"Islamic Extremeist Terrorist", or, Just 'Terrorist'?

[HeyYou]

I asked a few questions. Is that now considered an attack?

 

I question your "facts", especially when you ignore my requests where it is coming from, and who is providing it.

 

But then, you are always correct, and we are wrong. So, I will concede this 'debate' to you. The 'terrorists' are only misunderstood freedom fighters, whom we should give the middle east to, and then they will be happy, and stop being terrorists.

 

I am out. You have a nice life. (is that an attack too?)

[MajKrAzAm]

Invoking the ad hominem fallacy just doesn't work in this instance because you would actually be an idiot to deny the theological motivation behind flying a plane into a building. The level of your analysis, Xenoshi, is summed up by your willingness to accept uncritically and at face value Al Qaeda’s own explanation for its murderous acts.

Such an explanation actually proves very little, if anything. Lots of people object to America’s foreign interventions: but very few have attempted mass murder of civilians as a result.

The jihadists choose their methods because they are Islamists, not because any ‘political goals’ dictate or demand such methods. The methods they adopt demonstrate their ordering of priorities on an entirely non-political secular basis. There’s no real calculation of interests, no room for compromise or negotiation, nothing that resembles a basic understanding of politics as contest between groups over the distribution of power and resources – an understanding that is common to all political groups, in every culture everywhere, marking off serious political engagement from fanatical idealism.

Islamists are idealists in the very worst sense of that word, and their fantasies have nothing in common, either, with sane political thinking and calculation. Nevertheless, apologists for the jihadists (Xenoshi et al) portray their Islamism as somehow having ‘rational political goals’ or a reaction or as ‘blowback’. This downplays the role of ideology as an explanation for the anti-human, nihilistic momentum of jihadist actions and serves to aim at pinning the blame elsewhere. The core motivation of Islamists is theocratic fanaticism. And the way they act, mass murder and rape, reflects this worldview.

[Xenoshi]

I asked a few questions. Is that now considered an attack?

 

I question your "facts", especially when you ignore my requests where it is coming from, and who is providing it.

 

But then, you are always correct, and we are wrong. So, I will concede this 'debate' to you. The 'terrorists' are only misunderstood freedom fighters, whom we should give the middle east to, and then they will be happy, and stop being terrorists.

 

I am out. You have a nice life. (is that an attack too?)

The debate was never about whether terrorists are terrorists. The debate was about whether or not it was appropriate to call them Islamic Terrorists. It isn't. They are just terrorists. They are motivated by political and secular reasons.

 

Implying that I am an Islamist is an ad hominem attack.

 

Have a nice day.

 

 

Invoking the ad hominem fallacy just doesn't work in this instance because you would actually be an idiot to deny the theological motivation behind flying a plane into a building.

 

 

I'm not even going to read the rest of your post.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19crash.html?_r=0

 

" Leaving behind a rant against the government, big business and particularly the tax system, a computer engineer smashed a small aircraft into an office building where nearly 200 employees of the Internal Revenue Service were starting their workday Thursday morning, the authorities said."

The ideological motivation behind flying a plane into a building was a political and secular one. Not a religious one.

 

Thanks for playing.

 

Also, I lied, because I glanced at the rest of your post and you seem to be operating under the assumption that I am simply making all of this up as I go. I'm not. Scholars have poured countless hours of research into terrorism and the motivation behind it and they have all more or less come to the conclusion that the religion of the terrorist does not matter.

 

Infact, since 1970 only 7% of the worlds instances in terror attacks have come from organizations traditionally described as religious terrorists. In the European Union Alone, we see more terror attacks from separatists and left-wing radicals than anything else.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Essex

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Sikh_temple_shooting

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik

 

Furthermore, suicide terrorism has been used by non-muslims, as has the deliberate targeting of civilians by terrorists. "The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are considered to have mastered the use of suicide terrorism as "the contemporary terrorist groups engaged in suicide attacks, the LTTE has conducted the largest number of attacks." The LTTE also has a unit, The Black Tigers, which are "constituted exclusively of cadres who have volunteered to conduct suicide operations."

