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A comment on VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks. Parent comment

Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by steveklabnik on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @09:40AM (#10581282)
Not Jacques, but from a few months back: "White Supremacists More Dangerous To America Than Foreign Terrorists, Study Says" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domestic-terrorism-...

  > 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.
As Jacques says, "terrorist" attacks are only committed by a Muslim majority because we re-define any attack committed by a non-Muslim as "not terrorism."
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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by crusso on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @10:09AM (#10581476)
Are you actually going to put some lone nut jobs here and there on the same level as organized and determined jihadists? If so, you need to include the tens of thousands of murdered people that ISIS has been responsible for. You'll need to include the Russian jet that was blown up, the attack in Paris, and all those killed by al-qaeda on 9/11, etc.

You'll also need to explain why the FBI terrorist list doesn't show that the government has a similar concern for white supremacists.

https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists

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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by steveklabnik on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @10:21AM (#10581544)
The FBI is concerned about white supremacists: http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enf... (this particular domain isn't the best, but it's a story that was repeated all over the place) And stuff like https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/may/extremism_052212/e... , etc.

And they were in fact doing more, but a lot of it (along with funding) has gone by the wayside since 9/11.

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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by theorique on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @03:09PM (#10583614)
This is at least in part due to their bad habit of depending on the partisan SPLC for "hate group" data. SPLC is in the business of making so-called "hate groups" into terrible bogeymen, because SPLC reaps significant financial rewards through scare-tactics fundraising the depends on the threat of such groups.
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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by NotSammyHagar on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @10:37AM (#10581683)
We define away the problem. White people shooting others is not usually considered terrorism (such as a mass shooting committed by a white person). Terrorism is used to label actions by people you don't like. Some politicians even make statements calling the president a terrorist because he does something they don't like. We don't call it terrorism when the American government kidnapped people, took them to other countries, and let them be tortured (rendition); I do think that was not only wrong but was something you could use the T word for.
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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by crusso on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @11:07AM (#10581945)
White people shooting others is not usually considered terrorism

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.

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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by tareqak on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @07:19PM (#10585006)
The Charleston shooting of 2015 comes to mind as the perfect example [0].

[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

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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by onewaystreet on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @03:48PM (#10583839)
Mass murder and terrorism are not the same thing. Terrorism requires some political objective. The only the Charleston church shooting would meet that definition.
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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by tareqak on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @07:26PM (#10585049)
Most mass murderers' manifestos are political in nature. Whether anyone pays attention or remembers is pretty much the defining characteristic between calling one event mass murder versus calling it terrorism.
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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by vox_mollis on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @10:32AM (#10581658)
That's a very good research methodology. Excluding non-stateside attacks and arbitrarily selecting 2002 as the starting point to arrive at a likely preselected conclusion.
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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by querulous on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @12:17PM (#10582521)
sure. let's start in 1930:

white supremacists: 11,000,000+...

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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by steveklabnik on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @10:37AM (#10581691)
As a citizen of the US, I prefer to talk about my own country, since I have more historical context. And 9/11 was a one-time event that hasn't and can't happen again, now that we've done things like reinforce pilot's doors. Removing outliers is a pretty common thing.

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.

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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by rmc on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @10:21AM (#10581547)
It depends. For a long time the UK was happy to call Irish nationalists and the IRA terrorists.

Terrorism is what other groups do.

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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by Nursie on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @11:32AM (#10582136)
Well they were, and the IRA would still be a terrorist organisation, were it to continue, you know, performing acts of terrorism.
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