Metahive wrote:Y'know what's funny? When the Troubles or the Thirty Years War or the Crusades are brought up as examples of Christians murdering in the name of Jesus, people are quick to point out that there's more to it than just religious fanatcism, that there were very complex socio-economical and geo-political reasons that played into it as well which can't be ignored and that simply blaming it all on Christiainity is wrong. And you know what? Those people are right.
What you don't seem to understand is that I am
not one of “those” people. From where I sit you have a disturbing tendency to pigeonhole people and I object to that.
And while it is incorrect to attribute all about those wars to religion it is equally a mistake to ignore the role religion played.
ISIS flies the "banner of the prophet" but it is undenniable that the reason they were making it as far as they did isn't because they were overly "righteous" or "faithful in the strength of their convictions", it's because they were able to capitalize on past grudges.
Don't forget the ruthless brutality. These guys have a definite grasp of how to conquer and plunder. There's a psychological factor at work here, too.
I also stress again that the Sunnite-Shi'ite split is primarily political, the biggest difference isn't in any religious doctrine but in the question of who was the true successor to Muhammad's position and the power and influence it brought with it.
That may be how it started but to say the Sunni-Shi'ite is
currently political flies in the face of reality. People live and die over doctrinal differences
Also, ISIS is fighting with genocidal furor against the Kurds who are fellow Sunnis, so much for the implication of ethnicity having no part in this.
Again, you lack understanding. It's not uncommon for fanatics to view others of the same nominal religion as not devout enough
regardless of ethnicity. If it was
just about race ISIS wouldn't methodically butcher their fellow ethnics for not being devout enough.
On top of which –
which ethnicity is ISIL again? Because I've seen a lot of different skin colors in their representatives and heard a lot of different accents.
Also, why does Iraq have Kurds, Sunnites and Shi'ites so close together in one place who hate each other? Because the country is an artificial construct whose borders were drawn by the French and British at Versailles out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. So you can whine all you want about it, but this is yet another thing where Colonialism had its bloody hand in.
If that's the sole explanation why isn't
every artificially created ethnically diverse former colony/nation derived from defunct empire shattering?
Every modern nation larger than a postage stamp is derived from diverse bits and pieces. By your argument some place like Brazil should be completely unworkable yet still it exists and while not perfect certainly hasn't fractured like Iraq.
If we suppress Islam and put Muslims under general suspicion, which will be the likely result if we follow yours, Simon's and Crown's suggestion of blaming it all primarily on Islam, it won't do a thing to ISIS or Boko Haram and instead drive more Muslims in Europe towards sympathy with Al-Quaeda and the like. I mean, what have they to lose when you already think they're deep down murderous fanatics and treat them accordingly?
And.... this is why you piss people off.
Not one person in this thread has proposed anything of the sort, rather, we've all been at pains to distinguish the vast numbers of Muslims from the extremists that turn into terrorists. Aside from those who would like to remove all religions equally (and even those here propose reason rather than force), no one is suggesting outlawing, suppressing, or oppressing anyone, Muslim or not.
Islam is not The Reason because if it was we'd have a lot more problems than we do. There is something about modern Islam, though, that aids a certain form of extremism. I've heard it blamed a great deal on the Wahhabi sect, but even that is probably too simple. My guess would be an intersection of angry, dissatisfied young men and old men who give them a religious excuse to do something unpleasant with that anger.
I also have to laught at this whole "need to show strength", because all the pasts's "shows of strength" only made the situation worse and drove more people over there to fanaticism.
Well, gee, NOT doing anything really worked well, let's look at that part of history. In 1993 Al Qaeda detonated a bomb in the basement of NYC skyscraper and while the US did arrest a couple people there was no military action. In 2000 the
USS Cole was attacked and again, no military retaliation. A year later those nasty people went back to the NYC skyscraper and
that time they brought it down.
So, you see, history also shows that simply ignoring this problem doesn't make it go away, either. It's not that the people doing this shit want to be left alone, no, they want to provoke, fight, and kill. It's either “yay, they do nothing, we can kill more of them!” or “yay, they attacked us, we have an excuse to kill more of them!”
So, you can talk about colonialism, politics, racism, religion, and so on, but at the end of the day it's still a situation of barbarians at the gates. You can't ignore them, but resisting them risks more violence. So, what do you do when both action and non action have unpleasant results?
Metahive wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Islam, and fundamentalist Islam in particular, strongly influence the character of those revolts and wars. As in, what targets are considered valid, what tactics are embraced, what minorities are vulnerable to persecution.
Is anything ISIS does worse than what happened during WW2?
Not
yet, not that we're aware of... but really, WWII is a fucking hard act to follow in that regard. Come back when cities are burning and we'll revisit the question.
That didn't require religion to reach the bottom of the barrel of atrocities on both sides, did it? So why act as if Islam is special in this regard?
Because MOST religions these days don't go around spitting in the eyes of major players like the US, USSR, Britain, and so on.
And, again – in this thread people are NOT simply going “hur, hur, evil Muslims!”. We're talking about a
sub-set of Muslims, just like certainly doomsday cults are a subset of Christianity. When we say religion was a factor in the
Jonestown, Guyana suicides/massacre that's not to say ALL Christians are like that, or that religion is the sole explanation, but to deny that religion played a significant role there is a denial of reality.
Religion unites and divides people, but so do many other things like tribalism, politics and ideology and all of them have resulted in abject misery without needing any divine inspiration.
As true as that statement is, it is folly to
deny that it is just as much a factor as any of those others you listed.
Yes, people
really do kill each other over religious squabbles. In addition to all the other reasons they kill each other.
On the other hand, as I recall, you're awfully quick to present those past wrongs as justification and explanation for the status quo. Which I consider to be the moral equivalent of pointing to a child abuser and saying it's not really their fault because they were abused as a child too.
It is my personal opinion that if we only concentrate on the surface issues like what religion some evildoers have is akin to scratching an ugly carbuncle and hope it cures the intestinal cancer.
You error here is thinking that religion is
always a surface issue. It's not. You fail to grasp that for some people religion is as deep an issue as any other.
And to finally put an end to this, the ideology underlying islamic terrorism is...barely 50 years old. Look up Sayyid Qutb. Terrorist tactics in the name of Allah themselves hail from the distant past of...the 1980s. If terrorist violence is so ingrained to Islam then why is it such a recent phenomenon?
Who said terrorist violence is “ingrained” in Islam any more than any other religion? One problem with religion is that it can give people a justification for violence – as can a number of other things.
