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Comment by dopamean | Hacker News Reader

I have to ask, and please excuse my ignorance here, but what are we supposed to do?

If men, armed with guns and explosives, kill scores of civilians and injure hundreds more in the name of a particular ideology what are we supposed to actually do? When I hear the thought that "responding with knee-jerk Islamophobia" is exactly what they want it begs the question: should we do nothing? Any response is going to be deemed Islamophobic because the response is going to single out Muslims. Is that really a crazy thing though? The shooters sure weren't Shinto.

If we do literally nothing then what? We wait for another deadly, and possibly more spectacular attack. Are we supposed to do nothing then too? At what point are we supposed to act? I feel very torn on this because I have at times thought that as crazy as some may be Islamist extremists sometimes have a point about Western interference in the Middle East. However, I cannot get behind the idea that when they gun down civilians at restaurants and concerts that the response should be anything but severe.

I also take issue with people who label Western aggression in response to terrorism "Islamophobic." We in the West are not the ones making it about Islam. The terrorists are. They are the ones showing up with guns screaming about their God. They are the ones using their religion to recruit and justify their actions. And so when governments go after them then YES, they are going after Muslims. That is the bed they made and unfortunately we all have to sleep in it.

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How about first stopping with what we know makes things worse - NOT provoking them by for example interfering the way CIA have staged coups for decades, causing internal animosity, bombing carelessly (see the US bomb that hit Doctors Without Borders recently), etc...

All these countries are being careless and heavy handed, and the origins of most of the high profile terrorists of today can be traced back to actions taken by western countries. So many rebel groups armed by western agencies later turned into terrorists and guerillas once the agencies left, so many times, over and over. So many aided coup makers just defected and kept their power for themselves.

The most effective way to get rid of terrorists is to take away their recruitment base, by not giving people more reasons to attack. Yes, it will take long until all the current terrorists are gone. But the current methods are only making things worse.

Forgive me if this is in the linked article (it's not loading for me), but if we were to say to ISIS "let's negotiate", what is it that they want? Is it something reasonable?

He's saying the west should stop interfering in the middle east, with which I whole heartily agree.

What do they want? Here you go.

This is the first (and only?) interview ever given to a Western journalist.

https://www.facebook.com/JuergenTodenhoefer/videos/101527236...

I just watched that entire video and it's pretty terrifying.

Why would they want to negotiate? They're winning hands down.

Seems pretty clear from many sources that their stated goal is to restore the "caliphate" — an Islamic state under the rule of a community of religious scholars guided by a caliph taken to mean the successor to the Prophet Muhammad For them anyone who doesn't believe in their interpretation of Islam must convert or die.

Meanwhile President Obama has encouraging words for them: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”. So much for free speech and cartoons.

What is it that they want?

"What ISIS Really Wants" (The Atlantic, March 2015) [0]:

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...

No, that's not what we should do at all.

They got power because people in the region thought it was a better idea to give them power than to allow our destabilizing influence to continue. Take away all reasons for why they got support in the first place, and they will be marginalized by the people themselves.

NO NO NO

Let's end the myth that Western foreign policy is (solely) to blame.

What about Islamic terrorists killing people in Southern Thailand? Is there something wrong with their foreign policy?

What about Islamic terrorists killing Filipinos for the past 20-30 years? Have Christians been oppressing Muslims over there?

What about the recent clashes between Muslims and Buddhist monks in Burma? What did the monks do wrong?

Radical Islam is a GLOBAL jihad movement.

Radical Islam has become a global jihad movement and it was created by the west interfering in the middle east.

Because it's not like attacks like this weren't committed by muslims before ? In reality they've been at it since the early middle ages.

You mean those middle ages where a bunch of Christians went over to the middle east to kill a bunch of Muslims? You mean those middle ages?

First crusade: 1096 AD

Muslim expansion wars: 736 AD

In a way you're right, you've just got the agressor wrong. In fact the crusades were started because of muslim agression. Because, and I'm quoting muslim historical sources here "the blood of Christians was standing above our knees in Jerusalem".

Attention people! We found the problem!

Apparently the Muslims did a big land grab about 1500 years ago or so (just like the Romans did before them) and that's, apparently, where it all started.

