Third westerner beheaded by Isis.........

[DeistPaladin]

Get some perspective. The savagery of ISIS is infinitesimal next to those of many others during the last 50 years. Look at pol pot if Cambodia, the Hutu Tutsi genocide of Rwanda. Just because ISIS taunted the west by killing 3 western hostages (that they might have killed a few thousand locals is barely worth mentioning) they suddenly became demons of mythical proportions. Pol pot killed 2.5 million Cambodians in a year with clubs, and shutdown or destroyed almost all of the nations infrastructure, and depopulated the cities, and forces the entire population to live in concentration camp like collective farms. The Hutus, sometimes aided by local catholic clergy that the popes had declined to excommunicate, killed a million Tutsis with axes and hatchets in 2 months.

The murder of one man is an atrocity.

The murder of one million is a statistic.

The beheadings by ISIS were done on video. The massacres you mention were read about in newspapers. When we see a man in distress get his head cut off in a video, it becomes visceral and horrific to us. When we see some numbers on a printed page, it's just not real to us. It doesn't quite register.

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I'm not a conspiracist, but I can't see a lucid ISIS strategy for this.

There are two possibilities I can think of:

1. OBL wanted to provoke America into a protracted war in Afghanistan, hoping to break America the same way they broke the Soviet Union. It worked even better than he could have hoped, with Bush attacking Iraq, a nation that was actually opposed to Al Qaida.

ISIS may be hoping for the same thing, that if we get into a protracted war with them, they can bleed us through guerrilla tactics.

2. They may be convinced of their own religion, that Allah will lead them to victory. These are fanatics, after all.