Proving Lawrence right.

 M1911 pistol, like the type that equipped the U.S. Army until the M9 Beretta, and which equipped a fair number of British officers, including T. E. Lawrence, through private purchase during World War One.

Archeologist have found a 230 gr .45 caliber bullet at Hallat Ammar, Saudi Arabia (it's literally on the Jordanian border)

So what you ask?

Well, that is a location which, in 1917, the Hashemite Arab Revolt ambushed and destroyed a Turkish train.  T. E. Lawrence wrote about it in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

So, some would say, what's the big deal.  Wouldn't we expect bullets to be found at a place where combat had taken place?

Yes we would.

But almost as soon as the ink was dry on the Versailles Treaty people have begun to question T. E. Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt.

And that's because his role loomed so large, the natural question was, was he the Arab Revolt?

The answer to that would be no, but frankly the Arab Revolt would have been a horribly muddled and inefficient affair, if not an outright disaster, without Lawrence.  He didn't start  the revolt, but he frankly did take a revolt that he found that wasn't doing well, reformed its nature, organized it, to include at least partially politically reorganizing it, and took it on to near success.

 Col. T. E. Lawrence

I say near success, as to the extent it wasn't successful is that, the Hashamites, having won that part of the war, lost the peace in very real terms. Rather than uniting the Hajez with Jordon and Syria, the whole thing fell apart in very real terms as the French took Syria and the Saudis, in fairly short order, took the Hajez.  The Hasmites continue on in Jordon, of course, and they received Iraq as a consulation prize, but Iraq is about he worst prize in the box of Middle Easter Cracker Jacks that a person could conceivably get.

Now, why wold anyone doubt Lawrence's role?

Well, there are a lot of reasons.

Lawrence himself contributed to this a bit.

Lawrence was an enigmatic man, to say the least.  A  lively archeologist before the war, he turned out to be a natural military genius, perhaps aided a bit by his extensive study of the Crusades.  Warfare tends to be warfare, irrespective of the era.

But he wasn't comfortable with that role even during the war, and particularly after enduring an assault by a Turkish officer while briefly a prisoner.  He developed what today we'd recognize as a titanic case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and he had a massive case of guilt on top of it.  Lawrence came from very devout, if strangely non observant in one fashion, Anglican Anglo-Irish parents and he struggled both with PTSD and with the knowledge that he had, in part due to his own fascination with his goal, deceived both the Arabs and the British in his efforts.   He never got over it.

And in not getting over it, while he wrote a brilliant account of it which turns out more and more to have been very accurate, he obfuscated some details that he could have been clearer on, on military details, and he spent all the rest of his life, after the peace negotiations, hiding, more or less.

But that's far from the only reason.

A second reason is that he was so stunningly successful, and the Arabs have had to live with that.

That may sound odd, but in the history of revolutions, there's rarely an example of where such an insular people have so successfully been lead by a foreigner to whom  they own nearly all the success.  During our revolution, for example, we had the aid of French, German and Polish military men, but they didn't lead our entire army.  Lawrence basically did that for the Arabs. They were doing badly before he started that, and their success came under him, and is really attributable to him.

That's been a heavy burden for the Arabs ever since.

If the Arabs themselves can't really claim the mantle of success for their independence what does that do for their image? Are they even real countries?

 Sayyid Hussein bin Ali, Sharif and Emir of Mecca, King of Hejaz, and self declared Caliph.

Clearly, the Arab nations are real countries, but the whole thing is highly related to British efforts and even the countries that came to exist did so due to what the British did, and didn't do.  The King of Jordan today is the king as the British allowed a Hashemite to be king.  Iraq is a country as the English, perhaps mistakenly, decided it would be.  Syria is a nation as the British acquiesced to French control of Syria and French creation of Lebanon (with some indication that hte French might actually fight the British for both of those).  Kuwait is a country as the British decided that their monarchical leaders ought to be, instead of being part of Iraq.  Saudi Arabia is a state as it was a client, albeit not a good one, of India when India was part of the Empire, and the British decide not to back the Hajez against the House of Saud for some reason.  Everyone in that scenario, except the House of Saud, owes a debt, therefore, to a war time colonel in the British army.

