[ianch99]

Originally Posted by Stuart

I wonder if John Kerry is right when he says ISIS is becoming desperate.. Their income is apparently being hit by the airstrikes, and both Anonymous and the various government agencies have been quite effective at cutting off their social media access.

They are a long way from being a spent force, but they do want to appear to be functional and relevant (otherwise they risk losing whatever support they have), so they are mounting a lot of smaller, relatively cheap, actions. After all, to fly multiple planes into multiple buildings, thus causing serious disruption to those evil westerners, takes a lot of planning, training and resources. None of which is cheap. It's far cheaper to send someone you've been working to radicalise into a public area with an ax, assault rifle or home made bomb. You don't even need to pay their airfare, as you can radicalise them enough via social media that they pay their own, that's assuming you cannot complete the training via social media.

Combine all that with the fact that some countries (e.g. America) make it relatively easy for anyone to buy a gun, up to and including assault weapons, and I think you have a recipe that will lead to a lot more incidents like this, at least in the short and medium terms.

But, hopefully, long term, Daesh will no longer be as much of a threat.

We do (both Muslim and non Muslim) need to work together to iron out the problems in society that cause people to look to things like Daesh though. Merely stopping people entering a country because of their religion is not going to stop that. If anything, it's going to rally more people to the cause.

You are right. ISIS want the right wing media to whip up the hatred and fear of Muslims. ISIS want the weak minded to fall into the trap of hating and fearing all Muslims because of the actions of a small minority. This is exactly why they are doing this. If the Muslim minority feel they are seen as terrorists then they will start to radicalise even more.

If this happens then ISIS have indeed won ..