I wonder if this is really true though. Some statistics:
https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-20...
While Anders Breivik was shooting kids on the island in Norway, the Norwegian media were speculating that it was most likely perpetrated by muslim extremists. Even though we've historically had way more examples of terrorism perpetrated against immigration related targets by right-wing Norwegians (which was the case with Breivik as well).
The average Norwegian won't remember any of the mosques, immigrant reception centers and immigrant stores that were bombed in Norway in the past. I guess terrorism is quickly forgotten when it isn't your own group that is targeted.
Nonetheless, Breivik, unless I'm wrong about it, was not part of a movement trying to dominate the world and install a Christian kingdom, so ISIS differs from the white "movement" in that regard.
In regards to the current discussion, I am not sure which side of the argument I am on. I am not a Muslim so I can only comment from what I see from the outside. I have Muslim friends who are not at all sympathetic to ISIS or any of its friends, so I don't find it hard to believe that most Muslims find ISIS reprehensible as most Christians found Breivik. However, I have the opinion that nations in the region need to step up because ISIS threatens their freedom. There needs desperately to be a fight against ISIS in the form of a fight against their ideology... a movement that teaches that hatred and intolerance is not the way of Islam. I am not a Muslim, so I have no right to demand that of my Muslim brothers and sisters, especially as they've endured much in terms of discrimination in France (as that fascinating New Yorker pointed out) and elsewhere, but the ideology of hatred will survive bombs and invasions, if not be inflamed by it. The only way we can defeat ISIS is to defeat their message.
The biggest difference is - for want of a better word and I'm really sorry about using that term in the current context - because of their ability to execute. They would if they could, they just can't.
And in this simplistic scenario, why would you posit is the reason they "can't"?
US citizens are at greater risk of far right or Christian extremists than they are of Islamist extremists - see the numbers of people injured and killed by various mass shooters or clinic bombings.
How is that a fair or even interesting comparison, though? Islamist terrorists aren't killing people ostensibly engaged in criminal acts. Islamist terrorists aren't otherwise expected to be agents of the government charged with using physical force to protect the laws. Islamist terrorists target innocents in a deliberate effort to maximize damage and loss of life. Body counts tell almost nothing of the story in an honest comparison of the threat from police officers vs Islamic terrorists.
US citizens are at greater risk of far right or Christian extremists than they are of Islamist extremists
This is a slightly more interesting comparison, but even then you have to look at who the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are watching to understand that Christian extremists are individual actors who target specifics like abortion providers. They're not looking to take down all of Western society. They aren't amassing armies in other countries to assert 6th century law on all the territories that they conquer.
So sure, Christian terrorists' kill numbers might be comparable or even greater than Islamic terrorists domestically (if you unfairly exclude 9/11) - but that doesn't mean that they're the same level of threat in a strategic geopolitical sense.
True disturbingly often for police officers. About half the people shot and killed by police in the US (about 500 people per year) have mental illness. Compare that rate with the rest of the western world (less than 100 people since 2000) where people with mental illness tend not to be murdered by police. Even if we remove all the mentally ill people with guns from those numbers (to make the weapon use comparable across countries) we see very many more people killed in the US than any other western nation.
And if you want numbers for innocent people shot by officers with poor aim, well, they don't keep numbers so you can't get accurate stats. Here are a few: https://popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-love-yo...
> So sure, Christian terrorists' kill numbers might be comparable or even greater than Islamic terrorists domestically (if you unfairly exclude 9/11)
I'm not excluding 9/11. Christian and right wing extremists have killed more than 3,000 people in the US in the 19th and 20th century. At least 3,500 black people were lynched, for example. We've seen in this thread people claiming that Islam has centuries of violence, so let's go back 200 years and see who's being killed and who's doing the killing. Black folks are being killed, and Good White Christians were doing the killing.
> They're not looking to take down all of Western society.
