11 ms·

Significant numbers of non-Islam subscribers hold ideas that are incompatible with an open society too If that's your contention then you'd need to account for

by crusso 11y ago

Significant numbers of non-Islam subscribers hold ideas that are incompatible with an open society too If that's your contention then you'd need to account for the high terrorist attack output of Islamists vs other non-Islam subscribers.

jacquesm 11y ago
That's an open door, I don't need to kick it in. It simply revolves around how you define terrorist and that horse has been beaten to death by now, I really don't see any reason to revive it just to beat it to death again.
- tome 11y ago
  Wow, that's a complete cop out. Can you come up with any definition of "terrorist" where significant numbers of the one billion Chinese are commiting terrorist atrocities abroad, for example?
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    Can you come up with one where significant numbers of the billions of Muslims in the world are committing terrorist atrocities abroad? The vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace, just like everybody else. To your question though, the French resistance during the second world war could easily have been called terrorists, as could the American revolutionary army.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      - Algeria - Vietnam - Cambodia - Ghana - Iraq - Afghanistan The list is endless, you can keep that going for a long long time before you run out of names.
    - tome 11y ago
      If you want to consider the list (that's as long as my arm) of Islamic terror attacks in the 21st century "insignificant", then that's on you, I guess. It's absolutely not inconsistent to hold the view that Islamically-inspired terror is a big problem for the world, whilst simultaneously holding the view that the vast majority of muslims are peaceful. I don't know why anyone would think otherwise.
      - jon-wood 11y ago
        Its entirely consistent to hold the view that Islamic terrorists are a problem for the world without also believing that the majority of Muslims are terrorists. This seems similar to saying that I can't consider people being hit by cars a problem without also saying that the vast majority of car journeys result in someone being hit. A vocal and deplorable minority of Muslims are actively attempted to split the world into Us and Them, I don't see that playing into their hand and deciding that I'm going to declare all Muslims want me dead is really going to help matters.
        tome 11y ago
        > believing that the majority of Muslims are terrorists Nobody in this thread has suggested this > ... declare all Muslims want me dead ... nor this.
        jon-wood 11y ago
        My apologies, I completely misread "It's absolutely not inconsistent" as "It's absolutely inconsistent".
        tome 11y ago
        No problem. It was a lack of clarity in my writing. Double negatives are not to be unavoided!
    - riyadparvez 11y ago
      > majority of Muslims just want to live in peace, just like everybody else I think one of the major issues is defining peaceful and non-violent. From my personal experience (I am from a Muslim country), I have seen many Muslims who would not commit violence themselves, but they do not have any trouble if some extremists commit violence. Some would even give moral justification of the violence. In our country's atheist community we commonly joke "Extremists want to kill us, Moderates want Extremists to kill us". FWIW, apostasy is punishable by death in some Muslim countries. To sum up, almost all the Muslims are non-violent, but how many of them are truly peaceful? You will be very surprised to know the number.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    No, but it would be absolutely trivial to sketch the situation from a point of view where Bush, Blair and whole bunch of others would be seen as the terrorist masterminds causing the deaths of untold numbers of civilians. All in the name of the good of course, which is exactly what makes them just as bad as IS in that respect. They all actually believe they are doing the right thing. And that's a discussion that has been had many times over, it's as boring to me as vi versus emacs. Terrorist is a relative term, it mostly depends on which side of the fence your bed currently resides and what your personal belief system is. I see precious little difference to an attack on Fallujah to 'liberate' it and an attack on Paris to murder a bunch of people. In both cases lots of innocents will die and the world will end up a substantially worse, not better place for everybody afterwards.
    - tome 11y ago
      Wow. You can argue all you want about the atrocities of western armies versus the atrocities of Islamic terror. What I find very hard to accept is that you can't see them as distinct phenomena (they may be related, but nonetheless they are not the same kind of thing, at all).
      - Natanael_L 11y ago
        Why? Why can't they be the same thing, just in different contexts? On both sides there's people who believe the enemy will destroy the world, and believes in a particular ideal, and who sends out armies to achieve their goals, and both sides are very clearly not very precise in who they actually target (the bombing on Doctor's Without Border, anyone?). Both sides cause tons of civilian casualties, both refuse to apologize, both sides are full of rhetorics, both want the other to disappear, etc... While you can point out differences in their justifications, you can't pretend their actions are unrelated.
        tome 11y ago
        This kind of moral equivocation can only come if you really have no clue about the reality of these conflicts, in my opinion. It's one of the great weaknesses of our civilisation that we are "too broad-minded to take own own side in a quarrel" (to quote a phrase I just learned today). In the large, one side wants to impose rule based on beliefs about what an omnipotent sky person wants and is willing to sacrifice innocent lives (even celebrate such sacrifice) to do so. The other side wants to propagate individual liberty and democracy and takes great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. In the small, things don't always play out quite like this, but to draw equivalence between the two sides is morally abhorrent.
