3581 days ago
Why does ISIS exist? Because the meddling of the West created it. We ousted Saddam Hussein and created a power vacuum but also the alienation of Sunnis from the power centres in Iraq. Then we meddled to oust President Assad in Syria arming his opponents, including many who now fight for ISIS.
Sixty years of Western meddling to bring about regime change in the Middle East (I go back to Iran in the fifties) has made the West ever more hated in the region. Meanwhile the trail of death we have left in recent years through our illegal wars (Iraq) and tinkering (Syria) has acted as a fantastic recruiting sergeant among disaffected Muslim youth in the West for vile extremists such as ISIS.
Today ISIS has hit a new low by burning Jordanian pilot Maaz al-Kassasbeh alive. It hopes by doing this to get both the Jordanian regime and the West to over-react.
Jordan is an artificial country created by the West, notably Britain. The vast majority of its – mainly very poor – population are Palestinians. It should be part of a Palestinian State. A tiny minority from the Hashemite tribe have ruled since we put them on the throne. They are rich. The biggest one day massacre of Palestinians in history occurred in the early 1970s when the father of the current monarch bloodily butchered many thousand Palestinians who wanted democracy and economic justice.
When Jordan reacts by arranging hasty trials of Islamist prisoners in its jails and executing those folks many in the West will cheer. That they will be cheering the way that an ally of us ignores basic principles of justice in allowing full and fair trials before engaging in State sponsored executions. I fear there is just a lust for revenge blood.
How will ordinary Jordanians react? By showing support for the Western stooges who rule over them in these barbarous acts? I sense many will feel more alienated and more likely to support the Islamists.
Should the West throw in more of a military arsenal and “bomb ISIS back into the Stone age?”
