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Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

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Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no question that the ideology of islam - or at least the ideology of several of its sects is a critical element in these attacks. Claiming otherwise is leftist PC nonsense. Sure there are many good muslims, most of whom you will find adhere to a secular ideology and western value system despite labelling themselves "muslim".

I think the focus in Islam itself is misleading. The Ottoman empire was muslim for hundreds of years yet christians and muslims did not fight against each other on religious grounds, and there was definitely no such fringe fanaticism. My grandmother remembered that people were sad when muslims had to leave the balkans due to national population exchanges back in the beginning of the last century. The terrorists you s…

I'm sorry but I disagree with most of your comment (with the exception that we concur that the muslim population needs to take responsibility for their own communities - through their religious leaders being more vocal about "fanatic" elements).

You seam to have a very rosy picture of the Ottoman empire.Without going into too much detail, most historians would agree that it was an aggressive expansionist empire with intolerance to non-islamic sects.

"The terrorists you see today would become terrorists in the name of Christ just as well." - This is patently absurd, at least in this century, and a horrendously apologist argument.

I would recommend reading several key articles illustrating the Saudi Wahabi link to ISIS and how its clear that this is an intrinsically Islamist problem: eg.

http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/11/wahhabism-...

Also, I'd advise reading Sam Harris's "Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon"

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armag...

Re: Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

#672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Soviet national here... In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime... What gives you that idea?

Solzhenitsyn on Stalin, to be honest. _The First Circle_ is fiction, but I find it hard to imagine that he would have described Stalin as not caring about burglars unless that could be imagined of him... Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR wanted to keep things more or less held together, but wasn't that concerned about people who fell between the cracks.

If you equate Stalin with "the USSR", you're wilfully excluding about 40 years of additional history--history that was very, very different after 1953, and certainly is not captured in gulag literature.

What do you know about crime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years? (A whopping 29 years combined.)

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