Why is sympathy for Islam so common on the political left?

More numbers:

Deaths Linked to Terrorism Are Up 60 Percent, Study Finds

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/w...-terrorism-are-up-60-percent-study-finds.html

Apparently, it doesn't take many terrorists to kill a WHOLE BUNCH of people.

What if 450 becomes 4500....0r 45,000. Still statistically insignificant vs. the number of muslims overall. But will that matter to the hundreds of thousands of dead people should this trend continue?

 

"Kid," that got me. . . .

So, you like those airplanes and helicopters with FLIR imaging and laser-guided ordinance that TARGET people, right? Me too. Guess what: suicide bombers don't have that stuff.

I think suicide bombers are ****.

I just think you don't know how much killing America does every single day of the year, and you don't care. You're a hypocrite.

 

Reading comprehension does not seem to be one of your abilities, kid.

 

Big whoop. People accept being condemned by their family and community every day for comparatively silly things.

I don't really buy this argument past the age of 25.

 

America is a tough place. You can imagine that people need their ethnic/racial community for support when they are in a marginalized position.

 

Here, Dad: enjoy some of your targeted U.S. killing.

You can skip to about 3:05 to get to the juicy bits.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LF9P5vIzYyE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Have it your way. . . .

 

When a terrorist blows up a civilian area such as a mall do they unintentionally kill civilians?

I still don't understand how you can't grasp a very simple concept... INTENT

Yes, most Americans I would hope would not want to TARGET civilians. 'Target' means intent

 

I get it. You're saying if we say "oops" it makes it all better.

 

No. Just no. Stop strawmanning.

Intentionally targeting civilians is what Islamic extremists do. There isn't a moral eqivielnce to intentional targeting and unfortunate accidents.

The difference can be summarized into the notion that Islamic terrorists limiting factor in the amount of civilians they murder is resources(military might and money) while the limiting factor for civilian deaths under US hands is moral restraint.

 

Seems like you are the one who got diverted. The title of this thread is "Why is sympathy for Islam so common on the political left?" Do you have sympathy for these 85 Muslim civilians we killed? I do. My posts show why.

I don't like terrorists either. But you showing ZERO CONCERN for these 85 civilians is pathetic. News flash: some people in Syria are going to be mighty pissed off at the U.S. of A. about those 85 civilians we killed. But you're not. Why don't you care? Did you send them an email saying "Our bad!" and then they started smiling and laughing.

Obviously terrorists are demented, and they do very evil acts. That is not license for you and others to be so ******* cold blooded that there is zero response from you and other hawks to 85 deaths at the hands of the U.S. Two wrongs do not make a right.

If you want to try to paint me as a bad guy for being outraged that WE killed 85 civilians, I won't be surprised. I also know that many people in this thread actually do not give a **** about homicides; they just want to say "We're great! They suck!" because they are afraid of terrorism and willfully ignorant of the killing we do daily.

Go research more U.S. killings of civilians! Oh, you don't feel like it. It's because you don't care that we are killing people. . . .

So stop acting so self-righteous, Killer. I'm in it too--my tax money helped pay for those munitions. At least I don't keep my head in the sand. I want to know who I'm killing.

 

I don't know about the "left". What I know is that I have Muslim friends. Coworkers. I don't agree with their religion. But they are good people, good friends to me, hardworking Americans and they have as much right to believe and practice their religion as I do mine. They are my neighbors and I love them. And that's why I'm not going to even entertain any political ideology that unfairly scapegoats them for the actions of a few extremists.

I'm a Christian. My nature is to love my neighbors, even when they're different or even disagreeable. The Scriptures teach me that fear is not godly. So I cannot associate myself with the politics that teaches people to fear others. No.

 

Again... strawman after strawman.

You keep on trying to paint a narrative where ATW and I support civilian TARGETING. And I'm confident in assuming that a LARGE majority of Americans will answer no to justifying the TARGETING of civilians.

We state an actual nuanced difference that matters between the two entities that we are comparing and you try to make flippant accusations that we 'defend' the targeting of civilians....

