is ISIS evil?

Who are we to judge whether those people are "evil"?
Does that not just create more of the "us vs them" mentality to label *them* as evil? Does that mean that *we* are inherently good?

below are quotations from the linked sources

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3097033/ISIS-burn-woman-alive-refusing-extreme-sex-act-reveals-official.html

"ISIS burn woman alive for refusing to take part in 'extreme sex act', reveals UN official, as the Islamist fighters' sadism becomes even more depraved
ISIS committing horrific sex crimes against girls, United Nations has found
'They are sold naked to Islamic State leaders and soldiers at slave markets'
Terror group is targeting young girls from Iraq's minority Yazidi community
It has previously abducted hundreds of Yazidis from across northern Iraq"


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-burn-19-yazidi-women-to-death-in-mosul-for-refusing-to-have-sex-with-isis-militants-a7066956.html


"Isis militants have publicly executed 19 Yazidi women by burning them alive in Mosul, Iraq, local activists report.

The women were burned to death in iron cages because they refused to have sex with Isis fighters, the Kurdish ARA News agency reported.

“They were punished for refusing to have sex with Isis militants,” Abdullah al-Malla, a local media activist, told the agency."

I'm not arguing that they are doing horrific things. They are.

But by labelling them as evil, we're creating a dichotomy. If they are evil, we are good. And should we really be throwing stones in this glass house? Our cultural misdeeds are not as extreme, but to call ourselves blameless is hypocrisy.

Behind all of the horrific deeds are human beings who are most likely lost, misguided, unhappy.

Their actions are purposefully used to cause anger and terror and hatred, and by pointing a finger at them and accusing "evil", we're becoming what they are: a polarizing force. Because evil is easy to condemn and crusade against. What are we doing to end the cycle of violence? Or are we contributing to it?

my opinion is that the polarizing force is the force which burns people alive

i dont have a problem with creating a dichotomy where "those who burn women alive for not having sex with terrorists" are on one side, and "those who consider that to be evil" are on the other

i see that dichotomy as being much less of an evil than putting people in cages and setting them on fire

dichotomies themselves are not evil

but, setting people on fire like this is, and if i ever find my own society attempting to create a dichotomy which can used to justify locking women into cages and setting them on fire, then i will call that dichotomy evil as well

yes, i mistrust the use of the word "evil"
in fact i disagree with its use, often, because it is used to oversimplify and stereotype and to outright deceive

but the word hints at something that is real, and the thing which the word hints at ought to be recognized

every single person that is associated with IS may not be evil, but the group itself is doing things which i cannot call less than evil, by simple definition

e·vil
ˈēvəl/Submit
adjective
1.profoundly immoral and malevolent.

i would say that the deeds of IS are "profoundly immoral and malevolent" and i would say that we're not taking the high ground by pretending that they are anything less than evil

I think that we essentially agree. I agree that the deeds are the things we should be reviling.

The line I draw is by calling a group of people evil. They do evil things, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're evil.

To compare: (I hate bringing up nazis in an online discussion, lol) If we look at the horrific things that many nazi soldiers did back in WWII, they could be called evil. But were the individual people who engaged in these behaviours evil. or were they simply acting under orders because they had to comply or perish? Was it survival? Were Germans evil? We sure said the Germans were evil.

Dichotomies are not evil, but we have to be careful when using them. Because both sides are inseparable: by them evil, we're calling ourselves good. Can we truly do that?

As an employee of an international media company, I would caution everyone to consider the sources of information carefully. All sides of any conflict will try to manipulate the information to their advantage and present only that which makes themselves look "good" or the other "evil".

At this very moment there is someone somewhere in the Middle East discussing how "evil" Americans are, and likely citing articles about our military personnel raping and murdering innocent women and children. This person may be distributing pictures of burning bodies left after an alleged drone strike. The people he/she is talking to are believing it just as we tend to believe what CNN/FOX/ABC/CBS/BBC/NBC/AP are telling us on the nightly news.

Horrible things are happening and there is no denying that. That certain groups of radicalized individuals are perpetrating these horrible acts is fact. The tricky part is that the "radicalized individuals" are different depending on which side you are on and the acts deemed "horrible" always seem to be done by the enemy. Finding a neutral party to determine the truth isn't very easy.

Miss_Leah wrote:
Dichotomies are not evil, but we have to be careful when using them. Because both sides are inseparable: by them evil, we're calling ourselves good. Can we truly do that?

here's what we could do: we could produce 100 examples of specific instances of "evil" and see what they all have in common

100 hundred events which can be studied and reviewed, and which we would all agree would be "evil" if we believed that there were any such thing as evil to begin with

and also 100 acts that we could all agree are "good" (because I assume that we all believe there is such a thing as good? even though that could by definition also mean there must be such a thing as evil, by the logic used in your post?) and we can examine each of these 200 acts and say "what do all of these 100 have in common which are different from these other 100? why are they different; what makes them different?"

and i mean this could actually take years if we really were serious

and with that process i believe that we could actually come up with a fairly reliable definition and likely a set of definitive criteria by which to judge, at the very least to judge our own selves, with some confidence

Senan wrote: As an employee of an international media company, I would caution everyone to consider the sources of information carefully. All sides of any conflict will try to manipulate the information to their advantage and present only that which makes themselves look "good" or the other "evil".

