It is easy to be ironical, pose as a saint, and ponder:”Why stop at Isis when we could bomb the whole Muslim world? Humanitarian arguments, if consistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East.”
I generally like The Guardian’s Mr. Monbiot, and I understand he has to be funny and controversial to earn his keep. Yet, is that ethical? No. If “ISIS” (Daesh) could get its hands on Mr. Monbiot, they would saw through his throat as if he were another sheep (or Abraham’s son, whoever!). It’s something Fundamentalist Muslims have to do. I pointed this dynamic feature in many essays in the past, such as “Violence in the Holy Qur’an“. It’s best addressed this way:
French Rafale Hunting True Believers In Ultimate Violence
Here are a few quotes from the first real chapter (“sura”) in the Qur’an. “the Cow”:
“A fire has been prepared for the disbelievers, whose fuel is men and stones.’ [Qur’an s. 2: v. 24]
“Disbelievers will be burned with fire.” [Koran, S. 2:39, v. 90]
“Jews are the greediest of all humankind. They’d like to live 1000 years. But they are going to hell.” [Koran, s. 2: v.96]
“Allah will leave the disbelievers alone for a while, but then he will compel them to the doom of Fire.” [Koran, s. 2:v. 126]
“Kill disbelievers wherever you find them. If they attack you, then kill them. Such is the reward of disbelievers. (But if they desist in their unbelief, then don’t kill them.) [Qur’an s.2:v. 191-2]
“War is ordained by Allah, and all Muslims must be willing to fight, whether they like it or not.” [s. 2: v. 216]
“Those who marry unbelievers will burn in the Fire.” [2:221]
“Disbelievers worship false gods. They will burn forever in the Fire.” 2:257″
That’s just the first chapter, sura 2, as I said. Nothing wrong with it, of course, if you don’t take it too seriously. But apparently too many take it all too seriously, as they learn little else.
The same problem arose with Christianity: was the Bible to be taken literally? It was solved by the Church’s Founding Fathers, around 400 CE, by deciding it was all allegoric, metaphorical, etc. The exact opposite decision was taken by one Caliph around 850 CE.
Hence the on-going need to flatten completely some systems of thoughts and moods infesting the Middle East, as Ebola does West Africa. As Monbiot points out unwittingly.
Says Monbiot:”Let’s bomb the Muslim world – all of it – to save the lives of its people. Surely this is the only consistent moral course? Why stop at Islamic State (Isis), when the Syrian government has murdered and tortured so many? This, after all, was last year’s moral imperative. What’s changed?
How about blasting the Shia militias in Iraq? One of them selected 40 people from the streets of Baghdad in June and murdered them for being Sunnis. Another massacred 68 people at a mosque in August. They now talk openly of “cleansing” and “erasure” once Isis has been defeated. As a senior Shia politician warns, “we are in the process of creating Shia al-Qaida radical groups equal in their radicalisation to the Sunni Qaida”.
What humanitarian principle instructs you to stop there?”
Then Monbiot in his stupidity, proposes to bomb Israel, Iran, etc. He forgets that Israel is an ally, and Iran used to be one, and could be one again. Besides both have more or less free elections. After the French started to bomb in Iraq, the Iranian president came over, and visited with the French president, in peaceful agreement about the necessity to flatten terrorists.
The leaders of the West made no mystery that they are destroying fanatics according to the prime moral directive, namely survival. Saving the Middle Earth is secondary.
It is true that, as I have been saying for decades, and now Monbiot repeats, the plutocratic connections between Assad and London, or the Saudi family and Washington, ought to be brought to light (actually Monbiot does not mention the former: too close to his employer, and his social circles, I guess…). There is a global plutocracy problem, and it has impacted the Middle Earth, from Ukraine, to Pakistan, Libya…
However, it is useful to consult with a bit of history, Mr. Monbiot. In 1936, similar arguments to the ones you brandish, under the guise of irony, were used to do nothing about the Civil War in Spain. The first step is the hardest, and that’s getting into the fray, and flattening those who want to flatten much of what passes for civilization, in this world.
Another point is that there was certainly something very wrong with the Christianity of the Inquisition. If such ferocious Christians existed today, had an army, and invaded, one should certainly intervene, and flatten them. It would be a matter of security of the Republic, civilization, and… peace. I am all for sending some Rafales against Louis IX, the so-called Saint Louis, a rabid murderous fanatic of the worse type, and give him the Qaddafi treatment. However, as he died nearly 750 years ago in Tunis, I will have to content myself with scathing criticism.