NO mother ****er. You made a moral equivalency between the INTENTIONAL TARGETING of civilians and the UNFORTUNATE deaths of civilians due to either faulty intelligent reports or TERRORISTS INTENTIONALLY USING CIVILIANS AS COVER.

You are an arm chair commentator. I can with first hand experience actually give you explicit detail of how carefully methodical our armed forces are in attempting to prevent civilian casualties. I can go into nuanced detail of how it took our platoon 75 minutes to properly call in an airstrike because of the several levels of command it must go through just to be approved.

The mere fact that you try to tie in a moral equivalence here is disgusting.

The poll asked whether the TARGETING of civilians is justified. TARGETING.

We don't TARGET civilians. Islamic extremists do. It's really that simple.

 

Nope. I said very clearly you don't care when we kill civilians. And you still haven't said that you do.

I never said we're as bad as the terrorists. Quote me if you can or STFU about that one.

I never said there's a moral equivalency. Quote me if you can, or STFU.

Dude, you mean it took 75 minutes to call in that airstrike on 85 civilians? Wow! That's cool.

I'm damn glad we don't target civilians. I'm telling you we kill innocent people pretty much every single day, and I cannot get one expression of concern out of you.

Anyway, there is a reason why people sympathize with Muslims: because we are blowing the s$%t out of some of them, literally. Try to care.

Boom goes the dynamite!

Now I await your quotations of all the reprehensible things I've said in this thread. Quote your ass off! (If you can.)

 

You are implicitly placing a moral equivalence to the two entities by assuming that Americans being content with 'collateral damage' is equivalent to Muslims answering yes to INTENTIONALLY TARGETING CIVILIANS.

When people 'accept' that collateral damage is a unavoidable side affect of war, they are not speaking of an 'ought', they are speaking of a harsh reality.

The poll in question explicitly asks if TARGETING civilians is justifiable. I doubt many Americans would answer 'yes' to the question framed in that manner precisely because of the word 'targeting'.

Also, I can speak on behalf of my post history on the amount of times I went to great lengths to defend Muslims on this message board.

Your off the cuff assertions about me 'not sympathizing with Muslims' is just pure conjecture. Read my post history douchebag.

 

Great quotations of me! jk

(By the way, your use of quotation marks is wrong/misleading. "Not sympathizing with Muslims" is not a quotation of me.)

So Americans are "content with collateral damage" are they? I'm not. I don't like it at all.

Ok, let's do it again: find a quote where I said you don't sympathize with Muslims, or STFU.

I said you don't care about killing civilians, and you still have not brought yourself to say that you do care.

You're big on this whole INTENTION thing, like "murder or homicide"? I grant you: homicide is considered less reprehensible than murder. But I only said we do homicides, not murders. Homicide is bad. Agreed?

So . . . you failed to find any quotations where I said there is a moral equivalency between us and terorists. That argument is down the toilet. Now you're talking about a poll, because your position is crumbling.

I asked ultra-Rambo ATW if he would support targeting civilians in order to defend the United States from enemies. I did so to point out that the poll that you guys have been using as a red-white-and-blue dildo poses a question that is kind of leading, and most of us would answer yes to some degree: yes, we would accept some intentional killing of civilians in order to defend America from her enemies (e.g. Hiroshima).

How about starting off your next post by admitting it the fact that we (mistakenly) targeted civilian families while they were fleeing is horrifying.

 

Why would I have to mention such an obvious notion? Do you find someone exploding to bits 'horrifying'? I have enough respect for another fellow human to just assume such a notion as the default position.

Again, YOU are the one placing a moral equivalency to TARGETING civilians and accidentally hitting civilians. And the one thing you WONT touch is the notion that these Islamic terrorists LOVE using civilians as buffer zones.

 

Greta quotations of me. jk

I think my work is done here.

 

If you want to play on technicalities, the terrorists are not trying to win a war by killing the biggest number of people. Their target is the state or the government.

But if we go by technicalities, we are devaluing human life, which is exactly what I think you're trying to avoid. You're saying that targeting civilians is different than having civilians as casualties because of intent.

We can't really prove intent, that's actually the most ridiculous thing in all of the western common and civil law systems, that they sometimes even attempt to diagnose intent outside of confessions.

