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Yonatan Zunger about the Paris Attacks

31 points by martind81 11y ago

ckozlowski 11y ago
Just an aside, but Mr. Zunger is a large reason why I continue to spend any time following anything on Google+. He writes on all kinds of topics regularly (most are non-political), and is worth following.
joesmo 11y ago
The author is implying that Daesh or something like it would/could exist without religion and specifically without Islam. I doubt that. Also, just because there is Muslim on Muslim violence doesn't mean that Islam isn't the cause of it. Wars between different factions of the same religion are the rule, not the exception. So ignoring religion as a cause of these problems while touting climate change is both silly and goes against the stated goals of the essay to not tout slogans as solutions. Otherwise, it's a pretty good take on the situation.
- ch 11y ago
  It's more like he is implying that something like Da'esh will exist no matter if Islam exists or not. Their brand of violence is not rooted in ideological beliefs but rather psycopathic killing for killings sake. That Islam allows a way for them to recruit does not mean they are Islamic only opportunistic. The other issues of famine, fear and a power vaccume are more likely the reason they can last for so long. Groups like this in the United States tend to burn out very quickly or reduce their violence to attacks on rivals and divirsify their actions to more capitalistic actions.
  - acqq 11y ago
    > That Islam allows a way for them to recruit does not mean they are Islamic only opportunistic. Simply wrong. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism The ideology existed longer than the specific group called ISIS. They just dialed it to 10 what was always more and more cooking for the last few decades. That they are a bit more extreme than how Al-Quaeda is perceived in the West now doesn't mean that the exact Islamic ideology wasn't fully formed before, including the treatment of those with who they fight. The reason why they call themselves "people of hadith" is because they really believe to just repeat what their prophet was doing, and that that is the major goal of a true believer. It's in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith that they can read about every beheading and stoning performed by Mohammad. They just literally ask themselves "What Would Mohammad Do" in the sense that they "reject the use of Hellenistic philosophical discourse "(kalam)" in favor of strict textualism in interpreting the Quran." Pretending that all this doesn't exist (on rejecting to learn) won't help anybody understand what's going on.
    - ch 11y ago
      Interesting. I would still contend that one cannot take some form of ideology, "dial it up to 10" and then claim it is still that same ideology. What you instead have here is a set of liars that hide behind a name. That said, it does seem that Wahhabism and Sunni Islam are perhaps a more favorable place for such extremism to culture and grow. So I concede this is as much a part of Islam as the next part (however non-mainstream or mainstream it may be). Clearly the shift here is what allows such extremism to succeed, the funding, the teaching, the dispersion of such ideas, how are they not called out for what they are: callous and inhumane and insane? Who is responsible for turning a blind eye for so long? Is it just tolerated because it happens 'Over There' (in this case I suppose 'Over There' would mean 'Not Here in Saudi Arabia' where the political base of this brach of Islam claims home). Or is this more like someones thugs getting out of control -- i.e. this is a sponsored movement and attempts to restrain it are actively interfered with! I have more questions than answers! What a complex part of the world!
  - azth 11y ago
    > That Islam allows a way for them to recruit does not mean they are Islamic only opportunistic. Very true. Incidentally (and ironically), Islamically one is not allowed to overthrow their (Muslim) government to "establish a caliphate". So what ISIS is doing is against the teachings of Islam to start with. They take texts, keep what they like and leave out what they don't like, and use those texts for their own purpose. We have in Islamic literature, several authentic narrations that talk about, and warn of people who have a similar ideology to that of ISIS.
    - rdancer 11y ago
      They just declare the rulers apostate, and poof, no government. Same trick the medieval European rulers would use to get rid of their rivals, by the way (they had to convince the Pope). If their daily practice agrees with the Scriptures, and by all accounts, they are very uncompromising, it is very hard to argue that they're somehow not legitimate.
      - azth 11y ago
        > They just declare the rulers apostate, and poof, no government. Islamically, this does not hold either (and we have authentic narrations to back this up). In order to declare the leader an apostate (a very serious accusation by the way), there has to be extremely clear evidence upon which there is zero room for interpretation or excusing. I'm talking about something along the lines of the ruler outright coming out in front of everyone and saying that he is no longer Muslim. This applies to everyone, from Mobarak to Qadhafi to Saddam, etc. There were terrible things that happened under their regimes, and I am not defending them. However, absolutely no one can come out and declare them apostates without crystal clear proof upon which no two would disagree -- this has never happened.
        rdancer 11y ago
        I understand what you're saying, however, for the ISIS project to work, it is not necessary that all Muslims agree with them. In fact, ISIS are more than happy to genocide all Muslims who disagree, notably all the Sunni Muslims, and have steadfastly been doing so in the lands they have conquered. Might is right, and as long as the Caliphate keeps on existing, they will do what they're doing, simply because they can. Your theological objections cannot be taken seriously because they're a state power, you're not, and quite naturally conflicts where one side of the argument is a state, are best settled by war.
  - joesmo 11y ago