At this very moment there is someone somewhere in the Middle East discussing how "evil" Americans are, and likely citing articles about our military personnel raping and murdering innocent women and children. This person may be distributing pictures of burning bodies left after an alleged drone strike. The people he/she is talking to are believing it just as we tend to believe what CNN/FOX/ABC/CBS/BBC/NBC/AP are telling us on the nightly news.

Horrible things are happening and there is no denying that. That certain groups of radicalized individuals are perpetrating these horrible acts is fact. The tricky part is that the "radicalized individuals" are different depending on which side you are on and the acts deemed "horrible" always seem to be done by the enemy. Finding a neutral party to determine the truth isn't very easy.

i agree with this and i was hesitant to post the links or the headlines for this reason

but the U.N. refrence decided me, and that is why made sure to post both the "nine women burned" as well as the "A woman was burned"

i was assuming people would be able to think critically about it



here is a quote from a Washington Post article

"Zainab Bangura, the U.N.'s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, recently conducted a tour of refugee camps in the shadow of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, war-ravaged countries where the Islamic State commands swaths of territory. She heard a host of horror stories from victims and their families and recounted them in an interview earlier this week with the Middle East Eye, an independent regional news site.

[The misguided debate over the Islam of the Islamic State.]

"They are institutionalizing sexual violence," Bangura said of the Islamic State. "The brutalization of women and girls is central to their ideology."

Bangura detailed the processes by which "pretty virgins" captured by the jihadists were bought and sold at auctions. Here's a chilling excerpt:

After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold.

There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice, then emirs, then fighters. They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market. At slave auctions, buyers haggle fiercely, driving down prices by disparaging girls as flat-chested or unattractive.

We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his "property."

link to that article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/05/22/islamic-state-burned-a-woman-alive-for-not-engaging-in-an-extreme-sex-act-u-n-official-says/


I believe her

here is a link to the U.N.'s web page

specifically, the search results for "ISIS"

https://search.un.org/results.php?ie=utf8&output=xml_no_dtd&oe=utf8&Submit=Search&_ga=GA1.2.1236633302.1465849371&_gat=1&query=isis&tpl=un&lang=en&rows=10

here is a link to a video on that page entitled "On GPS: The horrific ways ISIS abuses women"

which was very difficult to watch because of how horrible and EVIL it is

now it might very well be that the united nations and the washigton post and even old devil fox news are all manipulating us with bogus information, but without getting into why that is not a viable solution i am simply going to say that i think they are probably accurate, or at least they are putting out information they have good reason to believe is accurate

OB1Shinobi wrote:

Miss_Leah wrote:
Dichotomies are not evil, but we have to be careful when using them. Because both sides are inseparable: by them evil, we're calling ourselves good. Can we truly do that?

here's what we could do: we could produce 100 examples of specific instances of "evil" and see what they all have in common

100 hundred events which can be studied and reviewed, and which we would all agree would be "evil" if we believed that there were any such thing as evil to begin with
and also 100 acts that we could all agree are "good" (because I assume that we all believe there is such a thing as good? even though that could by definition also mean there is such a thing as evil?) and we can examine each of these 200 acts and say "what do all of these 100 have in common which are different from these other 100? why are they different; what makes them different?"

and i mean this could actually take years if we really were serious

and with that process i believe that we could actually come up with a fairly reliable definition and likely a set of definitive criteria by which to judge, at the very least to judge our own selves, with some confidence

I'm not convinced we could, though. Morality is almost completely subjective.

OB1Shinobi wrote: ... I believe her... i think they are probably accurate, or at least they are putting out information they have good reason to believe is accurate

I tend to believe the U.N. and the Washington Post as well, and I believe the person who is quoted in these stories. The acts she describes are truly horrendous and I see little reason she would have to make them up. This information needs to be shared. I simply hope that we still have enough objective journalists and critical thinkers in the audience to take the information at face value and determine what it means for ourselves rather than relying on a propaganda machine to create the narrative for us.

Miss_Leah wrote: I'm not convinced we could, though. Morality is almost completely subjective.

ok well then as an experiment, try to imagine a scenario where a five year old child is sexually assaulted by maybe ten grown men and then tortured to death in front of his or her family, in such a way that it can be understood as an act of goodness

pretend that youre a writer and your masterpiece depends on justifying this act - not just explaining it, but actually making it into a good and righteous thing to do