Islamic Terrorism

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linguoboy
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby linguoboy » 2016-06-14, 21:57

vijayjohn wrote:In this case at least, it isn't just Muslims who are attacking gay people.

Steven Anderson is one of those ultra fringe attention trolls who seems to exist simply so my anti-Christian friends can link to his posts and say, "Christofascism, see!?" He's a one-man WBC and no anyone to be taken remotely seriously.
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Meera » 2016-06-14, 22:22

vijayjohn wrote:In this case at least, it isn't just Muslims who are attacking gay people.


I know Christians attack gay people too, many religions don't have tolerance to gay people and have attacked gay people. I was trying to explain to IpseDixit why the father may have said that comment. He is coming from a country where it is a crime to be gay so him saying that isn't surprising. In the USA if people say those things it is highly looked down upon and will hopefully get criticism whereas in a culture like Afghanistan it is quite normal and not looked down upon to say something like that.


One thing that is making me really mad about this, is that the same people who are calling for a ban on Muslims are the ones who supported Kim Davis, are against same sex marriage and won't let trans-gendered into the bathroom of their choice.
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-06-14, 23:26

I doubt this guy was mentally ill in any way. When stories like this happen, you see all kinds of shrinks offering armchair diagnoses about the perpetrator (never mind that there is an ethical principle called the Goldwater rule, named after the time this happened to Barry Goldwater during his presidental campaign, that forbids doctors from diagnosing people they've never even met) which are usually some form of personality disorder (antisocial, narcissistic, etc.). They should know better. Violent crimes are an order of magnitude more likely to be committed against the mentally ill than by them. Rarely, it does happen, in spectacularly gruesome cases like Vincent Li's murder of Tim McLean. But the odds are against that being a factor in mass murder.
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby IpseDixit » 2016-06-15, 9:00

Meera wrote:
Unfortunately that's just how many Muslims are raised and think. I guess it is similar to how Christians used to believe that gay people will burn in hell. In most Islamic countries being gay is outlawed. In Afghanistan it can land you a prison sentence. Not all Middle Eastern countries are like this as I'm pretty sure Lebanon or Turkey doesn't jail gay people. But in many Middle Eastern countries it is illegal to be gay or a Lesbian. In Afghanistan any sex before marriage is illegal and you can go to jail for it. If you are married and engage in sodomy you can also be jailed. These counties are quite conservative.


Yeah Meera, I'm not outraged by his beliefs per se. It's a well known fact that Muslims and Christians believe in that kind of BS.

What outraged me is that, apparently, he deemed ok to make such comments in the aftermath of such a big tragedy, denoting an utter lack of empathy and decency.

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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby TheStrayCat » 2016-06-15, 11:31

IpseDixit wrote:Yeah Meera, I'm not outraged by his beliefs per se. It's a well known fact that Muslims and Christians believe in that kind of BS.

What outraged me is that, apparently, he deemed ok to make such comments in the aftermath of such a big tragedy, denoting an utter lack of empathy and decency.


Most Christians from the US whom I know actually condemned the attack, prayed for the victims' families and, as far as I can see, nowadays they mostly do not see homosexuality as sinful. The only Biblical passage which some Christians take as an argument against homosexuals in fact may have several interpretations, and homophobes just use the most conservative one.

A few days ago I saw a comment on Facebook from some fundamentalist guy claiming that gays were "killing others' souls" and deserved to be murdered as sinners. I had no trouble proving to him that he was not an actual Christian using quotes from the Bible, but for some reason he got very offended.

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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby md0 » 2016-06-15, 14:07

And now apparently there's people supporting that gay self-loathing was part of the killer's motivation. Let's hope "closeted cases" aren't vilified more than they already are for the actions of this guy.
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby linguoboy » 2016-06-15, 20:45

TheStrayCat wrote:Most Christians from the US whom I know actually condemned the attack, prayed for the victims' families and, as far as I can see, nowadays they mostly do not see homosexuality as sinful. The only Biblical passage which some Christians take as an argument against homosexuals in fact may have several interpretations, and homophobes just use the most conservative one.

There are actually six passages (evenly split between the Old and New Testaments), though the two most quoted are Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:24-27.

