Having run out of sedans and swimming pools for its view of creative and fun forms of execution, ISIS is now returning to an old favorite of beheadings. In the latest video, they executed women for sorcery in Syria and earlier beheaded a street magician as immoral under Islam and Sharia law. Two women were executed with their husbands.
Two women were the latest victims of ISIS and its extreme view of Islamic justice. The group has been targeted possible sorcerers or practitioners of “witchcraft”.
Street performers have been deemed sorcerers if they merely do magic tricks for children. Optical illusions are deemed black magic under the primitive Sharia judgments of ISIS. The dead man’s image shows a broken bag full of prayer beads laid near his body. Such trinkets and charms are also viewed as black magic and blasphemy.
By the way, if this all seems incredibly medieval and bizarre, our closest allies also execute people for magic and sorcery, including Saudi Arabia. As we have discussed, Sharia courts regularly punish or kill people viewed as consorting with “genies” and engaging in black magic.
There are some very good comments just above me here. Ken Rogers, bambam, ninipecket, Tom Nash. Very good perspectives.
@ bam bam
1, July 1, 2015 at 12:47 pm
“doglover
“When hospitals or schools are used as launching pads to shoot rockets into Israel, Israel has a right to shoot back and disable those sites.”
The brutal 60-year occupation of Palestine by Israel (and enabling US administrations) has obviously and dramatically aided and abetted Islamic extremism throughout the whole Middle East.
Professor Noam Chomsky was interviewed regarding the then-latest assault on the Palestinians:
“Welcome back to Democracy Now!, [Professor Chomsky]. Please first just comment, since we haven’t spoken to you throughout the [latest] Israeli assault on Gaza. Your comments on what has just taken place?
“NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s a hideous atrocity, sadistic, vicious, murderous, totally without any credible pretext. It’s another one of the periodic Israeli exercises in what they delicately call ‘mowing the lawn.’ That means shooting fish in the pond, to make sure that the animals stay quiet in the cage that you’ve constructed for them, after which you go to a period of what’s called ‘ceasefire,’ which means that Hamas observes the ceasefire, as Israel concedes, while Israel continues to violate it. Then it’s broken by an Israeli escalation, Hamas reaction. Then you have a period of ‘mowing the lawn.’ This one is, in many ways, more sadistic and vicious even than the earlier ones.
“JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what of the pretext that Israel used to launch these attacks? Could you talk about that and to what degree you feel it had any validity?
“NOAM CHOMSKY: As high Israeli officials concede, Hamas had observed the previous ceasefire for 19 months. The previous episode of ‘mowing the lawn’ was in November 2012. There was a ceasefire. The ceasefire terms were that Hamas would not fire rockets—what they call rockets—and Israel would move to end the blockade and stop attacking what they call militants in Gaza. Hamas lived up to it. Israel concedes that.
“In April of this year, an event took place which horrified the Israeli government: A unity agreement was formed between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah. Israel has been desperately trying to prevent that for a long time. There’s a background we could talk about, but it’s important.
“Anyhow, the unity agreement came. Israel was furious. They got even more upset when the U.S. more or less endorsed it, which is a big blow to them. They launched a rampage in the West Bank. What was used as a pretext was the brutal murder of three settler teenagers. There was a pretense that they were alive, though they knew they were dead. That allowed a huge—and, of course, they blamed it right away on Hamas.
“They have yet to produce a particle of evidence, and in fact their own highest leading authorities pointed out right away that the killers were probably from a kind of a rogue clan in Hebron, the Qawasmeh clan, which turns out apparently to be true. They’ve been a thorn in the sides of Hamas for years. They don’t follow their orders.
“But anyway, that gave the opportunity for a rampage in the West Bank, arresting hundreds of people, re-arresting many who had been released, mostly targeted on Hamas. Killings increased. Finally, there was a Hamas response: the so-called rocket attacks. And that gave the opportunity for ‘mowing the lawn’ again.”
http://www.alternet.org/world/noam-chomsky-israels-assault-gaza-hideous-atrocity
“America’s role and record as the world’s sole military superpower”
There is no doubt about this – the USA has done more than its fair share of trying to sort out the World’s Problems….
And despite doing well, with the best of intentions, and great sacrifice, it hasn’t provided the answer (if indeed there is an answer).
The U.S.A. is clearly not the Agency with which to Police the World. Nor is any other country nor political system.
The U.N. is currently the only vehicle with a mandate to enforce Global Law. Reform is required for the U.N. to earn the international respect required for a successful role as International Policeman, Judge Jury and Executioner. And to do this, requires the creation of a more “apolitical” image.
If the U.N. can’t do it, a new “Apolitical Body” needs to be created that can…
ninianpeckitt – The UN police force? That would be the police force that molests little girls?
