And also…
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The linked article that actually posits motives for the terrorists is not by Patrick Neilson Hayden - who is quoted supporting the target - it is by Juan Cole, who appears to know something about middle eastern politics.
The article never suggests that the men who did this are not believers in a God that wants them to do this. You say:
But politics and religion being inseparable doesn’t mean there are no politics. It means that they are intertwined with religious motivations. If you read the article he is suggesting the attack may have been intended to create a backlash against French Muslims which would in turn create a group of French Muslims that would be easier to recruit to religious extremist causes. The end goal he posits is to recruit for the religious organization for religious ends. It’s absurd to say that he is taking the religion out of it. Is wanting a generation of European Muslims to be more sympathetic to extremist causes somehow not a religious motivation for these extremists?
He also notes cases in the past where we know explicitly that organizations have engaged in exactly the kind of behaviour he is describing, including Al-Qaeda.
Believe it or not, terrorist organizations spend a lot of time recruiting and fund-raising. They have to. Before the attack a man on the street was told by the gunman to tell the media they were Al-Qaeda from Yemen. If it is “intellectually dishonest” to not believe what a group of murders says then let’s take that as face value as well. If they are Al-Qaeda linked, and if they are from Yemen (or at least if they are affiliated with an Al-Qaeda group in Yemen) then they weren’t just some hot-headed men shooting up a newspaper that printed something they disagreed with. There was a plan. All Juan Cole is doing (aside from sharing expertise in the subject that probably goes way beyond what you or I have) is pointing out that the plan may not have been simplistic lashing out against a satirical newspaper with a circulation of 60,000 that nearly none of us would have heard of had this not happened. Maybe terrorist organizations may actually have a broader strategy to achieve their goals (which are indeed very tied their own interpretations of their religions).
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The prohibition on depicting Mohamed is about the prohibition on idolatry. For me, this was a clear example of people suffering from a cognitive dissonance who work through their problems by turning to violence. Distilled to its essence, we are left with a crisis of faith. On one hand, there is a prohibition on creating images of the prophet or of Allah and on the other there is a lack of faith in an all powerful god. After all, the faithful know that Allah does not need anyone to defend him while those who want to believe they are faithful but in fact are doubters (most often unconsciously) sometimes play out this internal conflict by becoming the self appointed guardians of the faith.
These are the unfaithful and the infidels. They are not self aware and they are dangerous. To ascribe some tactical motivation seems unnecessary but it’s understandable why people want to make rational the irrational.
I saw this from the other side when I was in university, as a disillusioned Evangelical. It wasn’t that I was specifically attracted to Islam as I was looking in a number of directions at the time (I was in a small interfaith discussion with four or five other people and was reading about humanism and other ideas). Sometimes it was almost like looking in the mirror - there were different versions of the same stories, but I found that I could definitely relate to the way they approached life and their faith. To be honest, there were also the same kinds of justification for why they were the one true way, why a literal interpretation of their holy book helped them in their scientific study and even the same kinds of stories of how they came to adopt Islam as their religion. Ultimately it brought me to the conclusion that humans are the same rather than their religions, but it was also a good reminder of the differences and similarities in our thinking (along with their inherent weaknesses).
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The answer is simple:
While non-muslims generally don’t care what other people believe, muslims clearly do, and they’re willing to kill over it.
It’s a couple of clicks away on a link by @daneel, but there are beliefs and opinions that are unacceptable to non-Muslims.
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I’m pretty sure the vast majority of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world also don’t care what other people believe.
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I’m sure that’ll be an informative and objective dialogue.
“I raked those people with AK47 fire, yes m’lud. I deserve to feel the full weight of the French judicial system on my shoulders, and recognise my inherent duty to society to obligingly accept the verdict of the court and any punishment that may be handed to me.”
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Oy. That one made my head hurt. The “moon god” thing is really weird and I’ve heard it before. It’s always surprised me that Bible-thumpers never seem to know anyone who speaks Hebrew or Aramaic.
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Quick! Get the net. A self-disproving statement. I never thought I’d see one in the wild.
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This is a good article, but I generally find the state of satire in the US to be abysmal. It’s all either toothless or cheerleading.
Yeah, those things tend not to be real big on nuance. Of course, the D&D one is sort of legendary… Someone even made a movie out of it.
I’m not sure I know anyone who speaks any of those languages. Both of our ancient historians study the Mediterranean, one ancient Rome, one medieval North Africa.
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