 

Also, The Tamil Tigers were responsible for ethnic cleansing against the Muslims in their territory, so your entire narrative that it's a strictly religiously motivated thing is out the window. Suicide terrorism is the product of secular motivation, regardless of how they dress it up.

 

"According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, LTTE was the first insurgent organisation to use concealed Explosive belts and vests. The specialised unit that carried out suicide attacks was named the Black Tigers. According to the information published by the LTTE, the Black Tigers carried out 378 suicide attacks between 5 July 1987, and 20 November 2008"

 

"In case after case, Wright details how Islamic radicals were drawn into the movement by perceptions of

territorial intrusion. For example, Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 plot, had

no real ideology beyond “vaguely socialist ideas.” What enraged him and caused him

to sign up for a suicide operation was the 1996 Israeli attack on Lebanon"

"Ramzi Yousef was the first Islamic terrorist to attack the U.S. homeland, blowing a two-hundred-foot crater in the basement of the World Trade

Center in 1993. Was he hoping thereby to impose Islam on the United States? There

is no sign that the thought ever occurred to him. “Not a particularly devout Muslim,”

reports Wright, Yousef was aiming to topple the Twin Towers in order to cause

250,000 deaths, “a toll he thought equaled the pain the Palestinians had experienced

because of America’s support of Israel”"

"Political scientist Robert Pape has developed an interesting methodology for

discerning terrorists’ motivation by studying their backgrounds. He collected biographical

details of 462 suicide terrorists who participated in 315 attacks from 1980

to 2003. He found that the most consistent factor behind suicide terrorism was

military intrusion in the individual’s homeland. He found, for example, that “alQaeda

suicide terrorists are ten times more likely to come from Muslim countries

where there is an American military presence for combat operations than from other

Muslim countries”"

 

Here we go with the same old argument circle, by the way. Literally anybody who has done any actual credible research into terrorism has concluded that the exact opposite of what you are saying is true. Unless you have some substantial documentation to back up what you are saying, you are offering nothing more than personal opinion.

 

But yes, by all means. Keep calling me an "Islamist apologist" because I happen to believe in reality. Heck, call me an Islamist for all I care. It doesn't do anything but prove that you're incapable of mounting an actual argument. Until you back your statements up with documentation, they are nothing more than your opinion. You are entitled to have your opinion, but that doesn't make it admissible as fact in a debate.

 

From my main man Pape: "Beneath the religious rhetoric with which [such terror] is perpetrated, it occurs largely in the service of secular aims. Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism ... Though it speaks of Americans as infidels, al-Qaida is less concerned with converting us to Islam than removing us from Arab and Muslim lands"

 

 

P.S - The Islamists would kill me, so that makes calling me an Islamist even more hilarious.

Edited May 3, 2015 by Xenoshi

[MajKrAzAm]

Only someone on the autism spectrum would compare the two terror attacks un-ironically. Islamist terror is statistically fat tailed, it has exponential growth potential. Your estimation from past data has huge errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One large sudden 9/11 event can cause huge casualties.

 

 

Also, I lied, because I glanced at the rest of your post and you seem to be operating under the assumption that I am simply making all of this up as I go. I'm not. Scholars have poured countless hours of research into terrorism and the motivation behind it and they have all more or less come to the conclusion that the religion of the terrorist does not matter.

 

 

No, I'm operating under the assumption that I'm talking to an American community college history major that thinks that Islamist mass murder of (mostly Muslim) civilians is a genuine reaction to American foreign intervention.

 

Do you honestly believe that an Israeli withdrawal from Palestine would have avoided the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a moral nihilist to suggest that. Islamists make it very apparent that their quarrel is with modernity and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) American foreign policy.

[Xenoshi]

Only someone on the autism spectrum would compare the two terror attacks un-ironically. Islamist terror is statistically fat tailed, it has exponential growth potential. Your estimation from past data has huge errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One large sudden 9/11 event can cause huge casualties.

