Just to add to Liberal Redneck's point of Arabs and American Rednecks having things in common, WWE was quite popular in the Middle East, as is car racing (F1 not Nascar though). Also camping and 4x4'ing.

Do you think their lack of educational opportunity plays into it too?
In your scenario, wouldn't it be easier to radicalize an orphan Fairbs if you only had a 1st grade education, the most out of any of your circle of friends? From what I read yesterday, that is the case for a HUGE percentage of Muslims in the middle east, and not by choice.

@enoch
I did my best :-) I honestly feel threatened by this attitude of feeding the bear crumbs and pretending he is a friend. Also cant help liking Abby, so very disappointed.

@newtboy
For russia Assad is a (replaceable) puppet, bolstering Assad is just using that puppet for their own needs. ISIS is a threat because it directly supports terrorist groups within Russia. Sending in their air force and that coal powered smoking joke of an aircraft carrier was a military excercise with minimal losses and huge political and home security gains. Expensive though.

One cant just send in a task force to take out a dictator simply because one believes it would be the right thing to do. Countries generally have a limitless supply of local mafioso would-be dictators or religious leaders which the local population prefers to foreign rule. Religion and politics are just a thin veil for local tribal wars. In spite of Syria being a fairly civilised country before the current events I doubt there was ever a "democratic" alternative to Assad. Sometimes you just get lucky and the dictator decides he wants democracy (South Korea, Chile, Gorbatchev inadvertently).

F**k the whole middle east actually IMHO, twice. The Kurds never get any love from anyone and they´ve survived in the middle of this crazy shitstorm for millenia. Yet they will never have a country of their own. Even "Palestinians" created only in the last few decades appear to be closer to that goal. Not fair at all.

Pretty much interview scripted by Putin personally.

Why the drama about US - russian relations if the russians supposedly are not dangerous and Putin is not evil.

Building a case to sell Poland and the Baltic countries to Putin. Worked like a charm with Hitler and Czechoslovakia before WWII. Poland these days does not even have a border with Russia proper, only with what used to be Koenigsberg. Poland is part of NATO and if Abby and her friend the professor want to give that up then it is them who are pushing us all closer to a war (cold or not).

Ukraine has already exploded. Putin has already taken 1/3 of the country breaking bilateral treaties. Cant get much worse, hard to imagine how the US can get involved, Trump notwithstanding.

Syria - its basically over, except for the humanitarian and human rights catastrophe. Putins ally won - a slightly pyrrhic victory perhaps, but for the meantime Assad stays. Did they level cities or liberate them? Hard to tell the difference. Probably both. That said US involvement in the middle east is a grave shitstorm.

This awesome "analysis" somehow misses the biggest current problem of NATO - Turkey - possibly because Putin does not have a good handle on Turkey yet so its off-limits. Also Pakistan/India and North Korea does not get a mention for the same reason - no chance to push Putins agenda.

NATO might have reassured Gorby it had no intention to spread. It is important to understand that Warsaw pact countries generally accepted Russians as saviours from German occupation, by the 1970s this had changed firmly to perceiving Russians as occupants, political persecutors and economic idiots.

After the economic collapse of the USSR (supposedly somehow caused by Ronald Reagan :-) all these countries needed reassurance that the Russians were not coming back. The only possible reassurance was joining NATO. If that meant breaking a promise made to an ex-representative of a no longer existing country, that is fine by me. If NATO had promised not to spread to Mother Theresa I would be more concerned.

The problem with the Ukraine is that we (EU) made an offer that put them in danger (from Putin) and we could not back that up with real economic or military assistance. Dumb move. But also Ukrainian politics is an incredible mess and simply too many ethnic russians live there giving Putin a strong nationalist base.

I think it's extremely unlikely that we'll see nuclear war as a result of Trumps election. In fact I'm pretty certain that it is *less* likely given the aggression by Russia in the last few years. If our news is to be believed, they've been directly threatening the stability of the Middle-East and Eastern-Europe, and if the US had elected a president with a harder stance against those actions, more conflict would have certainly been the result.
Currently we're more likely to strike deals with Russia, who has a strong relationship with China, (the other major power we'd have the most chance of going to war with) so the greater danger at this point is being undermined economically or through some other diplomatic/political tactics.

