Sigh. He didn’t start a war because of his religion.
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“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
“But Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”
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More food for thought (did I post this already? I don’t think I did):
And Saudi exporting of their brand of Salafism:
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I’m not sure how productive this argument would be - extremist western Christians don’t have the support of the state behind them like extremist Muslims do in some countries. There is violence against abortion providers and LGBT people, but not public executions. Who knows what radicalised Christians would do if they were supported by the government or permitted to do what they liked though?
I don’t think the Iraq War can be considered a religious conflict, although obviously the beliefs of the commander in chief will have some influence on his actions. Bill Clinton was also prepared to act with military force against Iraq, and made it clear that further action was possible if Saddam Hussein failed to comply. When Bush attacked, Clinton backed up his claims that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and tried to soften criticism against him.
“So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say, ‘You got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don’t cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.’”
Clinton told King: “People can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”
What’s more, a lot of those people who died were killed by Muslim extremists who were a lot more than callous and indiscriminate in their actions. At best this can be considered a draw as far as Christian vs. Muslim evil is concerned.
that’s partially because we have democracies, which give multiple voices an opportunity to weigh in on politics. We’ve actively helped strangle several democratic institutions in the region. And our strongest allies in the region are in the throes of a rise in religious groups to political power (Israel and Turkey, via democratic means and the entrenched Wahhabist in Saudi Arabia).
Margaret Atwood took a wild guess:
Do you think that killing from the air doesn’t seem callous and indiscriminate? Or that locking up people without a trial, when due process is meant to be a core ideology of our system, specifically because they are Muslim, doesn’t look callous and indiscriminate, or doesn’t undermine our stance of being tolerant? There is a long list of things that have happened since 9/11, that we did not have to do, that acted as remarkable recruiting tools for groups like IS.
It’s precisely this mind set, I think that makes the biggest loser here a secular society.
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That first article was good. But I take issue that if they are on a downward slide that more war from the west would help them. I think it will hasten their demise.
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I’m not giving points to the different extremist groups, just saying that the situations are different and while trying to bring about restrictive laws, the treatment of LGBT groups and other things that Christians in the US have done aren’t as bad as stoning adulterers, it’s not like extremist Christians in the US haven’t used the death penalty to enforce their beliefs in the past. Selectively calling the US armed forces Christian is one way to try to make things look the same now, but they really aren’t. As you say, the governmental systems are very different and if it had been Bush’s religious war, it wouldn’t have been building up before he came to power and it would have stopped with Obama. Not that they aren’t Christian, but there seem to be fewer claims that Clinton was waging a crusade by promoting military intervention or that Obama was doing so by increasing the drone strikes. We cannot wash our hands of this by claiming that it just comes from a Christian philosophy. On that point, I was working with an evangelical organisation in 2001. Here is a letter the (American) leader sent to George Bush asking him not to respond militarily before all other options have been exhausted:
We are at an important point in history especially in connection with the relationship between Muslims and Christians. Are we aware of what is going on in Nigeria, Indonesia and other parts of the world? I was amazed at what Muslims were saying on television here in the UK just the other day.
They have been receiving hate-mail and one of their schools had to close. There are massive misunderstandings and this is related to human prejudice and racism. The wrong move at this time could interpreted as anti-Islamic and could be the match that starts a thousand fires across the entire world. If the great powers of the world think they can ‘root out all evil’ then I would like to know what history books they are reading.
Are they being locked up by people who want to express their Christian identity, or is this happening because people equate Islam with violence? The first is another nice way to excuse those of us who aren’t Christian, but it doesn’t seem to fit reality.
I would like to see a more secular society, but I do grate at this repeated claim that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were crusades, and those who died were the victims of Christian violence against Muslims. If you want to go there, the war does not make Muslims look good either. In any case, labelling conflicts as religious is a common way for atheists to act like the problem is religion, rather than issues that also implicate them.
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Perhaps not, however:
I’m certainly not suggesting we do, but it’s much harder to untangle christianity from modernity in the West than we think, I’d suggest.
Again, I don’t want to do that, but letting the “Islam is a sonderweg” become the predominant narrative does that work of assuaging blame for the current situation as well. I see it as the larger problem, in the discourse, actually.
My point is that there is a power differential between the sides - with one side having the preponderance of economic and military power. Appealing to religious sensibilities, something that is generally higher in Muslim majority countries, has become a weapon of the weak in this case. I think that blaming ALL MUSLIMS (not that you’re doing that, I’m talking about the jihadi narrative more generally) only reinforces the pull of groups like IS.
Agreed here. It is part of what I’m (hamfistedly, maybe - 
) attempting to get at - the whole “religious people are THE problem” rather than how people act is THE problem idea. I think that, while we’d like our society to be truly secular, it really isn’t so much. Our societal structures of modernity were built on religious ones that came from the fall out of the religious wars of the early modern period - which was about shifting power bases, really (from the Catholic Church to various protestant sects). Secularism is more often than not a means of signaling our own sense of superiority over the rest of the world, rather than functioning as a truly secular society. Maybe that’s reinforced by where I live, but I think it has some merit with considering.
[ETA] Two more links about Fundamentalism in the US:
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Nor do I and you missed my point.
