if I understand you correctly you want to call it that because the terrorism is islamic in nature, not islamic in cause. Correct?
No, it’s both Islamic in nature (to a degree) and in cause (to a degree).
We hit civilian targets on a near-daily basis.
There’s a big difference between collateral damage and deliberately targeting civilians, this is an accepted fact in moral philosophy and international law. There’s also a big difference in terms of actual casualty numbers, you also have to factor in the fact that a certain number of civilian casualties may be an unfortunate necessity to prevent even greater casualties in the long run.
The current US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria for example have resulted in around 23,000 ISIS casualties, and around 450 civilian casualties. The British airstrikes to date have been even more precise (they’ve almost entirely focused on front-line targets, staging areas, transport, and training camps - they’ve got ordinance accurate down to a sub-metre level). This is in contrast to the activities of the Syrian, Iraqi and Russian Air Forces (the Russians have already killed more civilians than the US have in several years), who have been engaged in area bombing, and the activities of various sectarian groups, who have been shelling residential areas.
None of this excuses collateral damage, but to suggest it’s the moral equivalent of terrorists gunning people down at a music show is obscene.
They have limited capabilities to strike back on our soil, cannot possibly win any direct military confrontation, and therefore are better served by choosing political targets rather than military.
This isn’t true, the IRA almost entirely targeted police and military targets for example (the same can be said for most non-religious terrorism), and they had far weaker capabilities than ISIS do.
We are democratic. Therefore their best bet is to sap the public of their willingness to engage in the war, by targeting civilians. Targeting government buildings or political institutions would create public sympathy and would hence be counterproductive.
A minute ago you were saying they indiscriminately attack civilians to force us into fighting them, now you’re saying it’s the opposite? Make up your mind. And how the fuck would targeting politicians instead of the public create more public sympathy?!?
In fact, I wonder if you could put on your cynical-thinking cap for a second and explain to me how you’d go about winning this war, if you were them except that you were entirely secular?
If they were entirely secular we wouldn’t be fighting them.
You can take it back an arbitrary number of stages, back before colonialism, when slave-raids across the Mediterranean were common in both directions. I don’t think we’ll find any answers down that road.
You don’t have to go that far back, I’m talking about the last 10 years. And slave raids were not common in both directions. 1-2 million europeans were taken as slaves by the Caliphate over a hundred years or something, European’s weren’t really involved in slaves until the African slave trade (which had nothing to do with Islam).
We’ve already discussed the distinction between justifications and reasons.
We have? What did we conclude?