 

 

Also, I lied, because I glanced at the rest of your post and you seem to be operating under the assumption that I am simply making all of this up as I go. I'm not. Scholars have poured countless hours of research into terrorism and the motivation behind it and they have all more or less come to the conclusion that the religion of the terrorist does not matter.

 

 

No, I'm operating under the assumption that I'm talking to an American community college history major that thinks that Islamist mass murder of (mostly Muslim) civilians is a genuine reaction to American foreign intervention.

 

Do you honestly believe that an Israeli withdrawal from Palestine would have avoided the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a moral nihilist to suggest that. Islamists make it very apparent that their quarrel is with modernity and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) American foreign policy.

 

And here again you completely ignore all empirical evidence that proves your argument is flawed and instead opt to make assumptions about myself. You're wrong, by the way, on all accounts now...From your assumption about myself, to your hardly objective opinion on terrorism.

 

You are arguing against literally every scientific study conducted into terrorism. You are arguing against the compiled data on every major terror event since the 1970s. You are arguing against the factual evidence that (a) Suicide bombing is not unique to "jihad" or to an Islamic concept of terrorism. You tried asserting that only those dastardly Muslims who are terrorists would come up with flying planes into buildings, yet someone angry about taxes did the exact same thing. (b) The most prolific suicide bombers are the Tamil Black Tigers, who weren't motivated by religion but rather motivated by political separatism. They came from a society which historically revered those who died in combat. You can perhaps make the argument that societies which have a hero-worship mindset to those who die for their cause (i.e martyrdom) have a disproportionate predisposition toward terrorism, but correlation is not causation.

 

Also, how absolutely obtuse of you to insult the millions of people worldwide who have Autism. It shows how low my opposition has fallen when you resort to insults based on the mentally handicapped in your naive attempt to quantify the ridiculous drivel which you consider an argument.

 

Once more, I humbly invite you to produce a single modicum of factual evidence which supports any of the baseless claims you are purporting. Slippery-slope arguments are hardly becoming. So you are proposing that we should ignore all data and we should instead take a hostile approach to Muslims in particular, rather than toward terrorism in general, because of your rather inane notion that "Terrorism can happen! Boom! Scary! Aaah!". Like I said, slippery slope. Consistently since 9/11 both Europe and America have suffered far more terrorist attacks by non-Muslims than they have by Muslims.

 

You are ignoring all factual evidence that points out that terrorism in the Middle-East is inspired by political and secular motivations simply to bolster your own narrative that the terrorists were motivated by religion, when by their own admission they are not. Ramzi Yousef, the one who bombed the WTC was not even a devout Muslim. No, I am not arguing that if the Israelis withdrew from Palestine the "slaughter in Manhattan" would have been avoided. That isn't the point of the debate, at all. Terrorists are terrorists and they will always find a means to justify their terrorism. The problem is that religion is not the motivation for their terrorism, and the definition of what "oppressing Muslims" means to people like Osama bin Laden is vast and broad.

 

Now, would I propose that if America had never interfered in the Middle East, Never attacked Iraq, and if America had never stationed troops in Saudi Arabia would 9/11 Likely have not happened? Yes, I would go so far as to say if America had not done all of those things we likely would not have been attacked by Al Qaeda because the reason Al Qaeda started attacking America is because of our interference in Iraq, our positioning of troops in Saudi Arabia, and our continued influence in the Middle East. Prior to that point, Osama bin Laden did not express any anti-American sentiment. Which, by the way, American troops remained stationed inside Saudi Arabia until 2003 when they withdrew.

 

Furthermore,

 

Robert Pape looked at 315 incidents, in which all but 14 they classified as part of 18 different campaigns.18 shared two elements and all but one shared a third element, the elments which were:

1. A foreign occupation;
2. by a democracy;
3. of a different religion.

 

Furthermore, Mia Bloom a Professor of Security Studies for UMAss Lowell for her book Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism interviewed relatives and acquaintances of suicide terrorists. Her conclusions supported Pape's, finding that it was far more difficult to get someone to agree to a suicide mission with the absence of a foreign occupation. Ergo, the vast majority of terrorism in the Middle East is in direct response to foreign military presence.