So ISIS has grievances so they can kill whoever they want, whenever they want how every they want an no one can criticize them? Horse feathers. This bunch of murders are killing people, their own people, in the name of Muslim Orthodoxy. I accept their self identification. The only ones who can defeat ISIS are other Muslims. The West needs to stay out of it.
The Daoud regime that ruled Afghanistan from c.1973-1978 was fairly progressive. Women’s rights were elevated under Daoud’s rule, which was fairly secular by Islamic standards.
When the Communists seized power in the late 1970s, they immediately slaughtered Daoud and his family. Then the Communists leaders started killing each other. Daoud was able to keep the country together, although there was some opposition and an unsuccessful insurgency by fundamentalists.
The insurgency gathered strength once the Communists took power. The Soviets intervened to prop up the Communist regime….between the growing insurgency, and the infighting/coups/assassinations within the Communist leadership, the Communist rule in Afghanistan was likely to be overthrown.
For some reason, I often hear about “how well” Afghanistan did for years under Communist rule.
To the extent that Afghanistan had a progressive, stable regime, it occurred in the mid- to – late 1970s under Daoud. It was the the 1978-1979 Communist coupe and subsequent Soviet invasion that caused all hell to break loose.
doglover
When hospitals or schools are used as launching pads to shoot rockets into Israel, Israel has a right to shoot back and disable those sites. Israel’s army, unlike any other army of which I am aware, blankets the area with pamphlets, alerting the inhabitants to leave the vicinity because of planned attacks on the places launching rockets. It is Hamas, your buddy, who refused to allow its citizens to leave the area, under the threat of death, just so it could rack up casualties of its own men, women and children. The loss of life is terrible, but it is the terrorist government of Hamas which forced its own people to remain in an area being bombed.
John Smith – golems only protect Jews.
@ Neo
1, July 1, 2015 at 10:51 am
“Thank you US Government for creating ISIS so the USA Inc. can continue its perpetual war doctrine by fighting obscure entities.”
Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore suggests that, were the U.S. an individual, we would immediately recognize what such behavior was — addiction — and act accordingly.
America’s Got War
Poverty, Drugs, Afghanistan, Iraq, Terror, or How to Make War on Everything
By William J. Astore
(What follows is a verbatim excerpt):
While the mindset of global war was gaining traction, the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq. The most technologically advanced military on Earth, one that the president termed “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known,” was set loose to bring “democracy” and a Pax Americana to the Middle East. Washington had, of course, been in conflict with Iraq since Operation Desert Storm in 1990-1991, but what began as the equivalent of a military coup (aka a “decapitation” operation) by an outside power, an attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein and eliminate his armed forces and party, soon morphed into a prolonged occupation and another political and social experiment in violent nation-building. As with Afghanistan, the Iraq experiment with war is still ongoing at enormous expense and with even more disastrous results.
Radical Islam has drawn strength from these American-led “wars.” Indeed, radical Islamists cite the intrusive and apparently permanent presence of American troops and bases in the Middle East and Central Asia as confirmation of their belief that U.S. forces are leading a crusade against them — and by extension against Islam itself. (And in a revealing slip of the tongue, President Bush did indeed once call his war on terror a “crusade.”) Considered in these terms, such a war is by definition a losing effort because each “success” only strengthens the narrative of Washington’s enemies. [emphasis added]
There’s simply no way to win such a war except by stopping it. Yet that course of action is never on the proverbial “table” of options from which officials in Washington are said to choose their strategies. To do so, in the context of war thinking, would mean to admit defeat (even though true defeat arrived the very instant the problem was first defined as war).
Our leaders persist in such violent folly at least in part because they fear the admission of defeat above all else. After all, nothing is more pejorative in American politics or culture than to be labeled a loser in war, someone who “cuts and runs.”
In the 1960s, despite his own serious misgivings about the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson set the gold standard in his determination not to be the first American president to lose a war, especially in a “damn little pissant country” like Vietnam. So he persisted — and the conflict turned him into a loser anyway and destroyed his presidency.