 Prince Feisel, with aids, including Lawrence, at the peace talks.  The black man in the back row is likely a slave, slavery still being practiced amongst the Arabs at that time.  If not a slave, he's certainly a retainer of Feisel's.  Feisel became the King of Iraq.  He died ostensibly of a heart attack at age 48, but poisoning remains suspected.

And amongst the people whom gave birth to Islam, Lawrence provides a problematic reminder that the Arabs have often not really been all that observant of Muslims.  Today, in no small part due to events since 1970, we tend to think of all Middle Eastern people as being devout Muslims, but this is far from true. Amongst the Muslims themselves, even the Arabs have tended not to exhibit the sort of fanatic singular devotion, all of the time, that we associate with groups like ISIL today.  T. E. Lawrence was a Christian leading an Arab army whose seat of power was Mecca. That's a pretty stunning thought.  The Arabs themselves were in rebellion against the Otttoman Turks, whose leader was theoretically a Caliph and who had declared the Turkish effort a jihad.

Mehmed V, who was the Caliph during World War One.  He died in 1918 before the war ended, at age 73.

Abdulmecid II, the last Caliph of the Ottoman Empire.  He's live in exile in France after his position was abolished by the Ottoman parliament.

And he lead them very well.  And was not alone in being a singular English Arab advisor to the Arab forces.  Indeed, the English would continue to play a role in Arab forces right up until the mid 1950s. English officers served with the Jordanian Arab Legion during the 1948 Arab Israeli War.

Well, history is what it is.  And in spite of the embarrassment of some, and the wish that things might have been otherwise by others, we should take it as we find it.

And, perhaps fittingly, we re-find Lawrence the way he found Arabia. . . through archeology.

Persistent Myths XII: The "It's all about oil" edition.

The "It's all about oil" edition.

There's a persistent belief in the US that every conflict in the Middle East is about petroleum oil, and that's because every single nation in the Middle East is swimming in petroleum oil and vastly wealthy.  If non Middle Eastern nations are tied up in the affairs, including the wars, of the Middle East, that's because they want the war.    Some even tie past actions of various nations from many decades past to a desire to control oil, such as everything the UK did during World War One in the Middle East was due to its insatiable desire for oil.

Sorry, this just doesn't match the facts.

Oh, some thing in the Middle East definitely are about oil, no doubt.  And the Western importing nations have always been more careful to pay attention to the oil exporting nations than those that didn't have a commodity to export.  But then, paying attention to a nation that produces a necessary export commodity is something all nations have done at all times.

But a lot in the Middle East happens that has nothing at all to do with oil  And a lot of the Middle East is completely devoid of oil.

That last fact alone comes as a shock to a lot of people, but it's quite true.  Indeed, twice this past week I've seen events in Syria tied to oil. Well, Syria produces only a small amount of oil, about 28,000 bbls/day.  In contrast, the US produces over 3,000,000 bbls/day, Saudi Arabia over 9,000,000 bbls/day and Russia over 10,000,000 bbls/day.  They aren't fighting over Syria's small production, and the various outside forces that back one side or another don't have oil in the forefront of their minds either.  Shoot, Russia (and Iran) have tended to back the Syrian government, and they're both awash in oil.

And Syria isn't alone.  Jordon, a nation we hear about frequently in the region, isn't really an oil producer either.  Neither is Egypt.  Indeed, much of the Middle East is pretty devoid of appreciable oil production.

And frankly, oil doesn't matter like it once did.  It mattered more before the substantial Russian production, the greatest in the world, came on line and before new technology made the United States the third largest producer in the world.  The US now produces so much oil that, combined with other fuel sources, it's now a net energy exporter and it appears that the US will reenter the petroleum exporting countries.  Beyond that, we seem to be entering a period of flat demand, due to technological rather than economic, reasons such that oil will never resume the place in the global economy it once had.

