It's funny you should say that, because in this thread, my point is that it's the same f'ing ****. It's not different. It's not new. It's the same f'ing ****, and we should refer to it in the same f'ing manner, and treat it the same f'in way.
Here are some interesting bits of news I've come across: The UK PM has demanded an investigation into links with the British far-right.
That seems to be what a lot of people are trying to sell in here, which is true in the sense that yes, terrorism is terrorism, no matter who does it. It's awful and unacceptable. But that's about where the equality ends. We need not paint with any broader of a brush and make false comparisons between ideals, cultures, religions, philosophies, and so on. If we can't look at these things objectively and evaluate them in a reasoned manner, and ask ourselves the tougher questions, then we're all doomed to see more incidences like this.
Thank you for reminding us for the 30th time since friday that the true lesson from this tragedy is that Islam is qualitatively worse and that we shouldn't let terrorist actions of anti-islamists who believe this dissuade us from continuing to mention this ultimate, prioritized truth. We can't let anti-islam murderers distract us from our goal of publicly admitting that islam is bad and violent and prevalent - if we do that, then THE TERRORISTS HAVE ALREADY WON!
I'm not asking anybody to excuse Anders and his conservative, xenophobic, racist, nationalist failboating... I'm asking people to stop using this as a reason to make false comparisons to, or excuses for, other ideologies (and their violent directives/occurances). In fact, that's the entire reason I even bothered jumping into (getting sucked into?) this conversation. That's not exactly a terrible thing to suggest people refrain from doing. Sorry that bothers you, Sam.
Right - we have no disagreement here - you're doing exactly as i stated, chiming in once again to remind us that of the key point that we need to try to distinguish this horrific act of anti-islamic violence is to distinguish it from islamic terrorism and sanitize it as much as possible, because islam sucks way worse. Eyes on the prize, boys. Eyes on the prize. Can't let a bad mass murdering apple spoil the whole batch of good christian soldiers.
Not my point at all. You really ought to stop trying to tell me what my motivations/point are, that's kind of a waste of your time. You honestly think I have any love lost for Christianity, or any desire to protect its reputation over Islam? Really? Are you new here? Have you not seen my posts on the subject of religion and violence for the last several years? I get it, Sam, you think this guy represents as big of a problem in scale/magnitude as any other form/type of terrorist. That's your prerogative, however removed from reality it may be. I've showed you why this isn't true, and you basically ignore me. So, I'm pretty much done talking to you about this, if nothing else to spare everybody else another (what are we on now, the 3rd?) thread derailing pissing contest.
He also talked about becoming a martyr. He may not be the most devout..but he clearly sees a battle between Christendom (maybe in more of a political sense) and Islam as well as multi-culturalism, generally.
I have indeed wondered this - about the closest thing i can get out of it is some sort of "divide & conquer" strategy, where DonnyMost, online anti-theist extraoridnaire forms a temporary alliance with the Koran burners of the world in order to rid the world of the scourge of one religiion. It also could be some sort of phase of acting out to be contrarian. We all have been there. Whatever, it's mildly interesting but all speculative on my part. And this is undoubtedly true for Norwegians. Probably also true for Houstonians as well. Not so true of course if you live in Iraq in the middle of shiite-sunni car-bomb brawl somewhere - which is, uh, I guess somethign we should acknowledge now, because, uh, we NEED TO in order to defend Sir Jackie's posts...or something. Anyway, no that's not the issue, the issue is that when an anti-islam terrorist goes on a murderous, rampage, due in no small part to islamophobic ranting from the likes of Terry Jones, Pamela Geller and the bloody history of the Crusades et al, only a complete ass clown would say "we must not lose our perspective here, because quite frankly islam is really bad and we must distinguish this from other religious acts of violence! - probably out of embarrassment. The ironic part of this is, it's actually more embarrassing for you when you try to distinguish it than if you tried to acknowlege it ("Norwegian guys attempt to become a martyer for the Crusades is must be distinguished from Al Qaeda's attempts to restore the 9th Century Caliphate of Andalusia!").
The only thing that this loon and muslim extremists have in common is that they indiscriminately kill people in support of an unprovable ideology. But that pretty much describes all political killings, large-scale, small-scale, and so forth.