  - kohanz 11y ago
    So let's quantify your definitions of "significant" and "terrorism". In the past 5 years, about 2% of terrorist attacks in Europe were found to be religiously motivated [0]. The majority are perpetrated by separatist organizations. There are over 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide [1]. Size estimates for the terrorist groups are: ISIS (52k - 258k [2]), Al Qaeda (19k-27k [3]). There are others, but I believe these are the main ones that people are talking about when worrying about terrorist threats abroad. We're talking about 1 in 5,600 to 22,535. My humble opinion is that the terrorist threat worldwide is indeed significant, but if you think that it is a problem with Islam, then you are playing right into the hands of the extremists, who want (and they have publicly published these intentions) to divide the world into two camps that hate each other. The more hatred you direct towards Muslims, the more you drive them apart from you. ISIS's stated objective is basically world war - they want you to hate Muslims, so that Muslims feel like they have nowhere to go in the Western world. [0] http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/01/08/3609796/islamist-terrorism-europe/ http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/01/08/3609796/islamist-t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda
    - tome 11y ago
      Counting "number of attacks" is extremely misleading (I'm tempted to think, deliberately so). A moment's Googling shows that Islamic terror is responsible for the majority of deaths, by a long way http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7552225/terrorism-europe-chart http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7552225/terrorism-europe-chart (and you can add a big chunk of green for France November 2015 now too)
      - kohanz 11y ago
        Speaking of cherry-picking data, no comment on the 2nd and 3rd points? As I said, I agree that terrorism (no matter how you categorize the attacks) is a significant problem, but that linking it with Islam is choosing to be manipulated by the extremists.
  - baddox 11y ago
    Can you come up with a definition where significant numbers of any group of a billion people qualify?
steveklabnik 11y ago
Not Jacques, but from a few months back: "White Supremacists More Dangerous To America Than Foreign Terrorists, Study Says" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domestic-terrorism-charleston_n_7654720.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domestic-terrorism-... > At least 48 people have been killed stateside by right-wing > extremists in the 14 years since since the September 11 > attacks -- almost twice as many as were killed by > self-identified jihadists in that time. As Jacques says, "terrorist" attacks are only committed by a Muslim majority because we re-define any attack committed by a non-Muslim as "not terrorism."
- crusso 11y ago
  Are you actually going to put some lone nut jobs here and there on the same level as organized and determined jihadists? If so, you need to include the tens of thousands of murdered people that ISIS has been responsible for. You'll need to include the Russian jet that was blown up, the attack in Paris, and all those killed by al-qaeda on 9/11, etc. You'll also need to explain why the FBI terrorist list doesn't show that the government has a similar concern for white supremacists. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    The FBI is concerned about white supremacists: http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/ http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enf... (this particular domain isn't the best, but it's a story that was repeated all over the place) And stuff like https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/may/extremism_052212/extremism_052212 https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/may/extremism_052212/e... , etc. And they were in fact doing more, but a lot of it (along with funding) has gone by the wayside since 9/11.
    - theorique 11y ago
      This is at least in part due to their bad habit of depending on the partisan SPLC for "hate group" data. SPLC is in the business of making so-called "hate groups" into terrible bogeymen, because SPLC reaps significant financial rewards through scare-tactics fundraising the depends on the threat of such groups.
lars 11y ago
> the high terrorist attack output of Islamists vs other non-Islam subscribers I wonder if this is really true though. Some statistics: https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005/terror02_05#terror_05sum https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-20... While Anders Breivik was shooting kids on the island in Norway, the Norwegian media were speculating that it was most likely perpetrated by muslim extremists. Even though we've historically had way more examples of terrorism perpetrated against immigration related targets by right-wing Norwegians (which was the case with Breivik as well). The average Norwegian won't remember any of the mosques, immigrant reception centers and immigrant stores that were bombed in Norway in the past. I guess terrorism is quickly forgotten when it isn't your own group that is targeted.
- rmc 11y ago
  Breivik wrote a manifesto claiming he was doing it to support Christianity. And yet people don't call him a Christian terrorist.
  - tim333 11y ago
    Breivik was a bit of a one off. Sadly Islamic terrorism seems more frequent.
    - conceit 11y ago
      not at all a one off
  - noobermin 11y ago
    To be fair, Breivik was an individual, while ISIS is a movement.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Let's rejoice about that (About Breivik being only an individual, actually he's not quite just an individual, there are more idiots like that but so far they haven't been able to do a whole lot of damage in Western Europe, let's hope it stays that way).
DanBC 11y ago
