I realize the problem : if you follow a normal way of thinking you'll invariable end up with that the problems are located in the ideology, and of course that indirectly attacks a lot of people. That however is not a valid line of reasoning, as it
Sorry I am posting this because Dyab Abou Jahjah posted an article in the newspaper. He's a local muslim, a mouthpiece for muslims and he posted an article that stands out massively : it does NOT condemn the attack, but the "western response" to it [1], describing it as a consequence of the conflict "the west created".
Half of all muslims I know on facebook are reposting that. I just want to say, if that's the attitude of even 10% of muslims, civil war is inevitable. And it sure looks like it's more like 50%.
Maybe you shouldn't look at their behaviours today, but at their origins. Most such groups appear because somebody felt excluded and powerless, or because some sociopath exploited a power vacuum. They grow because there's large populations of people who feel powerless and excluded.
Prevent that from becoming a problem in the first place and the few remaining terrorists would be powerless, because they'd be too few and far between.
Why ? Those reasons aren't going to change, and the past is a very, very bad reason to fuck up the future. It's also merely an excuse: it's not a reason.
And frankly muslim violence happens because of their superiority complex. Those muslim ghettos in Europe, I drive through 2 of them daily. They are filled with people who will shout about their superiority, with -50 euros in their bank account and no job. When you see them shouting at other groups about who has banged whose mother recently and who has to die because of that at the station, it is not exactly a mystery why they don't have a job either ("problems with motivation" as it's generally put in HR documents).
The why is incredibly simple - because that's how you stop more of them from appearing. Don't treat the symptom, treat the cause.
Let's end the myth that Western foreign policy is (solely) to blame.
What about Islamic terrorists killing people in Southern Thailand? Is there something wrong with their foreign policy?
What about Islamic terrorists killing Filipinos for the past 20-30 years? Have Christians been oppressing Muslims over there?
What about the recent clashes between Muslims and Buddhist monks in Burma? What did the monks do wrong?
Radical Islam is a GLOBAL jihad movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_in_Myan...
The west holds its share of blame, but so does Islam.
Ignoring the religious and theological basis for this violence is part of the reason we've been so ineffective in fighting it. Clearly social tensions are part of the problem, but so is the religion itself.
There are plenty of buddhist terrorist attacks, and these can be found with simple web searches.
Tibetan armed struggle also happens, but because it's in China i) Chinese authority hides it ii) Chinese authority uses a too broad definition of terrorism. But there was armed resistance in 2008 in Lhassa.
There's a negligible number of buddhist terrorist attacks compared to muslim terrorist attacks.
The position you're defending is absurd and betrays an a priori conclusion on your part.
Moreover:
- Most Germans were non-violent people in 1944, but we can still talk about cultural elements that enabled Nazism
- Most Russians were non-violent in the 60's, but we can still talk about cultural elements that enabled Stalinism
- Most Chinese were non-violent during the Maoist dictatorship, but we can still talk about culutral elements that enabled Maoism
I could go on, but you get the point. Just because most Muslims are nice people doesn't mean that Islamic canon doesn't play a role in terrorism. No politically-correct nitpicking can change that.
The original point is that Christian terrorism is objectively rarer (though by no means rare). I argue that this discrepancy is mostly accounted for by a difference in canonical content of the religion, rather than in a meaningful difference in wealth or suffering.
I invite you to read this article (incidentally written by a Muslim man): http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/09/islam-is-a-religion-of-v...
In short:
1. Islam has jurisprudential elements that are not present in Christianity
2. Islam sets a precedent for a militarized, theocratic state with ambitions of (a minima) regional dominance, which is present in no other Abrahamic religion
3. The very prophet of Islam perpetrated unspeakable atrocities, contrary to every other Abrahamic religion.
Again: you must acknowledge these points, else you're betraying ignorance at best, and bad faith at worse.
In the present.
> Again: you must acknowledge these points, else you're betraying ignorance at best, and bad faith at worse.
He doesn't have to do anything.
As for the subject itself, Islam has yet to go through 'enlightenment' (assuming that will happen some day) and before Christianity did it was one of the more brutal religions on the planet. 5 centuries of progress can't be suddenly synchronized across the planet.
Precisely my point. My whole argument is that Islamic canon is partly responsible for the discrepancy, and that ignoring this fact accounts for our ineffectiveness in fighting radical Islam.
It indeed used to be the other way around. There is unique good to the Islamic cannon too.
True, Western foreign policy is not solely to blame. But it has definitely shown itself to have cumulative negative effects.
Perhaps the media equivalent of "Four legs good, two legs bad" is not a very insightful way to understand geopolitics and post-war history.
Muslim expansion wars: 736 AD
In a way you're right, you've just got the agressor wrong. In fact the crusades were started because of muslim agression. Because, and I'm quoting muslim historical sources here "the blood of Christians was standing above our knees in Jerusalem".
Apparently the Muslims did a big land grab about 1500 years ago or so (just like the Romans did before them) and that's, apparently, where it all started.
Turns out it has nothing to do with the US foreign policy of the past 60 or so years, the creation of the state of Israel (and the Israelis being a bunch of dicks about it, and for the record, I'm most certainly NOT an anti Semite, though I'm allergic to assholes) and the British hopelessly trying to colonize Afghanistan throughout 1800's and a whole bunch of other dickhead moves by the west and their buddies.
