Lost now because of the coverage of the terrorist attacks in Paris is the fact that Beirut, “The Paris of the Middle East”, suffered a major terrorist attack just a day or two prior. This too was attributed to ISIS and a large number of innocent civilians died. My heart goes out to the people of both Paris & Beirut. I hope that the western allies and Russia unite to concentrate their firepower on legitimate ISIS targets/facilities/infrastructure/weapons/personnel. Bomb them back to the stone age which the terrorists want to drag us back to. Then, after a unified attack and destruction of ISIS, concentrate on the other issues – Assad, post war stabilization and reconstruction in Syria, Iraq, etc. And whoever is helping to fund ISIS – you can go ahead and die too, including whoever the f is buying oil from them to fund their atrocities. There’s a global oil glut right now, no one needs to buy ISIS oil.

Amazingly this building survived the 1906 earthquake but then burnt down not too many years later.