You definitely should watch it all. Martin Smith knows what he's doing. But if you're reading this you're probably just glancing through this trying to find some way to own your online political opponents so I'll break it down for you:
Notice that it was actually Assad who created al-Qaeda in Iraq/ISIS/whatever. For some reason nobody has mentioned this for like 20 fricking years but I remember. Contrarian zoomers love to say that Assad/Ghaddafi/etc. were actually good guys because they were our bulwark against Islamists. No they weren't, dipshits. They invented all this stuff.
Jolani = Golani: This explains a lot. People tend to get "radicalized" when they're run off their land. Fortunately Israel is now creating a buffer zone to protect their buffer zone in the Golan. If that doesn't work, they can just go forward and make a buffer zone for their buffer zone for their buffer zone and never face any consequences.
He swears he was the high-level AQI leader who was against the strategy of sending suicide bombers to kill as many civilians as possible. He just went along with it. I would be sympathetic if it was a 15-year old boy getting peer-pressured into smoking a cigarette once. I'm not when this guy has the blood (and shredded guts) of a thousand children on his hands.
He swears that his suicide bombings in Syria were different. He didn't target civilians, and definitely not civilians just because they were Alawi. Sure, Abu Muhammed.
Torture? Torture??? No, he's the one guy in the Middle East who has never ever been involved in torture.
Overall there's just way too much of this that reminds me of the Mafia. There's this very sanctimonious code of honor among jihadis, but when it comes down to it they're really all just about money. If you can generate money for your bosses then you get promoted.
Many of the leaders of the various factions in the Lebanese Civil War said afterwards something to the effect that yeah, I fricked up, I made mistakes, I did things that were wrong, I bear some share of responsibility for what happened. Now these are not great humanitarians, most of them are basically gangsters, but they at least can look back in hindsight and have some remorse for what they did. When this guy has sent God knows how many kids off to suicide bomb other kids and then he tells us did nothing wrong, I start to feel like I'm being lied to.
I'm cautiously optimistic that the future will be not quite as bad because this guy seems like he's just a sociopath. A sociopath won't hurt unless he has a reason to. The Assads were actually actively trying to be evil. They got off on hurting people. This guy though, he's just a complete fraud. And I would not be surprised if there's quite a few people in the New York PR world who were involved in creating his newer, friendly, compassionate jihadist persona.
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He seems like a very reasonable guy. I wonder how he prefers to torture his political prisoners.
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Thomas Friedman said that they got trained by the East Germans. So certain mechanical stuff that the Nazis invented and they perfected. But he often just repeats rumors and I think he was just being salacious here.
The way they actually do this is pretty similar to everywhere else. Something that happens in most parts of the world outside the USA. You can (apparently, please God do not give me first-hand evidence) cause incredible pain to someone by beating the soles of their feet. One of the advantages is that it doesn't leave any marks. Most authoritarian regimes are trying to not be authoritarian 100% 24/7 so claiming that you didn't torture someone is valuable. (It's likely they will never walk again but
.) Arab countries and Iran are notorious for this, but it's no secret to the rest of the world.
The truth that you'll never see in movies is that you can just put somebody in a cell and not feed them and that's enough. Even with food, eventually they want to talk to somebody so bad, they spill their guts.
But that was never what this was about. Like Wing Commander Mandrake says:
They didn't want these people to talk. You don't keep someone in your dungeon for 40 fricking years because you want information. You do it because you like hurting people. The Assads were fricking sickos like Saddam Hussein.
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I played Quake.
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