Sure they are. "NEW WORLD ORDER" and "THE JEWS DID IT" and "FREEMEN ON THE LAND" are all about how corrupt the current system is. Read the Unabomber manifesto. That's all about overthrowing the system.
> They aren't amassing armies in other countries to assert 6th century law on all the territories that they conquer.
There's no point having this discussion if you're just going to shift the goal posts to keep redefining what terrorism is or what extremism is or what atrocities do or don't count.
No, they aren't. Christian extremists include organized extremist groups, including those that have been behind or sheltered abortion clinic attacks (e.g., Army of God), and also much of the militia movement (large segments of which are Christian extremist groups with apocalyptic views.) Sure, there are apparently lone wolf attackers (just as there are among Islamic terrorists), but they generally turn out to have both pre-attack affiliation and post-attack shelter from organized extremist groups (just as is true among Islamic "lone wolf" terrorists, though fewer of them have the opportunity for post-attack shelter.)
And there have been a number of investigations and arrests connected with these groups and specifically addressing them as organized, active, violent extremist groups. However, unlike international Islamic groups, they don't get reported in the media, in part due to media bias, but in part due to the fact that the FBI (and DoJ more generally) don't put out press releases for the arrests the way they do with Islamic terror investigations and arrests, and on the occasions when they do, they don't highlight the organizational links in the cases.)
This may, for the government at least, be part of a deliberate strategy to avoid aiding the growth of homegrown domestic terror groups by avoiding giving the specific groups visibility, but it has the added effect of misleading the general public about the nature of the sources of organized violent extremism threatening the United States.
What information sources do you follow that indicate that Christian extremism is even remotely as great a threat as Islamic extremism? When I look at the FBI most wanted terrorists lists and other sources, I see a complete dominance by Islamic terrorist groups.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/23/fbi-c...
Contrary to your claim that the DoJ is downplaying domestic terrorism, I've noted several efforts by the administration to "talk up" domestic terrorism and downplay Islamic terrorism - then when pressed on who these domestic terrorists are, administration officials have been at a loss to name any specifics.
Actual statistics on who kills Americans in America.
> When I look at the FBI most wanted terrorists lists
That tells you which individuals the FBI sees the most value to the policy objectives set by their political leadership to draw public attention to.
It doesn't tell you anything about relative risk of classes of terrorists. At most, given complete trust of the judgement of the FBI and assumption of their policy objectives being aligned with risk to Americans and assumption that there are no factors other than risk weighing into what they draw public attention to, it gives you information on the relative risk attached to individual terrorists. But, even then, if there are relatively fewer Islamic groups posing danger to Americans, and each of those groups is more dependent on a narrow set of senior leaders for effectiveness, then members of Islamic groups could be dominate the 10 most wanted list by being the individuals responsible for the most risk, even while Christian groups are collectively responsible for greater risk.
> Contrary to your claim that the DoJ is downplaying domestic terrorism
I didn't claim that DoJ is downplaying domestic terrorism.
What I stated is that they don't issue press releases as frequently, and don't highlight organizational ties in the press releases they do issue, for the actual specific arrests or specific investigations of homegrown Christian terrorists in the way they do for arrests or specific investigations of Islamic terrorists tied to international groups.
This is actually in tension with the DoJ's portrayals of the overall risk from domestic, non-Islamic groups (I suggest a possible motive for this inconsistency in my early post, though that is pure speculation.)
Edit: Not sarcastic. Something like the FBI's list that someone else shared, of the group responsible for US terror attacks from 2002-2005.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/the-terrorist-threat-conf...
> At the same time, the United States also faces significant challenges from domestic terrorists. In fact, between 1980 and 2000, the FBI recorded 335 incidents or suspected incidents of terrorism in this country. Of these, 247 were attributed to domestic terrorists, while 88 were determined to be international in nature.