Where oil demand should really matter is with developing nations, and not all that long ago there was serious concern that China was acting to tie up future supplies. But China itself is the world's fourth largest oil producer and it appears to be on the cusp of technological changes that will reduce its need for fossil fuels.

All of this is not to say that oil isn't important, and that people don't fight on it. But the common simple response of "it's all about the oil" is simply wrong, almost always.  Indeed, some of the places we have been involved in that have oil, if we were thinking of our own economy, we'd have been better off not getting involved with.

Understanding Saudi Arabia

The first thing to understand about Saudi Arabia is that the name does sort of tell all.  It's the Arabia owned by the Sauds.  Or rather that part of the Arabian Peninsula, i.e., most of it, that is controlled by the House of Saud.  And the Sauds are a family.

 King Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad Al Saud, the first king of modern Saudi Arabia, circa 1927.  Saud united a small kingdom to re-expand it to regions that his family had controlled centuries earlier.

The Arabian peninsula, as the name would indicate, has been the home of the Arab people since ancient times.  The Arabs were definable as such well before they came to be identified with Islam and indeed at the time of the rise of Mohammad.  Indeed at the time of Mohammad's rise the Arabs practiced a variety of religions, including Catholicism, Gnostic Christianity, Judaism and various animist religions.  They were not a united people by any means, which played into Mohammad's favor as he sought to unite them by force, where necessary.  The peninsula, while it would become Islamic, did not tend to be united however, although there were occasional exceptions of a type.

Prior to World War One there were various fiefdoms stretching back for centuries that controlled various areas of the Arabian Peninsula, which by the early 20th Century all claimed fealty to the Ottoman Empire, which itself was ruled by a claimed Caliph. The various tribal chieftains, sultans and kings did not always get along by any means and never had.  And within the peninsula various tribes contested for areas and territories.  Going into World War One arguably the most significant of these groups were the Hashimites, monarchs who ruled from Mecca, who threw in the with the British in an effort to expel the Turks and claim monarchical control over the Arabs.  

At the same time and earlier, however, the House of Saud, had been working on consolidating its power through marriage and through allegiance to an extreme puritanical form of Islam, Wahhabism.  Just prior to the Great War the Sauds took a portion of the Persian Gulf Coast from the Ottoman Turks, a bold move under the circumstances.  Following that, however, the  Sauds basically sat World War One out, in spite of sponsorship from English India, and they concentrated on a contest with the El Rashid, who controlled part of the peninsula to their north. They prevailed in that struggle in the early 1920s.   Following that, the Sauds conquered the Hejaz, effectively expelling the Hashimites from their traditional kingdom.

 King ‘Alī ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī al-Hāshimī, the last Hashimite King of the Hajaz and therefore the last non Saudi ruler of Mecca.  King Ali could have claimed the tile of Caliph by inheritance, but did not do so.

 Ikhwan, circa 1910.

Throughout this expansionist period the Sauds relied upon the Ikhwan, a Wahhabi militia. This cannot be overemphasized as the Ikhawan was a puritanical Islamic militia, conceived of by Islamic clerics who found elements of Bedouin life to be incompatible with Islam.  The relationship between the Ikhwan and the Sauds was not perfect, as the Ikhwan rebelled against the Sauds in part on at least two occasions, but overall the Sauds expansion was allowed due to their alliance with this hardcore Islamic militia, a group found around principals so strict that some Muslims regarded them as heretical early on.

Following the conquering of the Arabian Peninsula, outside of Yemen, the Ikhwan turned its attention to Transjordan, which lead to a conflict with the Sauds who feared that taking on the Jordanian Hashimite kingdom wold lead to combat with the British. This caused the Sauds to put the Ikhwan down, although it lives on to a degree in the form of the Saudi National Guard.  

The black flag of the Ikhwan, note the similarity to. . . 

the green flag of Saudi Arabia.

