Only because the guy lived. If he’d been killed on site, I suspect the pellet gun would be the fulcrum of many a false flag story. “You mean to tell me this is the only person who couldn’t procure a gun in the United States?”
I’d probably be for whoever was losing at the time, so as to avoid the necessity of having to fight the winner.
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Well, once again I am being pedantic, but it is precisely where you started responding. And I guess the point is that to ignore the causes of Muslim radicalism is to excuse the US history of military adventurism. But I understand that you think its probably going to be a fruitless discussion.
I guess I would say that the minimum the US might consider doing is killing fewer muslims and not supporting states who promote Islamic terrorism rather than say, killing more muslims and supporting KSA or Qatar who have funded both ISIS and AQ.
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A lot of people would not really have a choice, as both of those groups had a tendency to judge people on who they were, rather than what they said, did, or believed. So for many, the answer to the question is that they would be looking out through the barbed wire, wishing that they had fled before the knock on the door.
I do generally appreciate and agree with your sentiment. However, we killed a LOT more Germans and Japanese in WWII, and they turned into a few of our closest allies in a relatively short timeframe (a few decades?) There are more factors and nuances than counting the dead — but again, I do think we likely have a lot more overlap in our perspectives than may be indicated in this thread. Yay, communicating with strangers via text on the interwebs.
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Why do you think I said “militant fundamentalist” specifically? I’m well aware that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists or aligned with terrorists. All I’m saying is that it seems naive to assume without evidence that a terrorist who claims to have a specific fundamentalist agenda is lying. I would love to believe that these are just random copycats, but show me the evidence.
I was in Iraq a few weeks ago (if Kurdistan counts) and I was amazed by how popular Americans were in the place. Maybe precisely because it was Kurdistan. But the Americans were popular with Arab Iraqis too. Me, I would be pissed at them but I guess the main thing they were pissed about was not following up in the first Iraq war. It wasn’t as if Saddam was popular. However sanctions were not popular and they were bitter about them. For what little it is worth.
You do realize that there are many other political movements in the middle east from the 19th century on, yeah? If Islamism is ascendent that’s in part because we helped to destroy literally all of the alternatives in the region. We (and the British) helped to put the Saudis in the prominent position they are in in the “Islamic” world and we put a man in power in Iran who spent decades terrorizing people.
Stop pretending like all Muslims are alike, because they most certainly are not.
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Some discussion of Libya at the start, then goes into the broader AFRICOM issue. To quote the most relevant bit:
Yup.
Standard imperialist strategy: destroy/discredit/erase the moderate opposition so that you can dismiss all resistance as extremism.
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And even among Islamists, there is a variety of political positions. It’s not just all Salafists.
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And it ain’t just an overseas thing. See, for example, the history of COINTELPRO.
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Are you sure you are replying to the right comment? My whole point is that I recognize that all Muslims are not alike, and that I would be happy to listen to and learn from non-Islamist Muslims.
(edit) What “we” did when my parents were still in diapers is not something over which I have any control.
Salafism is the main Saudi ideology, and it seems like this is just a deviation from the mainstream Salafism. My guess would be that the current crown prince is more inline with the modernist interpretation as opposed to the wahhabist. None the less, it’s not as much of a spectrum here as you seem to think. It’s still driven by Saudi political desires and needs, more than anything else.
My point was that there was a larger set of ideologies circulating in the middle east that have since been squashed (not just by the US, but in part), including various forms of secular modernism.
I’m well aware, however, that thinking still informs our modern foreign policy and got us here in the first place. We purposefully cultivated more religious elements in Muslim societies as a counterweight to more secular movements like pan-arabism and Arab nationalism.
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really, that’s a good thing. if you can’t gut the petrochemical industry, at least get them from your own backyard. ( so you aren’t offloading the consequences. )
unfortunately, it’s hard to convince them of that.
( though, admittedly some of the premise of my statements might be off because it’s sounding more and more like it wasn’t directly a “them” attack. )
to be fair – it’s a tactic used worldwide. even here in the us. we have white supremacists killing people and burning churchs. the unabomber, timothy mcveigh, a guy flying his cessna into an irs building. assassinations of civil rights leaders. in the slightly more distant past things like haymarket affair.
the list in past and present is long. it’s not a problem of geography as your comment could be seen to imply.
as to why aren’t there more people committing terrorism? i think most people are basically good, and it takes quite a lot to push people over that moral edge. ( isolation, hopelessness, frustration, anger… )
think of the white supremacists here: they don’t even have it particularly bad, and they are willing to go quite far. maybe it means that “over there” they are even more moral and more well-meaning than we.
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I just want to say one more thing, Nobby.
Several days ago, before this terrorist attack, I had a Lyft ride from lower Manhattan to Brooklyn, from a Lyft driver.
The driver was an Uzbeki immigrant. Lovely man. He LOVED NYC, and its diversity. We talked for probably 20 minutes. He was in love with the city, definitely loved its diversity, and was not a terrorist who wanted to murder people, with his suicide as a likely result.
Why do you sympathize with the Uzbeki who wants to murder people, flagrantly? What makes that response something you sympathize with, versus the Uzbeki who was a gentle, loving, intelligent man?
I have to question you. And I would hope this board’s other participants would too. That is like excusing the Columbine kids because they decided to gun down their school, because they were bullied. When 99.99999999999% of bullied kids DON’T gun down their school.
It is a bankrupt moral policy. I doubt it’s one you even actually subscribe to, in fleshbody, and not on an anonymous interwebs bulletin board.
Nothing you said argues against my point that extremists in this day and age are an outlier, often go after “their own” more than “the other,” and as such, freaking out over them and saying “NEVER AGAIN!” is a diversion at best, and a diversionary tactic at worst.
And when, I wonder, will the stupid humans figure out the fact that crazy people who happen to swing to a particularly crazy ideology, and commit horrible acts in its name, are more indicative of crazy humans existing in general, and not the particular power of any particular crazy ideology.
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It doesn’t take any know-how or resources to drive a vehicle into a crowd or buy guns and shoot people, though…
