Relativity speaking

" without discrimination" how would one discriminate?

 

They spare no-one, seemingly, if they fit the criteria, "not one of us".

 

The indoctrination of youth into Cultural and Religious beliefs is the worst form of child abuse. Leave your past mistakes and baggage behind what ever Culture or Religion tickles your fancy. And move into a better World.

 

There's that principal of abrogation in play where older is superseded by the newer. In practice this sometimes seems to promote cafeteriaism, if I may be permitted to coin a term. But where abrogation is respected a lot of the peaceful stuff has gotten the heave ho. That would include positive early assertions about Christians and Jews.

 

It is impossible to not be inculcated with the culture you grow up around.

 

It bespeaks the failure of modern compulsory education in western nations, that young people are flocking to join such mayhem, reportedly 500 from Germany alone.

 

(a transparent and possibly futile attempt to hija- er ... steer, yeah, "steer the conversation a different direction")

 

Possibly more of topic ... such as it is....

 

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised some young people go off to join ISIS, a million European volunteers went off to fight for the Nazis on the Eastern Front.

 

Dunno how many of the youth joined to IS really knew what it was about. Remember a year back nobody spoke about ISIS, only about the crimes of the Syrian government. Russians thou warned about it but did anyone listen to them?

 

John Mc Cain wanted the US to aid them, in fighting Syria ! May have had a change of mind about that recently.

 

Which is of course why you don't go playing around with a proverbial hornet's nest in the first place. There's just no such thing as a friendly hornet, one that will fight other hornets but not turn on you.

And McCain etc should have known better: we'd seen years of fighting imports in Iraq and now the same sort wasn't going to pop up anywhere and everywhere else too during the Arab Spring?

 

President Bush said in one of his televised speeches that the war in Iraq was a "Holy War".

 

Certainly many of those flooding into the country to fight as partisans thought it was.

While I'm not a real rat ******* I used to run a different RPG campaigns and I'm quite imaginative, can imagine being a real world class rat ******* (if fantasy or superhero genre hardly matters, the GM is playing the bad guys too): back in the day when Iraq was flush with foreigners on their anti-crusader jihad I tried on numerable occasions to point out that to the extent that they were willing to fight in places where US and coalition troops could kill them -- as opposed to going after lower risk to themselves soft targets like Iraqi citizens -- they were behaving in a manner entirely contrary to their interests and entirely beneficial to ours.

Bear with me a moment: in 9/11 a few men undertook a high risk / high reward attack that actually damaged the United States. By contrast those foreign death squads were rushing into places (where they tended to die) where they couldn't actually hurt the coalition partner's ability to sustain the conflict and kill even more of them. They had come to embrace a very high risk, very low reward combat doctrine. Basically soldier assisted suicide. Rather than try to replicate the high risk/high reward efforts of AQ they basically fought and often died for nothing.

To the extent that they were cowards and went after Iraqis they did incalculable harm ... to Iraq. Hardy any to the "crusaders".

Which is to say that fighting them over there was for those nations a low risk proposition because we were weeding out people who under other circumstances, had they not been stuck on stupid, might have acted intelligently and tried to actually harm us at home.

Or put another way: if you find yourself at war, and your opponent wants to be dumb, accommodate their choices.

There are, frankly, few mistakes in war bigger than picking a fight with a guy you can't reach but who has little trouble getting at you.