Shall we call a crusade then?
I sincerely hope that you do not believe ‘Islamists’ need to be defeated.
The real enemy are people who treat other people as objects to mistreat or kill. The real enemy are people who cannot fathom the possibility that they are not infallible. The real enemy are people who think that people who have different ideas and ideals are a threat to be eliminated.
So stick your rolleyes back in your head and think whether you fit any of the categories listed above.
To all those jumping to roll eyes: that was obviously (to me) a response to Rune’s comment about “how come across time people keep on taking incriminating pictures of themselves doing bad things”. And the answer is, well, in all those cases they did NOT think it was such a bad thing. I did not read it as an attempt to insinuate moral equivalency of the acts themselves nor to imply that it was worse, the person who posted the link has said so much and even Brutus has acknowledged that, so LonesomePolecat, take a deep breath, OK?
Back to the OP and to terrorist video: to the “recruitment” angle, and the “righteousness” angle add the role of such conduct as another element of the whole terrorist mentality/strategy. Remember, the terrorist considers the “powers” he seeks to overthrow, and the peoples to be imposed upon, as weak and morally corrupt, who won’t be able to stand sacrifice or hardship. They want us to see what they are capable of, so that we will be so horrified we demand that something be done to make them go away w/o more gruesome deaths, resulting in:
(a) backing down, or
(b) attempt to buy them off, or
© lashing out indiscriminately, thus further polarizing things, or
(d) engaging in a prolonged low-intensity conflict which consumes resources and makes us live stressed out, scared, surveilled and miserable, which to them at least means we’ve been brought down a peg; “if I can’t be happy then neither will you”.
If you remember a somewhat sappy Reagan-era song by Sting, even during the Cold War there was a back-of-our-minds element of self consolation that full-on WW3 was held at bay to a great degree “because the Russians love their children, too”. Terrorists do not have that consideration.
The line gets a little blurry in Chechnya, unfortunately. Russian forces have razed villages and large parts of the Chechen capital, Grozny. In the process they have killed thousands of people. The Russian troops have also been alleged to be party to torture, rapes, extortion and extrajudicial executions.
The Chechen separatists have just ramped the brutality up another notch. It would seem inevitable that the circle of violence will continue and more innocents will reap the whirlwind.
That worked so well for them in Afghanistan.
Yes, PaulFitzroy, prove that the terrorists were right all along to fight the power by any means necessary. Way to go. Bring on the Crusades.
Remember this, however: the forces fighting in the name of Islam won the last Crusades. However, they eventually lost out economically.