> Right-wing groups continue to represent a serious terrorist threat. Two of the seven planned acts of terrorism prevented in 1999 were potentially large-scale, high-casualty attacks being planned by organized right-wing extremist groups.
And that's a discussion that has been had many times over, it's as boring to me as vi versus emacs.
Terrorist is a relative term, it mostly depends on which side of the fence your bed currently resides and what your personal belief system is.
I see precious little difference to an attack on Fallujah to 'liberate' it and an attack on Paris to murder a bunch of people. In both cases lots of innocents will die and the world will end up a substantially worse, not better place for everybody afterwards.
While you can point out differences in their justifications, you can't pretend their actions are unrelated.
In the large, one side wants to impose rule based on beliefs about what an omnipotent sky person wants and is willing to sacrifice innocent lives (even celebrate such sacrifice) to do so. The other side wants to propagate individual liberty and democracy and takes great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.
In the small, things don't always play out quite like this, but to draw equivalence between the two sides is morally abhorrent.
You talk a lot about not having a clue on "the reality of the conflicts" and yet, you are unable to take a step back and look from the perspective of someone completely alien to the situation.
America has, time and time again, used and abused its armies for strategic and economical purposes (The "if you have oil..." meme has been beaten to death, hasn't it?). It certainly is willing to sacrifice innocent lives as long as it doesn't make the news - which it doesn't because of how hostile the entire country is to muslim ideals. And I've heard more than once the term "God" being thrown around by US politicians to justify these things. Does all of this ring a bell to you?
One of the sides is certainly a lot more barbaric than the other, what with the beheadings and what not... but whether your family is dying to american bombs or to barbarians doesn't really change squat for the victims. With the exception that one of them is actually less destructive - take a guess which?
[0] Since we're talking about countries with backwards ideologies, how is it that it's political suicide to be an atheist in the US? We have plenty of them in France and nobody gives a shit...
Edit: I'll add to this... It's really hard to take a step back and picture yourself as being the bad guy. It's nearly impossible, in fact. You are raised on one side of a conflict and you simply do not have the full picture unless you've yourself lived on the other side or been with people on the other side. But try to understand this: In these wars, there's no "bad guy and good guy". There's two bad guys and a lot of followers who have been completely brainwashed to think the causes are worthy.
Wars are not about justice. They're not about spreading culture, be that culture islam or democracy. We'd be at war with North Korea if they were about any of those things. Wars are strategic, and always about taking something away from the enemy, be it territory, riches or political power. The two sides are equally bad, and the civilians/soldiers on both sides only see how evil the other side is - they don't get to see the evil of their own.
We're hardly going to be able to tease this one out over a Hacker News thread.
EDIT: Sorry for making this personal. Some details removed.
That's rich, given that you all but dragged the whole thing out in the first place.
If you're ready to call me 'ill informed' and you're unable to see that to victims of war it hardly matters whether the perpetrator is two old white guys praying in an old building for guidance or some Imam in a mosque who by remote control pull the trigger then indeed, I should have left this well alone. But trust me, as long as that is a thing that can not be discussed with some dispassion this mess will not end, it will only get (much) worse.
Embrace the occasion to reconsider whether it's actually ill-informed, then. :)
To clarify what I was saying before, I don't mean to say that "God" hasn't been the main driver for wars and terror before. My point is that it's usually just an excuse, so that more may join the cause.
If you want to wage war on Madeupistan and 95% of your country is hardcore vegetarian, it's easier to get followers if you tell your people you're spreading vegetarianism than if you tell them you want their unobtainium mines.
> We're hardly going to be able to tease this one out over a Hacker News thread.
Wanna try twitter? #140characters
This is why you're wrong. No, the leaders (whether it is the politicians or the military command) don't care about civilian casualties unless there's large vocal resistance.