 

It should be telling that the first major terrorist attack on the United States in the Middle East was the 1983 bombing of the Embassy in Lebanon and the Marine Barracks in Beirut, a direct response to the fact that there was a United States Marine Barracks...In Beirut...in Lebanon...During the Lebanese Civil War. This was the start of it all, basically which also coincides with the 1982 Israeli invasion into Lebanon. Prior to that, no Muslims were suicide bombing Western installations.

 

Prior to the US intervention in Kuwait and the deployment of US Troops in Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda/Osama bin Laden was not attacking America. Infact, all through the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan the CIA was providing money, training, and weapons to Osama bin Laden and his Mujahideen which would later become Al Qaeda. Prior to 1990, there was no Al Qaeda even. If they were solely motivated by their sheer hatred of all things not Muslim and by all things Democracy, why is it then that these groups did not exist until these times?

 

Quite the contrary, Islamists make it quite clear that their quarrel is with Western ideology. Osama bin Laden issued 3 Fatwa's prior to September 11th, not decrying the religion of the Untied States but condemning their imperialist dogma and calling on Muslims to drive the Americans out of the Middle East.

[Harbringe]

Only someone on the autism spectrum would compare the two terror attacks un-ironically. Islamist terror is statistically fat tailed, it has exponential growth potential. Your estimation from past data has huge errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One large sudden 9/11 event can cause huge casualties.

 

Ok so let me get this straight . Your basing your argument in a speculative assertion of events that have not yet happened and Xenoshi who has been basing his assertions on empirical evidence of events that have actually happened and on the conclusions that experts have made and somehow its him that is operating in the autism spectrum . By the way that is yet again another ad hominen attack being made. Also to use people who suffer from the affliction autism as your means of denigration is reprehensible and really just shows the depths people will sink to when they are so clearly getting whupped .

 

@ Xenoshi forewarn me if ever I am going to be on the opposite side of a debate as you , people resort to sticks and stones against you and you respond with laser guided missiles . And I used to think I had a handle on what the art of debate was .kudos

[MajKrAzAm]

You are arguing against literally every scientific study conducted into terrorism. You are arguing against the compiled data on every major terror event since the 1970s. You are arguing against the factual evidence that (a) Suicide bombing is not unique to "jihad" or to an Islamic concept of terrorism. You tried asserting that only those dastardly Muslims who are terrorists would come up with flying planes into buildings, yet someone angry about taxes did the exact same thing. (b) The most prolific suicide bombers are the Tamil Black Tigers, who weren't motivated by religion but rather motivated by political separatism. They came from a society which historically revered those who died in combat. You can perhaps make the argument that societies which have a hero-worship mindset to those who die for their cause (i.e martyrdom) have a disproportionate predisposition toward terrorism, but correlation is not causation.

Right, suicide bombing is not unique to jihadists, it’s only a coincidence that they happen to be extremely good at self-immolating thousands of innocent people every year.

 

Point B is a lie.

 

You are ignoring all factual evidence that points out that terrorism in the Middle-East is inspired by political and secular motivations simply to bolster your own narrative that the terrorists were motivated by religion, when by their own admission they are not.

 

http://imgur.com/Ofq36qT

 

Taken from the Global Terrorism Index 2014 Report.

 

Now, would I propose that if America had never interfered in the Middle East, Never attacked Iraq, and if America had never stationed troops in Saudi Arabia would 9/11 Likely have not happened? Yes, I would go so far as to say if America had not done all of those things we likely would not have been attacked by Al Qaeda because the reason Al Qaeda started attacking America is because of our interference in Iraq, our positioning of troops in Saudi Arabia, and our continued influence in the Middle East. Prior to that point, Osama bin Laden did not express any anti-American sentiment. Which, by the way, American troops remained stationed inside Saudi Arabia until 2003 when they withdrew.

 

 

Your comment here does contain a little tiny glimmering of insight, but I suspect you don’t realize it. Bin Laden’s objection to American soldiers in KSA was religious in nature, and not nationalist. He described the soldiers as ‘Crusaders’ violating the sanctity of Mecca. That you don’t seem to understand this make me think you are a troll or an apologist for Islamism.

