Theologies are systems of religious belief. I have no illusions about them being anything more than human and subject to human interpretation. Where someone (even a psychopath) teaches about a religion and other people believe those teachings and practice them, I don’t have a problem with calling those teachings theology. I don’t suggest that it’s legitimate in the sense of being an accurate interpretation of the religious writings or free from other ideology or motivation, but no theology is pure - including those in the original writings. That’s why I make a point of not saying that all adherents of Abrahamic faiths believe in the same god; theologies are developed in specific contexts and for different purposes and are often very different from others. I don’t think denying that they are theologies is helpful.
I don’t understand; they aren’t being targeted? In the case of drone strikes, you could argue that specific people rather than events are being targeted, and the fact that the target is surrounded by innocents or at a particular function is not taken into consideration, but in the three examples I gave, these groups were explicitly targeted for specific reasons. This was not because those groups had caused any harm to the terrorists or their families, but rather because they had ridiculed the prophet or were “hundreds of idolaters together in a party of perversity” (in the case of the Bataclan). Christians have also attacked those who they felt ridiculed Jesus. These actions have nothing to do with powerlessness. Rather, they come from a specific fundamentalist ideology that demands cultural dominance, and only gets stronger with more power. Like fundamentalist Muslims, Evangelicals suffered long periods of religious persecution, and the sense of victimisation became cemented in their ideology and did not disappear when the persecution ended.
That isn’t what I’m wanting to do. Like the claim “not all men” is used to divert attention away from worrying trends in culture, the rush to claim that a criticism of a very real subsection of Islam is a criticism of all Muslims (despite repeated clarifications to the contrary) is not helpful. Religious belief doesn’t explain everything, but it is an important factor here. Calling someone a jihadist isn’t to deny their agency or other factors, but their ideology is something that has to be confronted as it isn’t just about political grievances or lack of resources. It’s not just about religion either, as you point out.
Haha! Money laundering? I come across this frequently at work.
Reports are written about people with fraudulent documentation (they had a different name 4 months ago) moving suspicious amounts of money around suspiciously. They are filed and sent to the regulator and then the same individuals reappear again a few months later with different documentation.
But they doesn’t exist in the same way without a real or imagined existential threat. This works the same way with the Christian right. The rise of black nationalism, the second wave of feminism, gay rights, etc, all functioned as a foil for the christian right, to claim they (as the REAL Americans) were under an existential threat. The John Birch society did the same during the Cold War, and much of that trickled out into the mainstream of political thought. But it rested on the notion that “we are under siege” which helped create the siege itself.
I’m saying they USE the invasions in their propaganda. They also employ images of their “victories” against their real and perceived enemies in their propaganda. But those “victories” don’t exist outside of history. Some of this is IS using the whole “people want to be associated with a winner” mentality. They could just have used other ideologies, but there is a long-standing discourse on the role of Islam in modernity and in rejecting western-backed modernity. There are too many people unwilling to acknowledge that the rise of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and these more violent groups have a historical context that all too often gets glossed over and ignored. It’s the easy recruiting tool because many people are Muslims in the region, and they hear from their oppressive states only about the western enemy.
The official death toll is still 128, but there are 80 described as “critically ill” so it will certainly rise.
This is not about ethnicity, religion or culture. The IS communiqué says what everybody assumed; it’s retaliation for the French attacks on IS, and their general support for efforts to overthrow it. The message is very clear: “back off”. The chances of the French government doing so? Effectively zero. the chances of a further attack? Quite high.
Well, apparently that hospital was. The fact is, WE DON’T KNOW what our military is targeting, because a whole lot of shit is being hidden from us. The details of that hospital in Afghanistan get sketchier by the minute. Our military is also retroactively justifying their sites.
No, but from their PERCEIVED powerlessness. Whether it’s true or not, some Christians and whites feel persecuted in our country. Some have decided to strike out against the secular power structure that they see as being against them. The difference, I think, is that most white christians in this country aren’t oppressed, where it’s hard to make the argument that people in the middle east aren’t oppressed by any number of agents (comparatively, at least). Part of the discourse is oppression, but that’s also about the discrepancy between reality and perception.
This is precisely what I’m getting at. But the narrative has been and is going to continue to be that “Muslims hate us for our freedoms”, which will only continue to work against all of us. I’m not suggesting that al-Baghdadi is some hero figure, but that he makes himself into one that people can rally around.
So, it sounds like I’m making some defense of this event, I’m, of course not. What I am doing to trying to struggle against the “yes all Muslims” narrative, which is predominant right now. The clash of civilizations wasn’t real until people like Huntington and Bin Laden made it real. We have to figure out a way to get out of that if we want to move forward productively.
