I think there is a need to look under the hood of IS here. It's not in the sense of these attacks an organised structure such as many terrorist groupings in the past. It can claim and can be claimed by those carrying out atrocities but isn't necessarily anything other than a brand. I posted a link to an attack in zmelbourne recently where the idiot carrying it out both claimed the action, which deemed more thuggery than terrorism, in the name of Al Queda and IS, which since they oppose each other makes no sense.
I think we see the threat magnified under the 24/7 media coverage to be an existential threat when it isn't. It is the type of violence and in many ways at a lower level that we have had for at least 50 years, and as a theme for a lot longer. Many of the terrorist groups in Europe in the 70s were dedicated to the collapse of Western capitalism, indeed there was a strong Marxist wing in the IRA, so the idea that there were the nice sensible rational terrorists and now we have the nasty irrational ones is overly simplistic and the sort of narrative that politicians and media like.
I suspect that Rhiannon is right that we are in a sort of hula hoop fad of attacks at the moment, in part fed by the media and the need of sad fuckwits yobdoe and kill in the name of their latest obsession. But trentvoyager is definitely right that abrogating responsibility for the deaths of innocents caused by our game playing at geo politics is foolish and callous. If we back selling of arms and dropping of bombs that kill innocents, a condemnation of those who do the same is mere hypocrisy. The patents of a child killed in a Yemeni hospital would be mad to think that somehow that death was not as a result of evil simply because the bomb was produced with that special extra flavour, Western freedom.
And as ever, that isn't to say that any thug, who carries out any attack and cites the death of that child as a reason, is justified in any sense. Rather that their justification is worth exactly what out justifications are for supporting the sections that lead to the death of the child.
We are a species of scum and rainbows. If we solve one problem, we are inventive to create many others but that doesn't mean we stop trying to solve the problems. There is no simple equation that says if you stop x, then the 'othet' will stop that but I see no reason. For us to be supporting the bombing of areas where we have no coherent objective beyond it making us feel like we are doing something. I see no need to be arming regimes which are supportive of groups such as IS. I see no need for supporting regimes which carry out the exact same type of punishments that IS. While we continue to do those things we are not just hypocrites, we are evil hypocrites that support the whippings, and the beheadings and the killing of children.
