Marc Ash / Reader Supported News & Arturo Garcia / Raw Story – 2015-12-08 01:27:59
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33897-isis-and-the-gop-natural-allies
Religious Terror and Bans at the Borders
Gar Smith / Special to EAW
BERKELEY (December 7, 2015) — In his December 7 address to the nation, President Obama stated: “Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and al Qaeda promote.” He added: “It is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out misguided ideas that lead to radicalization.”
Would that Obama had made similar demands of the Christian community after Robert Lewis Dear’s deadly rampage at a Planed Parenthood facility in Colorado.
Dear, whose online comments included, “Turn to Jesus or burn in hell. . . . Every knee shall bow and tongue confess Jesus is lord in this world,†qualifies for the title, “Christian terrorist.”
Meanwhile, Donald J. Trump has called for a ban on Muslims entering the US. “I think that we should definitely disallow any Muslims from coming in,” Trump said.
Would that Trump had proposed a ban on any and all Americans entering Muslim countries — beginning with Americans wearing military uniforms, carrying weapons and dropping bombs.
ISIS and the GOP, Natural Allies
Marc Ash / Reader Supported News
(December 6, 2015) — In perfect alignment with the objectives of US Republican presidential candidates, ISIS has struck twice recently with the only weapon it has, cowardly murder.
On cue US Republican presidential candidates are literally tripping over one another to get to the microphone to scream “war” as quickly, loudly and self-promotionally as they can. Each one trying harder than the next to convince whoever will listen that they will be the next true, “war president.”
The problem is that there is no-one to have a war with, and there really never has been. We are chasing individuals not armies. They move from place to place, nation to nation, civilian population to civilian population without any serious power or strength. Hopping against hope that they can provoke the foolish Americans and West into another ill fated foray into Islamic lands. Why? Recruitment.
ISIS is not an army. They lack the means to really go to war with anyone. They can attack local defenseless populations, and obviously shoot unarmed civilians, but they have no real military capacity. The only chance they have is to draw the US into yet another one sided war effort.
Should the US once again occupy the Iraqi-Syrian region, then and only then does ISIS have any chance of marshaling the kind of popular support they need to gain any real traction. Right now they’re limited to murdering civilians. However that will all change if the US can be drawn back into Iraq. Then ISIS can gain immense strength.
You can’t go to war with a guy or the wife of a guy who can simply walk into an American gun store, quite legally purchase as many guns as they like and just start shooting people for publicity. You can’t go to war with that, and the GOP presidential candidates calling for war are well aware of it. Yes they are lying.
The biggest lie of all is that ISIS is responsible for gun related violence in the US While they would obviously like to be, they account for just a tiny fraction of the gun violence in America.
On the day of the San Bernardino shootings there were two mass shootings, and those were the 354th and 355th of the year, according to The Washington Post. Sorry to disappoint those crying for a war against Islam, but the vast majority of those who kill with a gun in the US are angry white men. Like Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio. “White terrorism” in America is a bigger problem by orders of magnitude than ISIS-inspired terrorism.
Yes, guns can be obtained in the US, but ISIS followers apparently had no difficulty obtaining the guns used in the Paris attacks either. Hand-held guns are, and always will be, fairly easy to get ahold of. No GOP-American War on Terror and/or ISIS will change that.
“War” with individuals who cannot even be identified does not, cannot make anyone in the US safer.
What is most revolting about the GOP candidates is their shameless self interest in calling for a war they know perfectly well will fail. They want power. To hell with whoever pays the price.
The first invasion of Iraq was pure insanity. We are paying the price for that fool’s errand dearly now. Repeating that mistake would be catastrophic.
Marc Ash was formerly the founder and Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Noam Chomsky: The GOP Is ‘No Longer a Normal Political Party’ — It’s a ‘Radical Insurgency’
Arturo Garcia / Raw Story
(December 4, 2015) — MIT professor Noam Chomsky told Truthout that, even if someone like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is elected president, the Republican Party will retain the ability to stifle any attempts to move the US in a more progressive direction for years to come.
“It’s important to recognize that they are no longer a normal political party,” Chomsky said in an interview published on Thursday, adding that “the former [Republican] Party is now a ‘radical insurgency’ that has pretty much abandoned parliamentary politics, for interesting reasons that we can’t go into here.”
Chomsky expanded on those reasons in a separate interview with Frontline earlier this year, citing findings from the conservative American Enterprise Institute:
Since Ronald Reagan, the leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilising sectors of the population that have not previously been an organised political force, among them extremist evangelical Christians, now probably the majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slave-holding States; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white Christian Anglo-Saxon country away from us; and others who turn the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the mainstream of modern society — though not the mainstream of the most powerful country in world history.
Sanders would also face opposition from many Democrats, Chomsky argued, since their policy shifts would not make them more like moderate Republicans. The senator’s best chance of effecting change if elected, the philosopher argued on Thursday, would come from the rise of popular movements which could push him further in his own policies.
“That brings us, I think, to the most important part of the Sanders candidacy,” Chomsky said. “It has mobilized a huge number of people.
“If those forces can be sustained beyond the election, instead of fading away once the extravaganza is over, they could become the kind of popular force that the country badly needs if it is to deal in a constructive way with the enormous challenges that lie ahead.”
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