I didn’t say that attacking Islam was the ( main ) point of sending it to Iraq; I’m saying that the sort of people who would go for terrorism in a different situation have the military’s attack on an Islamic country to satisfy them instead. And I’m not sure many of them even realize that Iraq under Saddam WAS secular.
I don’t follow you. A person who wanted to commit terrorism against Muslims would seem to be especially angry that the US went after Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, instead of Saudi Arabia, which had a great deal to do with 9/11. Terrorists are usually pretty clued in to the political undercurrents, or at least they are controlled by people who are clued in. It’s hard to imagine someone engaged enough to mount a terrorist operation yet not engaged enough to understand who the real bad guys are.
If your point is simply that Americans are a warlike people who must have an outlet for their blood lust, well, so is every nation. The only difference is that America has more means than most. You don’t think Pakistan would wipe out India with the flip of a switch, if it could get away with it?
And guess what? Our military and right wing are full of people who think that Saddam was behind 9-11. 90% of the military as of 2006thought that.
The poll didn’t give the actual question that was asked, so it’s hard to really know what the respondents had in mind. But a significant percentage of the military would probably believe that a band of leprechauns robbed Fort Knox and hid the gold under a secret hill outside Killarney, if they were told that by their superiors. It doesn’t matter. They follow orders, not their personal beliefs. They would provide security for a Gay Pride parade if ordered to do so.
What I found more interesting from that poll was that only 58% said the mission was clear, which doesn’t really jibe with what they supposedly said about Saddam, and also 72% said the US should exit Iraq within the next year. They don’t exactly sound like violence-crazed sociopaths to me.
Your response is based on several false assumptions. Firstly, you assume that the poll results are unaffected by the fact that Abdulmutallabn’s terrorist attack was so recent. It may well be that the percentage drops once the shock has died down and people are able to put this event into a proper perspective. By contrast, support for suicide bombing throughout the Muslim world has been astonishingly high for years and years, predating the Iraq war, predating Bush, predating even Clinton.
Secondly, your rebuttal rests on the unspoken assumption that it is morally wrong to support torturing Abdulmutallabn. Personally, I don’t see this as much of a moral question. After all, it’s not like there’s any question of his innocence. The guy’s a known terrorist who just tried to brutally murder over 200 men, women, and children he had never met for no good reason at all. While, were it up to me, I would eschew torture, it would only be to obviate the risk of his giving false information under duress. Frankly, this guy is just not an object of my moral concern. Because of his actions, a lot of people simply don’t care what happens to him. Believe it or not, it’s possible to be a good person and be indifferent to the suffering of an aspiring mass murderer. By contrast, you can’t really be a good person and regret Abdulmutallabn’s “technical failure” to carry out his mission. Same as you can’t really be a good person and approve of honour killings or stoning women to death for adultery.
On top of this assumption rests a third; that the respondents who answered in support of torturing Abdolmutallabn were purely motivated by anger and fear, rather than a misplaced belief that torture works. Like I said, I know it doesn’t work and that is why I personally would object if he were tortured, but I don’t see any reason to assume that everyone else is aware of this. If you put yourself in the shoes of someone who genuinely believes that torture works, and who consequently believes that valuable life saving information could be gleaned from waterboarding Abdulmutallabn, then the ethics of the question become far less clear cut. In other words, you’re assuming that everyone who answered ‘Yes’ (or at least a majority of them) were motivated by a desire for vengeance and that ignorance of the ineffectiveness of torture played little or no part. I would wager that if we were somehow to correct for this, the percentage would fall considerably.
Also resting on your second assumption is a fourth; that somehow support for torturing a known terrorist for specific information in order to save lives is just as reprehensible as support for suicide attack against civilian targets in order to reserve a guest spot in paradise. I think highly of you as a poster and I don’t for a moment think that you actually believe this, but I’m genuinely puzzled why you would use this poll as a counterpoint to the poll I cited, given the vast disparity between these two acts.
Incidentally, if you read Abdulmutallabn’s online postings you’ll see he spent a great deal of time pontificating on the blessings awaiting martyrs in paradise and the glorious resurrection of the Caliphate, and virtually no time worrying about Colonialism.
No. Absolutely nothing at all like Limbaugh’s audience in any way whatsoever. Around 44% of Pakistani Muslims think Osama Bin Laden is a pretty okay guy. They approve of his actions in isolation, not when compared to President Obama’s or anyone else’s. This is understandable, as Osama Bin Laden’s personal theology is quite popular in Pakistan being, as it is, steeped in scripture.