Thank you @enoch, I was trying to figure a way of replying on how there isn't a denial that a minority of Muslims believe in suicide bombing, but that it isn't as widespread and exclusive to Islam as the far right make it out to be. You summed it up pretty well.

I was also going to add all the abortion clinic bombings and the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park bombing... all Christian and being done in the name of Christ. Then in Ireland/UK with the IRA... though that one isn't just religion and is more political (though again, many of those political differences has to do with worshiping Christ the wrong way).

There are militant Buddhist too, who do very violent and aggressive acts against others.

And there are plenty on the left who decry Islam, look at Sam Harris by example who argues the danger of Islam a great deal.

I agree, that we need to address the underlying political issues... and sometimes just need to let things go. There is a big civil war going on the middle east between denominations of Islam, and we are picking a side, which in turn makes us a target of the other side. We ignore the fact that the goal of terrorist groups is to make it an "us vs them" world, so that it makes it easier to recruit potentially radicalizeable people. I hear Christians bemoan how Christianity must be true because of all the persecution, proves Satan is trying to push Christianity down, but then they have zero empathy for how it must feel for a Muslim, and the persecution they feel, and how that must make them feel they are the right one for the same exact reasoning.

The fact so many Christians are not only willing, but calling for a war, for a new Crusade basically, shows that Christians are just as easily radicalized. They may not be strapping bombs to their chests yet, but I'd guess if they were in a Muslim country and felt they were being repressed, then I'd wager they'd be more than willing to engage in suicide bombs.

The pint being, yes, some Muslims do engage in suicide bombs, but it isn't just them. Christians have done it plenty in the past, and will undoubtedly return to it again, especially as the more radicalized and violent portion of them become normalized here in the US thanks to the election of Trump who encouraged them all through his campaign.

We live in a society that is still reliant on necessary lies to be functional. For example that the wars in the middle east are not about oil, or that working every hour of your day until you die is the key to happiness. Until we can solve our energy problem (eg with thorium) and our socially destructive economic issues then lies and fake news will inevitably rule over reason because reason is not compatible with our necessary lies.

Just wait until he goes, grinning like a fool, into his first meeting with Putin and comes out thinking they understand each other. Putin is going to manipulate him like a small child.

His team is already making overtures towards partnering with Russia to deal with the Middle East.

The world is fucked.

Way to oversimplify a difficult decision. I expect she's happy to have voted for a woman who has cheer led wars and caused untold death and destruction across the middle east. A woman who was supported and was in the pocket of wall street, all the major banks, arms manufacturers, every elite American institution, and the saudis and fought dirty to deny the chance of the american public to vote for a true champion of the people, Bernie Sanders. Life is complicated and videos like this do the progressive cause no good at all.

I'm not voting for Trump newtboy, and I am not necessarily arguing with some of your points about Trump..I am not sure what to believe about who he really is or what he would do if he were elected president. I think even if he were going to be a good president at home, I still wouldn't trust him to handle the fragile situation in the middle east or with russia, etc.

By the way, even Richard Dawkins admits that Jesus is a real person, so you are pretty out there with that belief my friend.

I know it's a bit of a cliche to say it, but this whole video is just so much Russian propaganda. Right from the very first story 'ignored' by the MSM, you have the very same day coverage by the BBC here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36835678

The only difference is that the BBC coverage has some details that the video's source leaves out, like that the Free Syrian Army condemned the beheading and was seeking to punish those responsible.

There is absolutely zero question that Syria is currently a war zone, with Russian jets dropping Russian made bombs on Syrian civilians. There is overwhelming evidence that chemical weapons have been deployed by BOTH ISIL and the Syrian government.

I'm not really sorry if it seems like the MSM is drawing a picture that makes the Assad regime look like bad guys. The reality is that the FACTS make the Assad regime bad guys. That doesn't make ISIL good guys because they are fighting Assad, criminals try and kill each other all the time and that's what's happening. The really troubling aspect is there exist plenty of Syrian people in the region who legitimately wanted an end to Assad's dictatorship and started a legitimated rebellion and have been almost completely cut out and killed off by both Assad and ISIL. If you've been paying attention, Russian bombing strikes focus heavily on the NON-ISIS rebels because they have legitimacy and thus need to die first.