    "That Islam allows a way for them to recruit does not mean they are Islamic only opportunistic." Lol. They are by definition Islamic. You can't just change the meaning of words like "Islamic" because it suits your point of view. Da'esh is as Islamic as any other Islamic group.
- acqq 11y ago
  > Wars between different factions of the same religion are the rule, not the exception Exactly. For example, the US and Saudi supported "rebels" in Syria are Sunnis. Assad is Alawite Shia, Iran too. Now look at who's with whom. ISIS are inspired by Wahabi teaching, which was effectively able to grow thanks to Saudi Arabia and Oil, but consider any Muslim who's not ready to accept Wahabi view apostate, that is, somebody who is, according to their religious views, to be killed(!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism The chaos in Iraq after US invaded to "bring them democracy" resulted in de-facto war between the Shia who got to the power and Sunnis who lost the influence. Yemen, where Saudi Arabia performs military actions now, has large Shia population. Etc. It sounds complex, but it's not, once you understand what's going on and see how obviously groups support or fight one another exactly based on the religion, you can't even imagine that people can ignore the predominantly religious background for the most of the conflicts. If you don't make a difference between Sunni, Shia and Wahabi, it's your problem, but people lose lives because of that in the Middle East, in hundreds of thousands. Which is not to say that it's not even much worse (proportionally) for minorities like smaller religious Muslim groups and even worse for Christians there.
- thesteamboat 11y ago
  Expanding on this, the author writes: > Da'esh's plan to take over the world isn't rooted in a theological destiny of Muslims; it's rooted in an explicitly political vision of conquest. That is probably true of Al Qaeda or Hezbollah but Daesh's worldview is[0] rooted in Islamic apocalyptic theology. [0]: See "What ISIS Really Wants" for a good analysis of this. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
phamilton 11y ago
A serious question which I'd love to hear opinions on: Why are immigrants to the US from Mexico viewed so differently from immigrants in Europe? Or are they treated the same?
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  I guess it depends on who you ask. Some of us are afraid that they'll rename Los Angeles to something Hispanic-sounding.
  - ckozlowski 11y ago
    I see what you did there. =)
- gayprogrammer 11y ago
  Immigrants from Mexico don't follow a religion that instructs them to kill.
  - DrScump 11y ago
    Depends on how literally you define "instructs". Certainly, the first 100÷ years of Catholicism in Central and South America didn't value the lives of non-Catholics very much.
  - tomjakubowski 11y ago
    Read the Old Testament lately?
    - rdancer 11y ago
      If you're not a Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, or Jebusite, you should be safe. That's not a snark, by the way. Contrary to popular myth, the Bible doesn't prescribe warfare on any extant nation, group of people, or region.
    - sharpray 11y ago
gayprogrammer 11y ago
> Charlie Hebdo's targets ... Who was it that killed who again? >Charlie Hebdo's targets weren't simply religious extremists preaching from Saudi mosques; they were a portrayal of the French Muslim population as violent extremists, the dangerous other. It sounds like the author is saying that the satire cartoon invented "racism" against Muslims. But the cartoon "targets" proved the magazine absolutely, positively, bona-fided-ly correct. They proved Charlie Hebdo right. >You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. What did you expect was going to happen? So the author actually blames religious attacks on the act of people talking about it happening. In some circular way, the cartoon magazine created religious violence? I cannot fathom how the author would explain religiously motivated violence in places where a satire cartoon isn't there to talk about it.
em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
Author belittles commentators who make simplifications, but then claims root of conflict is water: "When we talk about the ultimate causes of the situation, this is the fact we tend to ignore: at the root of it, there isn't enough water, and there isn't enough food, and droughts have been hitting the area harder and harder for a decade."
bsaul 11y ago
I really wonder if this guy has ever been living outside the US ( either in a muslim country, or in a few european countries) to make so many wrong assertions about the root cause of the whole affair. Actually i'm even surprised he's working in any field related to logic, because his whole evaluation of french attacks having anything to do with what french do or did falls on the ground as soon as you notice that they've been occuring in every single part of the world ( every country in every continent with any religion) for the last 20 years. It is simply an ideology looking to conquer the world, which adjusts its speech to accomodate with its target. Nothing more unusual than that.
- mc32 11y ago
  He seems to be partial to the term blood-thirsty... This interview with a former recruiter and who now disavows the whole movement is quite interesting and illuminating: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/195238189/how-does-an-islamist-extremist-change-his-mind http://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/195238189/how-does-an-islamist... His time spent in an Egyptian jail in the company of other Islamists changed his mind about the ideology and its aims. Goes into detail here too: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=377442344&m=377495115&live=1 http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&i...
Camillo 11y ago
The notion that mass immigration from Syria to Europe is a necessary consequence of the war is trivially falsified by looking at the timeline. The Syrian civil war started in early 2011. Daesh entered the war in early 2012 as al-Nusra Front, and operated as ISIL since 2013. The Caliphate was proclaimed in summer 2014. But mass migration into Europe did not start until summer 2015. Obviously it did not take the Syrians four years to realize that there was a war in their country.

