Yonatan Zunger about the Paris Attacks
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Who was it that killed who again?
>Charlie Hebdo's targets weren't simply religious extremists preaching from Saudi mosques; they were a portrayal of the French Muslim population as violent extremists, the dangerous other.
It sounds like the author is saying that the satire cartoon invented "racism" against Muslims. But the cartoon "targets" proved the magazine absolutely, positively, bona-fided-ly correct. They proved Charlie Hebdo right.
>You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. What did you expect was going to happen?
So the author actually blames religious attacks on the act of people talking about it happening. In some circular way, the cartoon magazine created religious violence?
I cannot fathom how the author would explain religiously motivated violence in places where a satire cartoon isn't there to talk about it.
It is simply an ideology looking to conquer the world, which adjusts its speech to accomodate with its target. Nothing more unusual than that.
This interview with a former recruiter and who now disavows the whole movement is quite interesting and illuminating: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/195238189/how-does-an-islamist...
His time spent in an Egyptian jail in the company of other Islamists changed his mind about the ideology and its aims.
Goes into detail here too: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&i...
Exactly. For example, the US and Saudi supported "rebels" in Syria are Sunnis. Assad is Alawite Shia, Iran too. Now look at who's with whom. ISIS are inspired by Wahabi teaching, which was effectively able to grow thanks to Saudi Arabia and Oil, but consider any Muslim who's not ready to accept Wahabi view apostate, that is, somebody who is, according to their religious views, to be killed(!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism
The chaos in Iraq after US invaded to "bring them democracy" resulted in de-facto war between the Shia who got to the power and Sunnis who lost the influence. Yemen, where Saudi Arabia performs military actions now, has large Shia population.
Etc. It sounds complex, but it's not, once you understand what's going on and see how obviously groups support or fight one another exactly based on the religion, you can't even imagine that people can ignore the predominantly religious background for the most of the conflicts.
If you don't make a difference between Sunni, Shia and Wahabi, it's your problem, but people lose lives because of that in the Middle East, in hundreds of thousands.
Which is not to say that it's not even much worse (proportionally) for minorities like smaller religious Muslim groups and even worse for Christians there.
> Da'esh's plan to take over the world isn't rooted in a theological destiny of Muslims; it's rooted in an explicitly political vision of conquest.
That is probably true of Al Qaeda or Hezbollah but Daesh's worldview is[0] rooted in Islamic apocalyptic theology.
[0]: See "What ISIS Really Wants" for a good analysis of this.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
Simply wrong. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism The ideology existed longer than the specific group called ISIS. They just dialed it to 10 what was always more and more cooking for the last few decades. That they are a bit more extreme than how Al-Quaeda is perceived in the West now doesn't mean that the exact Islamic ideology wasn't fully formed before, including the treatment of those with who they fight.
The reason why they call themselves "people of hadith" is because they really believe to just repeat what their prophet was doing, and that that is the major goal of a true believer. It's in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith that they can read about every beheading and stoning performed by Mohammad. They just literally ask themselves "What Would Mohammad Do" in the sense that they "reject the use of Hellenistic philosophical discourse "(kalam)" in favor of strict textualism in interpreting the Quran."
Pretending that all this doesn't exist (on rejecting to learn) won't help anybody understand what's going on.
I would still contend that one cannot take some form of ideology, "dial it up to 10" and then claim it is still that same ideology. What you instead have here is a set of liars that hide behind a name.
That said, it does seem that Wahhabism and Sunni Islam are perhaps a more favorable place for such extremism to culture and grow. So I concede this is as much a part of Islam as the next part (however non-mainstream or mainstream it may be).
Clearly the shift here is what allows such extremism to succeed, the funding, the teaching, the dispersion of such ideas, how are they not called out for what they are: callous and inhumane and insane?
Who is responsible for turning a blind eye for so long? Is it just tolerated because it happens 'Over There' (in this case I suppose 'Over There' would mean 'Not Here in Saudi Arabia' where the political base of this brach of Islam claims home). Or is this more like someones thugs getting out of control -- i.e. this is a sponsored movement and attempts to restrain it are actively interfered with!
I have more questions than answers! What a complex part of the world!
Very true. Incidentally (and ironically), Islamically one is not allowed to overthrow their (Muslim) government to "establish a caliphate". So what ISIS is doing is against the teachings of Islam to start with. They take texts, keep what they like and leave out what they don't like, and use those texts for their own purpose.
We have in Islamic literature, several authentic narrations that talk about, and warn of people who have a similar ideology to that of ISIS.
If their daily practice agrees with the Scriptures, and by all accounts, they are very uncompromising, it is very hard to argue that they're somehow not legitimate.
Islamically, this does not hold either (and we have authentic narrations to back this up). In order to declare the leader an apostate (a very serious accusation by the way), there has to be extremely clear evidence upon which there is zero room for interpretation or excusing. I'm talking about something along the lines of the ruler outright coming out in front of everyone and saying that he is no longer Muslim.
This applies to everyone, from Mobarak to Qadhafi to Saddam, etc. There were terrible things that happened under their regimes, and I am not defending them. However, absolutely no one can come out and declare them apostates without crystal clear proof upon which no two would disagree -- this has never happened.