Push someone into a corner and it doesn't matter what ideal, culture, or religion. Same end result. There are more who died under communist russia. But I'm sure you'd like to keep islamic extremism on another level. Want to be objective? Use a sample size greather than 9/11/01 to 7/27/11.
lol, this is like the pink elephant in the room. Psychological effects of this repression and its link to violence is unmeasured.
This doesn't hold true. Take the oppression of Jains or Buddhists. You don't see them retaliating violently (very rarely for Buddhists, anyway). Yes, and that culture and philosophy sucked. Although that doesn't have much to do with this. I don't want it to be on another level (why the hell would I want people to be violent and oppressive?), it unfortunately is on another level in this space in time. Which sucks, for everyone. I don't think a decade is a small sample size, especially when compared to a normal adult lifespan. It's an issue of recency and modernity, I'm not exactly alarmed about the Moors or the Spanish Inquisition's threat to our day to day life. But if I were alive back then, I sure as hell would be. (and I'd be speaking out about it too, and I'd also probably be dead by now because of that)
I think this is a good point and you have me convinced. Thinking in the terms of the friction between the Islamic and Western worlds, he casts himslef as the OBL of the West. So, insofar as we call OBL an Islamic terrorist, Brevik is a Christian one. Though, I think a better term might be a Western terrorist in that context. He's fighting for a traditional Europe with a nominally-Christian identity, not a devout one. He's not Europe's version of the Taliban. Westboro Baptist Church or the abortion clinic bombers or the Texas Board of Education might fit that role better. It's probably easier for me to split hairs with Brevik because I'm so much more familiar with the intracacies of Western culture. Apart from Islamic terrorism, I have an easy category to put him in -- he's a standard-fare neo-Nazi. It'd probably do a good deal for cultural understanding if we had a category to put bin Laden in that didn't have the word Islam in it. Maybe 50 years from now, we can just call people neo-al-Quedans.
Osama bin Laden's multiple wives and p*rn collection doesn't seem to do much to relief him of terrorist tendencies.
Again, you are nit-picking and keeping it to religion. You're refusing to look at the big picture. Crazy thing is, you don't seem to notice that a lot of the Islamic extremist violence is against.....YEP! OTHER MUSLIMS!! Still think it's a purely religion thing? How does it not have anything to do with this. We're talking about extreme versions of philosophies that have lead to violence. I didn't mean it like that. I meant that you continually like to keep islamic extremism on another category level compared to other forms of extremism. We're not talking about "temporal" relevency. We're talking relevency in terms of cause and magnitude. Guess you would like to ignore the Rwandan genocide? The russo-afghan war that started this damn thing in the first place? Is the halocaust too far in the past for you?
I was referring to the hoards of brainwashed idiots who are lining up to do the bidding of terrorist leaders such as Osama Bin Laden.
Giving you a direct example of people "backed into a corner" and not exercising violence isn't "nitpicking". It's disproving your assertion completely, especially as it relates to religion. And no, this is not purely a religion thing (another discussion we've had a dozen times or more already in which I've acknowledged the outside factors over and over again). And I'm including muslim-on-muslim violence in my thoughts. (and always have) Yes, but what is your point? Marxist-Leninists killed people and suck, and...? How does this change how we should feel about religiously motivated violence? Extremism is extremism. But why somebody does something (or what they end up doing) does make them dissimilar in some ways. Kind of like how we have different classifications for crimes in courts. I'm not really sure I follow you when you say "category level", Islamic extremism is different in terms of how widespread it is and how dangerous it is. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you disagree with that, which is fine. Extremist Buddhists and Islamic extremists are similar in that they are extremists, but that's about where the similarities stop. I'm very familiar with Christian atrocities alike, I have no need or desire to "ignore" anything. No, it's not too far in the past, many events in our lifetimes have shaped the violence we see today, this is true. But I prefer to stay at least within a generation or two (or three) when discussing stuff that we deal with in "present day". But unfortunately from both a qualitative and quantitative standpoint, Islam wins (or losses, if you want to get technical) this tit-for-tat (both in present day application of it, and in the theory which governs it; I say this because there was one a time when Islam was a more peaceful religion bar none). Which is really a pointless exercise, because the atrocities of the past (especially the distant past) do little to make me feel any better/different about the atrocities of the present.
