Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
Bombing at gay pride event in Brazil yesterday. Latin American terrorism? Impossible, there's no Muslims there!
|
That kind of equivocation is ghastly. Did you look at the list I posted the link to?
Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
Again, organizations like Al-Qaeda have lots of money with which to support terrorism in the West, due to their backers having all kinds of oil money around, with which to import slaves to build skyscrapers and malls, buy military hardware from Canada, and fund some fundies. That's why these particular lunatics are so visible and successful. If you want to stop ISIS and its ilk, your best path is end world reliance on oil, not pontificate about how "Islam"* is to blame.
|
Sorry, the kind of attacks carried out in Paris and Brussels don't really require all that much money. They require expertise (not hard to find on the internet), discipline, and, most importantly, fanaticism. Political radicalism is the tinder, and fundamentalists religion is the gasoline.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
Further, being a Muslim or a Christian or a Buddhist or whatever is irrelevant to how I perceive you as a person, just like being an atheist doesn't endear certain intolerant and bigoted people - even on this very board - to me.
|
It can give me some clue as to someone's social attitudes. If someone says they are a fundamentalist Evangelical Christian from Kansas, I can make some pretty strong inferences about their attitudes towards pre-marital sex, family life, science, and homosexuality.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
*What is "Islam" anyway? That was my main original point, it's far too broad a term to really mean anything useful as far as tracing causes of events. If someone said "This particular group of Wahhabi Muslims subscribe to the teachings of this particular cleric who advocates violent terrorist action, and that's a problem", well, I would agree with that, provided it was true. When you say "Islam" this, or "Muslim" that, you are almost certainly about to frame a statement as "Us vs. Them", and that is exactly the thinking that creates the terrorism you claim to abhor.
|
Why not look at
polls of Muslims in various countries to get some sense of attitudes, values, and beliefs?
Let's be clear - I don't think we're in a struggle between Islam and the rest of the world. I think many Muslims are in a struggle with modernity. And some of those Muslims are taking up violence on a mass level out of intense frustration at the failure of their societies to cope with modernity.
Or you can look at it as a venn diagram. One circle is political radicalism, which includes people of every creed from around the globe. The other circle is Muslims, most of whom are not political radicals. Where those two circles overlap is where we have Islamicist jihadism, which is responsible for the overwhelming number of mass terrorist attacks in the last 20 years. Political radicalism and fundamentalist religion are both necessary to inspire that level of incendiary violence.