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VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

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Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#341

Post by robwilliams »

ausjke wrote: post #279

I'm agnostic so really no prejudice on either side. I see so many religions/gods on earth and I feel Muslim is the one that stays with their stone age laws/rules without updating/revising the original released versions. Other religions seem evolving over time, but Muslim is different and I feel they are just so out, thus all these tragedies. Anything that has no ability to upgrade/evolve overtime is doomed to be lose…

>Democracy or staying-politically-correct or show-mercy-to-the-murder are all useless to combat this level of violence, the only way to really fix it, is either they evolve and modernize quickly, or get erased by a war at a large scale. It seems more likely the latter will be the case as they're turning everyone against them quickly.

Who is "them"? ISIS or Muslims in general? It's absurd to think that there aren't "modernized" Muslims in the US.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#342

Post by NotSammyHagar »

crusso wrote: post #305
steveklabnik wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-... > 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, "…

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 t…

We define away the problem. White people shooting others is not usually considered terrorism (such as a mass shooting committed by a white person). Terrorism is used to label actions by people you don't like. Some politicians even make statements calling the president a terrorist because he does something they don't like. We don't call it terrorism when the American government kidnapped people, took them to other countries, and let them be tortured (rendition); I do think that was not only wrong but was something you could use the T word for.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#343

Post by steveklabnik »

vox_mollis wrote: post #336
steveklabnik wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-... > 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, "…

That's a very good research methodology. Excluding non-stateside attacks and arbitrarily selecting 2002 as the starting point to arrive at a likely preselected conclusion.

As a citizen of the US, I prefer to talk about my own country, since I have more historical context. And 9/11 was a one-time event that hasn't and can't happen again, now that we've done things like reinforce pilot's doors. Removing outliers is a pretty common thing.

Furthermore, it makes sense to start post-9/11 since "we're in a different world now" and all that rhetoric that politicians have been spewing since. This is about today's political context, where 9-11 was the defining moment.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#344

Post by will_brown »

Natanael_L wrote: post #290
tome wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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 apol…

IS = an ideological network of individuals hiding among civilian populations across the globe

US = an nation state with an identifiable military subjected to rule of law

>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

For better or worse the US is operating on intelligence specifically designed to avoid/minimize civilian populations, which is very difficult when IS doesn't wear military uniform (as required by the laws of war to distinguish military actors from civilian populace) and hides among civilians. I don't know if it is "tons" or what that even means in relation to human death figures, but I'll concede it happens, still it should be defined as collateral damage because the goal of US operations is not to kill the civilian populace but those individuals bearing the most responsibility.

On the other hand IS specifically designs its quasi-military attacks to be inflicted directly on the civilian populations with the goal of maximizing civilian casualties.

These are not just differences in justifications, but differences in actions...at least according to the law. Now I could see your issue if the US was secretly funding, training and arming non-identifiable combatants and recruiting/embedding them all over the globe to specifically orchestrate indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#345

Post by raverbashing »

jacquesm wrote: post #261
tome wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

> I see precious little difference to an attack on Fallujah to 'liberate' it and an attack on Paris to murder a bunch of people.

Oh of course, they're the same thing.

Bombing civilians (without those being the explicit target) in a military context is exactly the same thing as just invading a concert room or shooting randomly at people

You're missing the context and the intent, just that. But I can see your ideology prevents you from seeing that

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#346

Post by NotSammyHagar »

iamthepieman wrote: post #37

I work with a Muslim and I'm a Christian. Since we are both very conservative, I actually have more in common with him than with my secular coworkers and friends. Unfortunately we both work remotely and live several hundred miles from each other. I think we could be good friends if we lived closer. One thing I have learned talking with my Muslim coworker is that, just like in Christianity, there are many divisions an…

I think one reason a lot of conservative politicians are so fixated on worrying about Muslim religious laws having sway in the US (sharia law), is that they want christian laws to hold sway legally in the us.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#348

Post by kohanz »

tome wrote: post #221
jacquesm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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-t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#349

Post by tim333 »

rmc wrote: post #318
lars wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-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 terro…

Breivik wrote a manifesto claiming he was doing it to support Christianity. And yet people don't call him a Christian terrorist.

Breivik was a bit of a one off. Sadly Islamic terrorism seems more frequent.

Re: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

#350

Post by acqq »

the_af wrote: post #196
cygx wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make no mistake, I'm not a fan of 'conservative' Christianity. As I mentioned elsewhere, the problems are ideologies, in particular those that promote totalitarianism and unreason - whether or not they are religious in nature is incidental to me. However, note that no beheadings have been staged in Vatican City in recent years.

> However, note that no beheadings have been staged in Vatican City in recent years. True, but I think it's more complex than that. First, I do not think the Vatican automatically represents the most conservative brand of Christianity; not at all times, anyway. Not now, for example. Second, beheadings seem rightfully barbaric and horrendous to us, but as terrible as they are, I think their impact is superficial in a…

> ISIS beheadings are a matter of form, a propaganda tool

Wrong. The beheadings are the things Mohammad did, as written in their holy books, so they just do that, following their role model even without the cameras.

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