Scott Stantis for December 18, 2015

Republicans don’t think a lot of our military but call themselves patriots. ISIS is a bunch of psychos, not an army.

Product of fear mongering.

Overblown by the corporate media.

With over 300 million guns in the U.S. and tens of thousands of gun deaths, there is cause for concern/fear, but not from ISIS. Not one American in the U.S. was shot by ISIS; all the shooters in the mass shootings you reference were Americans. ISIS has taken on the aura of the Boogeyman, and it is the result of fear mongering.

Daesh is more a problem than a threat, being about the size of the NYPD. It IS those “lone wolf” nut cases whether the couple in San Bernardino, or Dylann Roof in Charleston, who are the real threat, and they aren’t all “Islamic”, but they are, like Aurora and Rosebug, terrorists.

Were the hijackers who killed more than 3,000 people in a single day, armed only with box cutters, a JV team? Not that I agree with being terrified and that our leaders or electorate should make decisions based upon fear, but we do need to be vigilant and smart rather than simply summarily dismissing the threat. (Part of that being smart is not electing a Republican, but another part of it is to not foolishly underestimate the enemy. Baslim posted an article recently that made that last point very clear.)

seems our comments slipped the bonds of time and are now with a new toon.

I agree with the rest of your words, but are you really comparing the threat of ISIL to that of slipping in the bathtub? One is an active threat; the other simply a matter of caution. Don’t know about yours, but my bathtub is not threatening to kill me. Even if you were to consider the bathtub an active threat, they would be two completely different types of same.

Good commentary by Mr. Sachs. The problem with #3, however, is that Islamist regimes and democracy are like oil and water. Turkey has largely succeeded, primarily due to a deliberate choice on their part toward westernization (which, one would note, is considered by many Islamic leaders to be anathema to Islamic principles, or so their particular ideology of “The West is Satan” leads them to think).

You didn’t really answer my question, though. Would you consider the hijackers who killed more than 3,000 people in a single day, armed only with box cutters, to be a JV team? My point is that a lot of damage can and has been done with few people and rudimentary tools.

That has been my experience also with my Muslim friends and acquaintances here. I have also ceased to practice my birth religion. I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of the religious era, and this will be an inevitable change globally. But first, unfortunately, will be the type of struggle we see between the “old energy” and the “new energy,” and I think that this will escalate before it finally resolves itself. The struggle will unfortunately be part of the process. But I am still hopeful that in my lifetime I will see the struggle at least mostly resolve itself. There is a better world coming, though it may be difficult to see sometimes with all of this current polarization, but I am very optimistic that it will happen.

Even if we had not gone into either Afghanistan or Iraq, the damage they did in that one day, from loss of life to the obvious psychological effects, was extensive. Call them what you will, the point is that simply discounting them as a JV team both misrepresents their impact and discounts their potential.

Define “existential” in the terms in which you are using that word.

I also think that this sentence from Martens said it well: “And that smart vigilance has to recognize the breadth of the problem of which ISIL is only a single manifestation.”The breadth of this problem – of which ISIL is only a *single manifestation. *Yes. Not just one so-called “JV team” problem child which is growing in number, but a wide-ranging systemic problem. Smart vigilance is definitely a necessity.

I would agree with that assessment.

New ’toon, old comments. On Ryan and deficits, just cut 30% from defense contracting, no harm to security, and start balancing the budget, even with funding 9/11 victims, and veterans.

We need to change the last line of the National Anthem from “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!” to “O’er the land of the sort of free, and the home of the extremely frightened.”

“World Trade Center tours”Hmph, sometimes I hate the autocorrect on my tablet. That’s towers of course…

I am not at all a fan of GWB, but that was just a case of happening to be in a particular place when a major event occurred. Could just as easily have happened to Obama.

I do see that there is some trouble identifying what is ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/IS and what sort of threat or level of threat they represent, especially on a global scale.

But I also see a great underestimation of how and what many, globally, perceive US, and to some extend also Western, actions as callous, uncaring and self-interested.Take “collateral damage”.The term screams callousness, one cannot get more callous than that. How different is it to how callous indiscriminate terrorism bombing is?

The inability of the West to see the hypocrisy further fuels reactions to its interference. World police? Who decided which country was the world police? Most do not see the US as a “world police” as many Americans like to define themselves (i.e. a benevolent paternal protector), more like yet another power with imperial notions; a World Police State (i.e. a police that ensures empire).

But ISIS is an indirect creation of the most recent western blunder in the region, after a string of many dating back decades; and until the powers figure out there are more than their view out there, for sure ISIS has the potential to become more than a regional existential threat. But that won’t be ISIS’s doing, that will simply be due to further floudering of increasingly obtuse powers.

Wondering why this site put comments for Dec 17th toon with the Dec 18th cartoon?