Islam is also a religion of Europe, and the USA, and ferocious, murderous Islamist organizations ought to be treated just as ferocious, murderous Christian fundamentalist organizations would be, if they were still around, killing and torturing.
By the way the present Pope is more than an hypocrite. He loves Opus Dei, the closest thing we have to the Inquisition, which took part in the massacre of millions of Spaniards, and has entangled itself with the West’s plutocratic circles… And probably Putin. The Pope just “beatified” the founder of Opus Dei. Opus Satanas is more like it.
This, of course indicates that the present Pope, below his benevolent smile, was in hock with the Argentinian dictatorship, as charged.
The present bombing in Iraq and Syria is highly targeted. The big bombs below that Rafale above are guided by laser beams, they land within a meter of the target. We are very far from the area bombing which flattened Hitler’s Reich. The French Air Force Rafale depicted can, and does, hunt, identify and destroyed individual vehicles (that’s how Qaddafi was targeted, hit, and, later died, after spending some time in a tunnel like a bleeding rat).
Scathing irony does not replace deep thinking, or, for that matter, scathing thinking.
Patrice Ayme’.
Tags: Bombing, ISIL, ISIS, Islam, Monbiot, Qur'an, System of Moods, system of thought, Violence
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
October 2, 2014 at 1:01 am |
I confess that I doubt that bombing alone can solve this issue, and I see that some military chiefs in the US think the same. You can do damage with bombing, but unless you turn the whole area into glass, you can only control the area with infantry. I am unimpressed with the Iraqi army at the moment, as they have run when they outnumber the ISIS fighters by about 9 to 1. (Note that von Manstein usually won when he was outnumbered by less than 9 :1 !) I know the US is sending advisors, but they have spent billions on advising already.
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October 2, 2014 at 1:24 am |
France has had advisers on the ground, lots of them, in Kurdistan, for weeks. Now there are even British advisers.
The idea is to be the anti-ISIL Air Force, like the Luftwaffe was Franco’s and Mussolini’s Air Force during the Spanish Civil war, if you will forgive that analogy of admittedly dubious taste.
It’s working super well. Rafales (which have superior detection pods) are flying missions to hunt for vehicles, so ISIL had to forget about convoys. They can pick up fuel and ammunition depots.
Goes without saying that the USA are doing the same on an even larger scale.
Air war has bad repute, because of absurd lies about World War Two. In truth, air domination was dominant then.
Von Manstein could not rescue von Paulus at Stalingrad. It’s well known Goering was a failure there (he had said he could maintain a sufficient air bridge). But it seems to me Von Manstein also was also one. Anyway, I don’t like him, as he was close to the worst type of Nazis, and survived the war, and kept on Nazifying until his death, keeping the Bundesweher very Nazified.
I mean I admire in some ways some Nazis, sometimes. Even Rommel, an ex-mass murderer Nazi fanatic, did some good things in 1944. But Manstein… At Stalingrad, he had a lot of force at his disposal.
The Peshmerga are fighting well. All this is possible, because the West finally decided to let the Kurds be. Seems like the Turks may swallow the pill too. I am for a free Kurdistan. Turkey could give it as many right as Catalonia, to start with.
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October 2, 2014 at 3:16 am |
I am afraid I disagree about Stalingrad. Von Manstein could have rescued von Paulus, but he needed some help from von Paulus. The problem was, Hitler wanted Stalingrad held, and that was not possible because there were too many Russians, it was winter, and in obeying Hitler, von Paulus refused to fight away from Stalingrad. Von Manstein punched a hole up to the edges of Stalingrad in weather that was unsuitable for his armour, and von Paulus had to order his men out that hole.
As for Goering, he was a clod of the first order. There was no way he could supply Stalingrad even if there were no enemy air defence because Germany did not have heavy lift aircraft. Winter and enemy aircraft were added difficulties. Goering also managed to find the only air tactics that ensured he lost the battle of Britain, despite the big advantage he had.
Fortunately for us, Hitler bungled the whole western advance. He should have rolled the tanks onto Dunkirk (sorry for the spelling, but I have forgotten the local spelling) and captured the British expeditionary force. After that, a short burst of proper air battle, then an invasion would almost certainly have worked because Britain would have been essentially defenceless.
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October 2, 2014 at 4:58 am |
Well, he did not roll into Dunquerque because:
1) the tank army was exhausted. After about two weeks on drugs, barely sleeping (a full week without), on amphetamines, and tanks breaking down, they:
2) met fierce resistance from the French army which was under absolute orders to hold the perimeter to allow the British army (and lots of the French army) to escape. The French and British commands knew that, if the one and only British army was captured, the war was lost.