Following the defeat of the Ikhwan, the Sauds had possession of a dirt poor personal kingdom, but one which included the important city of Mecca, which they had dispossessed the Hashimites of.  To the extent it formed a consolation, the Hashimites possessed the wealthier kingdoms of Transjordan, Syria and Iraq, none of which they were native to.

In 1938 oil was discovered in the country, however, and it became the base of the economy, as well as making it one of the richest and most economically powerful countries in the world.  Almost half of its population now is foreign born, with Egyptians and Muslim Filipinos amongst the most significant aspect of the foreign population.  The country has struggled with Islamic fundamentalist, and essentially it has since the 1920s, even though its foundation is in  Wahhabism. The Country is, therefore, awash in ironies. As a modern country, it's an absolute monarchy.  It has struggled with Islamic fundamentalism, and yet it is essentially a fundamentalist state which is the only one in the world, expect perhaps arguably the Islamic State, to have made the Koran its constitution.  The monarch is subject only to Sharia law.  It funds mosques in the western world, but only those that comport with a Wahhabi theological view.

Well, so what, you may ask?

A kingdom is an odd anachronism in the modern world, particularly one that is loosely based as Saudi Arabia is.  Its Wahhabi roots remain very strong and its a puritanical state, of a type, that is influential if for no other reason than that its fantastically wealthy.  The country is stunningly repressive, not even allowing women to drive.  It bizarrely has the chair position of the United Nations Human Rights Commission presently, a really bizarre thing to realize when basic human rights are missing in the country.  Don't even think about freedom of religion in regards to that nation.  

And something about it has spawned Islamic terrorists, although what that is, is not clear.  Osama bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian, with Yemeni roots.  Saudis were prominent in the 9/11 attackers.  

It was a country born out of tribal strife but united by Islamic extremist militias that it had to put down itself, but which it has remained close to in terms of origin.  With an unstable system of government in a region in which Islamic militancy has exploded, its fate is worrisome.

Postscript:

From an article in today's New York Times:

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.

Lex Anteinternet: The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and the Fate of Iraqi Christians

As of today, the situation discussed here has gone from bad to worse.  ISIS, or ISIL, depending upon the term you use, has taken the city of Qaraqoush, which borders Kurdistan.  Indeed, ISIS really took it from Kurdish militia, which was defending it.

Lex Anteinternet: The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and the Fate of Iraqi Christians

The extent of this disaster is vast.  The result means that a city not a town or a village, with a Christian population, is now on the roads, fearing for their lives.  And, to compound the disaster, the Yazidis, an ethnic minority whose religion is related to Zoroastrianism, is trapped on a mountain top without water.

The US is finally pondering intervention, but beyond this, it's finally the point in time at which those who have long held that Islam is a peaceful misunderstood religion to do something to show it.  ISIS claims to represent a Sunni vision of the world.  No doubt, it does not reflect the views of the majority of Sunnis, perhaps, but its claim to represent the hardcore tenants of Islam is not without support.  Without some regional effort on the part of Sunnis to contest it, they'll have claimed center position in this field without debate. It's easy to claim that they are "extremist", but it seems that extremist of similar mind abound in the region, with little to argue against their philosophy from those who hold the same basic foundational tenants.  If they do disagree, they need to now show it.

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Postscript

Tonight President Obama authorized airstrikes under certain conditions:

Today I authorize two operations in Iraq. Targeted air strikes to protect our American personnel and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and water and facing almost certain death.

Let me explain the actions we are taking and why.

I said in June when the terrorist group ISIL began an advance across Iraq that the United States would be prepared to take targeted military action in Iraq if and when we determine the situation required.

In recent days these terrorists have continued to move across Iraq and have neared the city of Erbil where American diplomats and civilians serve at our consulate and American military personnel advise Iraqi forces.

To stop the advance on Erbil I have directed our military to take targeted strikes against ISIL terrorist convoys should they move toward the city.

We intend to stay vigilant and take action if these terrorist forces threaten our personnel or facilities anywhere in Iraq, including our consulate in Erbil and our embassy in Baghdad.

