What was the other 1%? Overreacting over Muffin the Mule being taken off air?

A few examples:

The Muhammed cartoon-affair led to worldwide violence, riots and embassytorchings. Nuttin to do with FP/Iraq.

Darfur, nuttin to do with Iraq/FP.

Van-Gogh killing. Nuttin to do with Iraq.

Attempted terrorattacks in France and Germany. Nuttin to do with Iraq.

Deaththreats to european politicians who speak up against radical islam eg. Hirsi Ali, Naser Khader etc. Nuttin to do with FP/Iraq.

Bombing of Hindu statutes in Afghanistan: Nuttin to do with Iraq.

These are just a few examples.
Can you see the pattern ?.

When was the last time the muslim community asked itself:

Why does our community create these sick young men?.
What can we do to prevent our young men to turn to terror?
Is the machoculture that we teach our sons one of the reasons for this?
How can we help prevent homegrown terror?

Instead all you hear is:
Its all because of Iraq and FP.

Thats pure Bull.
Especially with regards to homegrown terrorism.

The core of the problem is Islamism. That is the common factor of 99% of terror-attacks.

Petey

So the ongoing slaughter going on in Darfur and going into Chad now is due to FP ?.

Your reasoning is a fine example of the core problem within the muslim community:

The failure to think outside the box, and especially the failure to look with scepticism upon core elements of your own religion, and how it is being practiced/raped by fundamentalists.

Unfortunately the Samira Ahmeds are few and far between.

Petey

I would answer by giving the same reason I give against suicide bombing: because it’s immoral.

This is my point too. We both know that suicide bombing is immoral and we both know that most interpretations of Islam would back up the declaration it is immoral. And yet you still gets lot of people half-justifying it by saying that is an expected response.

Tariq Ramadan summed this up nicely. There are two issues here: religious and political. If you have a political problem that is Israel/Palestine or Iraq etc, then deal with it politically. It is not a religious issue and there is no point conflating the two.

But because these people are hell-bent on making a political issue into a religious one, they are messing up both. They should have no sanction in Islam but they do because there are religious apologists out there for terrorism.

The point is this: the problem is political. People make it into a religious issue and use it to radicalise their “recruits”. On top of that they indocrinate them to believe that suicide bombing is not only a proportional response, but that it has religious sanction. That is a very extreme position to take, which is why most Muslims don’t go with it. The ones who do, have been indocrinated for psychological reasons (though FP is of course their motivating factor).

I hope that makes my stance clear. FP may be the motivation, but it doesn’t alone make a man into a suicide bomber. For that, psychological manipulation is paramount.

So lets drop the subject and move on.

What I can say is that today, my officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas. The extremists are motivated by a sense of grievance and injustice driven by their interpretation of the history between the West and the Muslim world. This view is shared, in some degree, by a far wider constituency. If the opinion polls conducted in the UK since July 2005 are only broadly accurate, over 100,000 of our citizens consider that the July 2005 attacks in London were
justified.

Safety for us all means working together to protect those we care about, being alert to the danger without over-reacting, and reporting concerns. We need to be alert to attempts to radicalise and indoctrinate our youth and to seek to counter it. Radicalising elements within communities are trying to exploit grievances for terrorist purposes; it is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow UK citizens, or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield.

Are Sunny and others going to accuse the Director General of M15 of being an apologist for terrorism because she doesn’t seem to be paying enough attention to the..*profound pause*…deep psychological factors Sunny is so enamoured of?

Whether or not their stated concern is genuine, my point is exactly that it is a recruitment tool.

I have to disagree even if the Israeli-palestininian conflict was resolved i doubt that the threat would decrease. They would move on to another concern. Your argument is drain the swamp and kill the mosquitos. Thats fine but appeasement works when the enemy can be appeased. To appease the enemy we would have to restore the caliphate including half of spain or convert and live under sharia law if they wish to rule the world. In short they want to take us back to the 7th century.

Anas these terrorists don’t really give a damn about the palestinians its just a recruitment tool. If there was no palestine it would be chechnya, Iraq or afghanistan as the dubious FP argument.

Sorry Anas but these terrorists are in pursuit of the caliphate and commit such atrocities in the name of the ummah.

OK I will concede this: the BNP comparison was a stupid one. I think my original intention was to argue that people react differently to certain aspects of their reality but that this does not negate the fact that their given justifications may truly reflect their motivations.

But yes, the two cases are disanalogous in the respect that although victims of alienation, the BNP voters aren’t going out and blowing other people up; their response isn’t as morally reprehensible as that of the suicide bomber. On the other hand, maybe one could argue that they are responding to two different kinds of event: that the wannabe suicide bomber would argue that his action is in response to the murder of innocent people and so is proportionate (an eye for an eye). So that proportional becomes in some way subjective. Either way the analogy, which wasn’t intended to be strict is at problematic.
I apologise if it was seen as in any way endorsing suicide bombing of civilians. That wasn’t my intention.

You don’t have sympathy for the suicide bombers, not explicitly anyway, but you deliberately want to deny that their actions are way out of proportion.
At the same time though, during the Israel/Lebanon war, you were saying the Israeli response to Hizballah firing rockets into Israel or kidnapping its soldiers was way out of proportion.

So in other words, in case of your “opponent” you want to play the proportional-reponse game, but not when it applies to suicide bombers. Then you see their behaviour as expected.

Well, behaviour can be both “expected” and “disproportionate”.

Like I said, a completely spurious position. Because to take your logic then to its extreme end, the government is justified in a completely disproportionate response to terrorism and lock up all Muslims. After all, they feel threatened, so why not do everything needed in response?

I would answer by giving the same reason I give against suicide bombing: because it’s immoral. It would be understandble, and many governments have used the same excuse in the past.

If I argue that most governments invariably behave in a disproportionate fashion to terrorist threats by curbing individual freedoms unnecessarily, does that make me an apologist for totalitarianism? Similarly if I argue that a certain fringe element of the Islamic community will likely respond in a disproportionate and absolutely immoral way to Western FP or exploit vulnerable young Muslims to commit such actions, does that make me an apologist for suicide bombing — because I’m saying it’s a response that can be “understood”? If I say I understand Israel’s terrorist response to Hezbollah’s kidnappings, because I do understand some of the reasons why they carried those actions out, does that set me aside as an Israeli apologist?

To understand is not to justify.

Everyone can see your reasoning for its hollowness. Isaa hit the nail on the head up there. There are deep psychological factors here you want to play down because you think FP alone is the motivating factor. It has to be because you think suicide bombing is a proportional response. But it blatantly isn’t. Deep inside, because you’re intelligent, you know this. You just don’t want to admit it.

Thanks, but I don’t think FP alone is the motivating factor, I just think it’s the main motivating factor. You’re claim seems to be that FP is only one amongst many factors and has no precedence amongst them, which would seem to suggest that if Britain’s foreign policy were completely different, then the risk to British security from Islamic terrorism wouldn’t be much lessened. My claim is that it would be greately lessened.

Could you please expand on the way that misogeny is the cause of all of this? I’d really like to know. I consider your views to be worthwhile, but you really need to go a step further, in terms of explanation. I think.