It's been a mixed bag for me. I got into a polite argument with one of my sister's friends who talked about how she loved "homosexuals" as much as other people because "all of us are sinners" and she "doesn't judge".
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Yasna » 2016-06-18, 19:28

When Islamists attack, the ‪‎Regressive Left‬ talk of 'loners' and grievances. When the Far-Right attack, they talk of ideology.
And the Populist Right does the mirror opposite.
The truth is, it's a mixture of grievances, identity, recruitment and ideology in all cases. Less ideological blinkers please.
Extremism: name it, isolate it, blame it and shame it.

-Maajid Nawaz hitting the nail on the head again.

In other news, here's a perspective from one of those "minorities within a minority" that we don't hear enough of:
Gay Muslim: Islam Is No Religion of Peace

Growing up in a small Indian town with a large Muslim population, I heard young men talking about jihad in Kashmir and Palestine. I have even heard such matters discussed in hushed whispers at Manhattan’s 96th St. mosque, where I sometimes go and pray on Fridays and where subjugation of women is discussed in the open without the blink of an eye. The mosque was built largely with Saudi money, and its Imams often come equipped with the perversions of Wahhabi ideology."

"In 2010, I stood outside a nightclub called Acid, perched on a Beirut cliff. It was Ramadan, and Acid was one of the precious few openly gay nightclubs in all of the Arab Middle East. I shared a cigarette with a friend called Babak as a car with Saudi tags rolled up.
“That’s a rich Saudi prince!” Babak said. He often comes here to cruise! You have no idea how many rich Saudi fuckers come here. We Beirutis must screw well! The Saudis? They walk around like they are so butch but once naked they are all bottoms.”
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-06-19, 1:08

I've met a lot of Muslims in person but never a single one who condoned terrorism. I'm not sure what's so remarkable about Muslims not condoning terrorism.

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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Hypocrisy » 2016-06-19, 14:04

As a person who lives in a country with an overwhelming amount of muslim population and identifies as Agnostic, I would like to share my view on this topic.

There's this particular thing about such matters that I always find very worrying. People who experience said notion, which is Islamic terrorism in this case, first hand or suffer from indirect reflections/repercussions of such an act being committed by those who identify as an adherence to the notion, are neither a siding party nor encoured to partake in such discussions for the most of the time. I don't think you'll get much from a conversation which is conducted by those who live in the same environment and are exposed to similar arguments from all sources of information. This is not peculiar to this topic. It's just a general concept that needs to be upheld by humanity if problems are to be solved, in my opinion.

As for the problem at hand, I think, there are several aspects to it. People who can't stand a group of Islamic people solely because they identify as Muslims are plain absurd. Aren't you in the same category with the people you're criticizing for being religious extremists while you, yourself, come off as an overthinking extremist for classifying people according to their personal belief, regardless of their attitude and intentions? Indeed, you are. Isn't it the sprout of the Fascist ideology created by the media overlords who are there to manipulate communities? Yes, it is. I can guarantee that the people I live with, who are mild Muslims, do not conspire against you and won't take deliberate actions that will harm you. Why would you hate these people without distinguishing what's good and what's bad? One must not fall for the vilification of targeted masses through false news and social media. They are powerful tools that can easily provoke people and turn them into mindless zealots as religion does to some people.

Speaking of the other side of the coin, most of the Islamic communities are undereducated, corrupt and ignorant. They are unaware of the true meaning of deeds they carry out on a daily basis. They don't soak the piece of information they need to, rather they get stuck at idle details. They mostly get separated from their motive of doing something benevolent and end up doing it for the sake of action. They pray to god not to repent their sins and be a good person, they do it because that's what they're taught and that's how it's written in the holy book. They find no shame in mentally/physically torturing someone throughout the process of a well-meaning action. Here's an analogy to get it across; it's okay to reprehend a mischievous kid on his birthday for whatever reason and gift him a present afterwards. Isn't the sole purpose of celebrating a day called "birthday" make your child happy? What's the quality of your good will if you miss out on many steps to achieve your purpose? This is just an example to express how the mind set of an average Muslim is in Turkey. Here's another example that might supplement this argument. I'm currently serving in the military and the Turkish military is the kind of place where younger soldiers tend to arguve over how faithful they are and coalesce around religion. On the other hand, they force newer recruits into doing their personal work, use brute force to keep them under control, disobey the commands and smoke weed frequently. Yet they fast since we're in Ramadan and try to perform religious rituals whenever possible. When I ask them why they act like that, they say it's okay as long as they go by the written dogma. You can see the inconsistency between their ideas and their actions.

