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Those who called for that war and who supported it, no matter how 'rational or intellectual' their thinking, have blood on their hands. Some of us knew this mess would happen (it was discussed prior yo the war).
Those lives matter just as much as ours.
And agsin: Hitchens, Harris or Dawkins, what have they done or said that is comparable to Islamic terrorism or even the actions of christians fundamentalists not only in Africa but in the Westerm world?
Hitchens was a useful idiot, providing 'left-wing' intellectual cover for the neo-cons as they pursued their post-colonial war in Iraq.
What's happening in Iraq and Syria now is 90% down to the actions of Bush and Blair. To pretend otherwise is self-delussional and an attempt to dodge our responsibility for what's going on there. Not only did our war unleash this hell on the people of the Middle East, but we've stood idly by and even abbetted the Saudis in their global campaign of radicalisation of young Muslims to turn them into Wahabists. We've made Saudi our trusted ally, but it's Saudi that's been spreading this Islamist lunacy across the world.
As someone said above, all of this was predicted at the time of the invasion - Bush and Blair and the lunatics around them chose to completely ignore those warnings. Our allies in France and Germany and countless other countries told us what we were doing was madness, but we ignored them.
And yes, the whole screwed-up situation in the Middle East is very much down to Europe and America's meddling there over at least the past 100 years, if not longer. We've crushed moderate, democratic, secular governments whenever they've threatened our interests. The long term results are there for us now to see.
And of course everything is twisted through our counter-productive, all too often un-critical support for Israel, and our need for oil. I don't think Israel is the primary issue at all, but our failure to demand a fair solution to the Palestinian issue has just created this festering sore - another useful recruiting device for the jihadis.
Taking a step back from it all, it's not actually all that hard to see why young Muslims are drawn to IS. They perceive the Muslim world as having been exploited and oppressed and poorly governed for centuries. And they see the west, with some justification, as one of the main perpetrators of the humiliation and manipulation of the region. IS offers simple, radical answers - something young people always like. I see the appeal as not disimilar to that of the extreme left in the 60s and 70s, which was also, built on a lot of legitemate grievances.
You are making some very good points. Its Incredible how hard it is for many in the western world to comprehend that for the arabs, also the moderate, antiradical, intellectual ones, it is a very difficult, sometimes unthinkable, prospect to see "us", and US especially, as the ones representing "justice" and "good" in this conflict after what has been going on there. (And I am not talking in regards to the fight against ISIS. The people countering ISIS so far are arabs in the region). Our treatment of the region has been incredibly cynical, violent and counterproductive, not to say extremely arrogant, and led to an almost unimaginable amount of suffering. Yet we naively expect them to happily and enthusiatically copy and adopt our democratic systems, with the leaders we elect, every time we bomb them. Its incredible! If that is not arrogance, what is?
They are: oil, banking, & defense (in no particular order).
All three industries are major exporters, and we know that we are all big importers of oil as well.
1. With banking (whether through organizations like the World Bank or IMF or commercial banks) you control the debt and when you control the debt you can dictate terms (including getting a hold of natural resources). The US went out of its way recently to try to stop Britain and others from joining China's new Asian Infrastructure Bank. They failed and there was a public spat about it. Britain is now a founding member of that organization, a competitor to the World Bank/IMF that will operate on lending terms not dictated to by Washington.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-20/who-s-afraid-of-the-asian-infrastructure-investment-bank-
2. With defense, you export weapons (Saudi Arabia was the largest purchaser of American hardware last year and 4th biggest spender on military- a country responsible for Wahhabism and Salafism - puritanical, violent & extreme forms of Islam). In order to sell more weapons you need to have more conflict & fear (The Lockheed CEO admitted as much recently in a shareholder meeting).
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/20/asked-iran-deal-potentially-slowing-military-sales-lockheed-martin-ceo-says-volatility-brings-growth/
3. With oil you control the well being of your population and ensure capitalism (or commercialism) continues in the West - you also can control how much of the black stuff your competitors can get. We need their oil. We also need to ensure that we control how much of that stuff is sold to fast growing China, India and others and at what price. Russia is not playing ball (it is doing deals with China outside the Western order and not transacting in Saudi backed US petro $ dollars). So it's being ostracized.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-opec-jostle-to-meet-china-oil-demand-1421987738
Make no mistake about it - these are multi-billion $ industries with massive geopolitical ramifications. Politicians are bought and paid for by these folks. I'm pretty sure if Obama was not president today we would already have WW3. There will be dangerous days after the 2016 election no matter who gets into power - that's for sure.
It's not a question of colonialism any more as a question of meddling in other country's affairs and attempting to shape their future in ways that do not suit them (they have to find their own way). Continued self-serving meddling is going to lead to continued asymmetric attacks by these folks - ironically one day with our own weapons.