So:
the Nazis depicted the whole thing like their choice, and then a problem with Goering. But the truth was that Dunquerque was a MAJOR defeat for Hitler and company.
This being said, re-enactment of the Nazi attack of May 1940, nearly never show a Nazi victory. The Nazis were desperate, and they got very very lucky. Because they were detected way too late, and the incredibly stupid deception by Hitler to attack the Netherlands unbelievably worked.
The French High Command demolished the armored fast deployment reserve headed by Girault. Each of these seven each divisions was at least equal to one of the ten Panzer. Plus the French had three and a half extremely heavy divisions, completely unstoppable.
To come back to Stalingrad, I reckoned that Von Manstein had fallen well short of its objectives, in space, and time. But it’s true that, in a Freudian lapse, Hitler had ordered to hold the city at all cost, claiming that otherwise they would never be back there, ever. The sortie von Paulus had prepared at some point, was never launched.
Anyway, good riddance to bad rubbish. The Sixth army had been playing hero in France, being very lucky, and it deserved to die. Amen.
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October 2, 2014 at 5:50 am
OK, we disagree again in places, and I guess we differ on what exactly were the facts, and there is no way of sorting them. The invasion of the Netherlands was, in my view, incompetent in that far too many forces were devoted to it. They beat the Dutch about twenty times and were very lucky in France with what were really insufficient forces. The German records do not show the tanks were exhausted, but rather Goering had his way, and as I noted above, he was a clod. But I guess we don’t know.
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October 2, 2014 at 6:21 am
The Goering thing, I can’t get no satisfaction, was disinformation. More in separate comment.
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October 2, 2014 at 5:12 am |
Chris Snuggs: Time to revive the “Axis of Evil”, now to include: the CCP, the Putin regime, the entire Middle East, Pakistan, multiple other “stans” and several African regimes, including Sudan. All should be expelled from the UN for multiple and flagrant human rights abuses.
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October 2, 2014 at 5:13 am |
Expelling from the UN was never tried, and it’s redundant. Moreover, it would remind us of the SDN. Bad idea. Putin is submitted to sanctions. He can broken, just like Rhodesia, and South Africa. He is going to get squeezed bad. The price of oil is going down… While Saudi Arabia is sitting on its hands (not reducing production). And now the West is on the warpath, a clear warning for Ukraine.
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October 2, 2014 at 6:26 am |
Nazi tank attacks, and other massive tank attacks were characterized by (less than) three weeks advance, and then stop. The stop at Dunkirk corresponded to all out artillery barrage by the French army. This was all disguised into it’s-the-fault-to-Goering’s fancy.
The truth is that the Nazis were completely out of means at that point. The Nazi system had bitten more than it could chew.
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October 2, 2014 at 2:44 pm |
You may recall Edgar Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum – where a desperate victim of the Spanish Inquisition is rescued in extremis by French General Lasalle.
Although definitely at odds with the facts, this story illustrates how force, and force only, can loosen the grip of religious tyranny. And how fragile such a victory can prove.
In 1815, when the British-led Seventh Coalition reinstated civilization and freedom all over Europe, the Inquisition was reinstated in Spain as well. Hoo-Ray! Cheers in Westminster!
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October 2, 2014 at 8:42 pm |
Dear Dominique: One of my defects is that I spurn literature. I’m too busy with reality. So Edgar Poe is beyond my radar. Hence it’s good to hear that Poe share the desire to flatten the superstitious ones when they themselves have used force to impose their mental imbalance.
Yes 1815 was definitively no progress. The Poles and the Jews were re-enslaved and viciously discriminated all over. And they were not the only ones. 1815 explains 1933. Actually the entire rise of Prussia was a Westminster’ conspiracy and machination. From 1756 on.
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October 2, 2014 at 8:55 pm |
Scathing criticism fights Alzheimer, and other ageing of the brain.
Yet, Oxytocin, the love hormone, extends life. It seems. That is, if confirmed: love really extends life. Human trials are starting soon. Even love is getting to become a province of science… and life extension.
My point long made (and mad!) about all the passions.
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October 2, 2014 at 8:56 pm |
Fascinating! Patrice, do you have a link to that research?
Paul Handover October 2, 2014
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October 2, 2014 at 8:57 pm |
Fascinating, indeed. So is GF11. Local research in a place called Stanford U. I came across it, as part of something bigger. I guess I, thus my site, am the link, hahaha.
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