The stoning of adulterers and hijab stuff is more related to the tribal societies that make up the Tribal Areas than Islam per se. The OP seems to conflate the Islam practised mainly by nomadic slave traders with a billion and a half Muslims. I was pointing out that you could reflect his silly argument by referring to GWBIII as a “born again Christian” which he claimed to be, and so misrepresenting the Iraq war as some sort of Crusade. Hence my “I can play that game”.
I actually consider it to be more significant that GWBIII and the chief cheerleader for him in the UK, Alastair Campbell, are both recovering alcoholics. And, to clarify since that’s obviously necessary, I don’t think that is the main cause of the war.
I know. I kind of expect irony to get picked up on these threads because the boingboing audience is pretty intelligent, but it doesn’t always work.
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An awful lot of people do seem to think so. Somehow killing people with missiles seems nicer than killing them by cutting their heads off. Because we have not had a mass war in the West for 70 years, we don’t have the people who wake up screaming from nightmares of their friends’ entrails hanging from trees, or trying to stop the bleeding from a shrapnel wound, to remind us that the media lies to us about the nature of warfare.
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… I don’t know about putting this on the working class … in Germany, in the last five to ten years, it’s parts of the middle class that are ramping up their xenophobia; as in other aspects of life, these people just prefer not to get their hands dirty themselves.
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I have never been sure whether people like Nick Griffin or Nigel Farage create xenophobia or whether they just expose it and use it to gain power. But I can assure you that the National Front members who tried to beat me and my friends up in the 1960s were authentically white working class.
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I agree - it is vitally important to protect Muslims against general suspicion or discrimination, but for those actually taking up arms under the flag of ISIS, I doubt that bombing the shit out of them will help them in any way. Then again, much of the current situation has been created by Western nations bombing the shit out of that region.
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The local shopping mall decided to test their emergency procedures this morning. Alarms blasting. Instead of avoiding the area, people passing by, including me, stopped and walked into the carpark looking and trying to figure out if it was a test or real.
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I’m saying that killing from the air is callous and indiscriminate. Suicide bombing a mosque, market, bus station or swimming pool or otherwise knowingly and intentionally killing innocent civilians is more than that.
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You’re in your 60’s? I always imagined you as younger!
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I am aware of the different interpretations of the word “jihad”; I was using the word “jihadist”, which I take refers to the ideology that true muslims must engage in a violent fight against unbelievers, as the Quran can be interpreted to state that non-muslims must be subject to Islamic rule. (Don’t get me started on what the Bible “can be interpreted to state” though).
In German-language discourse we commonly use the term “islamist” in this context, which is taken to be very much distinct from “Islam” and “islamic”. I gather the term exists in English, too, but I haven’t heard/read it nearly as often.
I can understand the desire to avoid saying anything that might support the right wing, though I believe that calling “concentration camps” a “likely outcome” is massive hyperbole.
Well, to me, it sounded like, “no, islamist terrorism is not about religion, because actually, it’s about ethics in capitalism”.
Okay, please do that. Austria hasn’t been invading any countries lately (I imagine we’ve got this big sign somewhere at the border saying “Welcome to Austria - Years since starting a Word War: [77]”), so there’s nothing we can really change at our end.
The problem with your solution is, it’s a pretty long-term solution. The West has been propping up despotic regimes for so long, that when they fall at last, they are often (not always - Go Tunisia!) replaced by something worse, at least at first. It’s been 36 years since the West propped up a despotic regime in Iran, and they have just thankfully reached the point where we can talk to them again. Also, someone should probably start planning the evacuation of the entire state of Israel just to make sure there are no legitimate grievances left.
You’re preaching to the choir here. Note that G.W. Bush has been widely reviled as a religious crusader in my corner of the world. Bush said, “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile”, and he lost all remaining support he had form sane people in Austria right there and then.
It is. (Hungary is in Central Europe, not Eastern Europe, though, and Croatia is often counted as a part of Central Europe, too.)
Lots of salt for your sources. I’d classify both of them as “wishful thinking”. The first one talks about an extreme right-wing politician (Orban) being Christian (big surprise!) and about the Croatian same-sex-marriage referendum (65% against marriage equality with a 25% turnout). Croatian nationalism has been strongly linked to Catholicism ever since the Yugoslavian war, so nothing new there, either.
The only reliable polls on the subject that I know about are the Eurobarometer polls on religion, where the same question has actually been asked twice in 2005 and 2010. The percentages of respondents who respond “I believe there is a God” has remained within two percentage points of the previous result in most countries, and dropped by up to ten in others. It varies wildly by country. Poland was at 79% in 2010, while the neighboring Czech republic was at 16%. For France, that number has dropped from 34% in 2005 to 27% in 2010.
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Perhaps the problem was making or allowing Despotic Regimes to fall.
If Saddam, Assad, Gaddafi were still in power, still brutally crushing their populations, we wouldn’t be in the trouble we currently are in.
(Said partly to be flamebait. But only partly)
It’s a tough call because oppression with a recognizable name is still oppression. Oppression resulting from nameless, formless evil makes it harder to specify a line item in a budget to fight it. But the net result is the same for the 99%.
