Sorry for the lack of formatting. Apparently, youtube's insane comment system only allows formatting in short posts. Ugh.

wow. this needs to be SPREAD... Fast

While I would agree that this is a complex situation, and that religion is not the only (or perhaps even the most important) motivation here, I feel that, Dr. Pape, in an effort to downplay the role of religious ideology, is neglecting to mention, or glosses over, some important aspects of this conflict. I'll list a bunch of them: - Why someone was radicalized is important, but that does not mean that their beliefs after radicalization are not equally important. Pape is creating a false dichotomy here and ignoring the product of the radicalization, which are these peoples' new core beliefs. Yes, people are driven to religious extremism for all sorts of complicated reasons, but that does not mean that that religion is not something that makes the situation infinitely worse. Had they been driven to Jainism, which is extreme in a wholly different way, they would certainly not be carrying out terrorist attacks. - Why is ISIS ISIS? Why isn't it the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria? Because it's goal is to take control of Al Sham and establish a Sunni caliphate there - a religious state - under Sharia, which is a Quranic precondition for bringing about the apocalypse. It is the location of the final holy war. Several analysts I've read/heard believe that this was a major influence in attracting radicalized foreign fighters. Note that this is also not limited defensive jihad. Rather, it's aggressively expansionist in its ideology. - On that note, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi is not his original name. Abu Bakr was the first Caliph after the death of Muhammad, and Baghdadi refers to his doctorate in Islamic studies that allows him to issue fatwas. He is also a member of Muhammad's original tribe, the Kuresh, which is a requirement if one is to call himself caliph (and helps explain why other radical Islamists never proclaimed a caliphate). - Abu Bakr's speeches have been analyzed for their content. He rarely even mentioned Iraq and Syria, choosing instead to speak of Allah, the Ummah (the global Muslim community), Muhammad, and the greater caliphate (which is much larger than the Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria). - A lot of what ISIS does and says is drenched in religious symbolism. They decapitate Christians and other non-Muslims because that is what the Quran prescribes ("smiting the necks" of the unbelievers). By the same reasoning, they immolate apostate Muslims, because they should be "treated as if they are in hell". They make propaganda videos where mujaheddin are petting kittens, but never pups, because the latter were out of favor with the prophet, whereas he seems to have liked the former. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the caliphate dressed in religious robes, from a mosque, wearing the black turban associated with Muhammad. And so on. (to be continued)

