Anyway, I always lean to the fewest words possible in a meme.
Any word I can cut out, is gone. For example, this one. The grammar is very lean.
Posted on 04/20/2015 5:10:42 AM PDT by elhombrelibre
Aloof. Polite. Cajoling. Extremely attentive. Restrained. Dishonest. Inscrutable. Malicious. The rebels from northern Syria, remembering encounters with him months later, recall completely different facets of the man. But they agree on one thing: "We never knew exactly who we were sitting across from."
In fact, not even those who shot and killed him after a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014 knew the true identity of the tall man in his late fifties. They were unaware that they had killed the strategic head of the group calling itself "Islamic State" (IS). The fact that this could have happened at all was the result of a rare but fatal miscalculation by the brilliant planner. The local rebels placed the body into a refrigerator, in which they intended to bury him. Only later, when they realized how important the man was, did they lift his body out again.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi was the real name of the Iraqi, whose bony features were softened by a white beard. But no one knew him by that name. Even his best-known pseudonym, Haji Bakr, wasn't widely known. But that was precisely part of the plan. The former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein's air defense force had been secretly pulling the strings at IS for years. Former members of the group had repeatedly mentioned him as one of its leading figures. Still, it was never clear what exactly his role was.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Islam spread, (FROM PERSIA TO SPAIN AND FROM SPAIN TO PERSIA!), in one century.
well the label is wrong. Islam did not spread from Spain to Persia as the title states. So an incorrect title destroys an otherwise nice graphic.
Anyway, I always lean to the fewest words possible in a meme.
Any word I can cut out, is gone. For example, this one. The grammar is very lean.
Like I said, in the pursuit of absolute brevity, I often trim the verbiage to the bare minimum, assuming a certain knowledge. Perhaps I can make longer explanation versions for those who need remediation.
Or, even if you had no bloody idea at all where Islam started, you might glance at the map, and the arrows. And the date by Mecca, and the date in Spain. Sheesh.
so much for reasonable criticism. have a nice day
Just for you:
“Islam officially began in Mecca in 629 AD. (See map.) Then, in one century, it spread all the way from Spain in the West, to Persian in the east. (See map.)”
I know where Islam started. Apparently you don’t based on your worthless graphic.
So, when you read the saying,”From sea to shining sea,” which sea did it start at?
How about “from here to eternity?” Where is the “here?” Perhaps you should post comments against the movie.
Life must be very hard for you, with your narrow and stilted reading of simple phrases.
Sheesh.
I'd say it was our blowback. If we had made a deal with Assad, he might not have allowed jihadists to flow through Syria. Heck, we might even have sweetened the deal with a few hundred million a year in foreign aid. Instead, we kept on threatening to invade Syria.
Lot of mixed messages. Foggy Bottom is aptly named.
I get it. In your mind, it was our fault. Blame America first. After all, we were not paying tribute money to the Assad family. And seriously, how is it our blow back? We didn’t create this army to subvert Iraq. Assad did. We didn’t transport them to Syria and onto Iraq to attack and kill Americans. Assad did. I know it’s hard to see it this way, but Assad and Iran killed Americans in Iraq to thwart our efforts there. So you can drop the Great Satan theory that everything is our fault.
America wasn't to blame. The incompetents chosen by Bush were. Bush wasn't merely incompetent in choosing Karzai and Maliki - he was incompetent in choosing the people who executed his policy as well as figuring out what policy to implement. The results are visible for all to see. Don't get me wrong - Bush is a smart, analytical guy. He was just a lousy decision maker. At every critical juncture, he made the wrong decision. America's only mistake was choosing him for president. Not that Gore, Kerry or McCain would have been any better, of course. We chose the least of the evils, and we got bit, anyway. Then thanks to Bush's incompetence, we got rewarded with 8 years of Obama, who's hyper-competent - at giving us Carter-era malaise.
