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Comment by SirSavary | Hacker News Reader

Note: ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east; Hamas is homegrown and was democratically elected by the people of the region.

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Democratically elected by plurality, where the only competition was incompetent, and still only won by plurality… and hasnt had an election in 18 years, which means 50% of the population has never had a democratically exercised opinion because they werent born yet, and of the other 50% not even 50% of the ones that voted had voted for Hamas

people really act like thats a “gotcha”

It's not a "gotcha", it's a factual statement. You can disagree with the mechanisms that brought them to power but it was still a legitimate election.

yes it is accurate and a rhetorical dog whistle for extremist approaches to making Palestinian civilians inseparable from Hamas

it is also accurate that it was 18 years ago

empathy shouldnt be that hard

No, ISIS wasn't "a bunch of European guys who got radicalized": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State

Marauding terrorist force that lays claim to an area != the people who inhabit that area*

* I understand that they also recruited locally; that doesn't change the fact that there were thousands of Europeans in ISIS' ranks, along with fighters from many other nationalities.

>ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east

>there were thousands of Europeans in ISIS' ranks, along with fighters from many other nationalities

Why did you start off with such strong statements but then retreat to this one after you're challenged? Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not?

> Why did you start off with such strong statements but then retreat to this one after you're challenged?

There's no retreating in my comment -- it's a fact that they sourced people from everywhere. I threw an asterisk on there at the last second because I wanted to show good faith; there's nothing nefarious about it.

> Is ISIS a bunch of European guys or not?

It was definitely a bunch of European guys, and Asian guys, and American guys, etc... my point was that ISIS was a group of people from around the globe and not an ideology endemic to the region.

See my other comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39153097

ISIS is 95% of people of African and Middle-Eastern origins. Then maybe a bit of crazies from Indonesia, Chechnya, etc. As well, ISIS was founded in Iraq itself. How is it a "bunch of European"?

Your 95% figure is incorrect -- approximately 45% of fighters hailed from Africa and the Middle East, with ~31% originating from Europe (East and West combined).

Here's a BBC article https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-47286935 and the report that it sources its data from https://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Women-in-ISIS-r... if you care to learn more.

That's not what the article says at all. It says 45% of the foreign fighters hailed from Africa and the Middle East. The foreign fighters numbered ~42k total. It's unknown how many total fighters ISIS had, but estimates range into 200k total, which would imply that the vast majority of ISIS was native; more conservative estimates are that half of the fighters were "foreign fighters," which would mean that ~75% of the fighters were MENA-native (since the foreign fighters were about half MENA-native). [1] The strongest claim you could make regarding European contributions is that ISIS was around 16% European, including fighters from Chechnya. (The weakest country-of-origin claim is it was about 7% European including Chechnya, although given that Chechen ISIS fighters nearly outnumbered all other European ISIS fighters combined — and that Chechnya is a majority-Sunni-Muslim semi-autonomous region of Russia, and ISIS was attempting to form a Sunni Muslim caliphate — I think the least-European claim might point out that trying to bundle that into a pan-European identity group is probably mistaken, and the most-accurate depiction is "ISIS was a bunch of radicalized Sunni Muslims, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa.")

TL;DR: ISIS was not "a bunch of European guys who got radicalized." It was mostly people from the Middle East and North Africa: somewhere between 75-93%. 95% MENA is probably not correct either, but it's much closer to correct than your original claim.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State

>with ~31% originating from Europe (East and West combined).

I think the parent comment was referring to the idea that the overwhelmingy majority of those "Europeans" we're rather people of MENA/Turkish immigrant background, not "ethnically" European.

Even if that's what the parent comment was implying it still wouldn't be correct; much more than 5% of ISIS' fighters were "crazies" from "Indonesia, Chechnya, etc".

I looked at the source. Are you confusing “women and minors as % of total” from a country with % of fighters in IS originating from that country?

> ISIS was a bunch of European guys who got radicalized and then travelled to the middle east;

The prevalence of British and American accents whenever the IDF is interviewed was certainly surprising.

They were trying to present a certain image, I would imagine they put the German terrorists in front of the German TV cameras, the French in front of the French cameras etc.

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