Might is right, and as long as the Caliphate keeps on existing, they will do what they're doing, simply because they can. Your theological objections cannot be taken seriously because they're a state power, you're not, and quite naturally conflicts where one side of the argument is a state, are best settled by war.
Perhaps, but how far will they get? There are Muslim nations that are fighting ISIS, both in military and in talking about their corrupt ideology and explaining how they have gone astray. For example (if you speak Arabic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb2yAczRc5g
> Your theological objections cannot be taken seriously because they're a state power
While ISIS may not take what I mentioned seriously, the goal is to educate people (especially the emotional and easily charged youth) into showing how misguided ISIS are, and answer their questions in an attempt to prevent the corrupt ISIS message from influencing them.
> where one side of the argument is a state
Just because they call themselves a state does not mean they are :)
> are best settled by war.
We try to educate first and bring truce, but yes, sometimes fighting is unfortunately necessary: http://quran.com/49/9
Lol. They are by definition Islamic. You can't just change the meaning of words like "Islamic" because it suits your point of view. Da'esh is as Islamic as any other Islamic group.
But mass migration into Europe did not start until summer 2015. Obviously it did not take the Syrians four years to realize that there was a war in their country.
"When we talk about the ultimate causes of the situation, this is the fact we tend to ignore: at the root of it, there isn't enough water, and there isn't enough food, and droughts have been hitting the area harder and harder for a decade."
Why are immigrants to the US from Mexico viewed so differently from immigrants in Europe? Or are they treated the same?
The Americas are in a unique situation because the dominant power, the US, contains large percentages of citizens with South American, Mexican, Canadian, and Asian, heritage. You still get violence and hate speech, but the strife between them is relatively short lived even when considering the likes of Japan, Vietnam, and China.
Then you have the religious and cultural differences between western and middle eastern values. I think this transcends everything as you see the same distaste of middle-easterners in both Europe and the United States.
That's not a snark, by the way. Contrary to popular myth, the Bible doesn't prescribe warfare on any extant nation, group of people, or region.
I've read the memoirs of a Mossad agent who later became the head of operations and he noted about the "romantic" period in global Terrorism. heavily paraphrased: "I remember when they (terrorists) used to recruit in the ivory towers of the universities of Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. Using the words of Marx and Lenin rather than those of the mufti."
He later goes on and discuses how drastically different they were even tho they would be just as ruthless you could talk to them when needed, and if not at least respected them for having a philosophic ideology rather than blind faith.
He also added some anecdotal evidence on that matter. "When we needed to find one, we knew not to look for them at the mosque or at the madrassah, but rather at a titty bar in east berlin. As one would be much more likely to find one ("terrorist") snorting cocaine of a stripper than listening to a sermon or hunching over hadits in a dim lit room".
When talking about how they compare to the Afghani mujaheddin he made another anecdote saying that the average Arab terrorist at his time would be wearing blue jeans and a bright polo and walk around with a ringo star haircut rather than have a beard and wear tribal rags.
Religious [Islamic] Terrorism / Militarism picked up steam in the 80's and onwards and you can literally distill it to 3 major (and somewhat interconnected) events.
1) The Islamic Revolution in Iran, heavily religious, very devout, used religion as a primary source of power and more important for divine mandate. This lead to the formation of Shia groups around the globe like Hezbollah which put allot of Sunni's in panic mode as they would be just as likely to fight against them as they would against "Zionists" and "imperialists"
2) (heavily interconnected with 1) The soviet invasion of Afghanistan, this is what gave the Sunni the break they needed. Anyone who've been, or read about the history of Afghanistan or Pakistan knows just how "nonreligious" they were this doesn't say that they weren't Muslim, but many especially in the tribal and nomadic regions weren't the example of a devout Muslim one would think of today. They didn't had mosques (some of the bigger villages had a house of prayer, but not a mosque as it's a bit hard to build a minaret from mud and straw) many of them haven't seen a Quran in their life and the few that did couldn't read Pashtu, Urdu, or which ever language they spoke out of the regional 5000 languages yet alone Arabic.
But none the less the Salafist seized the opportunity because they were one of the few that could (and they desperately needed it), you can't really fight Soviet communism with Arab communism/socialism, Iran wasn't in a position to do anything about it (nor did it want too) so a fight against tribesmen was turned into a fight against holy warriors due to the lofty assistance of Salafists extremists mainly from Saudi-Arabia and the minor gulf states.
This later turn to sprout the Global Islamic Jihad and it's various local chapters like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, it was the 1st time in nearly 40 years that west had to deal with religious ideological Islamic terrorism and not the usual socialist/communist club.
3) The r decriminalization of the Muslim Brotherhood and the release of it's leaders form Egyptian jails following the assassination of Sadat, this lead to spread of more religious ideology and lead to the formation of groups like Hamas in Gaza and Harakat Al-Islah in Somalia.
So sorry people will always find reasons to kill each other, with a few flaps of the butterfly wing we could've been still fighting socialist Arab/Near Eastern terrorism rather than Islamic one and it would be just the same just under a different banner.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Front_for_the_Liberati... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba%27ath_Party
Maybe we miss the proper word, the closest would be "totalitarianism" -- any kind of the ideology with the "final solution" and the desire to "rule over everything."