That’s really not what I’m arguing. I’m saying that global inequality makes things more likely to be violent and to give ideologies like this one a more firm footing.
No, it’s also political, cultural, and social. Not everyone who signed up to these various groups are religious ideologues. These are human beings with agency, who are working from a variety of reasons for what they are doing.
Of course they collectively came in their pants, but at least that movement is way past its prime and has lost all its mainstream credibility some time ago.
There are other more insidious players like the right-wing populist “euroskeptic” AfD and rightmost wing of the mainstream CSU which compensates for irrelevance on the national stage by being concerned about stuff.
Yeah, I can imagine this is giving the right wing in Europe more generally a big boost. And the rest of the political parties will have to follow suit or lose out to them. This is going to be horrible, in terms of the political fallout. All of us are only going to get further mired in the situation.
I have no desire to wave away the significance of the West’s actions as a factor in this (and by political ideologies, I was mainly referring to western ones). However, much as there are Evangelicals in the West who continue to see themselves as victims whenever they aren’t given priority, a lot of the grievances that terrorists have are not in any way reasonable, even when there are many grievances that they should rightfully be angered about.
Which of these terrorists was left without a family due to a drone strike? Most Europeans who join IS that I’ve heard of come from good families who are shocked to hear that this is happening. Why are groups like Charlie Hebdo, a music concert and Jyllands-Posten attacked rather than more legitimate targets? Why are IS’s targets always even more marginalised people? This isn’t about hitting back at oppressors, it’s a bunch of emotional toddlers wanting control. The fact that other Muslims are often the target doesn’t change that.
Just imagine if the collective $ that has been spent on “fighting Islamic terrorism” had been spent on humanitarian programs etc… instead. You know, it may have been a bit more difficult to rally against the former colonial powers if we had been say… building and funding hospitals (with of course accompanying “with our love - USA/European community/etc…” propaganda) rather than “accidentally” bombing them…
It’s “Ibrahim” right?..
That’s about as close to victim blaming as BB will allow. Nice job.
“Mired.”
Merde.
Well, the strain of fundamentalist islam is political, cultural and social. The vast majority of people are joining this quasi-nationalistic cult to bring about a theocratic world order under islam. They are religious ideologues who happen to also be cultural and political ideologues as well because they are are deeply entwined with each other.
From Wikipedia, since I can’t cut and paste from a paper book:
"Arnaud Amaury… was a Cistercian abbot who took a prominent role in the Albigensian Crusade. He is most remembered for allegedly advising a soldier, who was worrying about killing orthodox Catholics along with the heretics during the sack of the Cathar stronghold of Béziers, Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. (“Kill them. For the Lord knows those that are His own.”)
And then there’s the OT, with God frequently advocating mass slaughter of Canaanites, Palestinians or Ba’al worshippers.
And the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna advises Arjuna that what is to happen is already fated, so killing people is just fulfilling the divine order.
As Joseph Heller observes in God Knows, Divine guidance basically consists of a charismatic leader asking God if he should do something, and God saying “yes, you do it.”
G K Chesterton was quite clear where the blame lay:
“From all that terror teaches
from lies of tongue and pen
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men
From sale and profanation
of honour and the sword
From sleep and from damnation
Deliver us, good Lord!”
tl;dr: it is not a theology, it is the desires of psychopaths being imposed on a theology.
Yeah. But we’re ungrateful bastards. If they gave us too much we might get the idea we could have everything. Better to fuck things up and keep us fighting among ourselves.
They aren’t. But neither are weddings, funerals, or hospitals. Our governments are lying about who they’ve killed. We all know that. I’d also way part of the reason is that these are easier targets. That’s how this sort of asymmetrical warfare works.
So, what do you want them to do. I’m not justifying their actions or saying they are right, I’m contextualizing them. IS is able to recruit because people are desperate. The people in the west who have joined up have done so for numerous reason, one being that they see these guys are being against the power structure which they abhor, which is why they’ve been able to recruit both kids who grew up Muslim and those who haven’t. But those are not their primary foot soldiers anyway. It seems like many of these attackers came from the middle east anyway… Egyptian passports.
