It has nothing to do with hardline Islamists killing a blogger from their own country who wrote criticisms of Islam.
That’s like blaming the slaveowner when a slave kills another slave for sleeping with his wife. Sure the slaveowner did fucked up shit and caused inestimable harm, but that has nothing to do with the actual incident at hand or its repercussions.
It’s okay to place responsibility on the responsible party. Why you and others have insisted on making this about Western interventionism is inexplicable, other than to provide a strawman on which to deflect the actual incident in question.
Well, I’ve been reading the discussion trying to understand the various points of view, and now I’m confused, Stringbean…*
Did you start the thread to chastise Muslims for being “lax to initiate” “the hard work of rooting out the violent intolerant sectors of [their] society”, or did you want to simply decry this particular incident and shake your head sadly at the immorality of some individuals, regardless of the socio-political context in question?
Please help me to understand your nuanced sensibility regarding Islamic extremism.
*Purely rhetorically, unfortunately. Obvious weasel is obvious.
There’s a cultural clash occurring in the Muslim world between those who want increased secularism and those who want Islam to dominate their society.
This incident illuminates that struggle. Those responsible knew what they were doing and did so with religious motivation.
This incident has nothing to do with historical Western interventionism, and everything to do with the cultural clash I have described many times, both in the OP and in subsequent posts.
Those who derailed the thread into the evils perpetrated by Western colonialists sought to distract from the clear premise I have outlined above.
Do you wish to join the strawman or debate honestly?
The choice to weasel without obfuscation is yours.
So you seem to be saying that the incident which prompted your OP ‘illuminates’ a conflict between radical religious fundamentalists and proponents of secular government that you imagine to be taking place within ‘the Muslim world’ (which you haven’t defined beyond the very general label of a shared religion) but this conflict is not illuminated by any examination of the historical contexts from which the conflicting societal forces of that same ‘Muslim world’ emerged? Further, you seem to be arguing that the radical elements are a more or less cohesive historically regressive faction while the ‘secularists’ are a new, poorly organized and ineffectively expressed progressive category of Muslims who are collectively too fearful (or too lazy, weak willed or otherwise intransigent) to do any required ‘heavy lifting’ which might change their very very Muslim world for the better.
Yep. It’s the rest of us weaselling out of your hard headed examination in order to preserve our presuppositions. Yes sir.
Right. It all happened in a vacuum. There is no history that precedes this event. Fundamentalist Muslims and secularized Muslims simply popped into existence a couple of years ago, like atoms in a bad claim about quantum physics. I doubt that even you believe this, although you have to pretend that it is true to maintain your street cred with the rest of the followers of Fox News.
And here you are the one creating a straw man. No one in this thread has “blamed whitey” for this action. There have simply been responses to your silly claims that
The reality is that there are many Muslims who promote secularism. The reality is that the extremists who wish to take Islam back to the seventh century have been given ammunition to gather support by the actions of the West.
Pretending that this is strictly an internecine struggle without acknowledging the roles that outsiders have played in the situation is dishonest. Pretending that Muslim secularists are some tiny number of frightened people who rarely speak out is either dishonest or utterly ignorant.
I can’t help but find something kind of offensive underlying this statement. What if there wasn’t an outward reaction of the kind that you personally approve of? Who are you to offer them credit?
Are you absolutely certain that no one in your society has ever been “randomly murdered” for being something or other that he or she shouldn’t have been murdered for?
Are you absolutely certain that were such an event to be brought to your attention that your first thought would be to “I must immediately join a protest march that will definitely be recorded by video cameras and shown on television”?
Especially considering that the US ranks 91st of all the world’s nations in intentional homicide rate, whereas those horrid bloodthirsty Bangladeshis come in at… um… 130th.
Christian fanatics here in the US murder abortion providers who are violating no laws whatsoever. Rabid Islamophobes terrorize and attack Muslims (or people who they think look like Muslims) who are doing no harm to aybody. I don’t think our society has all that much room to scold Bangladeshis for their culture’s willingness to inflict fanatical violence on the innocent.
Atheist bloggers aren’t getting murdered in the US. Abortion providers are occasionally killed for their actions, not beliefs. But you kneejerk PC-ers know that, you’re just afraid of nuance, just like your idiot counterparts on the other side.
Ok, they lived together. That’s such a far cry from the case in Bangladesh that I don’t know how you post it seriously. Also, that’s one family of inbred backwoods crazies. So what? That does not equal the Muslim world’s crazy levels of intolerance these days.