 

Around 2002 Bin Laden issued another one of his rants where he whined on about the historical injustices against the Chaldeans that must be atoned for by the kuffir. Given that these events occurred before Islam or Christianity even existed you might wish to re-assess really how closely any concessionary strategy might actually go to satisfy Islamist fanatics

 

 

It should be telling that the first major terrorist attack on the United States in the Middle East was the 1983 bombing of the Embassy in Lebanon and the Marine Barracks in Beirut, a direct response to the fact that there was a United States Marine Barracks...In Beirut...in Lebanon...During the Lebanese Civil War. This was the start of it all, basically which also coincides with the 1982 Israeli invasion into Lebanon. Prior to that, no Muslims were suicide bombing Western installations.

 

 

This attack was state sponsored and planned by an Iranian proxy to interfere in Lebanon’s internal affairs in order to give Lebanon’s Shia militias strategic depth in a country of Sunnis, Christians, Druze and Shia. Foreign peacekeepers were an obstacle to Iran’s religious-sectarian goals.

 

 

Prior to the US intervention in Kuwait and the deployment of US Troops in Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda/Osama bin Laden was not attacking America. Infact, all through the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan the CIA was providing money, training, and weapons to Osama bin Laden and his Mujahideen which would later become Al Qaeda. Prior to 1990, there was no Al Qaeda even. If they were solely motivated by their sheer hatred of all things not Muslim and by all things Democracy, why is it then that these groups did not exist until these times?

 

 

Again, you are confusing different things and lying on others. The idea that the US supported OBL and AQ is nothing more than a stupid meme. There is no straight line linking the mujahideen with AQ. Yes, foreign Arab fighters joined the Afghans in their war but these fighters had huge financial backing and had no need for American help. Nor would the CIA want to support foreigners who have no operational knowledge of Afghanistan.

 

I suspect that you have confused the mujadhideen's role in the emergence of the Taliban. Again you are talking about an enormously complex group of different Afghan tribes with disparate aims and allegiances. You are overlooking Pakistan’s huge role in the creation of Taliban to give them a proxy to control southern Afghanistan in a future war against the Indians.

[Xenoshi]

 

You are arguing against literally every scientific study conducted into terrorism. You are arguing against the compiled data on every major terror event since the 1970s. You are arguing against the factual evidence that (a) Suicide bombing is not unique to "jihad" or to an Islamic concept of terrorism. You tried asserting that only those dastardly Muslims who are terrorists would come up with flying planes into buildings, yet someone angry about taxes did the exact same thing. (b) The most prolific suicide bombers are the Tamil Black Tigers, who weren't motivated by religion but rather motivated by political separatism. They came from a society which historically revered those who died in combat. You can perhaps make the argument that societies which have a hero-worship mindset to those who die for their cause (i.e martyrdom) have a disproportionate predisposition toward terrorism, but correlation is not causation.

Right, suicide bombing is not unique to jihadists, it’s only a coincidence that they happen to be extremely good at self-immolating thousands of innocent people every year.

 

Point B is a lie.

 

 

"Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels didn't invent the suicide bomb, but they pioneered it as a tactic in war.

For three decades, the rebels fought for an independent homeland with hundreds of suicide attacks, more than al-Qaida or any other group. All told, more than 70,000 people died in the fighting."

"Prof. PAPE: No. Actually, the Tamil Tigers are a purely secular suicide terrorist group. They're not a group that most of the listeners will have heard too much about because even though they're actually the world leader in suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, carrying out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they're not attacking us and they're not attacking our allies.

And so, even though they've done really quite tremendously spectacular suicide attacks - for instance, in 1993, it's the Tamil Tigers who assassinated - with the suicide assassination a sitting president, Premadasa, a president of Sri Lanka. That's the only time that a suicide attack has actually assassinated a sitting president.

