8 ms·

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

by 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?

by 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?