June 12, 2016

LMAO. Well, Christian whackos like to kill abortion doctors, so that might be a thing.

 

That's because they do not have sponsors.

 

Sure.

 

I know of NO legitimate Christian organization, denomination or group that endorses or advocates murder. In the Bible the most severe of punishments is reserved for murderers because it is the ultimate crime to commit against your fellow man. I get your joke, but to someone uniformed what you said may resemble a valid point.

 

Yeah, that's a fair point.

 

The Qu'ran also reserves its most severe punishments for murderers. (And, to say that the Bible doesn't have plenty of places that endorse killing requires substantial cherry picking of the religious text. I'm an ex-Jesuit and Christians really need to stop ignoring the extremely brutal, fucked up shit that's in our own religious texts.).

Here, the hair splitting really needs to happen with the term "legitimate" -- my wife and I both study counterterrorism and radical Islamic fundamentalisms as part of our academic work. (She has a very good article on Jihadist tactical communication coming out soon. Will link it publicly when it goes to press, proofs are due in sometime next month.). Neither AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] nor ISIL/Daesh are "legitimate" in the sense that most major branches of Islam see their religious interpretations, which are extraordinarily shoddy, as valid interpretations. Nor do most Islamic countries provide them with official* public support, attempt to enter into bilateral trade agreements with their occupied territories, advocate for their state status in international organizations or agreements, etc. ISIL has around 200,000 members - and quickly dropping due to multi-nation military action; AQAP is down to 3-4,000 at last count. In a religion that has 1.3 billion members, that's less than .0157% of the global Islamic population.

If they have legitimacy, we give it to them by treating them as more than a militarized religious fringe. Our arguing that they represent something authentic, essential, or embedded in the heart of Islam is an argument that they themselves deploy and put to use. By forwarding that same assertion, we're doing that work for them. By presenting them as our greatest enemy or threat, we're legitimating them as a global opponent of meaningful significance. ISIL/Daesh's theology relies on them presenting themselves as a revolutionary force fighting the remnants of the Roman Empire in order to bring on the apocalypse. Yes, that's f'ing loony. They're the theological equivalent of the People's Temple Agricultural Project (Jonestown), or the Aum Shinrikyo (the group responsible for the Tokyo sarin attack, now split into the groups Aleph and Hikari no Wa), or the Eastern Lightning, or the National Liberation Front of Tripura, or the modern KKK (which still commits terrorist actions), or the Lord's Resistance Army - all of which are Christian or Pseudo-christian groups.

Here in the U.S. and Canada, terror attacks undertaken by radicalized Muslims happen in part because of the web prevalence of radical Islam's English language publications, Inspire and Dabiq. They're the prime place that mostly angry young men encounter a (poorly constructed) ideology and theology that supports violent action. WARNING: you're going to want to be careful if you go out and download any of these to check them out as the Pentagon and State department have put extremely compromised digital copies of these on the web with hidden spyware, keyloggers, and much much worse. With very few exceptions (*cough* 9-11), these aren't attacks supported or planned by ISIL or AQAP -- they're mostly just claimed after the fact as a PR stunt to show influence and provide troop morale. ISIL's Dabiq magazine actually downplays the value of lone wolf attacks and their contributions because it doesn't want people wasting resources that could be spent bringing the potential mujahid to Daesh's occupied territories. They want fighters and skilled trades to help build up their theocratic state. You should see their writings trying to get doctors and medical students to come join their hospitals and help with their medical school (Dabiq issues 3 and issue 7). But if someone wants to kill U.S. citizens in their name, they'll claim it. To people who are already either susceptible to influence or marginalized (either by poverty, mental illness, family, or education-level), radical Islamic fundamentalism's apocalyptic and millennial theology sounds legitimate. There has to be a confluence of other fucked up issues already in place to turn a generally peaceful Muslim into a terrorist backing a radical ideology in a high human development index country - and those fucked up issues for sure aren't "Islam itself".

We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of DACs, now already in progress.

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*Official public support, because even our "allies" like Saudi Arabia, itself a brutal regime, provide radical terror groups with financial and military support...but through large individual family donations and unofficial channels. Sometimes the military actions of our fundamentalist allies are beneficial to other radical groups as well, but we don't seem to have too much of a problem with that.

 

Excellent write up.

 

This is interesting, because there is some reality there. But this is tricky business. As I understand it, US involvement in the Middle East has been directly responsible for a lot of this. For example, the CIA installation of the Shah of Iran in '53. Also, you can draw a direct line of US actions from the US support and recruitment of the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, to the rise of Al Queda, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the creation ISIS.

I just think that any discussion about the rise of fundamentalist extremism in the Arab world needs to include mention of how the US has done a lot of damage and helped create these conditions.

Flame on.

 

You don't have to go very far from home to find people talking about killing gay people. Even in the U.S. Northeast and Great Lakes region. Hell, I can go down to Hillsdale County, Michigan and find a handful of ostensibly Christian militia groups who believe that the gay bookstore in the center of town is a satanic cult and it's their holy mission to destroy it.

I'd agree with this - but that Americans aren't buying it doesn't mean that Islam, as a global religion, isn't followed by mostly peaceful people that are more or less looking for the exact same thing everyone else is: a place to worship, safety, food, sex, and sleep.

The "Middle East" is pretty far from a homogenous region. And, a lot of its problems -- and causes for refugees fleeing -- aren't always caused by Islam itself, but by particular governments and a whole slew of economic/geopolitical circumstances. Plenty of Muslims want to (and do) flee the Middle East as well. Why would they want to get out of there?

True. But just because "we can't tell the difference" doesn't mean that the difference isn't there. As a country, our optics are pretty fucked half of the time.

 

That wasn't a hypothetical or from "reading". (But, you know, thanks for assuming. I appreciate that ever so much).

My father-in-law lives on Boot Lake, right in Hillsdale. He works in at the Hospital in the center of town and buys his weed from the exact gay bookstore I was mentioning. Oh, and he buys his dogs from the exact militias I was mentioning too. Not. Hypothetical.

More broadly, what I was saying is that Islam doesn't have a global monopoly on homophobic nutjobs with millennial and apocalyptic leanings. Saying that I was using a false equivalence trope between Christian and Islamic religious violence is a straw man, at best.

 

Boy, I forgot DACs encompass religious and political discussions that were specifically prohibited when this site was founded. Way to go, Marv. Seems like a perfect climate for Anax to return to, he'd feel right at home.

 

P.S. Modi 2 Uber is a joy.

Ahhh, see now that's a conservative point of view, because that's the way we would like things to work, but that is not the reality of how the world world works. It's this kind of thinking that leads to the idea that we should invade other countries to fix them... cuz that always works out.