If he had emulated the US President and announced “the future will not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” after a terrorist attack, it might not have had the same effect. The mood in Europe has been changing over the last few weeks, and many people are starting to tire of pretending that Islamic extremism is not in any way connected to Islam. I think it will be hard or even impossible to effectively combat extremism without engaging in nationalist excess.
The average Joe doesn’t give a flying. The nutters want a bit of glory. Most everyone just wants to get on with life without being brutalised. World less ISIS = a few sighs of relief and carry on.
And all the Muslims who are not extremist, which are the vast majority of them, are tired of being called terrorists and being told that they just need to clamp down on the violence, when they themselves are the primary targets of that violence.
Until we can think our way out of this stalemate, nothing is going to change. We need a new language that doesn’t stigmatize either Muslims as terrorists or those of us in the west who don’t’ want this to continue.
I disagree. Nationalist excess has not had a great track record of solving problems. It’s only created more.
I am ashamed at the reaction of so-called British journalists. John Rentoul suggested that Jeremy Corbyn (Labour leader) would blame France. Toby Young read that there had been an attack at a football stadium and concluded that it might be due to German football supporters (he is extremely anti-EU). If you think some US politicians are reacting in a bonkers way, you are fortunate in not following some of ours on Twitter.
I think we broadly agree on a lot, and I don’t want to descend into a “it’s not just religion” vs “it’s not just politics” argument when we both accept those points. I do think it’s important to look at the religious side of this despite the fact that it’s inevitably exploited by the right wing. I guess we all come from different contexts though and that may be all you’re hearing. At this point, what I’m most concerned about are reprisal attacks and kneejerk policy changes that will affect refugees. This didn’t take long, although the deputy mayor is denying any connection to yesterday’s events:
I really don’t know what an effective answer would be, if by effectiveness we mean that we don’t fear a repeat of this kind of attack. We have a number of refugee centres within a km of our house (a couple of weeks ago they converted an old hardware store into another refugee centre). I’ve been to some of these places for different organised activities, and was surprised at how well they have adjusted to life here - many already speak pretty good German despite arriving within the last six months, and the people I’ve spoken to are generally very skilled and motivated - as you would need to be to have achieved what they have. Violence has increased with the refugees, but that is largely violence against the refugees, not crime caused by them. People are generally welcoming, but there’s also some unease about the ‘other’, and attacks like these really won’t help. Events like this won’t either.
I think perceived powerlessness is right. This doesn’t seem to have all that much to do with actual oppression at all, and it seems to be the groups that are used to relatively unchallenged privilege in their culture rather than those with a legitimate grievance that act in this way. People in the Middle East are oppressed, but it isn’t the Kurds, Christians, Yazidis etc. that are committing these atrocities. I also think that this makes IS’s actions more about exploiting a power vacuum than reacting to legitimate concerns about their treatment by the rest of the world.
I agree with some others here that we can’t just simply eradicate terrorism completely. But the response to it, well that depends on your long term goals. Ideally the solution lies in the population of the countries/areas that have a terrorist presence. I hear that Muslims are appalled by the actions of IS yet I don’t see or hear about massive support in these countries to stop them. I suspect the level of violence they would face, the history of violence and instability of these areas, and a whole laundry list of other issues isn’t helping. But the idea we (the US) can simply provide “freedom” is absurd. If the people of these countries wish to be free from this then we should help, but until then there is little that we can do that will have a profound affect.
Totally agree here. France has already shut down it’s borders. This will also help destabilize the already fraught EU situation.
I’d argue it’s because each of these groups are out of power socially and politically. Of the three groups, the Kurds have the most political power, in part because of our historical backing of them. They are functioning largely as a nationalist-ethnic group, fighting for territorial autonomy on a number of political fronts. Also, there has been a marked shift in Palestinian politics, which has emphasized the Hamas orientation, which is much more exclusive in nature, as opposed to the more secular leaning nationalist Palestinian movement. I’d also suspect that christians in the middle east have found it easier to seek refuge in the west than Muslims have. Some of the most well known Palestinian activists have been Christians (Edward Said, for example). I really don’t know much about the Yazidis, frankly, so I can’t comment on them. I’d suspect, like many other groups, they have been targeted by groups like IS for non-conformity, as they are monotheists, but employ some Sufi overtones and Sufis have long been a throne in the side of those who seek to centralize in this region.
My tentative analogy is that they seem to have about as much in common with modern “mainstream” Islam as Gnostic Christians do with modern “mainstream” Christianity - which is to say, not much! So despite being much older, fundies tend to especially revile them.
The wikipedia page seems to have a fair amount. But you’re right about the fundies.