Whether you call a several hundred million dollar stipend for Assad foreign aid or tribute, the reality is that the lack of an Iraqi insurgency would have saved us hundreds of billions of dollars. We hand out roughly the same amount of money to Pakistan, and they backed the Taliban who sheltered al Qaeda which perpetrated 9/11. Sometimes it's just less trouble to pay the ankle-biters. Heck, what do you call NATO other than decades of tribute involving trillions of dollars in military expenditures gifted to Europe to keep the Russians at bay?
I stayed up until 5 am yesterday reading this entire long article, which was well worth the time spent. The twists and turns of the international Islamic conspiracy (IIC, I just made this up, I like it), are enough to make your head spin. The comments are interesting too, although I read two long ones with different Western names which I think were a disinformation plant by one ISIL supporter.
Islam was spread from Medina to Spain and Persia in one century. The sentence was poorly written. Just look at the arrows on the map at comment #2. There was no spread directly from Spain to Persia. The Muslims were stopped at the Pyrenees Mountains by the French. Charles Martel, I think, thus saving the rest of Europe from their invasion until recently. They were finally driven out of Spain along with the Jews, by Ferdinand and Isabella around 1492.
The "nice graphic" makes it quite clear that the disease spread north, west, and east from a turd world rat hole named Medina.
“In 2003, the Damascus regime was panicked that then-US President George W. Bush, after his victory over Saddam Hussein, would have his troops continue into Syria to topple Assad as well. “
That line is in there pandering to European/liberal conventional wisdom - that the pigheaded reactionary policies of the bumbling Americans are the cause of the unrest of otherwise happy noble savages - assuring themselves that they are so much more sophisticated.
The truth is that the Syrian Ba’athist regime was an evil Anti-American gang long before George Bush was president. All our enemies are always looking for ways to make us fail. Any operation in the region will have to contest the efforts of many bad actors - it is an unavoidable cost of effecting change in that region.
Yup, and some of these bozos will believe that it’s merely situational that or episodic that the Assads and the mad mullahs of Iran have come to hate us based on some recent events. Actually, these apologists are little different than Obama who explain and mitigates the crimes of Islamists by making sure we remember the Crusades. They cut from the same cloth even if they claim they’re conservatives. They blame American regardless.
You sound like a man who’d be able to adjust well in prison as a catamite or as permanent payer of extortion money. Is it no guts or just too flippin’ cerebral? I’m sure you don’t know Americans who were in Iraq and blaming Bush is, well, just stupid.
Bush was in the hot seat, and he dropped the ball. You can hurl abuse at his critics all you want, but the reality is that they weren't the ones who spent $1T and lost 7K men in Afghanistan and Iraq only to see them go to hell. We've been paying $3b a year in financial aid to Egypt and Jordan since the Camp David Accords and $1b a year to Pakistan for decades, and those wasn't even situations where our men were being targeted, but somehow you have an issue with handing out cash to Syria to detain or kill would-be jihadists headed for Iraq?
Bottom line is that Bush wasn't thinking straight. Either he had political support to invade Syria, or he did not. If he could not invade Syria, for practical reasons, then his best option was to appease Assad. Besides, in what universe would it make sense to replace an Alawite regime in Syria with a Sunni one? Would a Sunni one somehow be less sympathetic to its Sunni Arab brethren fighting US troops in Iraq? The Iraqi Sunni Arabs who went from Brahmin to pariah status over the course of the several weeks of Tommy Franks's main force-avoiding blitzkrieg, which stored up trouble by avoiding rather than killing hundreds of thousands of Saddam's troops, in its lightning thrust to Baghdad?
Blazing away at Bush's critics is the equivalent of criticizing someone who dinged his accountant for causing him to be audited. Next time a homeowner complains that his developer's incompetence caused his roof to cave in, maybe you should criticize him, too. The way normal people look at this is when someone in your pay provides sub-standard results, he deserves every last bit of abuse hurled at him.
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