If this is such a truism, where are all the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Tibetans have lived under an oppression far more savage than even the Palestinians, yet I cannot remember the last time a Tibetan Buddhist committed an act of terrorism against a civilian population. Could this be because, unlike fundamentalist Muslims, they don’t adhere to any doctrines which would incline them to do this? Like the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad, for instance?
Because the limited number of Muslims who actually engage in terrorist acts really do have an organization. Wahabbism is an actual movement, with doctrines and leaders and supporting organizations such as al Qaida. Similarly, thanks to the accident of history that Christian Europe happened to make two leaps of technology at the very period when a number of strong Muslim Asian societies began to stagnate or splinter, nearly all Muslim societies have seen Western hegemony interfering with their own developments, giving movements such as Wahabbism fertile soil in which to plant their own extreme views.
(You also exaggerate when you claim that the phenomenon of terrorism is a united front. Certainly there are missionaries for the movement that wishes to re-create the Caliphate as a world power, but most of the terrorists still tend to stay home and fight their local battles.)
You look at every Muslim as being primarily a recruit for al Qaida in the way that a lot of folks in the U.S. used to look at everyone with politics to the left of Robert A. Taft, (or, at least, Robert Welch), as being a probable bomb-throwing Bolshevik. Setting up that sort of binary fear mongering simply means that we shut off possible communication with more moderate members and groups among the larger group, increasing the chances that we will drive more moderates to actually join the extremes on the grounds that it is hopeless to attempt to talk with us.
You’re welcome to your beliefs, but I find them depressingly counterfactual and counterproductive.
No, it is not. I simply reject the false assumptions that you are willing to allow on your side, such as that everyone who reads the words “innocent” or “civilian” actually believes that the victims are innocent. Just as you have no scruple about torturing someone if you thought torture worked, most of those people tend to not view anyone who is the target of terrorism to be “really” innocent.
The rest of the “assumptions” you ascribe to me are simply what you assume that I believe with no basis in my actual thought.
Again, if the favorable view of terrorism is a “Muslim” trait, why is it not universal across Muslim lands? Why do lands with little to no Western interference or lands that are not currently suffering civil war strongly opposed to its use while lands where the societies have already been disrupted more supportive of terror?
There are any number of reasons why the tibetans have not (yet) resorted to terror: The fact that their current oppressions are only about 60 years old instead of much longer; the fact that the Chinese have been pretty relentless in removing Tibetans and replacing them with Han; their religion could also be a factor; as could the fact that there has not been a long build-up of increasing terror among multiple players for many decades. “Muslim” terrorism did not spring to life with no antecedents. In Asia, many of the current “Muslim” fighters were “Communist” fighters in earlier generations, and they have seen harsh measures of repression imposed for generations as most of them represent independence movements of one sort or another. In the Middle East, there was “civilian conflict” for years prior to the creation of Israel and there were ample acts perceived as terrorism from both sides throughout that period. Even there, the phenomenon of terror took years to develop into the current situation in which suicide bombers attacked the truly innocent–a phenomenon that is less than 30 years old, beginning in the Middle East as attacks on military positions, then being developed, not by Muslims, but by the Tamil Tigers, as a method to attack and terrorize civilians, only later being brought back into the Muslim community.
Any explanation that simplifies the situation in “it comes from Islam” is not simplifying, but simplistic.
No, I don’t look at every Muslim as being primarily a recruit for al Qaida. I think you’re missing the point. All religions have a followers with varying degrees of fundamental belief. They all have different pyramids of structure.
Islam is no different in the fact that it consists of varying degrees of belief among it’s followers. However, by it’s nature, it provides a structure that is far more intense in it’s prosecution of that belief. Execution versus excommunication. Fatwa’s versus ostracism. Riots versus letters to the Editor. The religion is not secondary to the acts of terrorism associated with it. It is the primary driving force. Imams are either consulted, or are the direct recruiters for acts deemed justified by the religion.
There is something about Islam that pushes the most fundamental of it’s believers from thought to deed. It is a phenomenon that has forced billions of dollars to be spent on national security. It is the reason 13 of the 14 countries have additional screening requirements (Cuba being the 14th).
What does it matter what they sound like when they actually kill people? As a culture, we Americans talk all noble and about how we love peace, then go and slaughter people by the thousands all the time.