(continued) - The foundational texts that underlay the philosophy of Al Qaeda and ISIS (and other jihadi groups) are those of Wahhabi and other Salafist Muslim scholars, like Qutb (who said Islam should be a political movement whose goals should be to spread Muhammad's revelation), Azzam (who founded Al Qaeda and proclaimed that waging jihad against the unbelievers and apostates is an individual religious duty), and Walik (who stated that the only goal in jihad is the soul of the unbeliever, and that the most effective means of killing or converting them was through terror - all war has only one purpose; to establish Allah's sovereignty on Earth). I don't think the people running these movements would agree with Pape that they are not devoutly religious, or that their motives have nothing to do with Islam. - Al Qaeda carried out attacks because of East Timor, a largely Christian nation, segregating from Muslim Indonesia. This has little to do with intervention and occupation of fellow Muslims. - One of the primary motivations given for the resurgence of ISIS in Iraq is the sectarian regime of Maliki, which favored Shi'a over Sunni, the latter being brutally suppressed. This is sectarian politics, not an occupation by a foreign military force. - Of the Iraqi Christian population under ISIS controlled territory, about 200,000 out of the original >1 million remain. The rest have been driven out, killed, or forcefully converted. These people neither played an important role in the Shi'a / Sunni divide, nor did they have much to do with the U.S. intervention. The motivation for this ethnic cleansing seems to me to be entirely religious. - He states that Saddam Hussein's regime was secular. This may have been true initially, but after the first Gulf war, he increasingly surrounded himself with religious symbolism. He constructed the largest mosque in the world, named after himself. He wrote a Quran in (supposedly his own) blood) to be put on display there. He added the words "God is great" to the Iraqi flag. He allowed Sunni religious leaders to preach politicized hate speech in return for their loyalty, fueling the sectarian divide that makes it impossible now to have peace in Iraq. Saddam paid jihadi fighters to carry out suicide attacks in Gaza and the West Bank. The entire regime grew increasingly jihadist over time. You may argue that Saddam was just an opportunist, but let's not pretend that this is not a significant religious divide, or that this was a secular regime. - Saddam also harbored Islamic terrorists, who were openly living under the regime. Iraq therefore already had a large number of jihadis within it's borders when the regime fell. The suspicion exists that Al Qaeda anticipated the overthrow of the Hussein regime, and made an active effort to send jihadi into the country to seize that opportunity. - ISIS was more concerned, at least initially, with killing Iraqi Shi'a and Kurdish Muslim "apostates" in Iraq and Syria than it was with attacking the U.S. and the west. Only in 2014 did it call for attacks against westerners on foreign soil. The reason is that their motive is to purify apostate regimes and establish a caliphate where a purified Islam can be practiced. Apostates, or false Muslims, are seen as a greater threat than unbelievers, because when an apostate overthrows a nonbeliever, the resulting regime is still a corrupted form of Islam. This was one of the major reasons for their break with Al Qaeda, who felt that this distracted from the holy war with the west. - You'll notice that, although this is dismissed on several occasions, it is impossible to talk about this conflict without talking about the Sunni/Shi'a divide, which is a sectarian divide. This is also a major cause for the instability in the region, with Saudi Arabia and its allies (Sunni) fighting a proxy war against Iran (Shi'a) and its allies. Much of the internal rhetoric within IS and al Qaeda concerns conspiracy theories about the west being in collusion with the Shi'a to destroy the Sunni faith. Even in countries with almost no Shi'a population (like Egypt, 1%, or the Caucasus), increasingly radicalized Sunni extremists perceive them as the number one threat to their country. Even if it is compounded by other geopolitical and socioeconomic factors, it's silly to say that this increasingly deepening divide is not in its core religious in nature. - ISIS has it's roots in earlier terrorist organizations that predate the Iraq war (and Abu Bakr). Al Zarqawi started his first iteration of this organization in Jordan, not occupied Iraq. - Notice also that AQI managed to resurrect itself in Iraq as ISIS because of a power vacuum after the occupying forces left, not before. Likewise, it arose in Syria in the absence of foreign occupiers, not because of them. The regime in Syria toppled on its own, without the help of the west, leaving a hole for Al Nusra and ISIS to expand into. Some people predicted this exact scenario for Iraq prior to the invasion. Had that happened, would Pope suggest that AQI and ISIS would not have arisen out of the ensuing chaos? If so, I really think he's fooling himself. Likewise, Pape seems to be pro-intervention in the case of Libya. Why is it OK to intervene when Ghadaffi was about to kill a city full of people, but not to depose Saddam Hussein, who was responsible for the deaths, torture and rape of millions of people? Of course, in the case of Libya and Syria, the west is blamed for NOT intervening (or not intervening enough), keeping Assad in power, and not intervening in the politics of post-revolution Libya. I think there's a great deal of truth to that, but I think the exact same responsibility of inaction has to be taken by those who opposed the war against the horrific Hussein regime. - He looks at suicide attacks in isolation, which is not a reliable way to assess causation. To establish causation, you have to do a comparison to a control group, which as far as I can tell (and from reading the critiques of his work) Pape has not done. - He defines "occupation" extremely broadly, almost so broad as to render it meaningless; rather than military invasion by an aggressive foreign force, he includes separatist conflict (like in Chechnya and Turkey), the presence of voluntary troops, and people who sympathize with occupied people in other countries. Why, according to Pape, would people care about the occupation of another country enough that they would be willing to kill themselves over it? Well, the psychology of cultish indoctrination that occurs in radical Islamic groups like Al Qaeda can provide one with some very well researched answers to that question (see Margaret Thaler Singer's book "Cults In Our Midst", for example), but Pape has already excluded that from consideration. - Pape argues that suicide attacks are a rational strategy against an occupying force because they are effective, but others, like Max Abrahms, have analyzed this argument and have found that it is not an effective strategy (see his article "Why Terrorism Does Not Work"). - He says at one point that he can explain the pattern of attacks without religious motivation, purely by assuming that ISIS wants to control Sunni areas. But I have some problems with this statement. First of all, how is "Sunni" versus "Shi'a" areas a nonreligious division? Second, ISIS' stated objective is to control a far greater area; it is to restore the caliphate to its former glory (plus a little extra). In addition, couldn't one just as easily explain this pattern by saying that they are focusing first on (or even simply find less resistance in) the areas where they are likely to find the most support? That's just strategic thinking; it in no way suggests that they will stop there. By their own proclamations, they have far bigger plans. - He says religion is a constant, and thus it cannot explain the variation in suicide attacks. This is clearly nonsense. Religiosity of a population varies over time, and it doesn't have to take years for radicalization to happen. This is especially true when there are sectarian politics at play, in a chaotic time and place, with extremists flowing in to an area and moderates fleeing for their lives, under conditions of extreme violence, and with an extremist sect both actively recruiting and forcefully converting everyone it stomps across. Is he really willing to say that the territory occupied by ISIS is just as moderate now as it was before the insurgency? That seems delusional on its face. - Pape talks about radicalized people. But note that these radicalized people are not "radical Arabs" or "radical Iraqis or Syrians", they are radical Sunni Muslims, from a number of different countries. If intervention by a foreign force is the main problem, rather than sectarian civil war, why did we not see just as many Shi'a or Kurdish suicide attacks against the occupying forces (more in fact, since the Shi'a are in the majority)? Now, it's one thing to say that suicide attackers have a variety of motives for joining a cultish extremist religious organization, or to say that Islam does not automatically or even frequently cause terrorism. I would certainly accept that the vast majority of (even fundamentalist) Muslims are not terrorists or supporters thereof. But it is quite another to claim that religious extremism plays only a very small role. It is certainly true that there are many other reasons for this conflict, and that definitely includes the role of the west in the history and politics of the middle east and elsewhere. But this does not mean that other factors are not important, and pretending that religion doesn't play a major role seems to me to be irresponsible.

@0000thommes

8 жыл бұрын

You need to actually watch the video and then take some basic college 101 courses

@jellekastelein7316

8 жыл бұрын

What a childish, useless response. If there are things in what I wrote that you don't agree with, then that's fine, but please address them, rather than just going for the lazy, handwaving dismissal, phrased as an insult.

@demagreg

7 жыл бұрын

I found Dr. Pape's speeches very convincing but I noticed some flaws in his arguments that I couldn't quite pin down-for example what you mention about how he fails to distinguish between Shia and Sunni and doesn't even mention Wahhabi which I thought was essential to AQ and IS. Thank you for posting such a comprehensive counter-argument to Pape's points-I found it very interesting.

@jellekastelein7316

7 жыл бұрын

Thanks!

@Oners82

6 жыл бұрын

demagreg "he fails to distinguish between Shia and Sunni " He makes the distinction time and time again. Try listening.

This Dr. is singing the Tyrant hym devide and conqure. he speak suni shia inline with the main stream media that says also arabs kurds ........ Israeli agenda