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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Nice thoughts, but none of the groups you mentioned in your analogy have the worldwide penchant for terrorism that Muslim groups do. Berlin, Brussels, New York, Israel, Orlando, etc.

Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens.

I understand the tiny minority is the problem; just don't think your analogy to these other groups is an apt one.

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We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13560351.

Why? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Does removing it from its parent context make it better?

No, it does not. But such flagged comments lose their privilege of appearing high up in the thread.

But why was it flagged? I do not understand. There is zero explanation.

I don't know exactly why users flagged it, but many did. One possibility is that you've made a bold and controversial claim without accompanying evidence. That sort of thing predictably impedes our ability to have the kind of civil and thoughtful discussion that we're here for.

I call complete BS.

"The 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel in New York, of which a Chinese person was suspected, was blamed on the Chinese in general and led to physical violence. "The murder of Elsie Sigel immediately grabbed the front pages of newspapers, which portrayed Chinese men as dangerous to "innocent" and "virtuous" young white women. This murder led to a surge in the harassment of Chinese in communities across the United States."" - from the Wikipedia article "Anti-Chinese Sentiment in the United States"

The article goes on to talk about the "yellow peril" theory, in which scholars believed that "China, India, Japan and Korea were attacking England and the U.S., but that Jesus Christ would stop them"

Here's a pretty thorough argument on the characterization of the Irish as terrorists: http://inthepastlane.com/when-americans-saw-irish-immigrants...

I'll also point out that one of the final pardons of President Obama was of a Puerto Rican nationalist who led the FALN, a group that executed multiple bombings in major US cities in the 1970's.

So your allegation that the linkage of Muslims to terrorist extremism is unique is provably untrue.

Well, "complete BS" right back.

> portrayed Chinese men as dangerous to "innocent" and "virtuous" young white women

Suspecting a group of criminal activity is hardly terrorism; you could have just quoted attitudes towards blacks for a less obscure analogy.

> So your allegation that the linkage of Muslims to terrorist extremism is unique is provably untrue.

I never said that no other group has ever been linked to terrorism. I said it hasn't ever been close to the scale it is now, with major attacks in every culture across dozens of countries. Comparing IRA to ISIS is a big stretch, not in type but in magnitude.

Here's a list of the terrorist attacks in the UK over the past 40-odd years. You can see that up until the early 2000's, the vast, vast majority of them were perpetrated by the IRA, and the sheer number was much greater than those by Islamic extremists in current times.

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

Also, here's a list of plane hijackings by Cuban sympathizers from the 50's and 60's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cuba%E2%80%93United_St...

My point is not that Islamist extremist terrorism is not A BAD THING that we should do our best to eliminate. It's more that we should resist the temptation to label it as a unique existential threat that justifies discrimination against an entire religion. History tells us that we've been down this path scores of times before, we've been wrong every time, and we've lived to regret our prejudice.

> I never said that no other group has ever been linked to terrorism. I said it hasn't ever been close to the scale it is now, with major attacks in every culture across dozens of countries.

Actually, it was far worse (and more coordinated, backed by—among others—both major superpowers) during much of the Cold War, it's just that the armed forces using terrorism as a mechanism (especially ones successful in seizing and holding territory on the scale the "Islamic State" has) were more likely to be popularly labelled as militias or revolutionaries of whatever ideology their rhetoric focussed on (Communist, etc.) or, by governments sympathetic to their cause, simply as "freedom fighters". The ones that were labelled "terrorists" rather than other things were the ones that were comparatively unsuccessful.

And even then, there were still a number of high-profile terrorist groups around the world connected to the Cold War/anti-colonialism. The Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, various PLO factions, the IRA, etc. In the U.S. alone there a bunch of different groups (Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, Black Liberation Army, Puerto Rican nationalists etc.).