US citizens are at greater risk of harm from police officers (who kill about 1,000 people per year) than from Islamist terrorists. US citizens are at greater risk of far right or Christian extremists than they are of Islamist extremists - see the numbers of people injured and killed by various mass shooters or clinic bombings.
- crusso 11y ago
  US citizens are at greater risk of harm from police officers How is that a fair or even interesting comparison, though? Islamist terrorists aren't killing people ostensibly engaged in criminal acts. Islamist terrorists aren't otherwise expected to be agents of the government charged with using physical force to protect the laws. Islamist terrorists target innocents in a deliberate effort to maximize damage and loss of life. Body counts tell almost nothing of the story in an honest comparison of the threat from police officers vs Islamic terrorists. US citizens are at greater risk of far right or Christian extremists than they are of Islamist extremists This is a slightly more interesting comparison, but even then you have to look at who the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are watching to understand that Christian extremists are individual actors who target specifics like abortion providers. They're not looking to take down all of Western society. They aren't amassing armies in other countries to assert 6th century law on all the territories that they conquer. So sure, Christian terrorists' kill numbers might be comparable or even greater than Islamic terrorists domestically (if you unfairly exclude 9/11) - but that doesn't mean that they're the same level of threat in a strategic geopolitical sense.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > Islamist terrorists aren't killing people ostensibly engaged in criminal acts. True disturbingly often for police officers. About half the people shot and killed by police in the US (about 500 people per year) have mental illness. Compare that rate with the rest of the western world (less than 100 people since 2000) where people with mental illness tend not to be murdered by police. Even if we remove all the mentally ill people with guns from those numbers (to make the weapon use comparable across countries) we see very many more people killed in the US than any other western nation. And if you want numbers for innocent people shot by officers with poor aim, well, they don't keep numbers so you can't get accurate stats. Here are a few: https://popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-love-you-why-do-you-make-us-angry-like-that/ https://popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-love-yo... > So sure, Christian terrorists' kill numbers might be comparable or even greater than Islamic terrorists domestically (if you unfairly exclude 9/11) I'm not excluding 9/11. Christian and right wing extremists have killed more than 3,000 people in the US in the 19th and 20th century. At least 3,500 black people were lynched, for example. We've seen in this thread people claiming that Islam has centuries of violence, so let's go back 200 years and see who's being killed and who's doing the killing. Black folks are being killed, and Good White Christians were doing the killing. > They're not looking to take down all of Western society. Sure they are. "NEW WORLD ORDER" and "THE JEWS DID IT" and "FREEMEN ON THE LAND" are all about how corrupt the current system is. Read the Unabomber manifesto. That's all about overthrowing the system. > They aren't amassing armies in other countries to assert 6th century law on all the territories that they conquer. There's no point having this discussion if you're just going to shift the goal posts to keep redefining what terrorism is or what extremism is or what atrocities do or don't count.
rmc 11y ago
There are many many nationalist terrorist groups (e.g. IRA) or communist terrorist groups (e.g. Red Army Faction). The IRA almost killed the British Prime Minister. There actually aren't that much Muslim terrorist attacks
- jacquesm 11y ago
  A lone gunman managed to derail dutch politics for decades.
coldtea 11y ago
Because these people live in societies that have been colonized, manipulated, held down and bombed for decades on end, forcing them to get radically hateful and fundamentalist as a response and pass that on to others (younger men etc). Why would a white Swedish, Canadian etc. have any reason to do the same? Besides, is it just terrorism that's incompatible with an "open society", or other acts of murder and oppression too? Because from the extermination of 6 million jews down to colonialism, slavery, the pogroms, nukes on civilians, gulags, the massacre in Manchuria, 2 world wars, etc, most western and asian countries don't look that good either.
- crusso 11y ago
  What's your point? That Islamic terrorism is compatible with open society because of a bunch of things were done to them over the past thousand years? Or is it that because Western society has had some bad actors/states, that we can never thereafter point to bad behaviors or systems of thought?
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I think his point is that we still have bad actors and states. We're just a lot better at PR and image management but to the dead that makes precious little difference.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >What's your point? That Islamic terrorism is compatible with open society because of a bunch of things were done to them over the past thousand years? The question in the thread wasn't whether "islamic terrorism" was compatible with open society, but whether islam itself is. And my point it, whether it is or not, that "open society" is not as "open" as it pretends to be either. If some family had done "a bunch of things" (of enslaving, torturing and murderous nature) to your family "over the past thousand years", would you see them as friends? Especially if they continued those things in one way or another up to today, while celebrating how "open" and "tolerant" they are, (as opposed to you, who hates them).
    - 11y ago
baddox 11y ago
That probably has something to do with the fact that there has been lots of military action, regime changes, etc. in countries with large Muslim populations over the past few decades. That's exactly the sort of thing I would expect to cause the affected people to radicalize.

