faetal on 20/11/2015 at 22:35

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It's still a massive false syllogism. Not one single thing mentioned in this thread shows any reasonable link between Muslims and Salafist jihadi muslim terrorists, other than that they both refer to the same religious background. If the religious background was causal to the violence, then there'd be a lot more than 0.003% of Muslims associated with ISIL.

To reiterate - people really need to learn how to interpret how causality works. Just because you think that Islam is a common factor, this does not mean that a likely outcome of following Islam is support for ISIL.

Pyrian on 20/11/2015 at 23:25

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I honestly can't tell if that's an absurd strawman argument you're attributing to faetal in direct contradiction to his position or if you're actually positing that absurdity as a fact. :confused: What is your position, really? On review of your posts, it appears to be that Muslims whose sole religious observance is that they don't eat pork should be "painted with the same brush" as Islamic State militants.

Gryzemuis on 21/11/2015 at 09:32

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You look at this with a very neutral eye. You look at a bunch of neutral properties, you just give them label A, B, C, etc. And then you see if there is any causality regarding any of those properties.

But the fact is, both regular Muslims and extremists use the same book and religion as the source for their daily lives. Even if their ideologies are different, they do have the same base. And that common source is not neutral. Islam tells people that the lives of Muslims are precious, but the lives of non-believers is useless. It teach people to spread Islam all over the world, until there is no non-believer left. Muslims in the west don't care about that anymore. But muslims in the east is a different thing. Saudi-Arabia is actively financing new Mosques in the Netherlands. They pay for eastern, old-school Imams to come to my country and preach. And the Muslim ideology and ideas that they preach is much more aggressive than the Islam that people had here since the seventies. Many of those preachers even have Salafist/Wahhabist backgrounds. They are paid and sent by Saudi-Arabia, after all.

Those properties A, B, C can not seen as neutral. Because they actually have meaning. A meaning that is relevant to the discussion. Of course there is a link between Islam and violence when a few dozen attackers tell us they do their violence *because* of Islam.

Remember the 19th century, and the first half of the 20th century ? The Roman Catholic church sent priests to Africa and other continents to "convert the darkies". It's almost as the reverse is happening now. Non-western religion that comes to us, to try and spread their religion.

icemann on 21/11/2015 at 09:46

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Bzzzt. That answer is incorrect. It is in fact an interpretation. Just as how many words in religious texts can be taken differently based on the perspective of the person reading it.

https://bcbha.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/strike_1.jpg

demagogue on 21/11/2015 at 12:30

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If it's propensity to violence you guys want to talk about, then I recommend you watch a lecture or read a book on, respectively, the psychology, anthropoligy, and sociology of violence. What we're talking about here isn't pathologically aberrent violence, although some people with some mental illnesses maybe comparatively more likely to be attracted to violent movements, (who themselves probably are not too keen to recruit them since ex hypothesi they can't control them), but at any rate it would be seriously mischaracterizing them to say that's the driving determinant.

We're really talking about violence as a social practice in a context, and you probably learn as much from organization theory than anything. Saying it's all Muslims or something universal to human nature I think is missing the focus on why violent social movements form, what needs they fulfill, why violent practices come about, and what psych needs of what demographic groups in what socioecon situation it's playing too.

Eg, as is well studied now, ISIS members are rather religiously illiterate, predominantly frustrated young Sunni males needing a certain kind of validation, a leadership that's manipulating a warped worldview of 'the West' and liberal values, there's sectarian politics involved about Sunni's place (and alienation) in the region, there's a conscious adoption of violent practices with tactical ends, eg 'strategic rape' as a method of controlling a population and the footsoldiers alike.

There's also a particular historical backstory with why a caliphate styled governance is called for, but one that changes by group, eg, the Syrian/Iraq group has in mind Abbassads, but Boko Haram in Nigeria (which self declared as IS South) has in mind the Sokoto Caliphate (known in history as the engine of the W African slave trade), the point being that the Abbassad and Sokoto visions and ideologies are different, and the practice of violence is different, eg, why Boko Haram brand IS uses kidnappings, and ISIL brand IS uses forced marriages. This raises the other point that ISIS, organizationally, has a very bottom-up flat (non-heirachical) structure that devolves decision making to the bottom level, it's more a brand than an army, but consciously so. That means their 'violence planning' works differently than Al Qaida's very top-down way. And strategic aims are different. ISIS only wants to hold a limited amount of cities under a regime which makes them relevant to the region. AlQ was more about symbolic gestures.

The general point is, whenever you're thinking of responses or policy, the first thing you do is read up on these kinds of factors and situate practice in terms of individual's motivations and socio-cultural context. Well, that's enough for one post.