Betoni wrote:You don't think the fact that they had a gun influenced the decision to use a gun?
This is a dishonest question. It suggests that possessing the gun is at the crux of the problem and was the motivation for the violence, which is nonsense. The intent to commit violence existed independently of weapon ownership.
Existential Cats wrote:Eh, just curious, and besides I recall one of your old accounts boasted "Islamophobic" in its sig, and you just now recently said you'd be Islamophobic in response to Shrillland's comment. I don't know that many people who would boast of themselves as "homophobic" would have high opinions of most gays, for instance.
It is entirely possible to separate a religion from it's practitioners in a way which cannot be replicated with sexual orientation. The latter is a matter of biological makeup and is exempt from the choice of the individual; judging someone for things they can't help is entirely wrong.
Belief systems are another matter. Religion, unlike ideology, is not a conscious choice. For the former we are drawn to what feels truest to us spiritually, for the latter we look for reason and logic to shape our views. It is therefor wrong to persecute people who follow a specific religion or no religion at all; yet this doesn't mean a religion and it's teachings should go unchallenged - quite the opposite. It should be expected of people to challenge a religion whose moral and ethical teachings contrast with those of one's own culture. This is normal and healthy. What is truly unacceptable is to punish people for believing those teachings. Believe, not follow, to be clear. It is one thing to believe a man should be executed for being gay; it is another thing entire to hunt down a gay man and murder him for being gay. The latter is pure evil and deserves punishment, the former is still evil but necessitates censorship - not necessarily punishment.
I hold no ill will toward any Muslim who holds no ill will toward me. I have no desire to seize Mosques and convert them to Churches, ban burkas or hijabs, force Muslims to renounce their religion or leave the country, or whatever else have you. But I will not shy away from criticizing, challenging, or condemning the Islamic religion and all it believes for both secular and theological reasons. I will do so openly and militantly, and I will welcome their apostates with open arms.
Your argument, then, is that the violence of modern-day Muslims is rooted in the foundation and spread of Islam? Yeah, I'm really not convinced that the conquests of Muhammad and his immediate disciples 1300 years ago are a bigger cause of terrorist attacks committed by Muslims than the reasons I've outlined.
You should be considering this trend of Islamic holy wars has gone on uninterrupted for the entirety of those 1300 years. The West didn't radicalize Muslims; the Islamic World was continuously waging wars of conquest and aggression before, during, and after European colonialists and American interventionists began to interfere in the region.
I'm not interested in a semantics debate. The point is economic failures (and the Arab world being BTFO'd by Israel around the same time period) played a huge role in the growth of Islamism.
In this you're partly correct but you're also missing a key bit of context here. You seem to treat the growth of "Islamism" as if it was a direct reaction to Euro-American imperialism, which is partly accurate. The piece you're missing is that there was no period of peaceful non-aggression by Muslim states prior to this, which is what you seem to be implying.
I can't help but find it ironic how you dismiss the US-sponsored Iranian coup as irrelevant, but feel the need to bring up the early Muslim conquests. Incidentally, I think early Muslim-Christian conflicts define your relation with Islam stronger than most Muslims' (the non-fundamentalists, at least) relations with Christianity.
But anyway, I was specifically referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US-backed coup in Iran, the Suez crisis, European colonialism in the Middle East, etc.
I do not deny that these all contributed to destabilizing the Islamic World, but that isn't what we were discussing. You seem to believe that without the destabilization of the Islamic World by Western powers that "Islamism" would not exist; I completely reject this theory, because it contradicts the history of Islam as one being bound in violence against unbelievers. This isn't a matter of "ancient conflicts versus recent conflicts". The only period in which peace had been brought to Middle East was during the unrivaled dominion of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates and even this period was not entirely without violence. This period of relative calm was due explicitly because the Caliphates had driven out all their rivals from the region, and as Caliphal authority declined under the Abbasids the region faced new periods of violence thereafter. The period of this is one of continual violence between Muslim and non-Muslim powers, often motivated by an Islamic push for conquest with the exception of the European colonial empires and, much later, the USA and Israel.
Though these people are few and far between at least, as you expressed earlier, no?
I suggested nothing of the sort. Most statistics, IIRC, suggest that the majority of Muslims hold xenophobic-at-best attitudes toward unbelievers, apostates, heretics, and blasphemers. Admittedly I'm going off recollection here so I may be misremembering.
If it's a problem with a minority of radicals, then, the problem has much more to do with their dangerous interpretation of Islam than mainstream Islam.
Therein lies part of the problem: their interpretations aren't "dangerous", but traditional. While generally riddled with hypocrites, psychopaths, and blasphemers the self-proclaimed 'holy warriors' of Al-Qaeda bear a much closer resemblance to those of the medieval Caliphates than any modern secular republic in the Islamic World, especially the "Westernized" ones.
Muhammad would have invoked takfir against half the Muslim World if he could see what has happened to the Ummah.