by crusso 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago

That's an open door, I don't need to kick it in. It simply revolves around how you define terrorist and that horse has been beaten to death by now, I really don't see any reason to revive it just to beat it to death again.

tome 11y ago
Wow, that's a complete cop out. Can you come up with any definition of "terrorist" where significant numbers of the one billion Chinese are commiting terrorist atrocities abroad, for example?
- jon-wood 11y ago
  Can you come up with one where significant numbers of the billions of Muslims in the world are committing terrorist atrocities abroad? The vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace, just like everybody else. To your question though, the French resistance during the second world war could easily have been called terrorists, as could the American revolutionary army.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    - Algeria - Vietnam - Cambodia - Ghana - Iraq - Afghanistan The list is endless, you can keep that going for a long long time before you run out of names.
  - tome 11y ago
    If you want to consider the list (that's as long as my arm) of Islamic terror attacks in the 21st century "insignificant", then that's on you, I guess. It's absolutely not inconsistent to hold the view that Islamically-inspired terror is a big problem for the world, whilst simultaneously holding the view that the vast majority of muslims are peaceful. I don't know why anyone would think otherwise.
    - jon-wood 11y ago
      Its entirely consistent to hold the view that Islamic terrorists are a problem for the world without also believing that the majority of Muslims are terrorists. This seems similar to saying that I can't consider people being hit by cars a problem without also saying that the vast majority of car journeys result in someone being hit. A vocal and deplorable minority of Muslims are actively attempted to split the world into Us and Them, I don't see that playing into their hand and deciding that I'm going to declare all Muslims want me dead is really going to help matters.
      - tome 11y ago
        > believing that the majority of Muslims are terrorists Nobody in this thread has suggested this > ... declare all Muslims want me dead ... nor this.
        jon-wood 11y ago
        My apologies, I completely misread "It's absolutely not inconsistent" as "It's absolutely inconsistent".
        tome 11y ago
        No problem. It was a lack of clarity in my writing. Double negatives are not to be unavoided!
  - riyadparvez 11y ago
    > majority of Muslims just want to live in peace, just like everybody else I think one of the major issues is defining peaceful and non-violent. From my personal experience (I am from a Muslim country), I have seen many Muslims who would not commit violence themselves, but they do not have any trouble if some extremists commit violence. Some would even give moral justification of the violence. In our country's atheist community we commonly joke "Extremists want to kill us, Moderates want Extremists to kill us". FWIW, apostasy is punishable by death in some Muslim countries. To sum up, almost all the Muslims are non-violent, but how many of them are truly peaceful? You will be very surprised to know the number.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  No, but it would be absolutely trivial to sketch the situation from a point of view where Bush, Blair and whole bunch of others would be seen as the terrorist masterminds causing the deaths of untold numbers of civilians. All in the name of the good of course, which is exactly what makes them just as bad as IS in that respect. They all actually believe they are doing the right thing. And that's a discussion that has been had many times over, it's as boring to me as vi versus emacs. Terrorist is a relative term, it mostly depends on which side of the fence your bed currently resides and what your personal belief system is. I see precious little difference to an attack on Fallujah to 'liberate' it and an attack on Paris to murder a bunch of people. In both cases lots of innocents will die and the world will end up a substantially worse, not better place for everybody afterwards.