Displacing democratically elected leaders like CIA has been doing? Lying about WMDs like with Iraq? Being careless in general? Refusing to change, justifying collateral damage with unproven "national security"? Doing nothing to avoid civilians from being harmed? They're not bothering to ensure the military knows what areas to avoid and confirming who's who before bombing. They so obviously put profits first, and care more about having puppets in the governments than about the people. (It is even more obvious in the case of Russia's support of Assad.)
NSA have even admitted they kill on metadata = the position of cell phones, with as much accuracy as programs like COTRAVELER can give you when you have no clue who's who. Guess why so many weddings have been hit? Because somebody 2-3 degrees off from the suspect suddenly meets a hundred people including more people linked to some other suspect. So they bomb the place.
US = an nation state with an identifiable military subjected to rule of law
>and both sides are very clearly not very precise in who they actually target (the bombing on Doctor's Without Border, anyone?). Both sides cause tons of civilian casualties
For better or worse the US is operating on intelligence specifically designed to avoid/minimize civilian populations, which is very difficult when IS doesn't wear military uniform (as required by the laws of war to distinguish military actors from civilian populace) and hides among civilians. I don't know if it is "tons" or what that even means in relation to human death figures, but I'll concede it happens, still it should be defined as collateral damage because the goal of US operations is not to kill the civilian populace but those individuals bearing the most responsibility.
On the other hand IS specifically designs its quasi-military attacks to be inflicted directly on the civilian populations with the goal of maximizing civilian casualties.
These are not just differences in justifications, but differences in actions...at least according to the law. Now I could see your issue if the US was secretly funding, training and arming non-identifiable combatants and recruiting/embedding them all over the globe to specifically orchestrate indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations.
When you're under attack from a vastly superior military, your options for response are very limited.
It's hard for us in the US to even conceive what it would be like to be in that situation. The only analog is a War of the Worlds style invasion by aliens.
[1] and I still hold the idea that I held in 2003, that the Iraq war was a completely idiotic veture
Al Qaeda had very specific grievances. They wanted US troops to leave Saudi Arabia, where they first put bases before the Persian Gulf War.
(Aside: Bin Laden offered his irregular forces to Saudi Arabia to help defend the kingdom from Saddam. He was rejected. That pissed him off some, but the presence of infidels in the land of Mecca pissed him off even more.)
Not saying terrorism is a legitimate response, but it's much more explainable than "they hates us for our freedoms."
That was a position used to justify action, rally supporters, and which was quite overtly an instrumental (rather than terminal) goal in their grand strategy --- which was -- like that of Daesh -- to achieve a pan-Islamic caliphate.
(It's worth noting that al-Qaeda was formed several years before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that prompted the creation of those bases, and adopted the position of opposing the bases after the Saudi government turned down bin Laden's offer for al-Qaeda fighters to defend the Kingdom against Iraq in favor of accepting aid from the United States. And both al-Qaeda's long-term goals and their anti-Western rhetoric existed before those bases.)
> Not saying terrorism is a legitimate response, but it's much more explainable than "they hates us for our freedoms."
Sure, but not for the reasons you propose: al-Qaeda's opposition to the West is because their strategy for achieving dominion in the Islamic world is the time-tested strategy of totalitarians everywhere -- sell the target population on the threat of an external enemy, and use that to sell the idea that the totalitarian leaders and their proposed system of rulership are necessary to combat that external threat. Its not a response to anything the West does, although anything that the West does that creates (or can be fuel for propaganda to create) widespread grievances (legitimate or not) in the populations in which al-Qaeda seeks to establish its caliphate will be leveraged. Daesh is much the same in this respect.
Back in 1991 after Saddam invaded Kuwait, I remember thinking "why the hell do we have to solve the problem? Why not force Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States to take responsibility for their security?"
Practically all the Islamist terrorism that the US has experienced since then has flowed from that decision.
The likelihood of terrorism should be part of any decision making process when it comes to the Mideast, no different than estimating potential body counts from land invasion.
