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Historical ruins is our shared heritage and our countries should take blame for everything that lead to this situation, should they take harm. And I mean [almost] every country.

By playing petty and pointless political games we're about to lose things we have no hopes to ever have back. Will people learn? These days I think the only way for humanity to save face is to die off entirely.

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First paragraph is gold. Every country responsible involved in the proxy wars and game playing that has resulted in threats to these ruins is behaving in a criminally careless fashion and should be brought to account for their misdeed. The second paragraph is also gold until the last sentence which is absolute shit.

Humanity dying off is much much worse than ancient ruins being destroyed. Ancient ruins don't mean anything if there aren't any people around to experience them.

I invite you to tell that to the people who gave their lives trying to save archives, artifacts and records when the National Library in Sarajevo was shelled in 1992. I guess some people think these things are worth dying for.

Blame games don't solve problems.

Misanthropy and careless childish avocation of destruction rather than constructive aims is the macro issue here.

Maybe we can learn from history and rather than brutishly lash out in anger or fear we could attempt to build new bridges least we forget why the old bridges failed.

Understanding the history of the rise of ISIS might help us avoid similar situations in the future, and it might help us to reconcile with them if such a thing is even possible, but mere knowledge alone will not defeat ISIS. It may be that their movement is unsustainable and will wither away on its own, or it may be that local forces will eventually be able to defeat them, but if not then either we will take action against ISIS at some point, or we will have to coexist with them. Considering that this is a group whose express goal is the assimilation or destruction of all human cultures not their own, peaceful coexistence seems unlikely. (To be clear, I don't consider ISIS a global threat obviously, but they are certainly having a great deal of success locally at the moment.)

The West is so morally compromised here that it's hard to imagine that we could credibly (in the eyes of non-ISIS players in the region) take action against them, but that does not mean that destroying ISIS is not the right thing to do in theory. It just means that we probably can't do it. That's not a defense of ISIS though, it's an indictment of many decades of utterly stupid and short-sighted policy in the Middle East.

Well yeah, Daesh are shit lords and should be neutralized.

The set of dominoes and destabilization of that entire region really probably could have been prevented. When economies collapse and people are hungry and desperate that doesn't really help encourage stability or sanity.

When a person dies we also lose something we'll never get back. And the person who dies? They lose the entire universe and all of its future possibilities.

Sorry but I disagree it's fault of everyone else. True Bush invasion started this. But as far as the collapse of security forces in Iraq (which allowed ISIS to gain infamy), most of the blame lies with the Iraqi govt.

You can't stop a few hundred (or a thousand) guys with AK47 with pickups when your solders have M1 tanks?

Maliki and the Shia put some insane pressure, sure. But you're not giving credit to Islamism world-wide.

Political game playing by anti-Assad and anti-Iranian powers were also directly responsible for the rise of ISIS. These share a portion of the blame for some ISIS's misdeeds.

As long as we're assigning blame let's actually blame the people directly encouraging this, the wahhabist/salafi crusaders that are heavily funded and protected by the Saudi government and who have been at it long before Isis.

http://www.cfr.org/world/cultural-terrorism-wahhabi-islam/p5...

People keep forgetting that the Muslims all around the world are traveling there to rape children and murder civilian "apostates".

This isn't some "tiny" minority, they are over 100 of millions of supporters and people who approve of the doctrine that allows sex-slavery and killing apostates. In fact, according to Pew Research as of 2013, the numbers reach up to approx. 800 000 000 muslims who think that honour killings are justified amongst other things.

As an ex-muslim (much like an ex-smoker) I am rather biased, but here it is http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...

So your contention is that all these people's families are perfectly fine with them going to the Levant for a little sun and frolic? If they have such a support base for all these terrible things then why do they have to hide where they are going? I'm no friend to organized religion, but I remember enough about the so-called rules of jihad to remember that you need your father's permission. When you start going on about "the Muslims" you're the mirror image of all these assholes like Qaradawi that go on about "one Ummah" and the "rope of Allah"

I think the contention is that this does not matter - it is an intolerable situation. I think the contention is that having a subgroup in society with 1% of their people willing to kill cannot possibly be contained by a police force, and cannot possibly peacefully exist alongside other groups.

Add to that the fact that 50% or more of those muslims will protect the 1% extremists from the police force in all but the most offensive cases.

Let's face facts here : islam is a religion that was created in a massive war, that is on occasion blamed for starting the dark ages by cutting off all sea based trade in Western Europe and more than half of land based trade. The ideology internalized war during it's formation period. Hell, in the hadith you find plenty of references why the early caliphs "chose" islam, and the reason was they were at war. The religion survived only because it could convince large amounts of people to fight anyone else around them. Further in it's history it spread by war and it is absolutely unique in the sheer amount of genocides that just happened to take place just at the edge of islam, at the point where it was spreading. The biggest slaughter in history, the Mongol conquest of India, with the lower end of death toll estimates at over 3 times the WWII total death toll (over 30 times bigger than the holocaust), and may have killed half a billion (close to 100 holocausts), was an islamic expansion war.

And I wouldn't worry about them going to the middle east - or anywhere - that's temporary. This will spread, and the time will come when the fight is simply local.

THAT is the contention.

The biggest slaughter in history, the Mongol conquest of India, ... may have killed half a billion

Wow.. That's incredible considering that the WORLD population in 1200-1300 was only 400m people. In fact, it's so incredible, I think I'm going to need to see some references.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates

It is incredible. The reason they could kill so many is that they were at it for several hundred years and attacked different regions. So the population had some time to replenish before the next series of genocides started. Individual campaigns had death tolls in the 10-50 million range. There were 6 major campaigns. Several had multiple decades of genocide.

And of course, death tolls are a guessing game, as are population figures. So yes there are legitimate arguments about these figures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_India

I don't think "they" and "several hundred years" go together in a coherent sentence. What are we talking about here, the Borg collective?

Ah, I see this is the Isaac Asimov approach to Islamic historiography.

I don't think even Will Durant would toss around numbers like that. And 50% of Muslims sheltering extremists is a totally indefensible number. Maybe after the whole country had been subjected to sustained modern propaganda techniques of the sort we have not yet seen any Islamist regime deploy.

> These days I think the only way for humanity to save face is to die off entirely.

I have a slightly different theory - assholes will be assholes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullie...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q-bB-qywJ0

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