  - tome 11y ago
    Wow. You can argue all you want about the atrocities of western armies versus the atrocities of Islamic terror. What I find very hard to accept is that you can't see them as distinct phenomena (they may be related, but nonetheless they are not the same kind of thing, at all).
    - Natanael_L 11y ago
      Why? Why can't they be the same thing, just in different contexts? On both sides there's people who believe the enemy will destroy the world, and believes in a particular ideal, and who sends out armies to achieve their goals, and both sides are very clearly not very precise in who they actually target (the bombing on Doctor's Without Border, anyone?). Both sides cause tons of civilian casualties, both refuse to apologize, both sides are full of rhetorics, both want the other to disappear, etc... While you can point out differences in their justifications, you can't pretend their actions are unrelated.
      - tome 11y ago
        This kind of moral equivocation can only come if you really have no clue about the reality of these conflicts, in my opinion. It's one of the great weaknesses of our civilisation that we are "too broad-minded to take own own side in a quarrel" (to quote a phrase I just learned today). In the large, one side wants to impose rule based on beliefs about what an omnipotent sky person wants and is willing to sacrifice innocent lives (even celebrate such sacrifice) to do so. The other side wants to propagate individual liberty and democracy and takes great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. In the small, things don't always play out quite like this, but to draw equivalence between the two sides is morally abhorrent.
- kohanz 11y ago
  So let's quantify your definitions of "significant" and "terrorism". In the past 5 years, about 2% of terrorist attacks in Europe were found to be religiously motivated [0]. The majority are perpetrated by separatist organizations. There are over 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide [1]. Size estimates for the terrorist groups are: ISIS (52k - 258k [2]), Al Qaeda (19k-27k [3]). There are others, but I believe these are the main ones that people are talking about when worrying about terrorist threats abroad. We're talking about 1 in 5,600 to 22,535. My humble opinion is that the terrorist threat worldwide is indeed significant, but if you think that it is a problem with Islam, then you are playing right into the hands of the extremists, who want (and they have publicly published these intentions) to divide the world into two camps that hate each other. The more hatred you direct towards Muslims, the more you drive them apart from you. ISIS's stated objective is basically world war - they want you to hate Muslims, so that Muslims feel like they have nowhere to go in the Western world. [0] http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/01/08/3609796/islamist-terrorism-europe/ http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/01/08/3609796/islamist-t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda
  - tome 11y ago
    Counting "number of attacks" is extremely misleading (I'm tempted to think, deliberately so). A moment's Googling shows that Islamic terror is responsible for the majority of deaths, by a long way http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7552225/terrorism-europe-chart http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7552225/terrorism-europe-chart (and you can add a big chunk of green for France November 2015 now too)
    - kohanz 11y ago
      Speaking of cherry-picking data, no comment on the 2nd and 3rd points? As I said, I agree that terrorism (no matter how you categorize the attacks) is a significant problem, but that linking it with Islam is choosing to be manipulated by the extremists.
- baddox 11y ago
  Can you come up with a definition where significant numbers of any group of a billion people qualify?