Even as he waged war, as historian George Herring has noted, LBJ did not want to be known as a “war president.” Two generations later, another Texan, George W. Bush, grasped the “war president” moniker with genuine enthusiasm. He, too, vowed he would win his war when things started to go sour. Staring down a growing insurgency in Iraq in the summer of 2003, Bush did not shy from the challenge. “Bring ‘em on,” he said in what was supposed to be a Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry-style moment. Now, Washington is sending troops back into Iraq for the third time to engage an even more intractable insurgency, the Islamic State’s radical version of Islam, a movement originally fed and bred partly in Camp Bucca, an American military prison in Iraq. [emphasis added]
And just to set the record straight, President Obama, too, accepted the preeminence of war in American policy in his 2009 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo. There, he offered a stirring defense of America’s role and record as “the world’s sole military superpower”:
“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”
It was a moment that defined the Obama presidency as being remarkably in tune with America’s already omnipresent war ethos. It was the very negation of “hope” and “change” and the beginning of Obama’s transition, via the CIA’s drone assassination program, into the role of assassin-in-chief.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176016/tomgram%3A_william_astore%2C_%22hi%2C_i%27m_uncle_sam_and_i%27m_a_war-oholic%22/#more
How horrible. It’s so much better to kill people by torturing them in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or by dropping bombs on them or using drones to target wedding parties and rescuers or by bombing hospitals and schools in Palestine.
This blog was supposed to have had 26 Million hits. One would think that some Muslims in the world would speak on the comment section. Let us hear from you. Or forever hold your piece. I am holding mine.
Springtime for Hilter in Germannneeey!
Autumn for Poland and France..
There are some on the blog who attribute the creation or spread of ISIS to the United States and it’s policies. In that line of thought and rememberance do any of you recall the days when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan like back in 1980? The Soviets allowed women to attend college and be doctors and allowed the veils to come off. America did not like the fact that the Soviets had taken over a territory like Afghanistan and began a mass program to force them out. We are the one’s who help finance and move fighters into Afghanistan to go after the Soviets. The group morphed into al Qaeda. Yeah. CIA and MI6. We rounded up folks from all over the middle east and trained them and got them there. Iman al Zawari or however ya spull his name was just one.
This is coming to a theatre near you.
Support dictators if they hold nutty religions at bay. Those folks are not ready for Democracy. East of Corfu the Ten Commandments Dont Apply. Egypt is doing the right thing in running the Muslim Brotherhood brood into the ground.
I guess the Arab Spring beloved by Liberals did not work out so well.
Oh my God, those poor people. That’s horrifying. May their souls rest in peace.
It is absolutely true that Saudi Arabia enacts a similar medieval system of justice under Sharia Law. That is why I disagree with those who claim that ISIS is not representative of the region, or how Islam is practiced in the Middle East.
Dubai, Turkey, and Egypt have historically been the last holdouts against extremism, cosmopolitan tourist destinations. I don’t know about Dubai, but Turkey and Egypt are falling fast to the same extremist tide that is sweeping the area. It’s like the Muslim Expansion all over again.
US did not cause extremism in the Middle East. My father witnessed the beheading of gays in Chop Chop Square a great many years before the Iraq War.
Thank you US Government for creating ISIS so the USA Inc. can continue its perpetual war doctrine by fighting obscure entities. Isn’t ISIS (Egyptian goddess morphed into the Roman goddess Libertas) also the broad standing with a torch in New York harbor?
I do wonder if that beheaded is real this time and not another fake like so many others. I guess we all live in our own hell, one of our choosing.
President Assad does not execute street performers of sleight of hand. A secular tyrant yes, but one whose comparatively good record for tolerance of Christians and religious minorities was well established. Look at all the Arab Christians that fled our NATO ally Turkey for the safe haven of Syria in decades past.
In fact Saddam Hussein was more tolerant of Christians than the Saudis either. His fall has lead to many massacres of Christians who were secure under his tyranny.
No ridiculous stuff like this. That is what the golem ISIS does, inspired by its financiers, the Saudis.
The whole “get rid of tyrant Assad” farce needs to come to a screeching halt. McCain should apologize for his wickedness and stupidity.
This medieval thought process and behavior caused the dark ages. Are we really going to watch country after country fall to these fanatics? Fanaticism in any form is frightening because they really believe in what they are doing. It took hundreds of years to become enlightened. Is there such poor education in these countries that those who follow Isis are so ignorant as to not be able to see the harm they do to their own people?
I can’t help but wonder why, if the punishment for this behavior is so incredibly severe, would anyone within these primitive, throwback societies ever engage in any sort of performance involving magic or illusion? Obviously, they must know about the dangers involved. While I’m not one to ever condone the brutal and barbaric actions of the Saudi government, I have my doubts that it executes both the husband and the wife for the perceived wrongdoing of one. I could be wrong. I also assume that one is at least granted some sort of trial or hearing in Saudi Arabia before punishment is meted out. ISIS doesn’t burden itself with such formalities. Comparing Saudi Arabia to ISIS is somewhat of a stretch. Not much of a stretch, but a stretch.
These people are the absolute scum of the earth and must be eliminated. At a gathering like this a well placed drone strike is in order.
Isis must hate Vegas for many reasons. Hopefully the hilarious Penn and Teller have protection. The rest of the magicians..ehh.