31 points by martind81 11y ago

Just an aside, but Mr. Zunger is a large reason why I continue to spend any time following anything on Google+. He writes on all kinds of topics regularly (most are non-political), and is worth following.

joesmo 11y ago

The author is implying that Daesh or something like it would/could exist without religion and specifically without Islam. I doubt that. Also, just because there is Muslim on Muslim violence doesn't mean that Islam isn't the cause of it. Wars between different factions of the same religion are the rule, not the exception. So ignoring religion as a cause of these problems while touting climate change is both silly and goes against the stated goals of the essay to not tout slogans as solutions. Otherwise, it's a pretty good take on the situation.

ch 11y ago
It's more like he is implying that something like Da'esh will exist no matter if Islam exists or not. Their brand of violence is not rooted in ideological beliefs but rather psycopathic killing for killings sake. That Islam allows a way for them to recruit does not mean they are Islamic only opportunistic. The other issues of famine, fear and a power vaccume are more likely the reason they can last for so long. Groups like this in the United States tend to burn out very quickly or reduce their violence to attacks on rivals and divirsify their actions to more capitalistic actions.
- acqq 11y ago
  > That Islam allows a way for them to recruit does not mean they are Islamic only opportunistic. Simply wrong. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism The ideology existed longer than the specific group called ISIS. They just dialed it to 10 what was always more and more cooking for the last few decades. That they are a bit more extreme than how Al-Quaeda is perceived in the West now doesn't mean that the exact Islamic ideology wasn't fully formed before, including the treatment of those with who they fight. The reason why they call themselves "people of hadith" is because they really believe to just repeat what their prophet was doing, and that that is the major goal of a true believer. It's in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith that they can read about every beheading and stoning performed by Mohammad. They just literally ask themselves "What Would Mohammad Do" in the sense that they "reject the use of Hellenistic philosophical discourse "(kalam)" in favor of strict textualism in interpreting the Quran." Pretending that all this doesn't exist (on rejecting to learn) won't help anybody understand what's going on.
  - ch 11y ago
    Interesting. I would still contend that one cannot take some form of ideology, "dial it up to 10" and then claim it is still that same ideology. What you instead have here is a set of liars that hide behind a name. That said, it does seem that Wahhabism and Sunni Islam are perhaps a more favorable place for such extremism to culture and grow. So I concede this is as much a part of Islam as the next part (however non-mainstream or mainstream it may be). Clearly the shift here is what allows such extremism to succeed, the funding, the teaching, the dispersion of such ideas, how are they not called out for what they are: callous and inhumane and insane? Who is responsible for turning a blind eye for so long? Is it just tolerated because it happens 'Over There' (in this case I suppose 'Over There' would mean 'Not Here in Saudi Arabia' where the political base of this brach of Islam claims home). Or is this more like someones thugs getting out of control -- i.e. this is a sponsored movement and attempts to restrain it are actively interfered with! I have more questions than answers! What a complex part of the world!
- azth 11y ago
  > That Islam allows a way for them to recruit does not mean they are Islamic only opportunistic. Very true. Incidentally (and ironically), Islamically one is not allowed to overthrow their (Muslim) government to "establish a caliphate". So what ISIS is doing is against the teachings of Islam to start with. They take texts, keep what they like and leave out what they don't like, and use those texts for their own purpose. We have in Islamic literature, several authentic narrations that talk about, and warn of people who have a similar ideology to that of ISIS.