steveklabnik 11y ago

Not Jacques, but from a few months back: "White Supremacists More Dangerous To America Than Foreign Terrorists, Study Says" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domestic-terrorism-charleston_n_7654720.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domestic-terrorism-... > At least 48 people have been killed stateside by right-wing > extremists in the 14 years since since the September 11 > attacks -- almost twice as many as were killed by > self-identified jihadists in that time. As Jacques says, "terrorist" attacks are only committed by a Muslim majority because we re-define any attack committed by a non-Muslim as "not terrorism."

crusso 11y ago
Are you actually going to put some lone nut jobs here and there on the same level as organized and determined jihadists? If so, you need to include the tens of thousands of murdered people that ISIS has been responsible for. You'll need to include the Russian jet that was blown up, the attack in Paris, and all those killed by al-qaeda on 9/11, etc. You'll also need to explain why the FBI terrorist list doesn't show that the government has a similar concern for white supremacists. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  The FBI is concerned about white supremacists: http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/ http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enf... (this particular domain isn't the best, but it's a story that was repeated all over the place) And stuff like https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/may/extremism_052212/extremism_052212 https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/may/extremism_052212/e... , etc. And they were in fact doing more, but a lot of it (along with funding) has gone by the wayside since 9/11.
  - theorique 11y ago
    This is at least in part due to their bad habit of depending on the partisan SPLC for "hate group" data. SPLC is in the business of making so-called "hate groups" into terrible bogeymen, because SPLC reaps significant financial rewards through scare-tactics fundraising the depends on the threat of such groups.

lars 11y ago

> the high terrorist attack output of Islamists vs other non-Islam subscribers I wonder if this is really true though. Some statistics: https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005/terror02_05#terror_05sum https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-20... While Anders Breivik was shooting kids on the island in Norway, the Norwegian media were speculating that it was most likely perpetrated by muslim extremists. Even though we've historically had way more examples of terrorism perpetrated against immigration related targets by right-wing Norwegians (which was the case with Breivik as well). The average Norwegian won't remember any of the mosques, immigrant reception centers and immigrant stores that were bombed in Norway in the past. I guess terrorism is quickly forgotten when it isn't your own group that is targeted.

rmc 11y ago
Breivik wrote a manifesto claiming he was doing it to support Christianity. And yet people don't call him a Christian terrorist.
- tim333 11y ago
  Breivik was a bit of a one off. Sadly Islamic terrorism seems more frequent.
  - conceit 11y ago
    not at all a one off
- noobermin 11y ago
  To be fair, Breivik was an individual, while ISIS is a movement.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Let's rejoice about that (About Breivik being only an individual, actually he's not quite just an individual, there are more idiots like that but so far they haven't been able to do a whole lot of damage in Western Europe, let's hope it stays that way).

DanBC 11y ago

US citizens are at greater risk of harm from police officers (who kill about 1,000 people per year) than from Islamist terrorists. US citizens are at greater risk of far right or Christian extremists than they are of Islamist extremists - see the numbers of people injured and killed by various mass shooters or clinic bombings.