Turns out it has nothing to do with the US foreign policy of the past 60 or so years, the creation of the state of Israel (and the Israelis being a bunch of dicks about it, and for the record, I'm most certainly NOT an anti Semite, though I'm allergic to assholes) and the British hopelessly trying to colonize Afghanistan throughout 1800's and a whole bunch of other dickhead moves by the west and their buddies.

Apologies. I'm not trying to insult your (or anyone's) intelligence. I just couldn't resist...

/sarcasm

PS: I'm very much a westerner, white male, atheist, born and raised in the Netherlands and currently living in Australia, for what ever it's worth.

Exactly this. The elements for violence are baked into Islamic cannon in a way that has no equivalent in any other messianic religion.

The west holds its share of blame, but so does Islam.

You ignore the hundreds of years of violence perpetrated in the names of other religions.

No, I absolutely do not. What you are ignoring is that the canonical text of these religions are not equal. Where are the Tibetan suicide bombers?

Ignoring the religious and theological basis for this violence is part of the reason we've been so ineffective in fighting it. Clearly social tensions are part of the problem, but so is the religion itself.

Aum Shinryko drew upon Tibettan buddhist teachings.

There are plenty of buddhist terrorist attacks, and these can be found with simple web searches.

Tibetan armed struggle also happens, but because it's in China i) Chinese authority hides it ii) Chinese authority uses a too broad definition of terrorism. But there was armed resistance in 2008 in Lhassa.

>There are plenty of buddhist terrorist attacks, and these can be found with simple web searches.

There's a negligible number of buddhist terrorist attacks compared to muslim terrorist attacks.

The position you're defending is absurd and betrays an a priori conclusion on your part.

Still easy to find:

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/2/myanmars-buddhi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_violence#Regional... http://world.time.com/2013/06/20/extremist-buddhist-monks-fi...

Christianity was muzzled during the Enlightenment. While the religious right has been getting worse in recent decades (and this poses a long-term threat to freedom), Christianity is not practiced seriously and purely on a massive scale as it was during the Dark Ages.

Every large group has a fringe.

Agreed. And some fringes are orders of magnitude larger than others.

Moreover:

- Most Germans were non-violent people in 1944, but we can still talk about cultural elements that enabled Nazism

- Most Russians were non-violent in the 60's, but we can still talk about cultural elements that enabled Stalinism

- Most Chinese were non-violent during the Maoist dictatorship, but we can still talk about culutral elements that enabled Maoism

I could go on, but you get the point. Just because most Muslims are nice people doesn't mean that Islamic canon doesn't play a role in terrorism. No politically-correct nitpicking can change that.

You still ignore that Christian fundamentalists who perpetuate violence? Or that right wing extremism is a greater threat to Americans that Islamic fundamentalism?

We can talk about them too! I hate them just as much, but but understand that you're no longer addressing the original point.

The original point is that Christian terrorism is objectively rarer (though by no means rare). I argue that this discrepancy is mostly accounted for by a difference in canonical content of the religion, rather than in a meaningful difference in wealth or suffering.

I invite you to read this article (incidentally written by a Muslim man): http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/09/islam-is-a-religion-of-v...

In short:

1. Islam has jurisprudential elements that are not present in Christianity

2. Islam sets a precedent for a militarized, theocratic state with ambitions of (a minima) regional dominance, which is present in no other Abrahamic religion

3. The very prophet of Islam perpetrated unspeakable atrocities, contrary to every other Abrahamic religion.

Again: you must acknowledge these points, else you're betraying ignorance at best, and bad faith at worse.

> The original point is that Christian terrorism is objectively rarer

In the present.

> Again: you must acknowledge these points, else you're betraying ignorance at best, and bad faith at worse.

He doesn't have to do anything.

As for the subject itself, Islam has yet to go through 'enlightenment' (assuming that will happen some day) and before Christianity did it was one of the more brutal religions on the planet. 5 centuries of progress can't be suddenly synchronized across the planet.

>In the present.

Precisely my point. My whole argument is that Islamic canon is partly responsible for the discrepancy, and that ignoring this fact accounts for our ineffectiveness in fighting radical Islam.

It indeed used to be the other way around. There is unique good to the Islamic cannon too.