We are also providing urgent assistance to the Iraqi government and Kurdish forces so they can more effectively wage the fight against ISIL.

At the request of the Iraqi government we began operations to help save Iraqi civilians stranded on the mountain.

As ISIL marches across it has waged a ruthless campaign against innocent Iraqis.

These terrorists have been especially barbaric towards religious minorities including Christians and Yezidis, a small and ancient religious sect.

Countless Iraqis have been displaced and showing reports describe ISIL militants rounding up families, conducting mass executions and enslaving Yezidi women.

In recent days Yezidi men, women are children from the area of Sinjar have fled for their lives in thousands, perhaps tens of thousands and are now hiding on a mountain with little but the clothes on their backs, and without food, without water, people are starving, children are dying of thirst.

Meanwhile ISIL forces below have called for a systematic destruction of the entire Yezidi people, which would constitute genocide.

So these innocent families are faced with a horrible choice. Descend the mountain and be slaughtered or slowly die of thirst and hunger.

I have said before that the United States cannot and should intervene every time there is a crisis in the world, so let me be clear about why we must act and act now. When we face a situation like we face on that mountain with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale, when we have a mandate to help, in this case with request from the Iraqi government and when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States cannot turn a blind eye.

We can act carefully and responsibly to prevent an act of genocide.

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Postscript II

Those following this story will be aware that the U.S. has engaged in some airstrikes now, and additionally it seems clear that some supplies have been recently provided to the Peshmerga (a collection of Kurdish forces, not one single entity).  Hopefully this is not all too little, too late.

 As a follow up comment, however, I can't help but note how the main part of this tragedy continues to be missed.  Much of the story has focused on the Yazdis, who are indeed presenting with a tragic plight. The tiny Kurdish speaking ethnic minority is in danger of being completely wiped out.

But, at the same time, the Christian Assyrian minority, a minority but a large one, which constitutes the original inhabitants of much of this territory, pre dating the Arab invasion of centuries ago, received comparatively little attention.  Why?  I suspect it's simply because we in the west are so familiar with Christianity that a story about Christians, huge tragedy though it may be, just doesn't seem worth covering.  Even when it involves an ethnic, and from our prospective, exotic, minority.

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Postscript III

(Reuters) - Islamic State militants have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, burying some of their victims alive and kidnapping hundreds of women, a Baghdad government minister said on Sunday.

If Islam is a religion of peace, as its apologist claim, or at least ff Sunnism has that attribute, this is sure the time for them to step up and prove it.

Where are the Saudis, upon whose territory Mecca is located?  Where are the Jordanians?  Has any significant  Sunni state done anything?  What about the Turks, a secular state that once ruled this region?

Protests that are meaningful so far have come largely from western countries, and from Shiia Iran, the latter of which has its own religious stake in this fight.

At some point, actions speak louder than words.  We do not seem to be seeing much, outside, admittedly, of Sunni Kurds, who also have a stake in this fight, but who are fighting.
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Postscript IV

This is the Arabic letter "nun" which is the equivalent to the letter "n" in our lettering system.

The reason it appears here is that the ISIS has been painting it on buildings associated with Christians in northern Iraq, where it stands for "Nazarene", ie. a follower of Christ.

Shads of Nazi Germany and Kristallnacht at work there, with "N" substituting for the Nazi use of the Star of David to identify Jews in a like manner.

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Postscript V

The Pershmerga, aided by the US, UK and France in various ways, has been recapturing the ground it recently lost to ISIS.  The use of US airpower, combined with the provisions of arms and ammunition, appears to have been turning the tide for the Kurds.

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Postscript VI

This prayer, authored by Chaldean Catholic Bishop of Iraq, His Beatitude Louis Rafael Sako, has been appearing at least in Catholic circles this past week, providing a poignant plea for simply the ability to live in peace.

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Postscript VII

ISIS murdered an American journalist in what it conceives of as a reprisal for US intervention in northern Iraq.

