I’m sorry to gloss over all of that but I have to ask, do you have a central point that you’re arguing here? This is too much and I don’t know where to start responding.
Go back and re-read my original posts, subsequent posts have been mostly about correcting your mischaracterisation of my views (and adding further detail to remove any possible confusion). The initial point was that there is nothing wrong with using the phrase “Islamic terrorism” when it’s warranted by the facts, just as there’s nothing wrong with using “Christian terrorism” when similarly warranted.
“Synonymous” means “identical in meaning” and is hence a reflexive relationship. Is control synonymous with religion?
It doesn’t only mean that, it also means “Closely associated with or suggestive of something”.
The word “religion” itself means regulation, or control, if you will. At it’s most basic religion is a set of protocols that one must follow. And protocols and rules serve to control. Not always bad, but religion and control of people are intimately woven together from the very beginning.
Hahahah, yes. It’s an accepted fact from just about every point of view except for directly underneath the bomb coming down on your house.
I agree with everything in your post up to and including this sentence. My point wasn’t to equate the two, only to point out that killing civilians can be justified without appeal to religion. That the two things can be equated, and when it’s your own children being euphemistically called “collateral” you may be inclined to accept the equivalence, wrong as it may be. It’s not a justification I agree with (you don’t think I’m actually arguing for the slaughter of civilians do you? I live just down the road, it could have been me), but such a justification does exist.
Can you please quote where I said that? I don’t see it and I would like to retract it if I did. For someone who complains about their argument being mischaracterised, you spend an awful lot of time talking past me…
Well yeah, the difference is that the IRA were playing a home game. You don’t attack civilians when you are the civilians. Except of course, what the IRA was doing took place against a background of ongoing Protestant-Catholic violence, so I don’t know if they’re such a great example for what you’re arguing.
Also, Northern Ireland is still under the Queen’s rule. Whatever the IRA did, they failed. Just goes to show that hitting military targets is an ineffective strategy.
There’s a popular sentiment right now here in Paris that François Hollande and the French state are off playing war games and it’s the rest of us who are made to pay for their deeds. If instead Daesh attacked François Hollande or the French state, it wouldn’t create that same sentiment.
Fine but, humour me? You are the leader of Daesh, you’ve laid claim to a chunk of territory big enough to call a country and now you’re trying to get foreign nations to piss off out of it and leave you alone. How do you achieve that? I think you’d struggle to do better than sapping popular support for the engagement.
Holy shit, did you just forget about the entire Roman empire?
Shit buddy, so far by my count we’ve concluded exactly fuck all. But my point all along has been that Islam is incidental, that it is used to justify courses of action that have been arrived at due to entirely separate reasons. So when you tell me that ten years ago Islam was being used as justification for some other bullshit, you’re still talking past me.
@Falcor: Why is so much of a thread on white terrorism taken by a discussion of Islamic terrorism? (As if that doesn’t already happen too much elsewhere!)
Each thread about the Colorado Springs attack is getting derailed. Guess the reasons why someone would want to terrorize a women’s health clinic aren’t that important, probably because ladyparts.
Because I was making a point about the general principles we should use when describing terrorists, and have had to bring evidence in to back up my claims.
I’m not grinding an axe, I made a relevant comment regarding hypocrisy and it wouldn’t have gone any further if people hadn’t falsely disagreed with it. If someone keeps misrepresenting my position I’m not going to let that stand.
No they didn’t. The vast majority of their attacks were beatings, shootings and disappearing of civilians. They retained popular support because they were seen to be defending the Catholic community from militant Protestants (who became militants in response to the IRA’s formation in the first place), and an often hostile police force (while the RUC gradually became less partisan, it never went away and they were disbanded in favour of the PSNI in 2001, which still faces allegations of being pro-protestant).
In later years they set many bombs which were intended to kill civilians but they would phone in their location to the authorities before they went off, basically a game of “we can do this but we decided not to”. In fact, it was one of the bombs they didn’t warn about that destroyed their popular support.
The one position you keep circling back to here is that Islam itself is a significantly causative factor in recent acts of attention-getting violence. That’s not only bs; if it belongs on bbs at all, it belongs in another thread.
I wasn’t including beatings, knee cappings and the likes (which were mostly related to criminality in their own communities, often protecting their own criminality or fighting the competition, there was also some tit for tat stuff between protestant communities). Disappeared civilians were largely justified because of (often false) allegations of collusion (again, more closely related to criminality for the most part). Most deliberate actions unambiguously intended to kill (bombs with no warnings) were targeted against the security services, though there was civilian collateral damage. Warnings were used from the beginning btw, not just at the end. None of this is any kind of justification of course, there can be no justification for any of that, I think it’s fair to say that it’s different from the tactics of the jihadists.
Well I’d just restate what I said before, because I haven’t seen any valid arguments against it in this thread, which was basically in agreement that the hypocrisy being pointed out by @doctorow is ridiculous, the only point of contention seems to be which side of the line you fall on to correct that hypocrisy (some people don’t seem to think ideological beliefs are important in figuring out why people act the way they do, which seems like a ridiculous position to take IMHO):
If a Muslim commits a violent act with the purpose to terrorise, and does so because of their religious beliefs, then it seems obvious to me that it’s perfectly reasonable to call that an act of Islamic terrorism (this applies to all Islamist groups), if a Christian were to do the same (and this Planned Parenthood situation would seem to qualify for me), then of course this should also be accurately described as Christian terrorism.
