Some A grade tedious smug bollocks there. It’s hardly condescending to look at the actions of a group like ISIS, and decide not to take their word for it that they’re driven by the teachings of Islam.
Just imagine, for one second, that actually they’re a group of bastards who’re trying to whip up local hatred of the West and resentment for the various military and economic acts of the last 30+ years, by claiming it is the will of God that people should rise up and fight the infidel. I know, it’s fucking hard to even consider it, but just imagine that they’re lying!
More your statement is a weird and sad attempt at distortion.
A huge straw man as in fact it is the muslim opponents of the DAESH which point to the instrumentalizing religious discourse for other means.
of course the idea that one must take agit-prop at face value is a very stupid one, as it is hardly something unique to such movements to cynically exploit certain discourses for positioning and self justification purposes - or we will have to believe that Beijing is actually motivated by sincere marxist principals and objectives…
(well some of you more gullible ones might believe that)
In fact you are the one playing the superior westerner game.
of course it is possible (and consistent with the criticism) to see the mixture of motivations, and some truly interpreting in the deviant fashion.
but the Baathist officer and intelligence agents component inside of the DAESH that has been attested, in the Iraq, I do not doubt they are the cynical manipulators.
But taking propaganda on face value, that is simply a form of gullibility, perhaps deliberate.
This is ironic because you ignore what most Muslim terrorists actually say their motivations are (about 80% of which are political grievances and 20% are religious motivation). If you really wanted to credit them with being honest and self-reflective about why they are acting, and not just offering post hoc justifications for their actions in an effort to gain more followers, then you’d take that 80% more seriously.
It is also a cheap attempt to win some moral superiority by painting yourself as the culturally literate one, but the view you ascribe to western liberals that terrorist motivations are more complicated than religious fanaticism is completely in line with the mainstream view of commentators and scholars in the Middle East. The view that ISIS is representative of the one true Islam is pretty much the exclusive province of western bigots and ISIS itself.
You should consider reading some Shadi Hamid or even Will McCants instead of Sam Harris. The reality is that motivations are complicated and varied. ISIS absolutely has an interpretation of Islam that motivates their conduct. The bigot move is to believe that interpretation is the real Islam (or that the interpretation of a majority of modern Egyptians is the real Islam), instead of understanding that they are all competing interpretations–some better and worse, some more popular or less popular, some more scholarly and some less.
Westerners have to be excruciatingly careful not to mention the Crusades, but the Iranian legislature doesn’t really mean anything when it chants "Death to America!"and Hizbollah doesn’t really mean anything when they call for the destruction of Israel and terrorists don’t really mean anything when they yell “Allahu Akbar”. So it’s all good.
OK, I’m really trying to settle in to your wavelength. I was trying to summarize the gist of both articles in one or two statements because I didn’t want to risk an in-depth analysis becoming totally contentious, even though this is the Pit.
I didn’t get the impression from the Atlantic article that ISIS (DAESH to you) was a well-run efficient organization by any means. They’re basically a collection of psychos that just want to destroy shit and use religion to justify their actions. The people interviewed believed ISIS is genuinely trying to set up a caliphate, but because they’re forbidden from leaving their respective countries, they don’t actually have insider knowledge. It’s virtually impossible for the author to get an insider’s viewpoint without putting his life in extreme danger, so he spoke with whom he thought would be experts in relatively safe conditions. That’s why he doesn’t have a truly complete knowledge of the ISIS infrastructure. At this point, we can only speculate.
Leaving aside the broader issues reflecting your frustrations elsewhere (other than to note the irony of complaining about someone making inferences from his opponents’ posts while simultaneously attributing to that person " unstated positions") the context here is worth understanding.
The discussion in this thread is about the connection between Islam and violence perpetuated by believers in (a version of) Islam. In that context, nailing down the precise percentage of Muslims who can be conclusively shown to believe that infidels should be killed is not of any importance. Once you get to the point that there are quite a lot of such people, you’re there. If you’ve looked at countries comprising 20% of the Muslim population and found that from that group 13% of the world’s Muslims can be shown to favor killing infidels, and have not provided any evidence that the remaining 80% populations are any different, then it’s reasonable to assume that the remainder might be comparable. Or might not be. Perhaps those other countries are more liberal. But it’s a stretch to assume - without any evidence - that they’re markedly different. So there would be a range of estimates as to the percentage of the world’s Muslims who believe in killing infidels, let’s say from 30% to 70% - but the important points are 1) that it’s not likely to be anywhere close to 13%, and 2) that whatever it is - let’s say 30% - it’s pretty darned high and likely at least a substantial minority of Muslims, which is all you need for purposes of the issue being discussed in this thread.
In that context, heavily focusing about the fact that the infidel-killing in that survey comprised only 13% of the world’s Muslims is a diversionary tactic. It’s intended to force a mistaken focus on a low number, and away from the implications about the broader population. Get the words “only 13%!” in there and you’ve aided The Cause. So here we are.
But let’s suppose that’s not true. It’s a subjective inference etc. Let’s say it wasn’t intended as a diversionary tactic. Bottom line is that the effect is the same. That argument serves that misleading purpose in this discussion. So it’s something that needs to be countered by pointing that out. And if the maker of that argument gets her little feelings hurt or sense of superiority punctured in the process, then here we are too.
FWIW, my take is that it’s not that. It’s total denialism.