At least Eric Shinseki wasn't afraid to estimate the real costs of the Iraq war.
al-Qaeda has for more than a decade overtly targeted China over its policies in Xinjiang, and the Chinese government claimed that the East Turkistan Islamic Movement behind many attacks there was tied to al-Qaeda (and, indeed, some senior leaders of that organization were killed in fighting against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.)
BTW if you ever go to a Uighur restaurant try the horse. Tastes like chipped beef.
It's not always easy from the outside to tell them apart from their propaganda.
Rule of law does not excuse or lessen atrocities, it defines them. Moreover, the laws of war are specifically designed to lessen/avoid atrocities by limiting: 1. When a nation-state may engage in the use of armed force, and 2. How a nation-state may actually use armed force.
Having an open mind, I ask you to look within and ask whether the US is specifically targeting civilians, or has simply targeted military actors hiding among civilian populations? No matter what you answer, you must acknowledge IS is responsible for planning/executing military style attacks against civilians specifically.
We can agree to disagree, certainly there is nothing wrong with an all life is sacred approach, but you should not feel deeply disturbed that the law distinguishes between responding to a military attack with the use of force targeted at those most responsible and a non-state actor engaging in terrorist/quasi-military attacks against civilian populations?
Are you saying that codified law is the only thing that determines what is and isn't an atrocity? As in, anything that's legal isn't an atrocity? I certainly do not agree with that.
> Having an open mind, I ask you to look within and ask whether the US is specifically targeting civilians, or has simply targeted military actors hiding among civilian populations?
I don't have any clue, but I don't think that's the primary concern. I think there can be unacceptable civilian casualties even if there is a legitimate military target in the middle of civilians.
> No matter what you answer, you must acknowledge IS is responsible for planning/executing military style attacks against civilians specifically.
Of course, but why is that relevant? The existence of a worse actor does not make the acts of another actor more excusable.
> We can agree to disagree, certainly there is nothing wrong with an all life is sacred approach, but you should not feel deeply disturbed that the law distinguishes between responding to a military attack with the use of force targeted at those most responsible and a non-state actor engaging in terrorist/quasi-military attacks against civilian populations?
That's not what disturbs me. What disturbs me is the notion that a formal law in any way determines the acceptability of a violent act.
It matters here because my top level comment was a reply to someone emphatically stating there is no difference between the actions of the US and IS and I disagree. I believe there is a difference in the actions of US and IS, I used the law to distinguish between two acts. If someone said there was not a difference between the act of 1st degree murder and manslaughter, I would disagree and turn to the law to give examples of the differences.
>That's not what disturbs me. What disturbs me is the notion that a formal law in any way determines the acceptability of a violent act.
No doubt, to many laws of war is an oxymoron. However, the laws don't determine what the acceptable violent acts are, instead humankind determines what is not acceptable based on International consensus and through the treaty/UN we codify it into law.
One example, humans decided land mines as a weapon of war were to indiscriminate and had potential to far outlast armed conflicts and were outlawed by treaty and then codified into a UN Resolution, every year since then annual deaths of landmines has decreased from ~10k/year down to ~3.5k/year. Moreover, often times these laws of war have nothing to do with violence, but make sense such as requiring all military actors in armed conflict to be identified by uniform so as to be distinguished from civilians. Other laws such as Arms Reduction Treaty lead to Russia/US disposing of some combined 50-60k nukes.
Oh of course, they're the same thing.
Bombing civilians (without those being the explicit target) in a military context is exactly the same thing as just invading a concert room or shooting randomly at people
You're missing the context and the intent, just that. But I can see your ideology prevents you from seeing that
Pick some, they're all true.
Bombing civilians in a trumped up war about resources is to the victims exactly the same as shooting randomly at people. Ditto blowing up weddings with rockets, killing a few hundred thousand civilians to stop them from subscribing to another ideology and so on.
All of these activities are deplorable. I'm all for national defense, I'm not a pacifist (try harming me or someone I love and see how that ends) but at the same time I'm all for restraint and very careful consideration of the consequences of actions.