The notion that guns and mercenaries from the west are flooding in is simply untrue. You have the curious responsibility of explaining how the US has been incapable of removing Assad if it has provided such overwhelming support as you claim. What is true, is that Assad overreacted to the Arab Spring protests, unlike say Jordan decided to fire on protests almost immediately and brought a civil war on his hands.

Meanwhile, we also know the origin of the trajectory of the Sarin rockets fired were from areas of government control. We know Assad had a chemical weapons program. We know the volume of the attacks was almost certainly unattainable by anyone other than a state actor. We know that most of the victims were either civilians or the opposition. It's also a curious that these attacks only seemed to occur in Syria.

Again your idea that oil is still a motivation for US involvement in the Middle East is an outdated concept. The US surpassed Saudi Arabia as the largest global producer in the world thank to shale oil. The price of oil has crashed as a result and will likely remain low for a prolonged time as a result. The only beneficiary who stands to gains from revisiting the conflict between the US and Russia is Putin because it boosts his domestic popularity to be locked in a struggle with the US.

Many governments in the Middle East regularly throw out the excuse that anything that goes wrong (and is usually their fault) is a result of a US conspiracy. Egypt has regularly done it, Turkey has just recently blamed the attempted coup on the US even though the incentives for the US are clearly for a stable government there to provide a base from which to attack ISIS in Iraq. You should not be so gullible as to believe this is always the case just because the US has intervened covertly in the past.

Just remember... while there is a Congress that *might* temper some of his proposals... there's no Congress between him and the button (and the fact that he has said he would not rule out a first strike nuclear attack against somebody in the Middle East and Europe... and he also might not protect our European allies if attacked if they haven't paid). There's no Congress between him and him launching an initial retaliatory strike for making jestures... No matter how bad Hillary is, she isn't ready to destroy the world and start a nuclear holicast the way Trump is more than willing to do. Also, the lone wolf attacks we've seen the last year or so will only greatly increase under Trump as he and his ideals, implemented or not, incite futher self radicalization, by people who won't need contacts, they'll just be upset that the US is targeting Islam as a whole specifically, not just the jehadist... and remember, it looks like he'll win as he is winning in states like Florida and Ohio... When those nuclear missles rain into the United States, remember, those voiting for him, you specifically knew that would happen and you chose to destroy the world by voting for an egomaniac that has no clue how to be diplomatic, who has no clue how the real world works... who thinks the world opperates just like a boardroom... or one of his appartments where he kept black people out...

And now we got much further from understanding each other again.

Would we have any luck coming at this from an entirely different angle. What do you propose that Jewish Europeans, Jewish Palestinians and the Jewish populations around the Middle East should have done between around 1910 through 1948? Staying in Europe was a death sentence and it's just good fortune the allies were able to retake it while any of them were left alive. The jewish population of Palestine was being similarly disenfranchised, but unlike in Europe they weren't as badly outnumbered. The confrontations with the Arab Palestinians had turned violent, and their leadership openly admired Hitler. As preparations for WW2 got underway, British and Allied strategy was taking the strategic route of marginalizing the Jewish minority because the Arab majority support was more important to holding the region.

I don't see anything but death and suffering to the jewish population if they just follow what I gather as your position of basically living by the rules and the law of the land, whether they like it or not.

To an extent, I agree, but if you're willing to bomb a school expecting mostly non combatant children to be the victims because someone made a model rocket there, you are the evil party in my eyes. Israel has no qualms about killing a hundred civilians to target a single combatant. That makes them the evil party to me.

Australia, or...maybe...Germany.
I get that it's a non starter today, but when Israel was being created, it would have made far more sense to give them part of Germany instead of the middle east, IMO. That said, yes, anywhere else would be preferable at this point, specifically somewhere they PAY for, not somewhere they simply take control over by force. As it stands, they have lost the moral high ground completely, and squandered much of the sympathy they were due after WW2 with their aggressive and completely non empathetic actions since.