And then just a few years before that, Rajiv Gandhi, when he was running for prime minister in 1991, a Tamil suicide attacker, this time a woman by the name of Dhanu assassinated him. And so, despite the fact there have been these spectacular attacks, they have been occurring not against us or against our allies, and so many folks won't really have been as familiar with them.

But they are not religious. They're not Islamic. They're a Hindu group. They're a Marxist group. They're actually anti-religious. They are building the concept of martyrdom around a secular idea of individuals essentially altruistically sacrificing for the good of the local community."

I'm not going to bother read the rest of your post, because you were so hilariously wrong right out of the gate.

Any culture which glorifies death and self-sacrifice, idealizing 'martyrdom' has been inclined to suicide attacks as noted by the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Tamil Tigers. That Al Qaeda and other such groups uses a bastardized form of Islam to justify their attacks and in their rhetoric does not make them motivated by Islam in and of itself. But none of this actually matters, at all, to the question at hand.

We are not arguing that we should refer to terrorists who are Christians as "Christian Extremist Terrorists", or "Atheist Extremist Terrorists", or any other religion. The only reason for affixing a specific religion to "terrorism" is attempting to demonize and vilify over a billion people. If you want to start calling the Jewish Defense League "Radical Jewish Terrorists" and the Lords Resistance Army "Extremist Christian Terrorists", abortion clinic bombers as "Radical Christian Extremist Terrorists", and Anders Behring Breivik an "Extremist Christian Terrorist" and the Tamil Tigers the "Atheistic Extremist Terrorists" then you can argue that we should refer to terrorists in the Middle East as "Islamic Terrorists". Otherwise, they are terrorists who happen to be fundamental Muslims. Just like the KKK are terrorists who happen to be fundamental Christians, so on and so forth ad nauseam.

It isn't until we see the political interference on foreign countries on Middle Eastern soil that terrorism became an option. Prior to that, there was nothing like that coming out of the Middle East. They were Islamic the entire time and you never saw this terrorism from them.

Nothing you try to argue (and calling me a troll and an Islamist apologist, as you no doubt have done, wins you exactly 0 points) can change the vast amount of research and factfinding that has gone into this subject that categorically disproves the fact that terrorists are actually motivated by religion. Sure, you can find statistics from around the web that attribute terrorist attacks to "religious reasons" simply because they were conducted in the Middle East, but that is nothing more than sitting there and looking at the attacks and claiming that because they were done by Muslims, their religion was the chief motivator.

Unfortunately, this entire thing ignores the fact that Muslims bare the brunt of these terrorist attacks with 86%-98% of victims of all terror attacks in the Middle East being Muslims themselves, and the fact that experts in the respective field of terrorism and counterterrorism have wholesale denied that terrorists are actually motivated by religion. Furthermore, while their religion definitely correlates toward their predisposition toward terrorism, as I have already proven, all of the data illustrates that the kind of terrorism you see happening would be impossible if not for mitigating outside circumstances. Yes, they are Muslims. Yes, religion is used as rhetoric and to inspire them, but the chief reason they conduct their attacks is to "drive the foreign invader" out or as retribution for what they see as attacks on their culture and their religion. With no foreign invader, there would be no Jihad just as there was no Jihad prior to American interference in the Middle East. They weren't interested in blowing us up, though you could argue that the PLO in the 60s and 70s were already engaging in terrorism against the Israelis, but again, occupation/oppression by foreign sources. You have no real way to refute the fact that countless of scholars have examined the motivations of terrorism closely and have all concluded that religion is not the actual motivator. You can throw out useless statistics that refer to "religious inspired terrorism" all you like, it doesn't change the fact that the entire scientific consensus thus far is that these terrorists are not inspired by religion.

If it were an issue of "they're fundamental Islamists and nothing more", we would have been experiencing terrorist attacks against Western interests by Muslims prior to 1982.

The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea calls its self as such yet it is neither Democratic, for the people, or a Republic.

"While drivers of terrorist activity are often complex and

multidimensional, there are several generalised and

significant socio-economic correlates of terrorism. Countries

with higher levels of terrorism were found to have three

statistically significant factors:

Greater social hostilities between different ethnic,

religious and linguistic groups, lack of intergroup

cohesion and high levels of group grievances.

