This morning’s news sites show how dangers of international Arab ISIS terrorism, Iran etc. just can’t be swept under the rug.
One of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s greatest international failures is that he not only never succeeded in convincing the United States of the dangers of Iran, but he did so badly that the USA seems to trust Iran more than it trusts Israel. Obama and Kerry have been begging Iran to talk. They don’t treat Iran as a world danger, a pariah, which it should be.
PARIS — The Obama administration is open to talking with Iran on the security crisis in Iraq, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday, even after Iran’s supreme leader angrily said Tehran would no longer discuss Middle East issues with the United States…He acknowledged that he had opposed Iran’s attendance, but he stressed that the United States was still prepared to speak with the Iranians about Iraq and Syria, including on the margins of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program that will resume in New York on Thursday. Just because the Iranians were not invited to the conference, Mr. Kerry said, “doesn’t mean that we are opposed to the idea of communicating to find out if they will come on board or under what circumstances or whether there is the possibility of a change.” …The Obama administration has long sought to separate the nuclear talks with Iran from discussions of regional issues, out of concern that Tehran might seek concessions in the nuclear negotiations in return for cooperating on Syria or Iran.
I don’t understand how the Americans can disassociate the Iranian nuclear threat to world peace from the character and aims of the Iranian leadership. They’re using modern child psychology in dealing with dangerous psychopaths. Modern child psychology tells us to separate the child from his bad actions by saying:
“What you just did was bad.” Instead of saying: “You are a bad boy.”
This may work with young children who are inherently good, but it won’t work with Iranians, ISIS and the volunteers/recruits to Arab terrorism. There’s an excellent interactive article on the New York Times site about the rise of ISIS. It’s worth using one of your limited number of free NYT articles to read it. (If you know of a place it can be accessed freely, please let me know in the comments, thanks.) Here’s the opening:
A Rogue State Along Two Rivers How ISIS Came to Control Large Portions of Syria and Iraq By JEREMY ASHKENAS, ARCHIE TSE, DEREK WATKINS and KAREN YOURISH July 3, 2014
The militant group called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria seemed to surprise many American and Iraqi officials with the recent gains it made in its violent campaign to create a new religious state. But the victories achieved in the past few weeks were built on months of maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which define a region known as the cradle of civilization.
Not only has countries like Turkey proven fertile ground for recruits, but so has Europe and even the United States.
At least three Somali families in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have female relatives who have gone missing in the past six weeks and may have tried to join Islamic State, said community leader Abdirizak Bihi. He said that while the reasons for their disappearance were unclear, he had told the families to contact police.
Not long ago, I watched a very panicky news report on television about how shocked the British are that the ISIS be-headers had good middle-class British accents. We must remember that many of the worst and most brutal terrorists are educated.