crusso 11y ago
US citizens are at greater risk of harm from police officers How is that a fair or even interesting comparison, though? Islamist terrorists aren't killing people ostensibly engaged in criminal acts. Islamist terrorists aren't otherwise expected to be agents of the government charged with using physical force to protect the laws. Islamist terrorists target innocents in a deliberate effort to maximize damage and loss of life. Body counts tell almost nothing of the story in an honest comparison of the threat from police officers vs Islamic terrorists. US citizens are at greater risk of far right or Christian extremists than they are of Islamist extremists This is a slightly more interesting comparison, but even then you have to look at who the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are watching to understand that Christian extremists are individual actors who target specifics like abortion providers. They're not looking to take down all of Western society. They aren't amassing armies in other countries to assert 6th century law on all the territories that they conquer. So sure, Christian terrorists' kill numbers might be comparable or even greater than Islamic terrorists domestically (if you unfairly exclude 9/11) - but that doesn't mean that they're the same level of threat in a strategic geopolitical sense.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > Islamist terrorists aren't killing people ostensibly engaged in criminal acts. True disturbingly often for police officers. About half the people shot and killed by police in the US (about 500 people per year) have mental illness. Compare that rate with the rest of the western world (less than 100 people since 2000) where people with mental illness tend not to be murdered by police. Even if we remove all the mentally ill people with guns from those numbers (to make the weapon use comparable across countries) we see very many more people killed in the US than any other western nation. And if you want numbers for innocent people shot by officers with poor aim, well, they don't keep numbers so you can't get accurate stats. Here are a few: https://popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-love-you-why-do-you-make-us-angry-like-that/ https://popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-love-yo... > So sure, Christian terrorists' kill numbers might be comparable or even greater than Islamic terrorists domestically (if you unfairly exclude 9/11) I'm not excluding 9/11. Christian and right wing extremists have killed more than 3,000 people in the US in the 19th and 20th century. At least 3,500 black people were lynched, for example. We've seen in this thread people claiming that Islam has centuries of violence, so let's go back 200 years and see who's being killed and who's doing the killing. Black folks are being killed, and Good White Christians were doing the killing. > They're not looking to take down all of Western society. Sure they are. "NEW WORLD ORDER" and "THE JEWS DID IT" and "FREEMEN ON THE LAND" are all about how corrupt the current system is. Read the Unabomber manifesto. That's all about overthrowing the system. > They aren't amassing armies in other countries to assert 6th century law on all the territories that they conquer. There's no point having this discussion if you're just going to shift the goal posts to keep redefining what terrorism is or what extremism is or what atrocities do or don't count.

rmc 11y ago

There are many many nationalist terrorist groups (e.g. IRA) or communist terrorist groups (e.g. Red Army Faction). The IRA almost killed the British Prime Minister. There actually aren't that much Muslim terrorist attacks

jacquesm 11y ago
A lone gunman managed to derail dutch politics for decades.

coldtea 11y ago

Because these people live in societies that have been colonized, manipulated, held down and bombed for decades on end, forcing them to get radically hateful and fundamentalist as a response and pass that on to others (younger men etc). Why would a white Swedish, Canadian etc. have any reason to do the same? Besides, is it just terrorism that's incompatible with an "open society", or other acts of murder and oppression too? Because from the extermination of 6 million jews down to colonialism, slavery, the pogroms, nukes on civilians, gulags, the massacre in Manchuria, 2 world wars, etc, most western and asian countries don't look that good either.

crusso 11y ago
What's your point? That Islamic terrorism is compatible with open society because of a bunch of things were done to them over the past thousand years? Or is it that because Western society has had some bad actors/states, that we can never thereafter point to bad behaviors or systems of thought?
- jacquesm 11y ago
  I think his point is that we still have bad actors and states. We're just a lot better at PR and image management but to the dead that makes precious little difference.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >What's your point? That Islamic terrorism is compatible with open society because of a bunch of things were done to them over the past thousand years? The question in the thread wasn't whether "islamic terrorism" was compatible with open society, but whether islam itself is. And my point it, whether it is or not, that "open society" is not as "open" as it pretends to be either. If some family had done "a bunch of things" (of enslaving, torturing and murderous nature) to your family "over the past thousand years", would you see them as friends? Especially if they continued those things in one way or another up to today, while celebrating how "open" and "tolerant" they are, (as opposed to you, who hates them).
  - 11y ago

baddox 11y ago

That probably has something to do with the fact that there has been lots of military action, regime changes, etc. in countries with large Muslim populations over the past few decades. That's exactly the sort of thing I would expect to cause the affected people to radicalize.