Right. That’s like saying most Christians admire Timothy McVeigh.
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Those who did it were pretty clear about their reasons for doing it. Terrorists shouting “God is great” while gunning down innocents is getting pretty old.
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But bombing weddings and killing children by drones is just “collateral damage” and hence is unimportant? I’d suspect that’s become a critical recruitment tool for ISIS, not the past, but what is happening in places like Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria right now, today. Yes, they are responsible for their own actions, but how can we not expect anger and an attempt to retaliate against what’s happening right now.
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How about we stop invading their countries, stop propping up dictators, stop arming Israel, stop selling arms to Egypt, take in as many refugees from the violence we helped unleash, and do all we can to mediate between forces battling now.
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Islam provides an organized framework for people brutally dispossessed by vying global powers. Let’s think harder. Plutoctatic resource plundering is what I think is “getting old.” To be more specific: what @anon61221983 just said.
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Thank you for your permission.
I like @popobawa4u get annoyed at the people who think that the root of this is religion. The root of this is power. People who want power will start religions or political movements because they are centres of power that people respond to. But the power comes first.
WW2 has been called a war between ideologies (right wing nationalism and communism/democracy). But it wasn’t. It was a war initiated by a gangster who wanted power, and seized on right wing nationalism as the way to get it. The states he invaded happened to be democratic or communist but this was incidental except in providing a pretext. Daesh has seized on Salafism as the way to win followers, but what it is basically about is one group trying to fill the power vacuum in Iraq and extend into Syria. Salafism is the pretext, not the cause.
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I think you’re confusing self identification with a particular interpretation of a religion with a precipitating factor. The reason why people, especially young people, might find this ideology appealing is not just because they’re brainwashed by allah. It just goes deeper than that. Do you honestly think that a having the US invade and subjugate the region, and all that entails has literally nothing to do with it? Do you think that if the world were peaceful and we all had great global equity, and lived in generally democratic systems, and resources were spread equitably, that people would still do this sort of thing?
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Yes, yes, yes.
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@Mindysan33 and @anon15383236 - you are doing a much better job of commenting on this than I am.
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It’s my phone, actually – typing on it makes me succinct. I’m appreciating your comments too (and Mindy’s, as always).
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Of course. History is full of people who have murdered the innocent for ideological reasons, to gain power or because they were mentally unstable.
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Why do you assume that this madness is exclusive to religion?
Surely we’d never see people killed or hurt in the named of money?!!?
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German social media haven’t been pretty.
At least the people I actually follow behave for the most part, but the parade of conservative backbenchers, concerned citizens and miscellaneous nutters is disturbing.
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I disagree about being “mentally unstable”. that’s relative. But my point is that being hounded into a corner makes any type of mechanism getting you out seem like a lifeline - whether it’s a ladder or a line going to a bomb.
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I do understand that people will be angry, and I’m not naive enough to imagine that innocents will not be targeted. This is not a condemnation of all Muslims, as I’ve tried to stress. It’s not a denial of other factors either - I’ve spent enough time trying to explain to people from outside of Ireland that the troubles in Northern Ireland were not just a religious dispute. These groups are responding to political realities, but they are also accompanying that with a specific theology, which includes a god who approves of the slaughter, kidnapping and rape of innocent people - including other Muslims. This should not be a controversial statement, even though there are plenty of non-religious reasons why this theology has come to the fore recently.
Sure but I’m talking about a specific form of Islam that has no need for people to be dispossessed in order to thrive. In fact, it’s supported by some of the most privileged people in the world and it is not directed against the powers oppressing those dispossessed people.
[quote=“anon61221983, post:90, topic:69242, full:true”]
I think you’re confusing self identification with a particular interpretation of a religion with a precipitating factor.[/quote]
I don’t think so.
Sure, and young white men who shoot up schools also have reasons beyond mental illness. In both cases, the anger is horribly misdirected.
Of course that’s related. Still, this ideology didn’t start with the US invasion, nor is everything about us.
Yes, I think they would. People suck and even having more resources than most people doesn’t negate that. Having a more equal spread of resources would improve matters greatly, and the world is generally more peaceful than before, so there is hope. However, certain ideologies (including political ones) make a peaceful and equitable future more difficult to imagine.
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What’s the right wing group? Pegida? Look for them to become much more popular now.
I’m sure that can lead to violence as well, but it is absolutely ridiculous to believe that if the wealth was distributed equally we’d live in peace without massacres. The rise of islamic fundamentalism isn’t entirely economic.
For goodness sake, Osama Bin Laden was born into a family of billionaires and started Al Qaeda. You think he was blowing up buildings because wealth wasn’t distributed fairly enough to him?
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Likewise, the time to talk about gun culture is never in the aftermath of a massacre. Perhaps later, when everybody had stopped giving a shit and we can get back to not changing anything. Let’s take this time, now, to mourn, to grieve, and to honor the dead with our inaction.
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PRIMARILY, actually.
But we have no idea if this would exist without the historical background, distant and recent. You forget that history isn’t the facts that happened back there, but a political object in the here and now, just subject to interpretation and ideology as anything else.
Do you honestly think that’s the same thing? A guy pissed cause women reject him and a guy pissed because his family got killed by a drone bomb? We are radicalizing the shit out of these people.
Which is why I discussed the history of colonialism, not just the US invasion.
Including the one that the west is currently operating inside of, which as @anon15383236 is pointing out is the current neoliberal ideology.
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