Isis: The Origins Of Violence, CH4 tonight

[treelover]

Isis: The Origins of Violence – a brave documentary that will start many a fight
Historian Tom Holland asks tough questions about the roots of Islamist violence – and breaks all the rules of TV presenting by retching at the site of an Isis atrocit

Isis: The Origins of Violence – a brave documentary that will start many a fight

Looks like it is is going to be quite controversial, Tom Holland, the historian who front the doc is quite an idiosyncratic figure as well.

 

[Pickman's model]

Looks like it is is going to be quite controversial, Tom Holland, the historian who front the doc is quite an idiosyncratic figure as well.

and what do you think now?

 

[CrabbedOne]

Well there wasn't much in that beyond making IS seem more scary than they are already perceived to be and that's hype. Bit of an odd perspective with IS attacks in the West resembling drunk driving incidents and Baathist Syria right next to them creating far larger horrors and not long gone Baathist Iraq's also having pretty genocidal ways. I've read most of Tom Holland's books but here he seemed really out of his depth, shocked and not particularly insightful on the history of IS. He glossed over the terrible sectarian civil war that produced IS, Saddam's very divisive reign before it and the monstrous scars left by the Iran-Iraq war. IS isn't an occulted product of the Dark Ages but of a very particular and very brutal recent Iraqi history. As for Sinjar being destroyed by IS car bombs as I recall it was mostly wrecked during the Pesh retaking it which was at least a mutual effort.