Did you read my original reply where I don’t give a lot of weight to prison population. Then I CHANGE the hypo and say that if you told me that blacks actually commited mroe crimes then that would tell me something.
WTF was the point of that question? Were you just trying to catch me in some sort of semantic footfault? How is the distinction you are making (prison population in the black community versus the actual incidence of criminals in the black community) relevant to the debate we are having?
Yes, I would call all those things terrorism. I also call domestic violence a form of terrorism. It’s a word that can be used so broadly and selectively that it’s essentially meaningless.
I told you you would try to pick nits on the analogy. Sorry I couldn’t come up with a perfect analogy for a unique situation.
I understand that this wouldn’t offend YOU but I can understand how it would offend someone… even if you can’t. I don’t think its an unreasonable reaction, perhaps its not perfectly rational (and maybe this is what trips you up) but it is a natural human response. I don’t share that response but but I can understand it.
Well you’d have to see my posting in the thread where magellan criticizes me for saying that we shouldn’t profile muslims. Everyone from your side was probably nodding their heads at my posts in that thread. In this one not so much.
Well if you want the word to be meaningless then i guess the word can be meaningless. If you wanted to give the word terrorism any meaning at all, I think the best option is to consider it an illegal form of assymetrical warfare.
I think its pretty ridiculous to say words don’t have meanings because they don’t have precise definitions.
I guess if you redefine “extremist” so broadly and imagine how others are reacting to your posts at home, you can go ahead and call yourself a “moderate” if you want.
Assuming you’re correct about them being, at the moment, the big winner in actual instance counts, this shows correllation. It doesn’t show causation.
If you show that the disproportional percentage of crimes are committed by blacks, I would not conclude that black people have a crime problem, and I would especially not conclude that blacks are as a race inherently predisposed to be criminals. I would instead conclude that blacks as a class have a being poor problem, and that the poor have a crime problem.
I strongly suspect that the same reality is at play regarding muslim terrorism. The cause of the terrorism isn’t the religion - or at least, it’s not that their religion is any more malleable towards inciting violence than yours is. It’s that their countries suck. Terrorism is by and large a product of the societal environment, and people in various levels of power in the middle east can get a lot of mileage by pointing the populace’s ire at some other target, and fanning the flames.
Further, the specific use of terrorism as opposed to say crusades-styly military invasion or inquisition-style societal oppression is also a product of their environment, as it’s a form of violence well-suited to a weaker and smaller force facing a larger and more financially and technologically advanced force. So that’s why the US Army doesn’t send suicide bombers in to attack the enemy - it’s not cost effective, since they can afford to buy bombers and have to worry about their populace blogging at them. It’s certainly not because the military is populated by people with religions averse to terrorist-style attacks specifically.
So yeah. Even if muslims at the moment are outnumber the christians for terrorist-style murder, it’s not because Christianity has some kind of failure in its terrorist-producing mechanism. The religion in question has nothing to do with it, aside from all religions having the ability to be used to make the populace malleable.
Indeed. Our local abortion provider was bombed in 1999. The Catholic Church has built a services provider immediately next door to the abortion provider. Far from finding this offensive, I’m perfectly okay with it.
Out of interest, how many mosques did you visit in order to come to an accurate summation of this lack of condemnation?
Oddly enough, the situation of non-unequivocal condemnation is one i’ve heard before, but the last time I heard it it was an accusation against the U.S., in general, with regards to the IRA.
I just want to point out that, technically, Allah is just the translation of the word “God”. He’s not some other entity entirely. So (again technically) you’re saying ‘Fuck God. He doesn’t exist anyway’.
Whether or not you care is another matter, but I thought it was worth pointing out.
One argument would be : why should they ? It’s not like we lot keep apologizing for groups we’re not part of, don’t support and who do things we don’t approve of. Have you apologized to the nearest gay for Westboro Baptist Church, to the nearest Irish for the IRA recently ? Of course not, that’d be silly.
Why do you expect Muslims to do silly things ?
Another is that Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t merely terrorist platforms. They also do a lot of objective good in their community when they’re not busy lobbing rockets and booby trapped 9 year olds at Israel - building blood banks and hospitals, setting up schools and helping the Palestinian victims of the latest round of dickishness of one side or the other. They hand out money to the poor and setup charities (a very important thing to Muslims, I’m given to understand).