At this point, ISIS has clearly forfeited its only claim to legitimacy, that being that it's acting on behalf of the expansion of Islam.  No interpretation of Islam allows for simple murder of people merely because of their nationhood.  

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Postscript VIII

Earlier this week Pope Francis noted that the use of arms to protect the lives of those under threat of violence in the fashion that Iraqi minorities are is legitimate.  This is a statement that is consistent with traditional Christian thought, but one which is rarely expressed as applicable to an ongoing situation.

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Postscript  IX

ISIL has executed two American reporters in reprisals, with the executioner in the first example having a British accent, showing the penetration, I suppose, in some form of its views into Europe.

ISIL also executed five female fortune tellers this past week.

The United States is increasing its air activity, and it appears the UK will join in that. Germany has joined the fray through the supplying of a huge number of arms to the Kurds, the first independent direct supply without any supervision by Germany since World War Two.

On Wednesday the President shall address the nation on this topic.  An inevitable topic with be the expansion, or not, of the air effort into Syria, which by this point is regarded as nearly necessary.  Readers here will recall our warnings that Syria was a much more complicated nation than those who were earlier leading the cheers for fighting Assad would have had it.  Events seem to have born that out.

A really good article, btw, on ISIL is in the current issue of the New Republic, detailing what its goals are in terms of a restoration of a Caliphate, which it has in fact already declared.

Additionally, this topic has received some interesting commentary from Catholic clerics, not at the higher level, other than what Pope Francis is noted as having said above, but down at the Priest level.   This is interesting for a couple of reasons, one of which is that the commentary in some cases comes from people who are exceedingly well informed at the street level on one or more aspect of this.  One set of such comments comes from Father Dwight Longnecker, who was an Anglican Priest at one time, and who sees a connection between a rising level of assaults on women in the Islamic sphere and Islamic fundamentalism. He's not the first one by any means, and the connection is that at that level there's a fundamental separation of attitudes on western non Islamic women, who are regarded with contempt and free for the taking, and Islamic women, who are not attacked but whom, it might be noted, tend to be treated by chattel.

This is a complicated topic, and one such commentator, Egyptian born Jesuit Father Samir Khalil Samir makes the tie in, which has been made before (I first read the comment by a Canadian conservative commentator following 9/11) that a perception in  the Islamic world of absolute moral license in the western world fuels Islamic fundamentalism, but it's also been noted that part of the same fear is that the west features a goal of equality for women, which doesn't feature a chattel status, of course, and which also threatens any absolute male dominated society.

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Postscript X

The President addressed the nation regarding ISIL tonight, with it being the case that the US, in concert with other nations, will continue its air operations in Iraq, expand them to Syria, and back the Kurdish and Iraqi forces in Iraq.  We will also apparently be backing the "moderate" rebels in Syria, rather than the Syrian government, with the thesis being that they will fill the vacuum created by efforts against ISIL rather than the Syrian government.

It was emphasized that this will be a protracted struggle to some extent, which is no doubt correct.   There will be no significant deployments of US ground forces (the deployment of some ground troops will be a necessity), with our efforts mostly in the form of air assets and other support.

While I don't fully agree with this approach (I think our ability to pick a "moderate" rebel group in Syria is doubtful at best and probably quite naive) this approach is consistent with President Obama's preference for the use of airborne weapons and the strategy, in so far as Iraq is considered, probably makes sense.

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Postcript XI

Listening to the BBC yesterday, the full horror of ISIL begins to become more and more plain.  It turns out that more is now known of the fate of the Yazidis women who were taken prisoner by ISIL. They are now slaves, with their duties including cooking, cleaning, and being subject to assault.  You can fill in what that means.

Oddly, quite a few of them had cell phones and still do, so the word is getting out.  The reason is speculated to be that given as the Koran sanctions rendering non Islamic captive women the slaves to the desires of their males captors, they're entitled to have some rights.  In other words, that ISIL has returned to a practice that most would have thought part of the distant past, but which remains in the Koran, they're not ashamed of it in any fashion.