There is one thing that's good evidence of intent: repeating a reckless action over and over again. That means either the person is mentally incapable of controlling themselves or they have intent to do that thing. Here are some important points:

1) The United States foreign policy would obviously not target civilians directly simply because they don't need to. They can and do wipe countries out, no other country has this power. Iraq and Libya are gone, even if our primitive labelling system survives. You would be hard pressed to argue that the United States foreign policy CARES about civilian kills. There is no government in the world - and we have some really really violent ones - that use their army to conduct an attack on civilians. Bashar Al Assad doesn't target civilians. Mohammed Morsi did not target civilians while he was president. Kim Jong Un does not target civilians. Radical Islamic governments do not target civilians. So the standard you're setting that the United States government, the most powerful and among the most democratic countries in history, does not target civilians is simply meaningless. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that US foreign policy gives less ****s about civilian casualties than most countries in the world. We should not be having a conversation about the minimum level of decency almost all governments today have shown.

2) Other violent governments absolutely support and fund groups that would do it, but we've established that that's not targeting civilians because otherwise your argument about US policy falls apart. For example, Iran is notorious for this. Iranian government won't kill civilians, but they pay rebel groups who they know have a history of murdering civilians and they fund them and arm them anyway to expand and protect their foreign interests and assets. At the same time, the United States has armed, trained and funded groups for the same reason for example in South America that they knew would and eventually did target civilians. The United States funded radical shiite protests in pre-Islamic Iran that ended up killing a couple of hundred civilians.

3) Now let's look at the other side. All people who lack sovereignty, rights and an army eventually have a percentage of them resorting to targeting civilians. This is a dark part of humans which we want to deny, but history shows we're a ****ty species where some % of the humans in an oppressed group that doesn't have an army will resort to targeting civilians almost without fail (I can only think of Tibet as an exception). Ask any Israeli how the IDF was formed, and the IDF is one of America's greatest allies. That's how the Palestinian military will eventually be formed, by the same type of people. While the Kurds are today targeting civilian areas, no one even talks about how there are people in ISIS territory who want to but can't leave and the Kurds are just assuming that all ISIS territory is bomb friendly. South Sudan, East Timor, Colombia, Honduras, etc. This is not a Middle East problem, it's just that we have most of the world's unrepresented people competing with leaders who are fed arms and intelligence by the United States or Russia or Britain.

When someone is killed, what we want is justice. I assume we're on the same page that the goal is justice - not vengance, not winning an argument, not anything else.... there should be justice and ensuring the threat doesn't repeat itself. How is it not murder when US foreign policy responds to a terrorist attack by carpet bombing a country which is 99% innocent civilians? That's not targeting, by your definition. Where is the justice for the people who died who opposed the Taliban and Al Qaeda? Who is responsible for their death? The Taliban, who on the eve of war offered to hand over OBL in exchange for evidence that he did it? The Taliban who today US foreign policy is hoping rules the country now that ISIS has arrived? The Taliban who are formed from the mujahideen that the US government so gracefully thanked at the end of Rocky 3? Those guys? Someone is responsible for those deaths and if it were in your country, you would point at the person who shot the gun or detonated the bomb.

Bottom line is this: you are 100% responsible for the predictable outcomes of your actions. If I drink and drive and kill someone, I killed that person. Because I decided to drink that alcohol and then drove. I wasn't intending it. Whether that's called recklessness or man slaughter or whatever by a court, I have murdered that person. If I did it ten more times the same way, what does that make me? Probably an alcoholic and a murderer.

So yeah, you could make the strong argument that the US does not overtly target civilians, and that would matter me if we were writing a dictionary, and that is a meaningless standard in the world for equivalent groups.

But if we are talking about justice and the value of human life, there is no verifiable evidence that there are groups somewhere in the world that can guarantee rights to their members/citizens that act this reckless towards innocent humans.

 

I guess the US needs to throw out our current criminal justice system as a large portion of judgement centers around intent.

You are brushing of intent as if it doesn't matter with vague platitudes about 'devaluing' human life.

And intent can be proven through actions and words. No one is stating that proving intent is always 100% accurate.