Quote:
Originally Posted by AltaGuy
If you cannot discuss a specific issue without rattling off a laundry list of perceived wrongs committed by Muslims worldwide - a heterogeneous group of roughly 1.3B people - I'd suggest that you should probably start any related debate by looking at your own views.
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The global issues are brought up in here in response to two arguments:
1) The argument that the violence is motivated by Western meddling in the Middle East.
It's perfectly logical to run that hypothesis through a comparative analysis of other regions of the globe with a history of Western military intervention and political meddling, and see in which countries it has inspired terrorism against civilians. The next logical step is to then do a cross-analysis of all the places in the world where Islamic terrorism is taking place and to see how many are subject to Western military meddling.
After doing those two analysis, the findings are that the commonality of the places targeted with Islamist terrorism against civilians isn't Western military intervention, but the existence of Islamist radicalism - which is found around the globe.
2) The argument that all religions are the same because all have inspired violent radicals.
The logical response to that argument is to define what violent extremism is in a religious context and do a comparative analysis across religions. Admittedly, there's some subjectivity there. However, I'd suggest that flogging or killing sinners instead of just shaming them, and killing apostates instead of just denouncing them, is a sensible place to draw the line.
That analysis shows us that Islam today is home to more violently intolerant adherents than other religions.
If you don't think a religion where close to half the adherents globally countenance violence to enforce their religious dogma is ripe ground for the recruitment of religiously-motivated fanatics... If you think something like the Charlie Hebdo murders could just as easily have been carried out by Catholics or Hindus or Buddhists... well, I don't know what to say.
To say all Muslims support terrorism is rank idiocy. To say the terrorism we're witnessing in the West has nothing to do with Islamic extremism evident across the globe is also rank idiocy. Thankfully, rational people don't have to choose one of those two simplistic and ignorant options.
And to repeat: The great majority of the victims of this violent extremism are other Muslims. That doesn't mean it isn't religiously motivated.