You started and then fueled a religious flamewar here. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We have to ban accounts that post like this, so please don't post like this.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

It's hard to beat people on their own land who are fighting with conviction, which of course they are if you have invaded their land.

I am not convinced the religious reason you propose is the actual differentiator but if you're an expert on the role of islam in armed conflict I am listening. Otherwise we've seen insurgencies effectively resist much stronger forces in vietnam, ukraine, and at one point the united states itself, without any particular unifying theology that I'm aware of.

I didn't say only people with strong religious convictions can resist conquest by stronger forces, I just said that it's hard to conquer people with strong religious convictions.

To say what you're saying responsibly you need to establish that their religious conviction is the reason why. Given that we see it elsewhere and across religions it seems much more likely to me that simply being invaded by a more powerful state is a strong enough source of this conviction.

Aside from that the "they're happy to die because their religion says they get virgins" is something I remember my second most racist uncle saying after sept 11. It's not even really true? It's a very narrow reading of a particular passage, that, yes, extremists have gotten a lot of mileage out of. But from my lay understanding of islam does not feature heavily in the personal religious experience of most muslims.

Again unless you have some particularly insight or expertise about the role of islam in motivating individuals in conflict I think you should reflect on where you got this idea and what you were trying to communicate by using it here.

The Qur'an explicitly states that martyrs will die in heaven, and most Muslims believe this.

"Those who leave their homes in the cause of Allah, and are then slain or die,- On them will Allah bestow verily a goodly Provision: Truly Allah is He Who bestows the best provision. Verily He will admit them to a place with which they shall be well pleased: for Allah is All-Knowing, Most Forbearing."

- Quran 22:58–59

The virgins part on the other hand is a lot more iffy. And Muslims generally believe it's not acceptable to kill a single innocent, since the Qur'an says so, so only a very small minority support suicide bombing like 9/11 (on the argument that since US citizens fund the military, they count as soldiers, not non-combatants).

Muslims themselves have claimed not fearing death to be a reason for past military success. For instance the quote "I have bought you men who love death as much as you love life" from one of the early Muslim generals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_ibn_al-Walid . He said it to the Persians, whom the Muslim armies eventually defeated.

The issue is not whether these things are said, or even whether they are acted upon, but whether they are causally effective, and a number of war stories is insufficient to establish this.

An interesting point about Vietnam is that according to all participating parties for long stretches there was little to no support in the South for the Vietcong and everything was supported and orchestrated by the North.

https://archive.org/details/victoryinvietnam0000unse_u7j3 Victory in Vietnam : the official history of the people's army of Vietnam

Opened Soviet archives after the fall of the SU said the same.

The US basically always said that.

Quite the racist canard. The Vietnamese didn’t need to believe in “a ticket to paradise” when they humiliated the French and then the US.

It's not racist; the Taliban and the Houthis are Muslims, and most Muslims believe that martyrdom leads directly to heaven, since the Qur'an explicitly states so.

"Those who leave their homes in the cause of Allah, and are then slain or die,- On them will Allah bestow verily a goodly Provision: Truly Allah is He Who bestows the best provision. Verily He will admit them to a place with which they shall be well pleased: for Allah is All-Knowing, Most Forbearing."

- Quran 22:58–59

Many Muslims take pride in the fact, hence the popularity of the "I have bought you men who love death as much as you love life" quote from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_ibn_al-Walid to the Persian governor.

Plus the Houthis and the Afghanistanis aren't even the same race, since the Houthis are Arabs and the majority of Afghanistanis are not.

You keep talking about many/most Muslims without evidence.

If it's anything like Christianity most Muslims could well be practising but not devout and fully committed to everything written in the Quran.

Like saying Christians are hard to beat because everyone will donate all life savings to a religious war effort because of the one camel/needle line.

Meh, it's not like Islam has a monopoly on martyrdom. Religion is a multiplier for politics, not the other way around.

> it's hard to defeat people who believe dying in battle is a ticket to paradise

How about it's hard to defeat people in their homeland, when they are fighting guerilla-style and not fighting head-on. i.e. Vietnam.

Back to Twitter with you.

How could it ever be racist? Muslims aren't a race, anyone can become a Muslim.

Muslim is not a race, just FYI

This reply perfectly illustrates the mentality of SJWs: terms like "racist" are just weapons to be used against political opponents, divorced from any actual meaning of the word.

The point was that the comment was based on prejudice. It was deleted and the user reprimanded, so clearly not just an “SJW” jab (itself a ridiculous cliche to invoke in this context). Whether the comment was purely based on religious affiliation, or as commonly happens, conflated with race, doesn’t really matter.