I've yet to see any comment about the students from the same school being killed or not killed according to their religion though. Ah, I understand it's hard to use economics then : "I'm analyzing this at a theoretical level, don't bother me with the facts".
I think the line to cross is a bit like the same line between being religious or not ? Here you see some people having a very simplistic view of the world in terms of mechanisms, but very complex in terms of who operates : this way, you're always right, and each time you're proven wrong, it's not because the theory is wrong, it's because other people are behaving badly. The key is that any attempt by anyone else to prove your theory doesn't actually explain anything, can be debunked by some psychoanalysis babble. Is it why in the end, it's mostly male people who defend that ? :) All these religions have something in common, women are under men, and it's key for their existence.. Once you consider equality is a bad concept in our modern societies, you can start to excuse many, many things.
The problem with your interpretation is that you elevate religion and relgious fanatacism to some special higher status, detaching it from the realities of economics, social issues and politics.
If you believe that religion is fundamentally a human construct, as you claim, then you surely have to recognise that it's intricately connected to all our other behaviours and human-created systems of interaction, exchange, conflict.
Saying that this is 'all down to religion' doesn't actually expalin anything about what is actually going on in the real world.
Where do these jihadis come from? Why do they believe what they believe? Why are young intelligent western-educated Muslims drawn to extreme violence and intollerance. Where is their financial backing coming from? Who is orchestrating and benefiting from what IS is doing? What are the origins of Islamist extremism? Etc. etc.
When the west confronted communism it engaged in an intellectual, economic, military and cultural conflict at all levels. Communism was critiqued as an ideology in minute detail. We won't defeat the threat of Islamist extremism if our only response is to just dismiss them as religious nutters and ignore the wider context. It's our ability to analyse, understand and counteract the causes of Islamist extremism that will ultimately enable us to defeat it - or at least contain it.
I actually don't really understand what your point is. You seem to not want to understand, or engage in a discussion about the nature of the threat that we're facing from Islamists. If you don't understand your enemy and their motivitations it can make it a lot harder to defeat them.
I don't think any one on here is making excuses for what IS is actually doing - we're just putting it in a wider political and historical context. Something which Bush and Blair were unable/unwilling to do when they invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, ignoring the poisonous legacy of colonial interference (particularly British interference) over the previous centuries.
For instance, the British were so idiotic in Afghanistan that they did not realise that sending British troops to Helmand was the worst possible decision. The locals (not just the Taliban) hate the British with a passion, due to our colonial adventures there in the 19th century. Much of the oppositon the poor British troops faced was not actually from Islamists at all - it was just ordinary locals who hated the idea of foreign troops on their soil and particularly hated the idea of British troops. Many British soldiers died simply for the reason that they were needlessly sent into an area where history made their presence totally unacceptable to the locals and where they were never going to be able to bring peace and stability. Utter, ignorant stupidity than any military historian could have warned of in advance. Just because someone, or a political elite, were unwilling/unable to see things in a wider context.
With both Christianity and Islam, neither religion is defined entirely by the sacred text alone. There has been almost two millenia of interpretation of the new testament. Although there are people (generally protestant evangelicals) who have chosen to interpret the Bible as literally the word of God, to be read literally, that is not the mainstream Christian tradition at all really. To understand Christianity you need look at the wider texts, traditions and interpretations.
The same is actually true of Islam. During the centuries when Islam was argubaly one of the world's leading intellectual cultures, at the forefront of science and philosophical enquiry, Muslim scholars were very much engaged with interpreting the Koran. Like Christianity, interpretations have changed over time. The Koran has not always been interpreted in the rigid, entirely literal way, that is by so many of these tedious, ignorant jihadis.
So just reading the Koran and the Bible does not tell you everything about Islam and Christianity. Although they are obviously a good place to start and you're clearly streets ahead of most people if you've taken the time and effort to read them yourself. I've read some of the Koran in translation - the hardcore Muslims will of course say it has to be read in the original Arabic though!
If you have to interpret a religious text in a most imaginative way to make any sense of it or to make it fit normal human ethics, why not discard the whole text altogether?
Answer: Because then you have to discard the religion also, and that is for many an identity marker. Much easier to put on some blindfold and make pretend.
...And yet about 40% of American believes that the Bible tells the literal truth about the creation of the world and the appearance of life and humans on the planet. But even if not such a high number of believers were Biblical literalists, one would need to ask how does one determine what is literal and what is not, what is true as written and what is metaphorical.