There was also a lot of violent groups on the Right, but for whatever reason they didn't get labelled as terrorists as much and didn't seem to have the same kind of view of ideological solidarity. So the Sabra and Shatila massacre doesn't tend to get labelled a terrorist attack even though it dwarfed the actions of most of the above groups in brutality and death toll, and as far as I know there wasn't much solidarity between the Phalange and the KKK (even though they were both violent right-wing Christian groups).

Italians were literally accused of terrorism. That's what "anarchism" meant in the 1920s. And just as there is today with "Radical Islamism", there was a nationwide panic about anarchism.

Again, like I said, many groups have been labeled terrorist.

That's irrelevant though.

That seems like the opposite of the argument you're making, so not only is it relevant, but it also seems like a non-sequitur rebuttal. What am I missing?

My argument is not that the "terrorist" label that is unique about Muslims; it's that the frequency, scope, and violence of their actions is unique.

Disagree, but at least disagree with what I said :)

I'm from Sweden, we actually have quite the reputation for slaughter:

- The case has been made that the Gothic tribe who sacked Rome originated from Sweden

- The Vikings pillaged and slaughtered in Russia, Britain, Continental Europe, the Mediterranean, even as far as Newfoundland

- During the Swedish Empire, Sweden colonized and occupied Finland and the Baltic states, and waged war on Continental Europe, conquering half of the Holy Roman Empire

- During the same period Sweden built forts in West Africa, I can tell you what they did there was not always pretty

- Under king Charles XII, Sweden waged war in first Russia, then Ukraine, then the Ottoman Empire, soundly defeated there tried to invade Norway

- Norway was invaded again and this time conquered in 1808, taking it as compensation for the loss of Finland to Russia in the Napoleonic wars

Now, that's just Sweden. Let's not mention Italy (Ethiopia, anyone), Germany (...) and Japan (oh boy).

You need to study your history.

I know it's OT, but didn't Sweden also do quite some nation-building in Russia once? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians

In the centuries since, you're failing to live up to your reputation, Sweden.

> Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens.

Neither do Muslims? I mean, show me the statistics that show that they have a higher terrorism rate than other groups. The IRA, the extremist christian groups, and the mentally ill all do a lot of damage as well, but they're not being banned from the USA. I think Muslims get targeted by the media because they're different looking, and so they get reported on more thoroughly.

I could very well be wrong, but I honestly don't believe they are statistically more prone to terrorism.

> The IRA

Indeed, Pete King, one of the group assembled to work on the "Muslim Ban" has been a long-standing supporter of the IRA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_...

Overall numbers are hard to come by, especially for smallish incidents, but of the 23 acts of terrorism in 2016 killing a hundred or more people, 100% of them were done by Muslims.

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

> they're not being banned from the USA

Were there countries with huge numbers of extremely violent mentally ill people, I have no doubt the US would limit or halt immigration from those places.

There are huge numbers of radical or radical-sympathetic Muslims. If you have an open mind, I suggest getting a Muslim's take on the actual numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPvnFDDQHk (warning, has numbers, may not be PC)

It's fine to support open immigration, but denying that there is an unusual problem with violence in the Muslim community is indefensible.

I notice that reading that link, 22/23 acts of terrorism killing a hundred people or more happened in Iraq and Syria which is literally a war-zone.

Just as a thought experiment, if you listed civilian casualties in the Ukraine-Russia war as deaths from terroristic acts you could easily come to the conclusion that it was Eastern-European Christians that were the world's greatest terrorists.

The Bible and Quran share the same DNA. There's no difference between any type of religious extremism, just as there's no difference between any group of humans. The difference is context, and in the case of the Middle East the socioeconomic context is crushingly awful. Much of this (shoutouts to the Hypernomalization mention above, which I can't seem to reply to, excellent documentary) is even a result of more powerful, "Christian" nations.

That's probably why the "Muslim ban" wasn't a ban on Muslim immigration, but a ban on immigration from particular Middle East countries.

We don't need Internet message board speculation as to why the order was worded the way it was. The reason is that Giuliani suggested that particular language to try to make the executive order a "legal Muslim ban". This has been widely reported on--in fact, it was front page news a week ago.