This is simply not true as regards the religion. It has to do with various cultural and social issues that exist in the early 21st century that have as much or more to do with specific cultures and locations as anything else. If “by its nature” Islam was so much “more intense,” then we should never have seen the various periods when there was more freedom and less persecution in the Muslim world than in the Christian or Hindu or Confucian worlds. Yet, historically, there have been just such places and periods when Muslim societies were more accommodating to outsiders and less repressive to their own citizens. (And, of course, there have been times and places when Muslim societies have been harsher, but if Islam made societies harsh, then it should not have been capable of ever being tolerant–something it also has been.)
This is just the anti-communist boogeyman given a new cloak since we no longer have the Red Scare to keep us awake at night. Noting that Islamist fundamentalists are violent and that we need to take precautions to prevent them from harming us is prudent. Transferring that prudence to a condemnation of and fear of Islam is simply a lazy way to avoid studying actual situations and dealing with them.
When we address the issue of Islamism, we can work together with Muslims of good faith to counter Islamist propaganda and minimize the spread and danger of that movement. When we say there is something wrong with the Muslim system of belief, we can only alienate even the most benevolent of its adherents and set ourselves up for decades of fear and hatred. We already watched Europe do that to itself within Christianity, prolonging the conflict of the Reformation for a couple of hundred years too long. We did it with Communism, inflicting harm on millions of innocent people. Now, some of us are prepared to do the same thing on an even wider scale. It does not make a lot of sense, to me, but I guess that there is surely historical precedent for that sort of illogic.
The Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo issued a statement on 9/14/01, saying:
On 9/15/01, the Chief Mufti of Saudi Arabia issued a statement saying:
On September 27th, 2001, a group of Muslim scholars issued the following fatwa, saying in part:
No, this statement is factually incorrect. The intensity within which the religion is practiced is not a function of recent events. Execution for such “crimes” as leaving the faith are harsh examples of the fundamentalist end of the belief scale. I don’t know how many different ways this can be explained.
Examining the elements of a religion that lead to specific activities is not a condemnation of the religion. It’s an acknowledgment that events have occurred and have common threads that lead up to them. If we do not address the results at the root cause then nothing will change. And by we, I mean everybody. It’s a given that Muslims condemn the actions of fundamentalist extremists along with non-Muslims. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t examine the underlying problems that drive this behavior nor should that be viewed as a condemnation of the religion. Where would we be if Christianity or other religions weren’t examined and challenged throughout history.
You have never explained it, merely asserted it. The fact that it has not been a constantly true assessment of the religion throughout its history, not even in places where violence flares today, indicates that your claim does not seem to be more than flawed stereotyping rather than an actual rational assessment.
Since the premise is false, the explanation for that premise is irrelevant.
The brutal nature of Sharia law has absolutely been a constant of the religion. The flat hierarchy has been a constant of the religion. These components are very much a mechanism that feeds extremists. You take these components out and you have a religion with greater structure (control) and less brutality.
That’s just ridiculous. Christian religious law is also quite brutal; the difference is that governments don’t follow it, not that the religion is nicer. And you seem to be under the impression that all of Christianity is Catholic; with a single authority.
So, Islam’s been around for half a millennium, give or take. For the first hundred years or so its adherents were all rather angry and aggressive - spreading the word by the sword, and all that. All along, it turned out, they just wanted Jerusalem back. And possibly southeast Europe.
Of course, The adherents of Christendom were still trying to civilize the savages and help them find Jesus - and sending in the army when it turned out they weren’t very interested - at the same time.
Then we get 350 years of relative quiet. No jihads, no fatwas against Danish cartoonishs or English novelists, just quiet.
Then we get about 50 years of angry Muslims again. What do they want? Jerusalem! I see a pattern here.
So, to sum up: Christianity has been around for 2000 years or so, and its followers have been disturbingly violent for a good 1900 of those years. Islam has been around for 500 years, and its followers have been violent for… let’s say 200 of them.
However, Magiver thinks the latter is the violent one. Go figure.
Actually, Christendom got violent around the mid-300’s when it became the established faith in the Roman Empire. The violence really died down by the 1700’s. And it wasn’t a straight 1400 years of forced conversions, pogroms, witch-hunts, Crusades and Inquisitions either. STILL not a good record, but not as bad as you claim.
Fair enough, although “Christians” were still sending gunboats to civilize unruly natives as late as the turn of the century.
Don’t tell Der Trihs this, it’s a secret.