One of the issues with ISIS and similar groups is that they tend to recruit poor, desperate, unemployed, unhappy, already halfway off-the-radar young men and promise them money, prestige, a way to support their families, and a sense of belonging. Most of these people are not religious radicals before they join the…

Cheers, you too. The only way I’d want to see states based on religion/ethnicity would be if there was a larger supranational organization that they could be a part of that would diffuse tensions. A United States of the Levant, or a Middle Eastern Union.

A time machine, haha. As you said, it is a conundrum, one that people with smarter minds and greater work ethics than myself have not been able to solve. For Turkey, I don’t think any change regarding the Kurdish situation will arrive while a strongman is in charge.

And yet, prior to their indoctrination, most of those individuals probably spent their lives adhering to the belief that mass murder/suicide is not a good or effective thing to do.

Honestly, it goes so much deeper than that. They recruit folks from some of the most destabilized countries in the world with promises of stability (financial, social, political, etc). I’d argue that they promote the ultimate self-sacrifice as a way to give these folks a sense of pride that isn’t found in their…

It shouldn’t be hard to convince people that living a decent life or at a minimum martyring yourself on a battlefield is superior to killing innocent people in a club, but it is.  

You’d think that with all the brilliant thinkers / strategists / PR people we have floating around western civilization, someone should be able to come up with a campaign that could effectively delegitimize the “appeal(?)” of a mass murder suicide mission. I mean really: how hard can it be to convince someone that…

When you guys were called out for not reporting this in a timely manner, due to your preoccupation with defending the Mariah Carey, you claimed you needed more time to properly give this matter attention (which is inconsistent with your previous coverage of other mass shootings).

That depends on who you want at the table. Assuming an ISIS inspired attack, no one wants to legitimize ISIS by negotiating with them. Even if you got them to the table, got them to submit to long prison sentences and reparations, and got al-Baghdadi to come out in Dabiq as a queer feminist atheist willing to extol…

Unless a person is born into that life and indoctrinated as they grow up, there is a process a person goes through to be recruited into a terrorist cell. That process is the sophistication I’m referring to. Because not everyone who joins a terror organization does so because they are inherent jihadists or even…

It’s sophisticated in the way that Airbnb and Uber (compared to Holiday Inn and Yellow Cab) are sophisticated. You set up an international organization and export your ideology with little money, infrastructure, or risk.

Sohrab was the author on a paper discussing TOMATO diseases. This is Tomato troll.

How do you define “organized terror” troll? After the act you pulled in the other article I’m not inclined to be polite, and it looks like you’re talking out of your ass once again.

Reports don’t state it was only a lone gunman. Witness reports have been mixed, and it’s not clear even if their was a single shooter they acted alone. Daesh cells in Turkey are a well documented problem, and has been a problem in Europe as well. A single attacker hitting a soft target of opportunity doesn’t mean that…

........says the idiot without an intelligent counter argument.

“If it truly was...an act of terror”...okay hold up. Regardless of who did it, this is terrorism. Randomly firing into a crowd at a night club is terrorism. It’s a soft target designed for maximum fear and media attention. That it’s popular with foreigners only underscores that (more media attention).

Yeah, the whole “celebrating the New Year is kufr” thing was pushed really heavily in Turkey recently. Turkey’s top religious authority issued a statement today, though, saying there’s no difference between attacking a mosque and attacking a nightclub:

There is definitely a school of thought that says the Turkish government had already vilified people who would celebrate Christmas and/or New Year’s holidays, and ignored previous attacks throughout the week.

Or, you could argue that when ISIS exhorts and persuades lone wolves to carry out mass shootings, it’s the most sophisticated kind of organized terror- the kind that’s virtually impossible to defeat.

Ideologies are tough to defeat. You cut off the head of one, several more will pop up, especially in an ideology that emphasizes martyrdom. The technology you mention also serves to spread ideas and methods of enacting the ideology. Easy movement of people across countries with no corresponding movement of security…