Islam is evil and stuck in the 7th century...
Why Syria Can’t Be Fixed
The root cause of the conflict is Islam.
December 17, 2015
Daniel Greenfield
...
It’s not about human rights or justice. It’s about destabilizing your neighbors by exploiting their internal divisions. It’s how Islam achieved its original conquests by pitting Christians against each other.
Russia wants to put Syria back together again, but it also wants it vulnerable and in need of Moscow’s help. Iran feeds the chaos to control Syria’s Shiites and set off civil wars around the region. The Saudis, Qataris and the Turks want Obama to put the Muslim Brotherhood and various Islamists in power.
Obama wants the problem to go away because ISIS is making him look bad. But all the other players care even less about ISIS than he does. Russia did not get into Syria because of ISIS. Since then the terror group has become a major nuisance and Putin isn’t likely to forget or forgive, but neither is he going to spend too much time and money fighting a non-aligned terror group. ISIS is not a threat to Russia. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar however are a threat to Russian interests and fighting their militias comes first.
The state sponsors of Sunni terror find ISIS more irritating because the Caliphate’s major objective is to crush rival Jihadist groups funded by Sunni countries and force them to submit to the Caliph. ISIS doesn’t want to be another Saudi or Qatari terrorist puppet. It wants to be its own terror state and subsume them all. But it’s exploiting the Saudi and Qatari popularization of Islamic terrorism to do so.
The Sunni states see Iran as much more of a threat than ISIS. If their various Islamist militias lose, ISIS is their backup plan. And while they may put on a show, they won’t fight too hard against it. They may still need ISIS. Iran and Assad likewise see ISIS as a useful way to entangle their Sunni enemies in infighting.
And so, despite all the posturing, fighting ISIS is not actually a priority for anyone.
The Russians have put on a good show, but it’s more about boosting arms sales through pointless displays of advanced weaponry than about destroying ISIS. Putin’s bombing campaign is the equivalent of one of his staged pictures hunting zebras or diving underwater to spear sharks. Obama is no slacker at staging photoshoots either. His bombing campaign is also a show, but it’s an even more hollow display.
And there’s no realistic endgame to any of it.
Syria’s problems are built in. The only thing that would help is fundamentally redrawing the maps of the region along ethnic and religious lines. But while everyone is eager to impose a two-state solution on Israel, no one talks about two-stating Syria or three-stating Iraq. And so it isn’t going to get any better.
ISIS is smarter and more practical than Al Qaeda. That makes it more dangerous in the long run. It’s not thinking about terrorist attacks in Europe or America just in order to kill us, but to build the beginnings of Islamic states in the West by creating local terror networks that pledge allegiance to it.
Obama isn’t completely wrong when he says that ISIS wants to divide us. But what he refuses to admit is that we didn’t create those divisions. Islam did. If Sunni and Shiite Muslims can’t live together after over a thousand years, what are the odds that they will learn to coexist with us within the next decade?
What about the next hundred years? Because if this miracle doesn’t happen, we will be the next Syria.
We didn’t create Muslim xenophobia. We didn’t invent the tribalism and the intolerance that are tearing Syria apart. And we can’t make them go away by blaming ourselves or pretending that they aren’t there.
If we all converted to Islam tomorrow, we would have even more terrorist attacks. Syrians are massacring each other over differences in theology because Islam has a long history of settling theological disputes with violence. ISIS is a symptom of the problems inherent to Islam.
Obama speaks of defeating ISIS by fixing the root causes of the conflict. But the root cause of the conflict isn’t poverty, unemployment or Global Warming. It’s Islam. Unless Obama has more luck bringing Shiites and Sunnis together than Osama did, he can’t fix Syria. All he can do is find more ways to make it worse.
Why Syria Can’t Be Fixed
Why Syria Can’t Be Fixed
The root cause of the conflict is Islam.
December 17, 2015
Daniel Greenfield
...
It’s not about human rights or justice. It’s about destabilizing your neighbors by exploiting their internal divisions. It’s how Islam achieved its original conquests by pitting Christians against each other.
Russia wants to put Syria back together again, but it also wants it vulnerable and in need of Moscow’s help. Iran feeds the chaos to control Syria’s Shiites and set off civil wars around the region. The Saudis, Qataris and the Turks want Obama to put the Muslim Brotherhood and various Islamists in power.
Obama wants the problem to go away because ISIS is making him look bad. But all the other players care even less about ISIS than he does. Russia did not get into Syria because of ISIS. Since then the terror group has become a major nuisance and Putin isn’t likely to forget or forgive, but neither is he going to spend too much time and money fighting a non-aligned terror group. ISIS is not a threat to Russia. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar however are a threat to Russian interests and fighting their militias comes first.
The state sponsors of Sunni terror find ISIS more irritating because the Caliphate’s major objective is to crush rival Jihadist groups funded by Sunni countries and force them to submit to the Caliph. ISIS doesn’t want to be another Saudi or Qatari terrorist puppet. It wants to be its own terror state and subsume them all. But it’s exploiting the Saudi and Qatari popularization of Islamic terrorism to do so.
The Sunni states see Iran as much more of a threat than ISIS. If their various Islamist militias lose, ISIS is their backup plan. And while they may put on a show, they won’t fight too hard against it. They may still need ISIS. Iran and Assad likewise see ISIS as a useful way to entangle their Sunni enemies in infighting.
And so, despite all the posturing, fighting ISIS is not actually a priority for anyone.
The Russians have put on a good show, but it’s more about boosting arms sales through pointless displays of advanced weaponry than about destroying ISIS. Putin’s bombing campaign is the equivalent of one of his staged pictures hunting zebras or diving underwater to spear sharks. Obama is no slacker at staging photoshoots either. His bombing campaign is also a show, but it’s an even more hollow display.
And there’s no realistic endgame to any of it.
Syria’s problems are built in. The only thing that would help is fundamentally redrawing the maps of the region along ethnic and religious lines. But while everyone is eager to impose a two-state solution on Israel, no one talks about two-stating Syria or three-stating Iraq. And so it isn’t going to get any better.
ISIS is smarter and more practical than Al Qaeda. That makes it more dangerous in the long run. It’s not thinking about terrorist attacks in Europe or America just in order to kill us, but to build the beginnings of Islamic states in the West by creating local terror networks that pledge allegiance to it.
Obama isn’t completely wrong when he says that ISIS wants to divide us. But what he refuses to admit is that we didn’t create those divisions. Islam did. If Sunni and Shiite Muslims can’t live together after over a thousand years, what are the odds that they will learn to coexist with us within the next decade?
What about the next hundred years? Because if this miracle doesn’t happen, we will be the next Syria.
We didn’t create Muslim xenophobia. We didn’t invent the tribalism and the intolerance that are tearing Syria apart. And we can’t make them go away by blaming ourselves or pretending that they aren’t there.
If we all converted to Islam tomorrow, we would have even more terrorist attacks. Syrians are massacring each other over differences in theology because Islam has a long history of settling theological disputes with violence. ISIS is a symptom of the problems inherent to Islam.
Obama speaks of defeating ISIS by fixing the root causes of the conflict. But the root cause of the conflict isn’t poverty, unemployment or Global Warming. It’s Islam. Unless Obama has more luck bringing Shiites and Sunnis together than Osama did, he can’t fix Syria. All he can do is find more ways to make it worse.
Why Syria Can’t Be Fixed