And have you researched its origins? Have you looked into how it's funded, how it was funded, which countries support it now, and which countries supported it in the past?

Perhaps the media equivalent of "Four legs good, two legs bad" is not a very insightful way to understand geopolitics and post-war history.

Wastern foreign policy absolutely is to blame. You need to look at it on a timeline of a century to get the complete picture.

The Filipino-Moro conflict has a centuries long history that predates the modern jihadist movement, it's not a "past 20-30 years" thing. It's also hardly as one-sided as you're presenting it. The Spanish-American War was a significant externality in its escalation, go figure.

True, Western foreign policy is not solely to blame. But it has definitely shown itself to have cumulative negative effects.

Yeah, what about Burma? You sound quite well-informed, so could you explain a bit about that history, and how it relates to the centuries of persecution of Muslims over there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_in_Myan...

You're thinking different war theatre. Negotiating with ISIS will not bring the fruits you envision. You know when we say "we don't negotiate with terrorists"? These guys don't negotiate with us.

Who said we'll negotiate? The real problem is that our actions are large part of the reason for WHY they have such an easy time recruiting people. Lets not keep making it easy for them to recruit people.

Can we please drop this pretense ? One only has to look at the terrorists to know for sure that provoking them is not the issue, neither is poverty, or racism. I'm also seriously wondering what the Kurds ever did to provoke them ? The Yezidi ? The Shi'a ? The Iranians ? Iraqi Christians ? Alawites ? Druze ? The Lebanese ? Even if I can sort-of understand that Israel, Turkey and Jordan did do a few attacks, it did not justify the response at all.

I realize the problem : if you follow a normal way of thinking you'll invariable end up with that the problems are located in the ideology, and of course that indirectly attacks a lot of people. That however is not a valid line of reasoning, as it

Sorry I am posting this because Dyab Abou Jahjah posted an article in the newspaper. He's a local muslim, a mouthpiece for muslims and he posted an article that stands out massively : it does NOT condemn the attack, but the "western response" to it [1], describing it as a consequence of the conflict "the west created".

Half of all muslims I know on facebook are reposting that. I just want to say, if that's the attitude of even 10% of muslims, civil war is inevitable. And it sure looks like it's more like 50%.

[1] http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20151114_01970768

Your considerations may be true but there is simply no denying that there is some serious hypocrisy going on at the core of our value system. We fume when muslim terrorists bomb Paris, but we claim the right to bomb pretty much any muslim country whose government is not laying in bed with the West. The fact that we make some half-assed efforts to avoid "innocent" victims is no proof of moral superiority. The next time NATO blows up some wedding party in Afghanistan, I'd like to see the flag of Afghanistan projected on the opera house of Sidney.

> One only has to look at the terrorists to know for sure that provoking them is not the issue

Maybe you shouldn't look at their behaviours today, but at their origins. Most such groups appear because somebody felt excluded and powerless, or because some sociopath exploited a power vacuum. They grow because there's large populations of people who feel powerless and excluded.

Prevent that from becoming a problem in the first place and the few remaining terrorists would be powerless, because they'd be too few and far between.

> Maybe you shouldn't look at their behaviors today, but at their origins.

Why ? Those reasons aren't going to change, and the past is a very, very bad reason to fuck up the future. It's also merely an excuse: it's not a reason.

And frankly muslim violence happens because of their superiority complex. Those muslim ghettos in Europe, I drive through 2 of them daily. They are filled with people who will shout about their superiority, with -50 euros in their bank account and no job. When you see them shouting at other groups about who has banged whose mother recently and who has to die because of that at the station, it is not exactly a mystery why they don't have a job either ("problems with motivation" as it's generally put in HR documents).

> Why ? Those reasons aren't going to change, and the past is a very, very bad reason to fuck up the future. It's also merely an excuse: it's not a reason.

The why is incredibly simple - because that's how you stop more of them from appearing. Don't treat the symptom, treat the cause.

I completely agree that not interfering with the middle east would have been the way to go. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed, and there is no undo button.

> The most effective way to get rid of terrorists is to take away their recruitment base, by not giving people more reasons to attack.