Apologies. I'm not trying to insult your (or anyone's) intelligence. I just couldn't resist...
/sarcasm
PS: I'm very much a westerner, white male, atheist, born and raised in the Netherlands and currently living in Australia, for what ever it's worth.
THAT is my entire point.
I'm not trying to belittle or avoid the fact that people were demonized during these conflicts, in some cases with very unpleasant consequences. However, that had little to do with the conflicts themselves.
Iraq for invaded because oil most certainly, using the fear of WMDs as the excuse.
You're also conflating the original source of each conflict with the reason for WHY the large masses joined in and took sides, the reason for why the conflicts COULD become large and dangerous.
conflict one: economy was down the toilet, was attempt to fix it
conflict two: economy was bad, was attempt to fix that
My point was that conflicts happen (and grow) because the economy turns down, not because some people get demonized. That's a propaganda tool at best.
> The most effective way to get rid of terrorists is to take away their recruitment base, by not giving people more reasons to attack.
Yes, but this is not an option in this case because their demands are simply not reasonable. What are we to do? Convert to islam or kill ourselves? They have no single reasonable demand or space for compromise. Are we to enact laws that go against the very principles of our civilization, purely out of fear? There is no simple way out of this.
But this same "their" would only be a very tiny pool of powerless people if nobody else was willing to listen to them.
execute people, including children, for being gay (https://news.vice.com/article/the-islamic-state-executes-9-m...)
sever the hands of people accused of theft (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3007498/Sickening-mo...)
write sex slavery into its laws (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-ensh...)
But you know what actually did cause them to be like that? A literal interpretation of Islam.
Christianity is no better, but that is only obvious when you observe it in its unmuzzled form during the Dark Ages. Islam needs to be restrained in exactly the same way.
Attacking them for their poor justifications will not help you get anything done. Ensuring nobody WANTS to help them is how you stop them. And to do that, you need to make sure people don't feel that extremely desperate and make sure they don't have a reason to blame your for their situation - because the people joining them feel that it is their best choice for improving their situation.
Give people there a better choice and ISIS will lose their power.
https://news.vice.com/video/the-islamic-state-full-length
(9:57 into the video)
Passenger: "We are fighters."
Driver: "I swear, we hope for hardship. We don't want a happy life and trips, the opposite, such things take us away from God. The harder the situation is, the closer we are to God."
In the decades the followed the fall of the Ottoman empire), Arab nationalism ascended, and it answered this question with, "socialism and the formation of mighty nation-states will allow us to gain parity with the West materially, and then surpass it". For a multitude of reasons, this movement delivered neither military success nor material prosperity and became increasingly abandoned following the humiliation of the Six-Day War in 1967.
The replacement for Arab nationalism was a sharp turn toward religion on every topic, and in every aspect of life. The question became, "the West has material prosperity, but that is fleeting and an affront to God. furthermore it is no replacement for the riches of the hereafter."
This shift was no random accident - in fact, it was decades in the making prior to 1967. For more on that, read about the life and times of Sayyid Qutb. Prior to his death in 1966, he played a crucial intellectual role in shaping the Muslim Brotherhood.
An account of these shifts defies explanation in simple economic and/or material terms. Crises serve only to create gaps for whatever ideology has already taken root to rise to the fore. Ideology itself, that is, answers to pressing questions of the day, and coherent, integrated views of the world (even if they are wrong), is what ultimately drives all historical events, not the other way around.
I'll take a look at your references later.
Yes, ideology drives the direction. I'm very well aware of that and agree fully. But which one spread and how they spread and how popular they bevome largely depends on factors like, timing, who it spreads to first (influential people or not), the prior context, etc... Different contexts make it more likely for some ideas to spread but not others. Comparisons to virology is actually very applicable.
And a crisis is a typical situation that amplifies the probability of some idea spreading broadly and taking root, and the context and circumstances is part of influencing which ones.
This is the first (and only?) interview ever given to a Western journalist.
https://www.facebook.com/JuergenTodenhoefer/videos/101527236...
Seems pretty clear from many sources that their stated goal is to restore the "caliphate" — an Islamic state under the rule of a community of religious scholars guided by a caliph taken to mean the successor to the Prophet Muhammad For them anyone who doesn't believe in their interpretation of Islam must convert or die.
Meanwhile President Obama has encouraging words for them: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”. So much for free speech and cartoons.
"What ISIS Really Wants" (The Atlantic, March 2015) [0]:
The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
They got power because people in the region thought it was a better idea to give them power than to allow our destabilizing influence to continue. Take away all reasons for why they got support in the first place, and they will be marginalized by the people themselves.
All these countries are being careless and heavy handed, and the origins of most of the high profile terrorists of today can be traced back to actions taken by western countries. So many rebel groups armed by western agencies later turned into terrorists and guerillas once the agencies left, so many times, over and over. So many aided coup makers just defected and kept their power for themselves.
The most effective way to get rid of terrorists is to take away their recruitment base, by not giving people more reasons to attack. Yes, it will take long until all the current terrorists are gone. But the current methods are only making things worse.