As far as “wanting control”, that’s kind of my point - they have no control in their lives in part because of western support for their political leaders and then the past decade and a half of war in their countries. When people feel marginalized, they act in different ways - some constructive, others destructive. Just saying “MUSLIMS” doesn’t get us any closer to understanding what is happening here - it only reinforces the right wing, Samuel Huntington narrative of “clash of civilizations” which people like Bin Laden, and al-Baghdadi benefit from, as well as all the western arms dealers and security experts, who are making a mint off of us thinking that “the muslims hate us and want to kill us all because of our freedoms”.
I’m arguing that just saying “religion” does nothing to help the situation and only escalates it and reinforces the stereotype of an evil jihadist, out to slaughter people because they don’t conform to his view of the world. We can recognize that these are human actors with agency, who have done a horrible, unforgivable act, and still recognize that they are human beings. In fact, if we’re to get out of this at all, we have to recognize that they are indeed people, and that this is much more than just a battle of ideologies. If we want them to stop accepting the dehumanization of us, we need to stop accepting the dehumanization of them? Would you call an American soldier an ideologue for volunteering to go to war? Do we just assume that they aren’t complicated individuals who joined up for a complex set of reasons? No. Why do the same to the people who make up IS, al-Qeada, the Taliban, or Al-Shabob (did I spell that right)?
I think it’s wrong to assume that whatever al-Baghdadi says is what they all think. I’d suggest that people joined the jihad for many different reasons.
That’s ridiculous. IS recruits people exactly the same way that the US recruited people for WW2. They say their way of life is under threat, pump up the nationalism, demonize the enemy and make their cause seem just and great.
Sure, some of people minority of people joining IS are desperate or because they want revenge, but most are people going to join a movement because they believe in Greater Islam.
Are you suggesting that the whole thing just started because a bunch of Muslims hate our freedoms? I’m sorry, but it’s much more complex than that. Do you honestly think that the current set of wars are not the primary recruiting tools for this movement? In fact, at times when there historicallly hasn’t been much going on in the middle east, in terms of stuff like the war on terror, etc, Islamists don’t do nearly as well political. The reason why these groups got such a great boost in the past few decades was because of things like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It drew people in.
To be clear, I’m not absolving people or justifying their actions. I’m saying it’s not just religion.
This is what I would like to understand. IS is alive and well because they have a very reliable income source from oil.
Who is keeping them afloat, who is buying their oil? Surely, the first step of fighting them is to make sure that not a single drop of oil even remotely associated with them can be sold to anyone…
Are we (Western European / Americans) sponsoring the whole shenanigans?
Sitting here in London, on the border of the most efficient money laundering operation in the free world, I am furious with idiot Governments prepared to risk the lives of their citizens because money… How dare… they.
Is it some secret plan to keep London safe by ensuring that all those evil money laundering terrorists can walk among us…freely, they won’t kill their own, except they do.
What’s going on?
You can’t run such an operation without funds. Where are they flowing from. That’s where you deal with these people.
“Video from inside the Stadium shows a scene of chaos:”
WTF? No. I’m suggesting that people have joined a religious/nationalist cult that wants to wage war and expand its membership in any way possible. I don’t think they give a fuck about our freedom.
They seem to be able to use their own attacks to bring in new people just as effectively as existential threats. They are very good at propaganda. You can point to US invasions, Russian invasions or whatever all you want, but absent these things, I’m fairly certain that they would simply create threats the same way the right wing does in the US when it says “Christianity is under attack all over the world.” Sure, pictures of people dead from enemy strikes makes propaganda easier, but they seem to use pictures of the dead from their strikes just as effectively.
Doesn’t France also have very strict rules about public displays of religion? No religious symbolism at all in public schools; no crosses, headscarves, yarmulkes, etc. They’re very serious about that church/state separation. I feel like this is the very thing they try to prevent by drawing such a sharp line.
The secondary or possibly tertiary sigh for me after reading this story was looking at the feed of a gal I know in London…
My best friend is currently living in Germany near the Belgian border. So I wasn’t too concerned about her and her family. Then this morning I see there’s been arrests in Brussels connected to this.
There are enough of the narcissistic overprivileged in the West that we know it is attention-getting rather than ideology, like the rich kid who paints his bedroom black and crashes the BMW because his parents give him money but don’t unconditionally worship him.