Yes, but this is not an option in this case because their demands are simply not reasonable. What are we to do? Convert to islam or kill ourselves? They have no single reasonable demand or space for compromise. Are we to enact laws that go against the very principles of our civilization, purely out of fear? There is no simple way out of this.

> their demands

But this same "their" would only be a very tiny pool of powerless people if nobody else was willing to listen to them.

"Provoking" the Islamic State did not make them:

execute people, including children, for being gay (https://news.vice.com/article/the-islamic-state-executes-9-m...)

sever the hands of people accused of theft (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3007498/Sickening-mo...)

write sex slavery into its laws (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-ensh...)

But you know what actually did cause them to be like that? A literal interpretation of Islam.

Christianity is no better, but that is only obvious when you observe it in its unmuzzled form during the Dark Ages. Islam needs to be restrained in exactly the same way.

The interesting question in stopping them is why do people choose to follow them?

Attacking them for their poor justifications will not help you get anything done. Ensuring nobody WANTS to help them is how you stop them. And to do that, you need to make sure people don't feel that extremely desperate and make sure they don't have a reason to blame your for their situation - because the people joining them feel that it is their best choice for improving their situation.

Give people there a better choice and ISIS will lose their power.

They follow out of religious devotion:

https://news.vice.com/video/the-islamic-state-full-length

(9:57 into the video)

Passenger: "We are fighters."

Driver: "I swear, we hope for hardship. We don't want a happy life and trips, the opposite, such things take us away from God. The harder the situation is, the closer we are to God."

And again, what drove them to take that position?

For the past century, the most important question asked by people in the middle east has been, "Why does the West have so much, and we have so little? Why are we always defeated politically, unable to rise to the stature of the West in every way?"

In the decades the followed the fall of the Ottoman empire), Arab nationalism ascended, and it answered this question with, "socialism and the formation of mighty nation-states will allow us to gain parity with the West materially, and then surpass it". For a multitude of reasons, this movement delivered neither military success nor material prosperity and became increasingly abandoned following the humiliation of the Six-Day War in 1967.

The replacement for Arab nationalism was a sharp turn toward religion on every topic, and in every aspect of life. The question became, "the West has material prosperity, but that is fleeting and an affront to God. furthermore it is no replacement for the riches of the hereafter."

This shift was no random accident - in fact, it was decades in the making prior to 1967. For more on that, read about the life and times of Sayyid Qutb. Prior to his death in 1966, he played a crucial intellectual role in shaping the Muslim Brotherhood.

An account of these shifts defies explanation in simple economic and/or material terms. Crises serve only to create gaps for whatever ideology has already taken root to rise to the fore. Ideology itself, that is, answers to pressing questions of the day, and coherent, integrated views of the world (even if they are wrong), is what ultimately drives all historical events, not the other way around.

Sounds to me like a case of not understanding the true cause leading to a case of The Fox and The Grapes (I can't achieve that, so I decide it is bad), leading to animosity. And then they justified that animosity by mixing it into their beliefs (religion - but one can argue the religion isn't a necessary component, just look at totalitarian communist regimes). Yes, probably oversimplified, but I still just see known common psychological traits in action.

I'll take a look at your references later.

Yes, ideology drives the direction. I'm very well aware of that and agree fully. But which one spread and how they spread and how popular they bevome largely depends on factors like, timing, who it spreads to first (influential people or not), the prior context, etc... Different contexts make it more likely for some ideas to spread but not others. Comparisons to virology is actually very applicable.

And a crisis is a typical situation that amplifies the probability of some idea spreading broadly and taking root, and the context and circumstances is part of influencing which ones.

1. Take their arguments away from them. Stop invading countries trying to bring democracy, ultimately making things worse. Stop torturing and so on.

2. Take their people away from them. Like other forms of extremists, they need young male identiy-seeking misfits, who have nothing going on for them and want easy answers, somebody who gives them orders and to be part of something bigger.

3. Prosecute them like other criminals, too (with police forces).

Police and civil procedure only work in your own sovereign state where everyone plays by the same social contracts and has shared values (mostly).

Force necessary to achieve threat elimination and future deterrence work on sovereign adversaries who chose not to play by your rules.

Doesn't matter why they don't like you (rightly or wrongly), if they are a violent adversary you will suffer consequences if you do not stop them.