  - rdancer 11y ago
    They just declare the rulers apostate, and poof, no government. Same trick the medieval European rulers would use to get rid of their rivals, by the way (they had to convince the Pope). If their daily practice agrees with the Scriptures, and by all accounts, they are very uncompromising, it is very hard to argue that they're somehow not legitimate.
    - azth 11y ago
      > They just declare the rulers apostate, and poof, no government. Islamically, this does not hold either (and we have authentic narrations to back this up). In order to declare the leader an apostate (a very serious accusation by the way), there has to be extremely clear evidence upon which there is zero room for interpretation or excusing. I'm talking about something along the lines of the ruler outright coming out in front of everyone and saying that he is no longer Muslim. This applies to everyone, from Mobarak to Qadhafi to Saddam, etc. There were terrible things that happened under their regimes, and I am not defending them. However, absolutely no one can come out and declare them apostates without crystal clear proof upon which no two would disagree -- this has never happened.
      - rdancer 11y ago
        I understand what you're saying, however, for the ISIS project to work, it is not necessary that all Muslims agree with them. In fact, ISIS are more than happy to genocide all Muslims who disagree, notably all the Sunni Muslims, and have steadfastly been doing so in the lands they have conquered. Might is right, and as long as the Caliphate keeps on existing, they will do what they're doing, simply because they can. Your theological objections cannot be taken seriously because they're a state power, you're not, and quite naturally conflicts where one side of the argument is a state, are best settled by war.
- joesmo 11y ago
  "That Islam allows a way for them to recruit does not mean they are Islamic only opportunistic." Lol. They are by definition Islamic. You can't just change the meaning of words like "Islamic" because it suits your point of view. Da'esh is as Islamic as any other Islamic group.
acqq 11y ago
> Wars between different factions of the same religion are the rule, not the exception Exactly. For example, the US and Saudi supported "rebels" in Syria are Sunnis. Assad is Alawite Shia, Iran too. Now look at who's with whom. ISIS are inspired by Wahabi teaching, which was effectively able to grow thanks to Saudi Arabia and Oil, but consider any Muslim who's not ready to accept Wahabi view apostate, that is, somebody who is, according to their religious views, to be killed(!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism The chaos in Iraq after US invaded to "bring them democracy" resulted in de-facto war between the Shia who got to the power and Sunnis who lost the influence. Yemen, where Saudi Arabia performs military actions now, has large Shia population. Etc. It sounds complex, but it's not, once you understand what's going on and see how obviously groups support or fight one another exactly based on the religion, you can't even imagine that people can ignore the predominantly religious background for the most of the conflicts. If you don't make a difference between Sunni, Shia and Wahabi, it's your problem, but people lose lives because of that in the Middle East, in hundreds of thousands. Which is not to say that it's not even much worse (proportionally) for minorities like smaller religious Muslim groups and even worse for Christians there.
thesteamboat 11y ago
Expanding on this, the author writes: > Da'esh's plan to take over the world isn't rooted in a theological destiny of Muslims; it's rooted in an explicitly political vision of conquest. That is probably true of Al Qaeda or Hezbollah but Daesh's worldview is[0] rooted in Islamic apocalyptic theology. [0]: See "What ISIS Really Wants" for a good analysis of this. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...