There's been a lot of debate here in the US on whether the war against ISIL requires "boots on the ground" with some noting that some Arab states have volunteered to provide those boots (just as Syria actually did when we fought Iraq in the 1990s).  Some have also noted that perhaps the arming of "moderate" Syrian rebel groups (a dicey proposition in my view) may somewhat serve this purpose.  In either event, this group is so hideous that at some time not acting becomes complicit in their crimes based upon establishing a totally male dominated, strictly Islamic, view of the world.

As if this story couldn't get any worse, by the way, there's evidence that it extends to Christian female captives as well, including minors.  And there's at lease some accounts of physical mutilation being performed by ISIL on the same female population.

This group, in its monstrous views, is as bad as the Nazis ever were.  We've sometimes criticized ourselves for not intervening in Europe before Germany declared war in the United States, and we've done that more recently in the case of the Rwandan genocide.  We are intervening here, but the question is will the intervention be quick enough, and complete enough.

Postscript XII

Airstrikes have commenced of ISIL targets in Syria.  Jordan and Saudi Arabia have contributed to the aircraft involved in the strikes.

Postscript XIII

Showing the full extent of their barbarity, ISIL burned to death a Jordanian pilot it had captured. No matter what a person's view of jihad may be, this is clearly beyond the pale for anyone and I'm quite certain that virtually no observant Moslems support an action such as this.  Indeed, it seems that recent events over the past few years in the Middle East are actually causing a departure in the region from the Islamic religion, as people do not wish to be associated with acts such as this in any form, or even the lesser acts of violence that some do in its name.  Apparently in some regions, while statistics are very hard to come by, the number of people abandoning Islam in the region is not insignificant.

This act already is causing a regional revulsion against ISIL by everyone.  And its resulted in an immediate reprisal, something that Middle Easter states apparently still consider a valid political act, while western nations, and most others, would have moved away from this sort of retaliatory violence many, many years ago.  Jordan, in reprisal, executed two Al Queda prisoners it held, including one woman, a move I don't think anyone saw coming and which no western nation would sanction.  The fact that they took such an act, as a regional power, almost surely suggests a likely move toward increased regional action against ISIL by states in the region.

In other news in the region, it appears the Kurds continue to regain the ground lost earlier to ISIL, although it is taking a long time.

Postscript XIV

And now it seems that ISIL has assaulted Christian towns in Syria, taking about 300 Christians hostage.  It's also turned its ire on objects of art, something the Taliban also did.

Lex Anteinternet: Islamic Violence, Islamic Silence and Western Rela...

Lex Anteinternet: Islamic Violence, Islamic Silence and Western Rela...: This past week the world has been witness to another outrage committed by those who claim devotion to Islam.  If this event were unique, a ...

Of note, on this matter, in the past week protests, some pretty heated, have broken out in Pakistan, Algeria and Jordon.

Protesting violence in the name of Islam?  No.

Protesting Charlie Hedbo's post assault cover showing a crying Mohammed.

Most would think this a pretty innocuous cartoon, perhaps even slightly reverent, but  Muslim crowds have not in those locations, demonstrating the nature of the problem here.

Even more demonstrative, the paper, which in my view is not at all admirable in general, as I made clear in my Je ne suis pas Charlie post, attacked Christianity and the Catholic church viciously in the same issue, and proclaimed itself to be atheist.  Taking pride in that status, it took vicarious credit for the large crowds that came out in Paris, perhaps failing to understand that sympathy for victims, which in this case is perceived as the French Republic as much as anything else, does not really equate to sympathy with the papers crude cartoons and sometimes crude text.

But was there a violent Christian or Catholic reaction?  No, not at all.

There was a reaction, with even the Pope commenting, but of note it tended to once again find sympathy with the victims and also plead for all Faiths to be treated with respect.  This too highlights the nature of the problem the West faces here.  In the West, most agree with the Christian view of turning the other cheek.  In Islam, it seems that a large percentage of the faithful do not agree with that view at all.  As that's the case, this problem can't be regarded as minor, or isolated.