If the adversary is reasonable, diplomacy is always a preferable option, but not the most common denominator.

And as long as we do not have a world police under the UN (which benefits are itself at least debatable), that's a fact we have to live with. Ignoring it, just makes things worse. You can use the military to sink some pirate ships or to stop Russia from going crazy, but you cannot win a war against guerilla. Every generation has their example war for this but we still keep joining them.

There are many ways to win wars against guerillas, but just as guerilla attacks on civilians are incompatible with western values, most of the responses are similarly incompatible.

Prosecute them? You are going to mail a warrant to a war zone in Syria? Assuming the letter even makes it way to ISIS they will be grateful for the free toilet paper.

Syria would not be a war zone if we hadn't used much more "effective" measurements in Iraq before. I do not know what to say to people, who at this point still think, that our military can somehow bring peace to the middle-east after decades of war, thinking "this time is different".

Why don't we invade Saudi Arabia, who practices a cruel form of Islam with death-sentences and so on, too? Why don't we abolish them in China or the US? Why don't we focus on Africa or - as a European - Eastern Europe? I am not saying, that ISIS is not bad, I just find the obsession with the Middle East strange, if it is really about their actions that are so horrible, let's stop doing them ourselves first. If you really want to make the world a better place, that should be a much easier goal to achieve.

The French position in 2002 may have been a bit cynical but would probably have saved lots of life: Saddam Hussein may be a scum-bag but at least he was holding the country together and keeping Sunni and Shia from killing each others. Same for Gaddafi, Al Assad, Ben Ali, etc. That being said all dictators fall or die sooner or later, and a lot of the troubles in the middle-east have more to do about ethnic hatred than about religious extremism. We could possibly have delayed it but perhaps not prevented it.

> Stop invading countries trying to bring democracy

Please drop this pretense. Nobody invades anything to bring democracy. You can't force democracy on people even if you wanted to. Democracy is so much more than just the elections.

You invade countries because you have geopolitical interests in the area, and want to gain political or economical influence.

It used to be the case that you invaded countries because the territory itself was valuable, but when was the last time you heard invaded people become citizens of the invaders' nation state? These days the cost is calculated and operations carried out are means to an end.

Crimea?

I believe it fits. If they had wanted to annex it they would have done so properly. It's not like any other actor would risk all out war over it. If this had been 300 years ago, it would have played out differently. (The status as autonomous region also bring a whole cadre of complications. I don't know much about it really more than you read in history books.)

It's about avoiding useless acts of anger. Why hating peaceful population of a certain faith ? what will this do ? I just saw a documentary about day to day "life" in Iraq, these people are just like me and you, victims. Victims of what ? that's the question. Some are fanatics, some are clinical psychopath that want to kill, some are gullible lost souls believing in evil/good and rallying ISIS thinking it's the good (lots of westerners), etc etc Now include the hidden political ties behind all this, because we ~know all States have helped to trigger the fever since the last 40 years (ISIS gets money selling oil, who buys it ? weapons from other States, including past help from westerners, who keeps helping them growing aggression power ?). Now answer this ? what is "the" cause ? how to stop it without creating more problems ?

So far nobody really knows, nobody talks about viable solutions except typical PR/Medias speeches. It seems a really nasty mess involving lots of nations, populations, ethnic and religious groups.

> If men, armed with guns and explosives, kill scores of civilians and injure hundreds more in the name of a particular ideology what are we supposed to actually do?

Like an invading army?

Reminds of the Iraqi expat I met, who made a burger for me. He asked where I came from; I'm from the US. He clenched as he quietly strangled out how Bush crushed Iraq.

Always bizarre to see how oblivious "my people" and our sympathizers are, like the racist, cartoonish "Islamist" in our heads. We're fundamentalists indoctrinated in state ideologies like capitalism and imperialism. I mean, what do people think it'd be like if the reigning global superpower (let's pretend China) sent legions of uniformed killers, bombs and drones across the world at us?

(Come to think of it, a common theme in literature where catastrophe ends the US government, is fascist militias carving up the country... No surprise where ISIS came from.)

> but what are we supposed to do?