It is a ban on immigration exclusively from Muslim-majority countries with a bypass for Christians from those countries.

Christians do not have a pass.

That wouldn't make sense anyway...how would they prove their Christianity?

> Christians do not have a pass.

Members of "minority religions" in their country of origin are eligible for waivers of the bans issued in the EO. Trump has specifically said that Christians would be a priority.

> That wouldn't make sense anyway...how would they prove their Christianity?

Whether it would make sense or not is irrelevant to whether it is actually part of the policy.

And the phrasing, and intent, does not recognize Shia as a minority religion, though they are very often just as persecuted as Christians.

The current Ukraine-Russia conflict has little to do with religion.

By something like an order of magnitude, more people are killed annually by armed toddlers in the US than by radical Islamist foreign nationals. Both Islamists and toddlers take a back seat to the nationwide vending machine threat --- vending machines can be counted on in 2017 to kill enough Americans to justify a travel ban on all employees of the Coca Cola and Frito Lay corporations.

I fear you many have selected the wrong forum to litigate this argument in. The deeper we dig into the facts behind the argument you're trying to make, the (rapidly) less credible that argument is going to become. You might have more luck with it on Facebook.

>all but one of which were part of the civil wars in Iraq or Syria.

Unsurprisingly all sides in a muslim majority country's civil war are muslim, equally unsurprising is that the non-recognized-states action are written down as terrorism.

I strongly recommend watching the documentary "Hypernormalisation" by Adam Curtis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation).

The main focus of the documentary compares the styles of Trump and Vladimir Poutine, but has interesting recap/point of view on the evolution of terrorism in the middle east.

(his previous documentary, Bitter Lake, was on Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia, also interesting, but the visual/narrative style kind of annoyed me)

I think it's easily misleading to look at these things only by the numbers. We need a better understanding of the background. Numbers can support your argument/context, but you need a better argument.

In my opinion it's one thing to acknowledge that Islamic terrorism is an issue; it is another to hand-wave this into an entire billion strong community with a simplistic framing.

Fitting a United States perspective into your criteria seems difficult. Using this Wikipedia reference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States), there have been only three terrorist incidents in the United States that have killed more than 100 people. One was September 11th (Islamic extremists). The second was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (right-wing extremist). The third, curiously enough, appears to be Mormon militias (the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre). Note, the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 could possibly fall in this category depending on the death estimate. A rather oddball collection there, not enough to generalize for sure.

Recent terrorist incidents in the United States with >=10 deaths have been biased towards Islamic terrorism, sure. However, going back to 2001, the perpetrators were: a person born to Afghan immigrants in the US (Pulse nightclub shooting); a Pakistani couple, one a US citizen and one a permanent resident (San Bernardino); a person born to Palestinian immigrants (Fort Hood); an African American who converted to the Nation of Islam (Beltway shootings); and September 11th (15 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from the UAE, 1 from Egypt, 1 from Lebanon).

Aside from September 11th, all of these incidents involve US citizens. And even if in the greatest of stretches we include the nationality of the parents, it is worth noting that (including September 11th) none of the nationalities that committed these terrorist acts are on Trump's 7 country travel restriction list.

> but of the 23 acts of terrorism in 2016 killing a hundred or more people, 100% of them were done by Muslims.

From your link, 100% of those killing 100+ are done by the islamic state militants who are fighting what they consider to be a civil war.

If you cannot manage to see the distinction in that, then you don't really have an open mind about this discussion.

> It's fine to support open immigration, but denying that there is an unusual problem with violence in the Muslim community is indefensible.

Being scared shitless of over 1.5 billion people just because some of them are bad people, is just ridiculous. There isn't a problem with violence in the Muslim community. Go to any Muslim community not in the middle of a war, and I doubt you'll find more violence than you do in your average Jewish or Christian community.

I spot-checked the stats you linked to, and 100% of the "acts of terrorism" in which 100 or more people were killed were committed by paramilitary groups like ISIS and the Taliban, and took place outside the US.