And the same is true of any sacred text. My problem is not with the moderates, but with the radicals, nevertheless both draw their inspiration on the same book they hold as sacred. And we know these sacred books to be wrong in so many ways, on so many subjects. And when the book starts being wrong when it says you have to submit to this hypothetical (I say this to be polite, I'd say imaginary usually).
I agree of course. And lots of moderate Christians and Muslims would say that one the reasons for extremism is poorly educated or misguided people reading the sacred texts and making very simplistic, literal interpretations of what they say. Many American Christians are protestants of course, who are encouraged to read and interpret the Bible themselves, whereas Catholics and Orthodix Christians rely much more on a scholarly interpretation, which tends not to be quite so literal.
Yes, I think it's imaginary as well, but of course if you believe it, then it's not imaginary - it becomes something real. That's the thing about religion, even those of us who don't believe it cannot dismiss it simply as fantasy, because religion does exist and has real consequences. It's been created by the human mind over centuries. It's actually what makes it so fascinating. I'm an aetheist, but I find the history of religion fascinating. It's played such an important part in the development of the human species and human civilisation - we can't just dismiss it as fairy tales, because it's real significance is much more than that.
I think it matters a lot to study the history of religions. And often by doing so we see how unsubstantiated the beliefs are.
That there is far more involved than economics, for one thing the male drive towards aggression combined with a search for a spiritual need to make sense of life and the world play a big part as well.
Economics are a part of the make up of aggression under the guise of religious violence, they are not the explanation.
What I think he's trying to say is that it's not because something has existed for long that it is right, just or legitimate. The Church was and is a phallocratic institution. Homosexuals are murdered in Africa and elsewhere according to Christian and Islamic doctrines. The sacred texts say it is the right thing to do. The moral thing. But no need to use these extreme examples: women vote has been opposed by the Church and they could dwell on a long tradition to justify it. anti-Semitism too. A tradition has in itself no legitimacy or veneer of honorability.
Agreed. No one is putting this down to economics alone. We finished that discussion about two months ago on this thread. The problem is economic, cultural, educational, social, & religious doctrine (independent of culture), .There's no need to rehash the "economics-only" argument here over and over again. We are well beyond that. It is a factor. Not the only factor. Keep in mind that when we say economic we don't only mean from their side. We mean from our side too - I have articulated in my last post what large scale factors are being used, by which industries, and how they benefit the west while essentially making use of the middle east through divide and conquer. A reaction to that is inevitable - it's just become more immediate recently.
Having said that, this is also not a "religion-only" argument as some have tried to conveniently portray it as. I know it's easy to have a bogey-man to demonize (communism, Marxism etc. and now flavour of the month Islam), but it is more than that. Jack Nicholson famously said, this town needs an enema (in this case, it's more like this world needs an enemy). Radical Islam in this case is just a convenient tool being used to mobilize the disenfranchised & those without hope who have grievances (some legitimate, some illegitimate but none justifiable of murder).
That's true.
That's true as well.
I don't think it's fair to dismiss everything about religion outright. While some of the fables & parables do not stand up to scrutiny, like any good story these can teach us valuable lessons about life and good and bad - as long as we take them in the context that they should be taken - as stories - as narratives - and nothing more. Like a good movie.
Many take it as more than that. This is where problems start.
People are known to take all kinds of things for more than they are. Bond fandom, Batman fandom (the theatre killer from a few yrs back was obsessed with Batman movies and this was an influence in his crazy killing spree).
So that is a human problem (believing that which is not provable), and organized religion does us no favours by officially (and with vigor) continuing to propagate the dogmas that cannot be proven. To some extent, they have an official license to mislead. This is true of all religions however, not just Islam.
Religions should not be officially sanctioned or taken as fact in societies though. They should be taken as narratives/traditions that are there to teach us things about life. Just like a good movie. Just like a good story. Would be US presidents should not have to pledge their allegiance to a faith to get elected - but that is a requirement in fact (if not in law).
One day the laws will be changed to give religion less emphasis in societies - but we're a long way away from that - science has more work to do to debunk some of the so called 'facts' religions spout..
We're not going to get far with battling Islamists if our response is to tell Muslims everywhere that religion is just a load of old bo**ocks.
That is true.
No matter how far fetched some religious parables etc. are, many do believe them wholeheartedly.
Having said that, there are also Nobel prize winners who are religious too so just because someone is religious does not mean they cannot be reasoned with.
One cannot reason with fanatics though, no matter what the religion, and sadly we have fanatics from all faiths and without faith as well.
The latter part of the article is especially interesting, with reference to Tony Blair (Quartet Special Envoy) and our good friend Saudi Arabia. Politics makes strange bedfellows indeed:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/31/combat-terror-end-support-saudi-arabia-dictatorships-fundamentalism