It sounds like you think that a culture that condones shooting schoolgirls in the face for speaking out is worthy of equal consideration. I think that the large number of Pakistanis who would prefer to live in a secular environment would be disappointing in your judgement of what is and is not their culture.
Killing Taliban is self defense. The only option other than fighting them is backing off and giving them the keys to a nuclear armed state.
I disapprove of shooting girls in the face. In fact I disapprove of shooting anyone for any reason which is not self defense. It sucks to get the short end of the stick in any culture but that does not give us a right to go in and shoot even more people. We just make things worse not better. And the hypocrisy is blatant when we are friends with countries like Saudi Arabia or dictatorships which commit egregious human rights abuses (and even help them do it). Let us not pretend we are better or more moral. We just want to steal their stuff and impose our will. And we will kill to do it.
Too many. We can’t do much on a message board but we could start by acknowledging it, preferably without having to examine the sins of the Great White Satan at every interval.
Too many. America is primarily responsible, but not wholly so. Much of the violence has been sectarian in nature caused by state and non-state actors other than the US.
Yes we condemn it.
As far as Iraq the motivation is better at least, Americans initially supported the war because we were led to believe it was required for our self defense, not to go kill Muslims or Arabs or to steal oil. Although I would not completely discount racism as a factor.
Anyone who was even slightly paying attention knew better than to buy that. Most of the world knew better. Self defense had absolutely nothing to do with it, and it was blindingly obvious at the time that that was so.
So if Muslims believe their killings are done in “self-defense” would that excuse them? Because pretty much a lot of what they do they justify exactly by saying “Islam is under attack, our religion and our culture are under attack, foreigners are occupying our countries and our holy places, etc”. And, here’s the kicker, they have much more reason to believe the way they do than Americans because, in fact, American and other western armies have invaded them many times and attacked their homelands. It was not the Afghans nor the Iraqis nor the Iranians who came to the west to attack us in the 19th century. It was the western imperialist powers who went there and have not ceased to go there and attack them. Don’t they have good reason the believe they are under attack? Does that excuse them from killing what they perceive to be their enemy? If it works for Americans it should work for their enemies as well.
You seem to have a rather naive view of the world. Whether or not we should have made a deal with the Saudis or could have done otherwise, it is a done deal now. And part of the money they made on oil went to fund this dark aged Salafi bullshit that the Taliban is engaged in implementing. No, the US is not innocent at all, we helped create the Taliban to help defend against the spread of Soviet influence. But the world is a dirty place, and one can have bloody hands and still be a shining example compared to other systems of life. I would not make that comparisons in most cases but in the case of the Taliban I do.
Anyway, I think that people are falsely projecting the American situation to places where it does not fit. Here we need the ACLU to keep the Christian majority from forcing us to hear about Jesus at every government event, the cries of persecution here are empty. The situations of Christians here and in the places we have been discussing are so different that this projection of our situation onto them is a huge mistake.
No one knew for sure what Sadaam had. Hell, even Sadaam probably thought he had WMD. Regardless, even if you conclude it was all manufactured evidence instead of convenient mistakes, they still had to make up the lies, right? Americans must not be quite that bloodthirsty if they have to be tricked into war by being led to believe it is in self defense. Certainly not as barbaric as people who would have you killed for being gay, having consensual sex, or for disbelieving religion.
What you have stated goes a ways towards explaining why much of the extremism exists. But it doesn’t really say much about what should be done about it at this point. And when the Taliban time their bombs to go off in markets right after schools let out, something has to be done about it. What we are doing about it now is disrupting their activities by killing their leaders, the drones are very effective at this. What I guess that you don’t understand is that in this case, like many others, the us and them is not so simple. Many Pakistanis are way more like us (USA) than like them (Taliban). You might say that we should leave them to the task, but their operations would use tanks and planes and artillery and would have a much much higher civilian toll, and might still fail. And if it fails we will still have to confront the Taliban, it is not like they would stop at the 1947 borders. The Taliban do not stop, they only take strategic pauses.
Naive? My view is that America’s motives for invading and killing are no better than any other motives of any other people. That is naive?
America has been friends with the Saudis who are just as barbaric or probably worse. Why is it OK for the Saudis to do those things but not for others?
Why has America historically been overthrowing democracies and installing friendly dictatorships? Why did America condone and help in the tortures and killings? Operation Condor - Wikipedia
Why does America continue to practice huge Human Rights abuses and how can America preach to anyone on this subject?
And I am the naive one?
No, America is motivated just like everyone else by the feeling that it is OK to kill and torture people as long as they are not of your own group… and sometimes even if they are. Americans are no different. They are humans and motivated by human emotions.