Those are horrific acts, but IMO are more akin to the US' behaviour in Vietnam, or Blackwater contractors in Iraq. Would you support a ban on Americans travelling to other countries because of those events?

The issue with terrorism isn't the body count. Its all the destabilizing damage people do to themselves in response out of fear. Look at all this chaos over such a tiny body count.... its dumb, imo.

Go back to the 1970s, and you'll see similar numbers by the Irish.

Okay...

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

Perhaps you could be more specific?

I don't know about the Irish in particular, but the list of links you've presented --- sorted by casualties, on a year-by-year basis --- makes a powerful case for the diversity of terrorist attacks in the 1970s. It doesn't well support an argument that terrorism is somehow endemic to specific ethnicities.

Well, it depends on your point. Your point seemed to be that Arab Muslims are uniquely violent, that terrorism is their own thing. Look at the 1970s, and you see plenty of terrorism from Europeans.

In the early 20th century people feared that Italians were all anarchists.

There's nothing particularly novel about modern fears that Muslims are all terrorists. It's just another case of othering.

> Nice thoughts, but none of the groups you mentioned in your analogy have the worldwide penchant for terrorism that Muslim groups do. Berlin, Brussels, New York, Israel, Orlando, etc.

This is called the availability bias - you're correlating the tendency of a group to take certain actions with the ease of which you can think of examples of members of that group taking those actions.

If I can think of an equal number of examples of Christian (or Jewish or Eskimo) terrorists, then by your logic we should be equally suspicious of those groups.

Yeah, the Irish never did any terrorism worldwide; no gun-running, dealing in explosives, managing international supply networks from Palestine to the US... none of that, totally. Same for the Germans and absolutely my fellow Italians - if we ever did that, there would be books and movies all over! The Japanese absolutely never moved to mainland Asia with bellicose intents, and the Swedes never imposed themselves over their Baltic neighbours, and of course there was never any violence by the zionist movement that brought about Israel.

Oh and you should totally compare local ethnicities with a worldwide religious community of billions, that's totally the right thing to do.

Fun fact: the vast majority of North American terrorism is committed by white men. No other group since 9/11 has contributed more to terror than disgruntled white dudes in North America. Refugees are trying to escspe the same horrors you are describing. The situation is similar to the US turning away Jews under the banner of "America First" during WW2 because they feared Nazis sneaking in with the Jews. The "safe" countries you describe haven't been rocked by war, their national identities not torn down and confused by decades of installed dictators, foreign resource exploitation, and post-cold-war rebel group armings. Remember, we created the Taliban to fight the Russians. That one sure had some long lasting effects. Now we're empowering neo-nazis domestically to fight this perceived threat of Muslim people. How do you think this is going to play out when we're done being afraid of Muslims?

It's easy to be scared right now, but turning to racist rhetoric instead of finding parallels in history is what allows fascism to take hold. Read up, educate yourself, and come back tomorrow better ready for building a better tommorrow.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/01/31/most-te...

> No other group since 9/11

So no other group since the largest terrorist act in the history of the United States?

If that's not a convenient choice in timing, I don't know what is.

15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. The current ban would have done nothing to prevent them from coming here.

I could see a ban making some sense, but any ban that leaves out Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia has deficiencies so glaring that it would never be worth the suffering caused.

Prior to 9/11, the all-time US terrorist record was the Oklahoma City bombing, by two white dudes. Divide out the number of deaths in each attack by the number of people directly involved in the attacks, and you reach comparable numbers.

Considering your views towards Muslims and willingness to ignore vast amounts of domestic terrorism, it seems like the goals of the 9/11 hijackers has been acheived.

9/11 is a valid date to start from because a large part of its shock value is that for the most part of post WW2 America, there weren't any foreign attacks on American soil. 9/11 was the anomaly, meant to provoke US outrage and further our violence against the middle East, convincing more young people that the US was an agressor and that they were the righteous. Clearly, these people are not righteous, but neither were we.

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