Tag IS

Tourism in Islamic countries: my prediction

Tunisia’s second attack in recent times has left the country reeling, and British tour operators pulling out for the next week, at least. This has been the biggest attack on and death of British people in a terrorist attack since the 7/7 bombings in London and the country has been rocked. But not as much as Tunisia itself will be rocked.

Is there trouble with Islam?

Before I get stuck in, I want to emphasise how I am a liberal commentator and am happy to be shown where I am wrong; I do not want to level accusations at Islam which are wrong and which have developed out of a biased media caricature of what Islam is. It is easy to fire from the emotional hip and to rely on emotional social identity theory of ‘us and them’ such that I present an attack on Islam which is either straw man or unwarranted.

Moreover, there is an issue here with the while notion of causality, something which I have looked at in the post “Have I ever killed someone?” I will not so much deal with that in huge depth here as I want to look at the two ideas in unison in the next post on this matter.

Kurdish Oath

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of this, but it seems pretty cool. I found it on a comment on a Yahoo News Article:

For general interest I copied down the oath given to a new group of fighters with the PKK. The Kurdish YPG fighting in Kobane are a different organization and their oath may be different, but it is actually many of the same people.