German author visits Islamic State | Hacker News Reader

German author visits Islamic State

bbc.co.uk

26 pointscallum8510 comments

Native German here, you should always take things said by Todenhöfer with a HUGE grain of salt. He always reports from a ultra-left, anti-western stance of view. Also he is known for falsifying photographic evidence from Gaza to document israeli "crueltys". In the last couple of years, he also is one of the leading figures of leftist anti-semitism.

One of the interesting things that technology is doing is abstracting the concept of political group away from a certain geographic location. So Greens in Europe and Greens in North America can chat, share, and talk about strategies to change to world. Same goes for all sorts of other groups.

Here we have people with a common shared strong political/religious viewpoint assembling from around the world in one spot and declaring a new state. That's very unusual.

We see miniature versions of this in the states with "flash mobs", but the stronger the feelings involved, the more disruptive something like this can be.

I wonder if we're not going to see a lot more of this over the next few decades.

It mentions he is the first Western journalist permitted access but didn't Vice do an entire documentary from within IS earlier this year?

Essentially every country with a Muslim majority is an "Islamic state". Hence the title could mislead some.

No it isn't (eg turkey, albania, etc etc etc.). IS is meant for a radical islamist group that wants to establish a theocratic state.

If you consume lots of western media. For example I don't own or watch TV and read much mainstream news .... Everytime I see this it takes me a second or two to realise, Ah, they don't mean all Islamic states, they mean "THE ISLAMIC STATE" thingi that has recently popped up.

As I'm extremely uneducated in terms of all this western anti-whatever propaganda for me it actually took to google what exactly is the Islamic State, but anyway headline appears to be correct, as, according to Wikipedia "Since June 2014 it calls itself the Islamic State (IS), a name widely rejected by non-members". So indeed it would be incorrect to call it ISIS or ISIL or whatever else.

Countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have governments that exercise their own interpretation of the Quran. They are therefore, per definition, also Islamic states:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syariah_Court

Turkey is a secular country where sharia is not practiced (and doesn't even have an official religion)

"islamic state" != "Islamic State" (capital letters matter)

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