about the issue. My point is a well-worn one, and it's that democracy is for those who are in-situ citizens. It is purpose-built to allow those who are incumbent to debate the effects of change on their society, amd one of the greatest changes is the change in values that arises as a result of immigration.

Now, I positively support immigration, I support pluralism, i support playing our part in taking in genuine refugees, and I have no truck with incivility. What I don't support is the attempt to suppress or divert debate about the effects of Islam on our society through the cry of racism and Islamophobia. The burqa, the "kill Rushdie" marches in the Uk through the 80s and 90s, the terrorism problem, and the Imams urging their followers to kill British Jews and British soldiers - all are signs to me that there is something wrong with parts of Islam, and we are importing this.

In a vibrant democracy this will be patiently discussed, weighed, and debated by ordinary men and women who have the right to argue for and against change, up to the point where they seek violence. Instead, such discussion is often howled down by the cry of "islamophobia" or racism. I'm not going to rehash the TP-PTID exchange, as it didn't pass my test of civility in debate, and i think it's better that it be allowed to RiP.

My point about intellectual elites - of which i am presumably a member- is that democracy was designed for the people to make laws, not those who see the world through a certain lens of education, opportunity, global access, or assumptions. If you don't feel that the elites are running way ahead of the people they purport to serve, then i've got a Euro to sell you. If that observation puts me in the same camp as uncle Joe Stalin, well, so does a taste for Georgian cuisine. The last time we shot the breeze together I suggested he might have gone a bit far killing 20 million, but he just grunted and asked me to pass the Souzi.

Final point - I'm genuinely not ducking this, but i've lived away from Australia for a long time, and so I don't have much context to judge. I didn't vote for Abbott, as i disagre with most of his public statements and I loathe his polarising style. I do, however, support close surveillance of Islamic extremism and I do accept that we need to give up some freedom post London, New York, Atocha, Nairobi et al. Perhaps because London is my home, and 55 ordinary Londoners on their way to work were killed on our transport system (with many more maimed) in 2005, I have a sharp sense of what these people want to do. I don't know that Australia gets it yet, even post Bali. Monitoring this should be a major priority for any government. If the Abbott govt is pursuing it hard, then that might be the only policy they have with which I clearly agree.

Sorry for the long post.

NB edited, as usual, at least once for my lousy iPad typing, and for clarity etc.

[pietillidie]

[Mugwump]

[Mugwump]

[pietillidie]