One rational response is that we know plenty of terrorist plots are foiled by intelligence agencies and police, so giving them more resources to act could be a logical thing to do. Similarly, improving communication between agencies and between countries might be helpful.

Most of that would not be publicly noticeable, so to the general public it might seem like "nothing is being done." But that wouldn't be the case.

What might not be rational is to change public policies, like foreign policy or domestic policy or immigration policy. Those might serve the role of theater, making the public feel that something is being done. But you also run the risk of being led along by the terrorists - the attacks might have been a provocation intended to elicit that response (do they want France to stop attacking them in Syria? Or to attack them more so they can more easily radicalize their followers? who knows). Instead, if we react rationally, it doesn't matter what they intended.

Your point about "Islamophobia" reminds me of this almost twenty-year-old article from The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/article/crazed-palestinian-gunman-an...

Follow the money. It might be uncomfortable to find out that much of it originates at home but would it be all that surprising? Money is our god and the West continually turns a blind eye when we can also turn a profit.

Violence is like a terminal virus, propagating it doesn't bring a cure, it just ruins more peoples lives.

The other thing is to destroy their power base by finding a way to turn Iraqi Sunni tribes against them.

If you turn off the tap there will be no need for that.

Nothing so far that wouldn't compromise principles modern society lies on.

If people who do these acts have a mindset that they have nothing to lose and that their activities are righteous, then you have to think in a way that would undermine either their belief in that or put their activities at causing them more harm then their own life. KGB did something along those lines, where when soviet officials were abducted. What KGB did was effective, but it is not compatible with modern western society: http://articles.latimes.com/1986-01-07/news/mn-13892_1_sovie... Could you imagine a modern country like France abducting and mutilating and executing all of relatives of attackers? I cannot. I can imagine Russia doing so, or even Mossad. Not France.

Personally, I do not think either way is a way forward. I'm jus answering your question - what can we do? There were several approaches, of which KGB's one was proven to be effective.

Yes I can see France doing it. They've done similar things in the not so distant past. We have a story in our heads that we are somehow better than <insert name here> but really there is a ton of evidence to the contrary. Have a read of this: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/06/french-sp...

Oh, come on. This wasn't especially glorious, but that's manslaughter, not homicide. If you want examples of truly horrible crimes committed by the French military, you can look up our last few decolonisation wars.

It was just the most recent example that came to mind but you are right.

> I also take issue with people who label Western aggression in response to terrorism "Islamophobic." We in the West are not the ones making it about Islam. The terrorists are. They are the ones showing up with guns screaming about their God. They are the ones using their religion to recruit and justify their actions. And so when governments go after them then YES, they are going after Muslims. That is the bed they made and unfortunately we all have to sleep in it.

However, our anti-terrorist policies almost always seem to wind up targeting innocent Islamic people (and people who look like they might be Islamic).

The very best response imo - not that this will ever happen, France just bombed Raqqa - is to do absolutely nothing. To deny them a platform and to very quietly concentrate on the ringleaders and the process of radicalization. This will take a lot more guts than what we collectively have because it would certainly lead to more attacks as the counterparty gets more and more desperate why their ploy isn't working but the Achilles heel of ISIS as far as I can see is their ability to recruit. If they are judged to be unable to move the needle in any meaningful way (either negative or positive) then they will lose. On another note, kick out each and every Imam that preaches hate to their flock rather than compassion and balance. Those guys are definitely part of the problem and they should not be aided and abetted because they are effectively part of the recruitment arm of ISIS. On a more positive note, this seems to be changing and these characters seem to be much less welcome than they were in the past. Yet another note: joining ISIS by westerners should be a one-way ticket, once radicalized and gone to fight there there is no way back. This would require quite a bit of legal hassle.

If IS takes the pain to fund and coordinate something like this, it is surely because they want to obtain something. If the attack would not change status quo in any way, there would be no reason to invest time and resources in carrying it out.

According to those Western scholars who study IS ideology, it is clear that they adhere to an apocalyptic interpretation of islam where they envisage some kind of final battle against "the armies of Rome".

Whether the attack was intended to serve a strategic or ideologic purpose, or just to make a point, it is clear that the last thing they want is for it to change nothing.