Note that there is a fairly direct line between the Iraq invasion (which France was adamantly against, remember the 'surrender monkeys' and the 'Freedom Fries'?), and the attacks in Paris. Action begets reaction, so before you react without considering the consequences you should hold still. And only when and if you've identified root causes can you go and attack the problem.
Attacking Iraq on false pretexts after 9/11 was a step on the way to Liberating Fallujah (or should that be 'wiping it off the face of the earth') which indirectly led to the US leaving Iraq which led to a power vacuum which led to on the raid of Mosul by IS which was one step on the way to IS becoming more coherent which was one step on the way to a bunch of murderers shooting up the Paris nightlife.
It's not that hard. Context and intent are a lot more complex than they seem to be at first glance, ideology has precious little to do with it.
Depends on the way to go.
If you're going for 100% freedom of speech then you'll have to accept things like the WBC or Neonazi hate speech
Now if you're going for what happens in Europe then going agains hate speech should work for all forms of hate speech, including hate towards any groups and the country itself. Tolerance goes both ways.
> Note that there is a fairly direct line between the Iraq invasion (which France was adamantly against, remember the 'surrender monkeys' and the 'Freedom Fries'?), and the attacks in Paris.
Yes, and I agree with the correlation, but they were against it and got the short stick first.
So damned if you do, damned if you don't? Might as well do it then
> Action begets reaction, so before you react without considering the consequences you should hold still.
I agree. But you can't predict all consequences. Saddam was a ruthless dictator but he kept the other ruthless wanna-be dictators in check.
I'm fine with that. I'd rather have such sores out in the open than underground where they can rot and fester that much more efficiently.
It also shows them for the idiots they are instead of being able to isolate their wanna-be company into a nice little echo-chamber.
This is absolutely, truly, astonishing.
Imagine if a drone from Saudi Arabia or better yet Assad's Syria swooped into your community looking for, the leader of a US infantry commander, and instead blew up a wedding party. And not just once, but dozens of times over the course of years.
How would you feel about that? Would you want retribution?
Would you want to spend time debating what a "terrorist" is?
Before Japan's surrender they were planning kamikaze operations against the US invaders and believed casualties might be in the millions. They had already launch 2,000 kamikaze operations to that point in the war.
Hirohito ordered his people to submit, and the US allowed him to stay on the throne as a reward. Most of his generals were executed.
If Hirohito himself had been executed, it wouldn't surprise me if there had been a horrific backlash against the occupiers.
I don't know why you mention Vietnam. From their perspective, Vietnam won the war. More importantly, they got the US to do what they wanted: leave them alone.
If you start talking about intent like this what your really saying is I share the values of one side and hence find their actions more justifiable. And I obviously even after with you about the west fighting for the better value system, but I would also prefer it would win on its own merit and not because it was forced on countries like Iraq.
One intends to cause terror, the other to hit military targets (against a certain government).
Who mentioned values?
To your question though, the French resistance during the second world war could easily have been called terrorists, as could the American revolutionary army.
It's absolutely not inconsistent to hold the view that Islamically-inspired terror is a big problem for the world, whilst simultaneously holding the view that the vast majority of muslims are peaceful. I don't know why anyone would think otherwise.
A vocal and deplorable minority of Muslims are actively attempted to split the world into Us and Them, I don't see that playing into their hand and deciding that I'm going to declare all Muslims want me dead is really going to help matters.
Nobody in this thread has suggested this
> ... declare all Muslims want me dead ...
nor this.
I think one of the major issues is defining peaceful and non-violent. From my personal experience (I am from a Muslim country), I have seen many Muslims who would not commit violence themselves, but they do not have any trouble if some extremists commit violence. Some would even give moral justification of the violence. In our country's atheist community we commonly joke "Extremists want to kill us, Moderates want Extremists to kill us". FWIW, apostasy is punishable by death in some Muslim countries.
