Quote:
Originally Posted by longsuffering
The poster you replied to is not wrong. You are.
For the passed 19 years I have lived and worked in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, as well as in Yemen. I've lived (not rotated) in Jalal Abad, Kyrgyzstan; Kyzlorda, Kazakhstan and Baku, Azerbaijan. I've rotated in and out of Sanaa, Yemen. I've spent time in Turkey, Jordan and Egypt.
The overwhelming majority of the the people I've met are as Caged Great described. They want the same things from life as we do. Security, employment, education and opportunity.
It is the people who live without hope in dirt poor regions, often oppressed by an ethnic or religious majority, who live with no hope and no opportunity who turn to groups like Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and ISIS from desperation and despair convinced that outside interests - Western, Christian, etc - are responsible for their predicament and become extremists as a result. Yemen illustrates this perfectly. When you can't feed your family, find a job, and live in fear, you to turn to someone telling you they can fix it, or its not your fault because outside forces are to blame.
You are the one who is taking a set of beliefs that is held by a tiny fraction of Muslims world wide and attempting to suggest that it is representative of most Muslims. ISIS doesn't represent a 'strict view' of Islam. It represents the most extreme view. Al Qaeda and ISIS prey on the desperate.
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The data show that you are incorrect.
A strict observance of the Quran (ie Islamism) is not strongly correlated to lack of education or poverty. We know this from relatively reliable Pew poll research and other sources.
ISIS in particular has a significant component of its fighting force made up of western Muslims who took a pilgrimage to fight for the cause.
The source of ISIS' motivation is the doctrine. They say that it is, and it is easy to see why this might occur when the doctrine is analysed. And yet, western liberals refuse to believe them when they say so.
The fact that a huge component of the Muslim world chooses to ignore and/or "moderate" sections of the doctrine is a great thing, but it does not address the process at work here. A direct line can be drawn between the doctrines of Islam and the actions taken by the 9/11 bombers, and by ISIS. And no, it is not intolerant, bigoted, racist, or xenophobic to say so. It's just identifying that ideas/ideologies can instruct action, and we should neither deny this fact, nor refuse to admit it when it happens in front of us. To do the opposite is nothing more than wishing the world was different than it is.