So, in a purely rational world, the best reaction would be to change nothing. Not scale up military presence in Syria, certainly not scale it down, not change any policy, keep on carrying out business as usual, and on the emotional level, mourn, but not fear. Of course, we do not live in a purely rational world, so whether this route is even possible to follow, I don't know. But I really believe that if we were able to react (or rather non-react) in this way, it would be the very least the attackers wanted. It would reduce their "heroic deed" to just the meaningless slaugher that it was.

As a semi-analogy: After the right-wing extremist Anders Breivik killed some eighty people at a youth camp a few years ago, the Norwegian government more or less handled him as a regular criminal (albeit a high-profile one). Now he spends his day alone in a prison cell, occasionally whining in the media about not having the latest X-Box or something similar, pretty much revealing to everyone with a working brain what a small character he truly is. If he had been executed (not possible in Norway, I know....) he could surely have ended up being seen as a martyr by some.

> So, in a purely rational world, the best reaction would be to change nothing.

I think that ship has sailed:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-16/france-conduct-airstri...

Quite possibly, and in any case I did not have many illusions that we'd actually catch that ship.

But I am not sure whether this particular news item shows that anything has really changed in terms of policy. France has been bombing IS for quite some time already, as far as I understand.

> If men, armed with guns and explosives, kill scores of civilians and injure hundreds more in the name of a particular ideology what are we supposed to actually do?

What we're supposed to do is distinguish them from non-violent people claiming the same named ideology and focus response and condemnation on the murderers, not the community claiming the ideology that the terrorists are trying to target and recruit from with the idea that an apocalyptic existential struggle is in progress between the named ideology and the rest of the world.

Because when you do conflate the terrorists with the named ideology that hundreds of millions of people who aren't terrorists claim and target your response against that community rather than distinguishing the terrorists from that community and targeting the terrorists, you validate the terrorist propaganda, and make the people that the terrorists want to be your enemies into your enemies.

The west only needs to dump their old good friend, the Saudis. This corrupted family morally and financially support and endorse extreme and barbaric version of Islam, Salafism. But unfortunately, economics (e.g. massive sales of arms) and geopolitics don't allow the west to do the right thing!

Oil will run out. It can't happen soon enough.

To myself, a good start would be to ask what the social and economic costs of allowing 5 million Muslims into France has been?

As far as I've been able to uncover, when you put all the politically-correct rederick away, the driver of this has been the fact that Europeans have not been having enough children to economically replace and support all the people that are now retiring... Basically, there needs to be more tax-payers to cover everything and to balance the books.

So is this working out?

Are Muslims as a group embracing European values and becoming individuals / or are they maintaining their group and forming a parallel society, which is largely unskilled, xenophobic, closed-minded, and predominantly seeks welfare from the state?

Considering that the Muslim population in France (and other European countries) overall negatively impacts every single metric of social-ills, and with a grim European economic outlook (manual labor is no longer needed, gainful employment requires skills, those jobs are few, etc), I think that whatever this is, it has failed.

The first step to the solution is to drop the white-guilt act and call a spade a spade. This will open the door to actual debate instead of shutting it down with words like "racist" and "bigot" for simply not being politically-correct.

The second step is to stop importing "other cultures" into Europe. The human race has been based on groups/collectives since its inception, with each group producing, collecting, and evolving individuals of similar attributes and behaviors. Put two groups together that are too different, you'll likely get violence.

The third step is trying out a program similar to Sweden's to try to integrate the existing Muslim population with special targeted resources. But only to a point - not ongoing forever. And designed to grow European values, not to preserve or maintain a parallel society.

The forth step is likely some type of a guaranteed minimum income based on negative income tax across the entire EU system (as proposed by Milton Friedman).

What wide a brush you paint with. Are blanket statements and bird shot opinions all you've got to contribute?

but what are we supposed to do?

How about we put the terrorists we can find in jail (after a fair trial), help the refugees who flee the conflict zone and convince the various "powers" covertly involved in the conflict to stop putting more fuel on the fire?

How exactly do you propose we help the refugees? We're already failing to integrate culturally Muslim populations, and this failure is very much responsible for the current wave of radicalization. I don't see why accepting hoards of refugees should yield different consequences now.

Make peace in Syria, and help them rebuild their lives there.

Agreed, but that will involve killing people.

