A guest--I didn't catch his name--on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor told guest host Eric Bolling (a man even more right wing than O'Reilly) that the month of Ramadan encourages Muslims to believe they'll be more blessed if they practice jihad during that time.  In other words, watch out for fanatical Muslims infused with the desire to please their deity by killing non-believers, as we saw yesterday in the shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
     Ramadan isn't about killing people, as much as Fox News pundits, encouraged by bigots like Eric Bolling, would like us to believe.  Some fundamentalist Muslims are a pain in the world's ass.  Some fundamentalist Jews and Christians are also pains in the world's ass.  Take religious viewpoints out of war and half of the armed conflicts going on now might cease.  George W. Bush, hardcore Christian, believed he was doing right when he attacked Iraq, and it wasn't just for oil or to overthrow Saddam Hussein.  His first public comments about invading Iraq included the word "crusade" to characterize the operation, but he was advised not to use that word again.  It has unpleasant associations in the Middle East, where European aristocrats and knights intruded themselves, called upon and blessed by Popes, conquering and killing Muslims, Jews, and local Christians.  Two days ago was the 916th anniversary of the climax of the Siege of Jerusalem, when European crusaders breached the walls and killed nearly everyone in the city.  The leaders prayed in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, thanking God for delivering the Holy City to them, a city literally covered in blood.  I suspect the word jihad unsettles the stomachs of Eric Bolling and other professional paranoids the same way the word crusade unnerves some in the Middle East.
     Bolling's guest also said that "we" must track down pro-Isis-related tweets, while Bolling suggested more bombing.  Yes, war for control of the twitterverse, plus intensification of bombing, will win the war.
     Neither one of these doofuses seems to realize the impossibility of eliminating everybody who fights American interests and hates U.S. foreign policy.  Malicious and unwise actions in the Middle East have doomed U.S. efforts there.  U.S. policies (and bombs, and torture practices) create a vigorous flow of enemies the Pentagon will never run out of.  Instead of focusing on the execrable domineering practices of U.S. foreign policy in action, Bolling and a host of group-think politicians and news media people in America concentrate on recruitment by terrorists, primarily ISIS, trying to solve the problem backwards, cart before the horse style.
     ISIS and other anti-American groups thrive on the shit the U.S. has been throwing at the Middle East for decades.  The first step in getting people to like you is to stop being an asshole.  Hellfire missiles shot at civilians in Yemen don't make Americans safe, but that does create hatred.  The twenty-four year old Muslim who killed four Marines at a recruiting center in Tennessee before he was shot to death by cops, probably carried out his self-appointed (ISIS encouraged, perhaps) mission because he despised U.S. military actions in the Middle East.  Bush and Cheney's legacy, really, is a mountain of corpses rising from a sea of oil.  Sometimes, the dead pile grows with Americans who had nothing to do with decisions made by the killer crusaders who caused the problem in the first place.

                                                                               Vic Neptune