errr

Most of the journalists I had ridiculous dinner with last night thought the Islamic State fuss is overblown. Kobane is just an excuse for the Kurds to bail on the peace process and go back to their violent ways, they said. Americans criticizing Turkey for not saving Kobane don't understand that it's in a different country where Turkey has no business--that was interesting I don't think there's any confusion about Kobane being on the Syrian side of the border but that was their claim. Another was that whenever there's a revolution there's a radical phase when lots of people are killed violently but the Islamic State isn't really that different from Saddam or especially Khomeini--things will settle down. This of course ignores that they are anti-nationalist with inherently irredentist territorial claims and are doing their very best, e.g. by blowing up and bulldozing ancient ruins, to completely erase any non-Islamic forms of identity for their subjects, quite unlike Saddam or the Islamic Republic of Iran. One made a silly argument that the US had come up with the label ISIL to scare the region because Levant suggests that they are expansionist when really the project is limited just the a chunk of Iraq and Syria (Sham is probably indeed better translated as Syria than Levant but the Islamic State has since dropped the IL/2nd IS from its name in a pretty clear signal that it claims the whole Muslim world). I don't think I got my points across as the two main talkers were incredibly arrogant and much more interested in talking then listening. Whatever I said the one whose English was worse (I spoke mostly English both to better express myself and because red wine was crippling my Turkish) kept doing a masturbation motion with his hand and saying Oh yeah baby sure -- that was his response to several people on a wide range of topics and I wasn't sure if he actually understood what I was saying (fair enough, I'm in his country speaking my language, but the constant jerking off motion was a bit weird and distracting).
There were other conversations/arguments too, mostly about progressive politics and rich people deserving their money and I don't think I convinced anybody of anything. Anyway I woke up annoyed this morning.