It’s actually a bit odd that liberals have a such a strong tendency to carry water for Islamic fundamentalists, whose ideology is so diametrically opposed to their own. But I think there are two primary factors in play.
[ul]
[li]Western liberals live in a society in which Christianity is the dominant religion. As such, they have a framework in which Fundamentalist Christianity already occupies the Religious Bogeyman slot, such that it’s easier to deemphasize aspects of Islam that they would tend to dislike. And at the same time, Islam itself is something of a counterweight to Fundamentalist Christianity (which tends to most strongly oppose it).[/li][li]More importantly, Muslims are predominantly Third World people. Liberals tend to identify all Third World people as oppressed people, whose troubles - including any unpleasant aspects of their culture - are the direct result of colonialism and discrimination by Westerners. In line with this, the notion of Islam as the Religion of Peace, being perverted to a small degree as a result of political and economic evils committed by the West, has a lot of appeal. [FTR, I think there’s actually some truth to this, but not nearly to the extent that liberals have bought into.][/li][li]There is some amount of opposition to Muslims which is motivated by racism/xenophobia, and this produces a counter-reaction from people for whom opposition of Racism is a great passion of their lives.[/li][/ul]
In sum, people see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe, and if they want to believe something strongly enough there’s no amount of evidence that can’t be explained away or looked away from. And that’s what we have here, IMO.
ah poor Partisan Algorythm Response is frustrated that his political Tribe gets criticism for hypocrisy so he makes sad attempts at gotcha ya.
Of course outside of the Algorythm response, even your very incompetent George Bush understood a self-interest to not make extremely stupid statements that would provide ammunition for propaganda to the Al Qaeda tendencies and would not drive away possible or actual allies, islamic or otherwise.
Even this small achievement in not being grossly incompetent becomes a bad thing because The Other Political Tribe criticises the Algorhythm’s Tribe.
It seems some persons are made mentally deficient by their ideological tribalism so that they can only understand the world through circus mirror distortions…
What does this have to do with anything mentioned?
No they also include some of the Baathist military and intelligence officers who even now make no great appearances to be religious or practicing. But they do seem to see the ‘psychos’ as ‘useful idiots’
That is stupid. And false.
He drew essentially and almost exclusively one can see from the article on one american based scholars view - there are many centrist and moderate Islamic experts and scholars with differing views on the good foundation or no of the DAESH tendency. He channeled one particular and biasedly incomplete view that is not in accord with a very large body of both muslim and non-muslim opinion about the good foundation of the DAESH ideology. There is question of safety, it is not dangerous to talk to scholars in the West - of which are many solid ones - or even in the Muslim countries where DAESH is detested. The idea he had to put his life in “extreme danger” to find a more complete information or opinions on the DAESH thinking is without foundation.
The article is not useless but it is extremely incomplete and on its assertion of the good foundation of the idelogy in the ‘medieval’ theology, it is just wrong.
thus the letters and the attacks by the major theological scholars from indeed every tendency on the DAESH.
I am not following you. When the Iranians say “Death to America” or a terrorist says “Allahu akbar” before he kills someone, is it a distortion that they are wishing death to America or saying that their actions are being done in the name of Allah?
There are more than a hundred thousand hungry ghosts wandering the wasteland of Iraq, whispering in unheard spectral voices “Why did you kill us? Why are we dead?”.
But, no, we did not say “Death to Iraq!”, that would be wrong, that would be uncivilized. Rude.
In the US, with fairly thorough societal opposition to explicitly racist, homophobic, or anti-religion expression, we limit ourselves to other ways of prickery. On any given weekend, I am quite happy to join my drunken prick friends in a rousing chant of “Fuck Seattle.”
(I feel it is important to note that at no time do I actually wish to copulate with the city of Seattle, nor the members of its soccer team. At least not all at once.)
I urge my fellow pricks to throw Vancouver and Seattle footballers on a bonfire and burn them. I mock the citizens of Seattle for having smaller penises than the citizens of Portland. When an opposing player hits the turf, I joyously scream for him to go home in an ambulance, and to be shot like a horse. I sing a beautiful Italian antifascista tune that strongly implies my intentions to cause a riot. I scream for my team to “burn, destroy, wreck, and kill,” whilst admonishing the opposing team’s supporters that I intend to have forcible sex with their women and steal their beer. I actively encourage the players I support to cause harm to their opposition. Cleats up, Timbers, cleats up.
On match day, in other words, there is No Pity in the Rose City.
We are pricks. And that’s in bleeding-heart, politically correct, oh-so-inclusive Portland Oregon.
But of course none of that should be taken literally. We’re White and American. Unlike what those foreign supporters do. That’s different.
No one is actually doing or has ever done any of those things to Seattle players and fans. That by itself makes the context different.
If there were actually a lot of people throwing Seattle footballers on bonfires and burning them etc., then that would put a completely different spin on these chants.
Or, imagine that they’re telling the truth! It’s possible they know their religion way better than you and I do.
I have no doubt that Christians who kill abortionist providers really, truly believe that it is the will of god, do you? I have no doubt that the Westboro Baptist Church really, truly believe that protesting funerals is the will of god. That they are wrong does not make them any less sincere. Nobody points to these Christian groups and says, well, they aren’t doing this because of their religion because it’s obviously because of their religion, and they’re telling us that it’s because of their religion. And if their numbers reach the ranks where they were taking over swaths of entire nations, then their religion would have a huge damn problem to deal with.