In the UK we seem to be failing to integrate populations quite knowingly and deliberately, by promoting separatist faith schools for religions of all persuasions, including Islam, radical and otherwise, and various fringey forms of Christianity.

This is curious behaviour in a society that's become increasingly and adamantly secular.

I have no idea how Rest of World does it, but government policy on this issue is either insane, sinister, or both.

Short term: food and a safe place to sleep.

Longer term: end the Middle East war(s), stop treating everyone who looks like they're from the Middle East like they're terrorists (or at the very least terrorist supporters).

We can have greater involvement in the war in Syria, or we can have less. Either way we have to deal with the consequences. But right now we are in a war with Isis and navel gazing about religiosity is hardly going to help.

The key thing to understand is that ISIS is first and foremost a criminal and terrorist organization, not a religious group. They use religion (or rather a perverted interpretation of it) to construct a unifying framework, a story for its members, something that they use to silence their members' potential critical thinking.

Don't think for one second that the higher-ups in ISIS and the ones who planned this recent attack are religious people or drink their own ideology kool-aid. ISIS leaders are criminals and do whatever it takes to advance their "careers".

> Don't think for one second that the higher-ups in ISIS and the ones who planned this recent attack are religious people or drink their own ideology kool-aid.

Oh yes, they are, and yes, they do.

Maybe supporting "moderate" Islamic groups more?

(N.B.: I am not saying that use of force againt ISIS or other terrorist organizations should not be used - I am only suggesting something to do _in addition_ to a military/intelligence program to target the threat)

Just read an article stating Islamic groups are too fluid, the moderate may become extremist very quickly. This idea might backfire.

You can do a lot of things ,

Firstly you stop using the words like Muslim and terrorist together, the word terrorist is pretty much self-explanatory noun (plural terrorists) A person, group, or organization that uses violent action, or the threat of violent action, to further political goals. See not religious," political" goals. Same with islamophobia, these words are overused on the internet without people understanding them like the word inception(most people on the internet think it means a thing within a thing within a thing, its not that's recursion) also like hashtag#, people started using hashtag everywhere, without knowing it's use.

Second of all you can learn a little about different religions , but search using keywords like "is Islam a religion of Peace", " what are the basic teachings of Islam" do not start by searching " is the prophet of Islam a pedophile" the keywords you use directly impact the results. So always look for legitimate information.

Next you can learn a little about psychology and learn why people do what they do. Now I'm not a expert on psychology, all I know about psychology comes from American TV shows(like criminal minds, law and order etc), one can question their accuracy and methods but its hard to miss the point. People do henious crimes coz of certain things that can scientifically explained. Regarding our current situation you can look into how Cults are formed and their inner working and ideology. A cult leader is some with leadership qualities, has brainwashing skills, Is very charming and motivational. The leaders just brainwash psycopaths, orphans, impressionable kids. Osama bin laden never wore a suicide west, he just coordinated and planned the attacks, his followers follow him blindly and there are reasons for that, well documented and researchered for you to read. Do you think that ISIS leaders actually go to ground zero to fight ?? They probably sit inside bunkers surrounded by all the things "haram" in Islam.

Next thing you can do is start questioning... Question how such a remote and cut off place is getting hi-tech western guns and ammunitions. How are these guys getting funded. How come Afghanistan is the largest producer of heroin, how they can snuggle heroin in US(biggest consumer of heroin) without the help of americans. Then you can ask why do these terrorist plan for years to coordinate something like 9/11 when they can burn oil wells in their own country and actually cripple western countries in a matter of days.

Don't sleep on it, educate yourself on how modern society works , how money and power are so important and root cause of all evil. Not religion, Islam was founded in the middle East to fight evil like all other religions. All religions are practically the same ..they all preach the same things with minute differces.

Just educate yourself more on current world affairs and remember there's nothing wrong with any religion or country. It's all political propaganda for power and money. Every such act is based on profit of the cult group and for the people funding them.

You can also help human beings who are suffering, its the best thing you can do, help anyone and everyone it's the only things in your control , for things out of your control you cannot do anything, but you can always educate yourself and fight ignorance.

PS:English is not my first language. PS:I'm a kid so please refrain from blunt/harsh comments.

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