Yes, of course, America is more advanced than other cultures in some ways. It also has some way to go and is behind other countries in some other ways. But to think America is motivated by noble intentions is silly. That is what is naive. And nobody really believes it. It is just a convenient fiction to excuse the imperialism and the plunder.
Why is it America’s responsibility to fix those problems? Why does America only care about certain countries and not others? Worse things happen in Africa and America does nothing. Why is America’s “help” always in the form of military attacks? Why won’t America help by taking refugees? America created a huge refugee problem in Iraq and yet took almost no refugees. The whole thing does not pass the smell test. It stinks.
Caring about those people is a blatant lie, a fig leaf to cover the truth which is imperialism plain and simple. America has killed and tortured as much as it wanted to achieve its ends.
No, I’m pointing out that, DESPITE the atrocities carried out in the name of Christianity (and a similar argument could be made for Hinduism and Islam) much of the stuff that is written about Christianity is merely highlighting how flawed humans have allowed power to effectively twist the teachings of Christ and his disciples.
I’m not suggesting that the number given is excessive - in fact on a different message board I belong to there is currently a debate whether a more recent figure of 100K a year is valid - http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/moreorless/moreorless_20131102-0600a.mp3
Interestingly, when one does a bit of delving, it is probably more like 1500 a year -
http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2013/may/7-in-10-christians-killed-worldwide-last-year-came-from.html (and some articles I’ve read give the 150K as a ten-year figure).
What I and others are pointing out is that persecution of Christians does occur around the globe - and that Nigeria is a hot-house of this.
That would be difficult, considering it was an European one in the 1st century.
Of course we knew he had nothing. That’s why we attacked to forestall the UN inspections, and why our troops bypassed all the supposed WMD sites to get to the real high priority targets like the Oil Ministry. Where were Saddam’s “mobile WMD labs” and “drone fleet”? Mysteriously absent…
Hardly. Americans just have a desperate need to believe that they are heroes, no matter how vile they behave. The lies were transparent, but they didn’t have to be very good lies because Americans wanted to believe them. Anyone who wanted to see through the lies did so with ease; the rest of the world did.
As opposed to Americans who kill you for being Muslim, for profit, being brown, or just because it’s fun.
Thanks for that. That came up in my Google search earlier - but I dismissed it because of the domain name.
I would like to see those other articles you read.
Nigeria is a basket case where people are persecuted and killed for being of the wrong ethnic group, the wrong color, the wrong gender, the wrong age, the wrong religion of for having a nice wrist watch. So trying to make it all about persecution of Christians is silly. And for Christians in other countries to try to claim they are persecuted and gain sympathy on account of this is beyond stupid.
People of all religious and ethnic groups are being persecuted and suffereing around the world and Americans could not care less. This is just an argument to malign groups which are not American. If the same acts were done by America we would be hearing the most unlikely explanations and excuses.
Western Christians who want to claim some form of victimhood are nuts.
Regardless of the truthiness of the WMD talking point (which is naturally bogus, but I’m willing to grant it because it makes no difference), there was no way, no how, whatsoever that Iraq could have attacked the US with them. On account of the US being far away and to the left of the map, and Iraq not even having a space program, let alone ICBMs.
And whether or not he could have successfully hidden WMD research from the prying eyes of a hundred nations, their spies and satellites trudging over themselves ; you can’t hide a rocket test launch - so that, we *knew *he didn’t have.
Quite the opposite. I incline to the view that lots of people are killed for their faith, in the sense that their faith causes them to take actions which other object to strongly enough to want to kill them. My point is just that a lot of other people wouldn’t characterise that as being killed on accout of faith.
Please point to the reports of people being killed and persecuted in significant numbers in Nigeria for being the wrong colour, gender or age. I’m assuming that you being unnecessarily hyperbolic in the last sentence.
I’ll also concede there is ongoing ethnic tension, due to the ongoing conflict in the Niger delta. However, this is in the (Christian) south, not Muslim north.
Nigeria is in a civil war and the split is along tribal and religious lines. If we say the northern Muslims are killing the southern Christians because they are Christians then it follows the Southern Christians are killing the northern Muslims because they are Muslims.
But in reality religion is just one of the issues and ethnic group is more important.
Again, for western Christians to use this as if to say “look at poor me, people of mine are being persecuted, poor me” is just ridiculous.
These things are used as arguments to justify how bad Muslims are and how they should be killed. They are not used to say “poor innocent victims, let us offer them help, let us offer them asylum”. No. The argument is just to gain argument points. And for that we have to ignore that the Christians are also fighting and shooting.
Some people persecute Christians for being Christian. Little or none of this happens in the U.S. Some people persecute Muslims for being Muslim. Some people persecute gays for being gay, or brown people for being brown. None of these statements contradict any of the others. People the world over persecute others for being different.