They’re kind of like the Yakuza that way : hateful pricks who still have a good side, or at least a good PR department.
Sometime around the invasion of Iraq I read a article by a Arab American. In it he made the point that the Middle East had been held back by the corruption of it’s own governments. One way for a government to deal with the disatisfaction of it’s population is to blame thier problems on an external enemy. Israel and the US became that enemy. We helped in that blame by offering real offenses.
The tragic truth is that now the same thing is happening here as ruthless people want to use 9/11 as a tool to focus the anger of Americans upon terrorism and Islam as they grasp for power and money. Things like this book burning and and Christian leaders talking of some kind of Holy War against Islam are a reflection of that kind of manipulation. IMO a threat from within is more accurately the fear mongers and a totally dishonest media rather than Muslims in the US. Fanning the fires of fear and hatred increase the chances of violence.
The people with biggest militaries define terrorism in a certain way so that they don’t have to admit to themselves that they are the biggest terrorists.
For everyone else, a terrorist is someone who causes others terror.
And by that definition the US have been, since the end of WWII the worst terrorists in the world.
Not a comfortable fact which is why people delude themselves by tweaking the meaning of the word ‘terrorism’ so that they can pretend it doesn’t apply to them.
I agree with that. I don’t think terorism is something that is intrinsic to the muslim faith. How much islamic terrorism was there in the first half of this century? In history?
If I told you that blacks commited MUCH MUCH more than their share of crime even after taking into account socioeconomic status, I STILL wouldn’t think that being black made you more likely to be a criminal but I would suspecft that there is something going on in your community that is not going on in poor Appalachian communities.
I’ve said this before btu i think that the federal drug laws and rap music have glorified criminal behaviour in the black community. I know I sound like that old guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn but I really think that a lot of rap music is poisonous and it is fed by the large incarceration rates that result from the federal drug sentencing guidelines. I feel that this has removed much of the stigma of going to jail or engaging in criminal activity.
A lot of countries suck and they don’t all resort to terrorism. There is something that has made terrorism acceptable in that culture and i think it all stems from the aplestinian conflict. There seems to be broad populist sympathy for the palestinians, which is why you rarely see muslim leaders (moderate or otherwise) condemn Hamas or Hezbollah. I feel that this has created a greater acceptance of terrorism in the muslim community than in the general population.
Well, I am mostly going by public statements by Muslim leaders.
As for the lack of full throated condemnation of the IRA. Its probably because there was significant support for the IRA here in the states. Not the car bombings but there was solidarity for the oppressed Irish.
I understand your point and to a certain extent am sympathetic to it but think it continues to fail on semantic grounds that have nothing to do with an international conspiracy to define the word in a certain way. “Terrorism” is a form of asymmetric guerilla warfare, usually carried out by groups that do not have the means to conduct conventional warfare as official militaries do.
Your argument suggests that we should use “terrorism” instead of “war” because “terrorism” is somehow a worse thing. I happen to think “war” is quite bad enough.
I guess i was trying to point to sub-surface level of acceptance of terrorists within the muslim community. I understand that the vast majority of hamas and hezbollah spends its time doing good charitable work but there is a militant arm of hamas that everyone should either reject or admit that they believe that terrorism is a legitimate form of resistance to Israeli oppression. I think that many in the muslim community have accepted terroism as acceptable the case of Palestine and Israel and this acceptance has led to a greater willingness to consider terrorism in other cases as well. Like flying a plane into the twin towers.
I don’t think that islam as a religion is pushing anyone towards terorism but the example of palestine has made some portion of the muslim community view terrorism as legitimate and this percolates out to the broader muslim community.
I personally think that we have more to fear from the fringe elements of the teabaggers than the the domestic muslim population. I see the hatemongering and it offends me.
Lets put aside these jackholes that aren’t even from NYC, who have no connection with the victims of 9/11, who come in by the busload to protest the building of a mosque that isn’t even in their state. They seem more like bigots than people who have any reasopn to be offended.
BUT if your family died on 9/11 and you are offended by the notion of a mosque opening so close to the twin towers, I would probably say you are irrational but I don’t think its mere bigotry, I can understand how they might feel that way.