These people need to be approached with love, affection and knowledge. They need to be taught what's right and what's not. They need to be shown what's to approve and what's to disapprove. They shouldn't be condemned for sharing the same religion with a few lunatics who fell victim to a mastermind as a consequence of many hardships.

TL;DR: It's not their fault that some people condone religious extremism. They're not desired to speak out loud and they're deprived of lots of facilities due to corrupt powerhouses. Do not hate them, let go of your prejudice and help them prosper. Aggression is not the way to go.

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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Johanna » 2016-06-25, 23:41

Yasna wrote:
When Islamists attack, the ‪‎Regressive Left‬ talk of 'loners' and grievances. When the Far-Right attack, they talk of ideology.
And the Populist Right does the mirror opposite.
The truth is, it's a mixture of grievances, identity, recruitment and ideology in all cases. Less ideological blinkers please.
Extremism: name it, isolate it, blame it and shame it.

-Maajid Nawaz hitting the nail on the head again.

In other news, here's a perspective from one of those "minorities within a minority" that we don't hear enough of:
Gay Muslim: Islam Is No Religion of Peace

That's definitely not the view of the left around here, they still call Islamic terrorism just that.

The difference is that the mainstream left try to explain the causes behind it so that it can be countered in a way that's actually effective and doesn't end up with loads and loads of dead people on each side, while the extreme left simply call it "justifiable terrorism", at most "guerilla warfare", but don't try to tell people it's not politically motivated.

The mainstream right on the other hand have always been tripping over themselves trying to explain how Anders Behring Breivik, John Ausonius and Peter Mangs were just lone loons with guns (and in Breivik's case, also a bomb) who can't in any way be tied to any actual political movement even tangentially. Even though there are plenty of said movements on the (these days not so) far right that outright state that we're at war, a war being waged between the true (white) Nordics and everyone else, with non-whites and collaborators alike being acceptable targets, and more importantly: what the men in question have told about their motives themselves.
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Yasna » 2016-06-29, 13:45

Airport Attack Rocks Istanbul, a City ‘Already Hurting’

Nothing new for Turkey, except the scale of the attack. Of course Turkey's government, along with other governments, is partly to blame for the scourge of ISIS since they tolerated them back in the early days in order to undermine the Syrian government. I'd welcome an invasion of ISIS territory by Turkey to quicken the demise of ISIS, but Erdogan doesn't seem particularly eager.
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Yasna » 2016-07-17, 2:12

Qandeel Baloch: How her murder reflects a divided country

Let us remember that it's not just us racist, colonizing, Islamophobic Westerners that are being slaughtered and dehumanized by Islamist nutcases, but also women, gays, liberals, you name it in many Muslim majority countries. We owe it not just to ourselves, but also to oppressed Muslims around the world to name and shame Islamism and all the injustice it brings upon the world.
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Saim » 2016-07-17, 9:06

Yasna wrote:We owe it [...] to oppressed Muslims around the world to name and shame Islamism and all the injustice it brings upon the world.


What is people in the West "naming and shaming" Islamism going to do for oppressed Muslims?

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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby md0 » 2016-07-17, 10:37

My guess would be, it creates a hostile environment in which Muslims are pushed more towards identity consolidation as a defence mechanism.
White man's burden mentality, however noble and well-intended in some cases, is just shy colonialism and after hundreds of years of colonialist meddling in our region, I think a lot of groups are justified not welcoming the concern Yasna expresses.

It's been only a few years ago when British and American TV personalities wrote open letters to Cyprus patronizing us about gay rights ("it's time for the Cypriots to wake up and feel the love etc etc"). Thank you Stephen Fry, you solve heterosexism in Cyprus by signing that open letter.

