if by ‘they’ you mean ‘authorities, locals, and people in general’ then I have to agree. But there is a definition of ‘they’ that includes 12 peers who very much CAN decide a motive. And that ‘they’ is the only they that counts in the part of the equation that includes motive.
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OK. Let me just put this out there for your edification…
Yup. The “religion of peace” where, even in a peaceful country, 100,000 people, while not actually willing to do the killings themselves, fully support the ones who did.
EDIT:
Let me clarify. There are some people who are mentally ill. There are some people who kill who just happen to call themselves one religion or another. If a guy comes home and finds another man in bed with his wife and he kills him, I think that it is fair to say that religion is not involved.
I am talking about people who kill BECAUSE of their religion. Somebody shooting an abortion doctor is included in this category. Need I remind you about Paris yesterday? A dozen people dead, apparently Muslim terrorists (not proven yet, but the evidence strongly suggests it).
For a Christian to become murderer “for God,” you really need a mentally ill person. I have not heard about a lot of people in Christian leadership saying that it is acceptable to kill abortion doctors.
Lots of Muslim leaders, on the other hand, actually HAVE said that it is acceptable and even encouraged to kill certain people. This is the sort of thing that could convince an otherwise-sane person to commit murder.
So I guess your basic point is that Islam is a worse religion than Christianity, and that Muslims are worse people than Christians?
And since you’re so good at finding stats, I wonder what percentage of Christians in certain polls have supported Abortion clinic bombings and/or shootings of doctors who perform abortions? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a poll of some kind somewhere has found that more than 6% supported one or another such incident.
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Plenty of Christians seem to endorse the wars in the middle east and see it as a crusade… They have zero qualms about the deaths of hundreds of thousands Muslims who do not support Al-Qaeda or ISIS, and in fact are victims of both groups. The VAST majority of victims of these organizations are fellow muslims, not American or European Christians. You do realize that right? And it was the Cold War which help give rise of many of these Islamists organizations - because we thought that they were better than the secularized pan-arab movement, which had socialist overtones. We supported the Saudi Regime, and there is evidence to suggest that the Israelis encouraged the growth of Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO (a far more secular, pan-palestinian organization.
Ann Coulter is just an example of that Christian crusader mentality (kill them all and convert them to Christianity, she once said - how is that not extreme? and she’s considered a person to have on TV!). Despite the fact she’s clearly out for the cash, I doubt she’d say thinks like she has if she wasn’t sure she had an audience for it.
Also, shit like this:
Look, just because you don’t hear about these sorts of extremists doesn’t mean they are non-existent. They exist. If they are not blowing themselves up for Jesus, it’s likely because they live relatively safe middle class lives. Put those same people in the hell that has become Gaza, Afghanistan, Mosul, or Syria… I’d guess you’d get a different story.
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You’re obviously not familiar with the IRA or the history of abortion-clinic bombings in America. Surely, at least, you’ve heard of the Olympics?!???
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Interesting how the first part of the definition is to exempt the government from the rest of the definition. So you end up with a definition broad enough to include the Montgomery Bus Boycott (because boycotts can be considered coercion) and narrow enough to exclude the police state (because usually legal) (and when they do illegal things like assassinations, they can block investgations).
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There’s always the highly unlikely possibility that this was a crime committed for non-terrorist reasons, like trying to blow open a safe to steal something. Or the possibility that it was an act of terrorism committed by someone outside the U.S…
Right now I’d call it “almost certainly an act of domestic terrorism.”
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Mod note: Stay on topic.
Yes, this. it’s all about who is legitimately able to use violcence as a political tool. Of course, there is the law as it exists, and the law as it’s deployed. Of course, especially in the 50s and 60s, lots of police and sheriffs were part of the KKK or at the very least actively coordinated with them, giving that sort of violence the force of law. There was a long history of connections between the state, especially at the local level, with the KKK historically. Despite the fact that in the late 1860s, the US government passed a series of laws aimed at reigning in the Klan, they still managed to operate totally outside the law, with the force of law backing them up (usually through acquittals for crimes committed).
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FALCOR HAD A BABY!!! OMG!
What a cutie!
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Fox News: C, check. B, check. A, not illegal. Darn it!
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[quote=“Kevin_Harrelson, post:22, topic:49464”]
I am talking about people who kill BECAUSE of their religion.[/quote]
And you use London in your example. I was nearly killed twice in one day in London by IRA bombs. Catholic vs Protestant…gee, that’s never been a problem before! /s
[quote=“Kevin_Harrelson, post:22, topic:49464”]
I have not heard about a lot of people in Christian leadership saying that it is acceptable to kill abortion doctors.[/quote]
Then you haven’t been listening or reading.
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And when you can get your xenophobic catharsis delivered on a global (and local!) scale by your very own democratic government, you get to appear less radical while still rooting for, or at least rationalizing the death and destruction of innocent bystanders…
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ok, ‘we’ would’ve been a better word choice than ‘they’
Coffee was originally discovered in Yemen, so Al Qaeda can quite legitimately look like latte drinkers (though the Latte itself originated in Berkeley…)
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I’d heard about it, but I’ll give the news media some slack on this one. The Charlie Hebdo murders were an attack on the press, and it’s reasonable for them to find that upsetting, and it was a brazen broad daylight attack, not somebody sneaking in at night when nobody’s there.
By contrast, the NAACP bomber was such a bloody incompetent that nobody got killed and there wasn’t even significant building damage. Had the terrorist been successful, I’d hope the story would have gotten much more extensive coverage, and I hope that when they catch him, the media will take the time to investigate whichever racist movement he’s part of.
The Evil Mrs. Coulter is more like the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists than like the terrorists who killed them. She’s an entertainer who finds the most extreme and obnoxious things she can say, and says them when everybody else has more self-control, and apparently there’s been an audience for that.
It’s not the same as whoever came up with the “Kill a Commie for Christ” line (My Google-fu isn’t finding the origins of that; it was used satirically during the Vietnam years but appears to predate it, but Wikipedia doesn’t seem to attribute it to Father Coughlin or Billy James Hargis, who I thought one of had been the originator.)
That’s not to say that Coulter’s not reprehensible, but she’s sort of a rather-right-wing version of Stephen Colbert’s character Stephen Colbert rather than an actual fanatic.
I see a reference to it in “Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America” (Stephen E. Kercher), as part of an early 1960’s Second City spoof of Oral Roberts’ television evangelism.
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I agreed with you, right up to this part… I tend to think they’ll gloss it over, but that’s probably my own cynicism talking.
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