To sum up, almost all the Muslims are non-violent, but how many of them are truly peaceful? You will be very surprised to know the number.
- Vietnam
- Cambodia
- Ghana
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
The list is endless, you can keep that going for a long long time before you run out of names.
There are over 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide [1]. Size estimates for the terrorist groups are: ISIS (52k - 258k [2]), Al Qaeda (19k-27k [3]). There are others, but I believe these are the main ones that people are talking about when worrying about terrorist threats abroad. We're talking about 1 in 5,600 to 22,535.
My humble opinion is that the terrorist threat worldwide is indeed significant, but if you think that it is a problem with Islam, then you are playing right into the hands of the extremists, who want (and they have publicly published these intentions) to divide the world into two camps that hate each other. The more hatred you direct towards Muslims, the more you drive them apart from you. ISIS's stated objective is basically world war - they want you to hate Muslims, so that Muslims feel like they have nowhere to go in the Western world.
[0] http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/01/08/3609796/islamist-t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7552225/terrorism-europe-chart
(and you can add a big chunk of green for France November 2015 now too)
Your third point I responded to in another reply.
I find this comment very strange. It's as though I can't acknowledge that Islamic terror is the biggest violent threat facing Europe whilst at the same time not hate muslims (?!?!?! how can anyone do that ?!?!?!).
> At least 48 people have been killed stateside by right-wing
> extremists in the 14 years since since the September 11
> attacks -- almost twice as many as were killed by
> self-identified jihadists in that time.
You'll also need to explain why the FBI terrorist list doesn't show that the government has a similar concern for white supremacists.
And they were in fact doing more, but a lot of it (along with funding) has gone by the wayside since 9/11.
If those white people were part of a religious movement indiscriminately targeting the larger society, then of course they would be labeled "terrorists". Do you have an example of where I'm wrong?
calling the president a terrorist
If you'll recall, the White House referred to the GOP as suicide bombers over debt ceiling negotiations. That's political posturing when either side does it and has little to do with legitimate use of the word "terrorists" in the context of labeling organizations seeking to maximize loss of life and destruction through surprise attacks on civilians.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Confederate_flag_controve...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Confederate_flag_controve...
Edit: spacing
white supremacists: 11,000,000+...
Furthermore, it makes sense to start post-9/11 since "we're in a different world now" and all that rhetoric that politicians have been spewing since. This is about today's political context, where 9-11 was the defining moment.
Terrorism is what other groups do.
Besides, is it just terrorism that's incompatible with an "open society", or other acts of murder and oppression too? Because from the extermination of 6 million jews down to colonialism, slavery, the pogroms, nukes on civilians, gulags, the massacre in Manchuria, 2 world wars, etc, most western and asian countries don't look that good either.
Or is it that because Western society has had some bad actors/states, that we can never thereafter point to bad behaviors or systems of thought?
The question in the thread wasn't whether "islamic terrorism" was compatible with open society, but whether islam itself is.
And my point it, whether it is or not, that "open society" is not as "open" as it pretends to be either.
If some family had done "a bunch of things" (of enslaving, torturing and murderous nature) to your family "over the past thousand years", would you see them as friends? Especially if they continued those things in one way or another up to today, while celebrating how "open" and "tolerant" they are, (as opposed to you, who hates them).
They were "westerners" only in their nationality not in their ethnicity. For some western societies it's difficult to imagine the difference, but it exists -- not everybody gets assimilated to the culture he lives in, especially if there's another culture he feels he belongs to by inheritance.
For those of people (who are not the majority of ISIS, but a small minority) it's about a twisted idea of revenge for what happened and happens to their (origin) countries and to people of the same faith there, and how the west views and treats them -- not about struggling with poverty.
If that's your contention then you'd need to account for the high terrorist attack output of Islamists vs other non-Islam subscribers.