phamilton 11y ago

A serious question which I'd love to hear opinions on: Why are immigrants to the US from Mexico viewed so differently from immigrants in Europe? Or are they treated the same?

SamReidHughes 11y ago
I guess it depends on who you ask. Some of us are afraid that they'll rename Los Angeles to something Hispanic-sounding.
- ckozlowski 11y ago
  I see what you did there. =)
gayprogrammer 11y ago
Immigrants from Mexico don't follow a religion that instructs them to kill.
- DrScump 11y ago
  Depends on how literally you define "instructs". Certainly, the first 100÷ years of Catholicism in Central and South America didn't value the lives of non-Catholics very much.
- tomjakubowski 11y ago
  Read the Old Testament lately?
  - rdancer 11y ago
    If you're not a Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, or Jebusite, you should be safe. That's not a snark, by the way. Contrary to popular myth, the Bible doesn't prescribe warfare on any extant nation, group of people, or region.
  - sharpray 11y ago

gayprogrammer 11y ago

> Charlie Hebdo's targets ... Who was it that killed who again? >Charlie Hebdo's targets weren't simply religious extremists preaching from Saudi mosques; they were a portrayal of the French Muslim population as violent extremists, the dangerous other. It sounds like the author is saying that the satire cartoon invented "racism" against Muslims. But the cartoon "targets" proved the magazine absolutely, positively, bona-fided-ly correct. They proved Charlie Hebdo right. >You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. What did you expect was going to happen? So the author actually blames religious attacks on the act of people talking about it happening. In some circular way, the cartoon magazine created religious violence? I cannot fathom how the author would explain religiously motivated violence in places where a satire cartoon isn't there to talk about it.

em3rgent0rdr 11y ago

Author belittles commentators who make simplifications, but then claims root of conflict is water: "When we talk about the ultimate causes of the situation, this is the fact we tend to ignore: at the root of it, there isn't enough water, and there isn't enough food, and droughts have been hitting the area harder and harder for a decade."

bsaul 11y ago

I really wonder if this guy has ever been living outside the US ( either in a muslim country, or in a few european countries) to make so many wrong assertions about the root cause of the whole affair. Actually i'm even surprised he's working in any field related to logic, because his whole evaluation of french attacks having anything to do with what french do or did falls on the ground as soon as you notice that they've been occuring in every single part of the world ( every country in every continent with any religion) for the last 20 years. It is simply an ideology looking to conquer the world, which adjusts its speech to accomodate with its target. Nothing more unusual than that.

mc32 11y ago
He seems to be partial to the term blood-thirsty... This interview with a former recruiter and who now disavows the whole movement is quite interesting and illuminating: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/195238189/how-does-an-islamist-extremist-change-his-mind http://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/195238189/how-does-an-islamist... His time spent in an Egyptian jail in the company of other Islamists changed his mind about the ideology and its aims. Goes into detail here too: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=377442344&m=377495115&live=1 http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&i...

Camillo 11y ago

The notion that mass immigration from Syria to Europe is a necessary consequence of the war is trivially falsified by looking at the timeline. The Syrian civil war started in early 2011. Daesh entered the war in early 2012 as al-Nusra Front, and operated as ISIL since 2013. The Caliphate was proclaimed in summer 2014. But mass migration into Europe did not start until summer 2015. Obviously it did not take the Syrians four years to realize that there was a war in their country.