Presence of state sponsored violence such as extrajudicial

killings, political terror and gross human rights abuses.

Higher levels of other forms of violence including deaths

from organised conflict, likelihood of violent

demonstrations, levels of violent crime and perceptions of

criminality."

"The Afghan jihad was backed with American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. He received security training from the CIA itself, according to Middle Eastern analyst Hazhir Teimourian. While in Afghanistan, he founded the Maktab al-Khidimat (MAK), which recruited fighters from around the world and imported equipment to aid the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army. Egyptians, Lebanese, Turks and others - numbering thousands in Bin Laden's estimate - joined their Afghan Muslim brothers in the struggle against an ideology that spurned religion."

"The Maktab al-Khidamat, also Maktab Khadamāt al-Mujāhidīn al-'Arab (Arabic: مكتب الخدمات or مكتب خدمات المجاهدين العرب, MAK), also known as the Afghan Services Bureau, was founded in 1984 by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden to raise funds and recruit foreign mujahidin for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. MAK became the forerunner to al-Qaeda and was instrumental in creating the fundraising and recruitment network that benefited al-Qaeda during the 1990s"

[MajKrAzAm]

You have not addressed any of my points in my previous posts, instead you reframe the argument and make fatuous comparisons between Islamists and secular extremists and attempt to draw a shameful moral equivalence between them.

 

Your argument reduces the actions of Islamist groups to merely a reaction to Western foreign policy, without identifying anything specific to it, and – worse – conflates the actions of al-Qaeda with the justifiable general sentiment among people who have been wronged by America and the West.

 

We are not arguing that we should refer to terrorists who are Christians as "Christian Extremist Terrorists", or "Atheist Extremist Terrorists", or any other religion. The only reason for affixing a specific religion to "terrorism" is attempting to demonize and vilify over a billion people. If you want to start calling the Jewish Defense League "Radical Jewish Terrorists" and the Lords Resistance Army "Extremist Christian Terrorists", abortion clinic bombers as "Radical Christian Extremist Terrorists", and Anders Behring Breivik an "Extremist Christian Terrorist" and the Tamil Tigers the "Atheistic Extremist Terrorists" then you can argue that we should refer to terrorists in the Middle East as "Islamic Terrorists". Otherwise, they are terrorists who happen to be fundamental Muslims. Just like the KKK are terrorists who happen to be fundamental Christians, so on and so forth ad nauseam.

 

You forgot to mention the Anglican terrorists of the 18th century :laugh: .

[Tidus44]

Sort of a meaningless issue terminology, but I suppose some do require a word that reflects the comfortable prejudices that has been instilled by propaganda – but whatever.

In 1969 (my 1^st ME tour) the term used was “guerrilla”. In 1985 (my last tour) the term was “terrorist”. Such precise terms don’t seem to matter all that much when someone is trying to kill you, so I usually just used the terms “friendlies” and “hostiles”, but that's just me.

 

While I have no particular issue with the points raised by Xenoshi and do agree with them up to a point, it does raise the question (in my mind anyway) of how much consideration was made by those gathering the information that they were addressing individuals who are fundamentalist Islamic followers.

The reason for my question is because the Islamic religion is not simply worship as a social habit such as it is for Christians; it is completely entwined into every aspect of life; from personal hygiene to protecting the environment and is much more linked to politics than it is in other cultures.

While I have no specific issue with the stated political reasoning, and do understand it, I have some difficulty with the statement that religious beliefs are irrelevant as it is extremely difficult to separate one from the other in the Islamic world.

 

The Terrorist Perspectives Project: Strategic and Operational Views of Al Qaida and Associated Movements (United States Joint Forces Command), The Canons of Jihad: Terrorists’ Strategy for Defeating America (US Naval Academy) and Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Philip Carl Salzman) offer a somewhat different view of the integration of political and religious aspects in the ME, but when it gets right down to it, it is just people tired of the negative interference in their lives and culture who are rebelling against it.