The duty we have to other groups' struggle is to show solidarity and republish their message. Not to be arm-chair activists who sit down and write position texts about the politics of a society they haven't interacted with even once, like some sort of European Maoists (that is weirdly enough, a thing that exists).
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Yasna » 2016-07-17, 18:22

Saim wrote:What is people in the West "naming and shaming" Islamism going to do for oppressed Muslims?

Not much, just make some of them realize they are not alone in this struggle. It's not much, but any more active approach is just as likely to hurt their cause by drawing the accusation of cooperating with malicious foreign powers. And then there are of course the cases where foreign powers do act maliciously under the guise of supporting human rights, which we must be very wary of.

md0 wrote:My guess would be, it creates a hostile environment in which Muslims are pushed more towards identity consolidation as a defence mechanism.
White man's burden mentality, however noble and well-intended in some cases, is just shy colonialism and after hundreds of years of colonialist meddling in our region, I think a lot of groups are justified not welcoming the concern Yasna expresses.

Do dark-skinned people around the world not welcome others around the world vocally rejecting racism? Do women around the world not welcome others around the world vocally rejecting sexism?

md0 wrote:The duty we have to other groups' struggle is to show solidarity and republish their message.

I agree. But what you actually have in the West is many self-described liberals working AGAINST Muslim reformers by repeating ad nauseam that terrorism perpetrated by Muslims has nothing to do with Islam, that these terrorists aren't true Muslims, etc. It's disgusting not only for being intellectually dishonest, but also for discrediting the message of Muslim reformers around the world.
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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-17, 20:02

Yasna wrote:
Saim wrote:What is people in the West "naming and shaming" Islamism going to do for oppressed Muslims?

Not much, just make some of them realize they are not alone in this struggle.

What, on some forum for language nerds almost none of them look at or probably even know about?
Do dark-skinned people around the world not welcome others around the world vocally rejecting racism? Do women around the world not welcome others around the world vocally rejecting sexism?

Not always, because the ways that other people around the world vocally reject racism and sexism often also include either a poor understanding of the initial problem or a rejection of other aspects of their identity, including the Cypriot example md0 mentioned.
But what you actually have in the West is many self-described liberals working AGAINST Muslim reformers by repeating ad nauseam that terrorism perpetrated by Muslims has nothing to do with Islam, that these terrorists aren't true Muslims, etc. It's disgusting not only for being intellectually dishonest, but also for discrediting the message of Muslim reformers around the world.

You also have actual Muslims who are completely against terrorism saying this.

And the fact that it's specifically Islam that's being used as an excuse really doesn't seem particularly relevant to me in a world where any religion is used as an excuse for violence, even Buddhism (e.g. Wirathu in Burma, the Bodu Bala Sena in Sri Lanka).

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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Yasna » 2016-07-17, 20:08

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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-17, 21:09

That's one point of view. Here's another, from a Muslim who supports terrorism no more than Maajid Nawaz does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gK2SagB6zA
I'm not sure who's denying that Islam is being used as an excuse for violence (note that pointing out that Islam is being used as an excuse is NOT the same thing as equating terrorism with Islam), and again, I see other religions also being used that way. And as another brown person myself, I disagree with Nawaz that the point liberals are making is necessarily that brown people are somehow incapable of being secular democrats.

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Re: Islamic Terrorism

Postby Saim » 2016-07-17, 21:34

I actually do agree that it's silly to just repeate this has nothing to do with Islam and they're not real Muslims. AFAIK in Islam an individual for takfir (excommunication) to happen and be legitimate there has to be some sort of real judicial process and not just opposing factions throwing the non-Muslim label back and forth. More to the point: by making it an issue about who's Muslim and who's not we're entering into the takfiri sectarian playing field. Neither Muslims nor non-Muslims should engage in this discourse.

Regarding the first statement, it obviously does have something to do with Islam. It may be a particular interpretation of Islam that's at root but to say that Islam isn't a factor at all is just playing to the right-wiing discourse that says that we're "IGNORING THE TURTH" and repeating nice-sounding mantras.


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