To associate such brutal ferocity to the idea of branding may seem simplistic, even callous. Yet the Islamic State’s success at spreading its gospel to destroy “infidels” throughout the world involves cunning propaganda and skillful branding to convince a portion of the Islamic world that they’ll remove Islam’s enemies from their lands, while insuring the IS name is more on their target’s mind than that of its leading competitors, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
http://www.atelierworks.co.uk/blog/the-dividends-of-death.phpWe are becoming inured to the killing, the ice cold murderousness of the Islamists. But IS has produced something new, a way of cataloguing its murders, and communicating to the wider world. Like any company or charity or government department, it publishes annual reports.
Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.
Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society.
FWIW, I think Malala Yousuzai's Nobel Peace Prize was well deserved, certainly more so than most that have been given out over the decades. Also, I think that the activists that made the British parliament's non-binding resolution on the recognition of Palestine possible deserve to be commended. To read the comments in my news feed, you'd think that Malala Yousufzai was directing a bombing campaign for NATO and that the PSC were subcontracted by the Netanyahu cabinet to pull off a stunt. There is a lot of weird nastiness in some quarters of the Left ... this is a bit sick.
Baboon -
Point is, there's no need to get defensive - I'm having a go at the Truther idiots, not you.
Edit: it may be a stereotype but like most stereotypes it's not based on nothing. On the contrary, rather than coming "out of thin air" it's based on many, many statements I've read or heard from many people over many years. Remember old padraig/HMLT who used to post here? Textbook case, although there have been others. It's a worldview that proceeds entirely from a conviction that "The West", whatever that is exactly, is the Great Satan and that everything bad happening, anywhere in the world and for any apparent cause, is the West's fault. That's the self-loathing part. I call it crypto-racist because basically everyone in the rest of the world, but especially the Muslim world, is assumed either to be acting in a purely reactive, deterministic way, without moral agency, or to be in on the great Western conspiracy. So it either dehumanizes them or makes them the West's puppets.
And it's just so depressingly solipsistic, it makes everything about us.
Does Naomi Wolf have any real power? No.
what Naomi Wolf said is crazy, but way more crazy is bombing the shit out of a country that became totally fucked up because you bombed the shit out of it previously (illegally and against the wishes of millions of your citizens).
You might as well say that Afghan people who think the Taliban are the worst thing in the world and spend most of their time criticising them, are 'self-loathing'.
Now you're almost making my point for me! Iraq is dysfunctional entirely because The West bombed it, end of story. Because it was, you know, a perfectly nice liberal democracy back when Saddam was in charge.
Do you see what I mean?
She's a high-profile figure and people listen to her. If you say she has no "real power" because she's not a politician then you could just as well say the same thing about Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly or whoever. Do the things these people say have no consequence at all?
Now you're almost making my point for me! Iraq is dysfunctional entirely because The West bombed it, end of story. Because it was, you know, a perfectly nice liberal democracy back when Saddam was in charge.
Do you see what I mean?
OK, I should be more clear: it's not a personal self-loathing, more on a cultural and national level. But the comparison between the UK government and the Taliban still doesn't quite hold, as the Taliban has no democratic mandate whereas at least a large proportion of the UK's electorate has voted for parties with belligerent foreign policies (the great majority, in fact, given the similarity in policy between the three major parties).
Moreover, clearly even the most ardent critics of the Taliban haven't accused, say, the recent invasions of Afghanistan (whether by Soviet or NATO-led forces) of being false-flag operations by the Taliban itself, so there is no mirror-image equivalent to loonies like Wolf or Alex Jones who think every little insurrection, bomb plot or whatever happening anywhere in the world is a CIA/Mossad-led conspiracy.