No one calls these attacks "blowback"

[SHRED]

Because to do that would implicate the western powers and their nefarious dealings with the middle east these last hundred years.
No...much better to call them "radical Islamists". That way perpetual war can be maintained and guilt-free war at that.

This is a sick and brainwashed world.

[merrily]

1. If a Christians kills an abortionist, it is attributed to the killer's "radical Christianity?"

If it is, fine. If not, a double standard seems operative.

A pre-emptive comment, which may or may not be necessary: My post has nothing to do with numbers of incidents, nor am I preferring one religion over any other.

[SHRED]

2. I submit that "radical Islam" is a symptom

Not a cause.

And that the western world laid the groundwork for this radicalism.
But no...TPTB would much rather we focus on a religion rather than the blowback that is happening now due to decades of abuse to the people in that region of the world by the oil cartels.

[elljay]

4. No, it is a late 18h century doctrine

from Ibn al Wahab and adopted by the Al Saud clan as it took control of Arabia. The Saudis have spent hundreds of millions of dollars spreading Wahabism throughout the Muslim world. Islam is an imperialist religion whose followers conquered most countries in the Middle East and forced their inhabitants to convert, discriminating against or killing those who refused. And, a bit more history would show that there was plenty of Islamic imperialism until the early 20th Century. The Ottoman Empire didn't relinquish control of Eastern Europe until they lost a series of wars with Russia and then WW1. You can blame the unrest in Bosnia, Kosovo and Cyprus on the Muslim invasions of Christian Europe and the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan to Muslim imperialism in the Caucasus.It is very simplistic to blame everything on the West. Our misguided policies certainly opened the floodgates, but the radicalism was already there.

[appal_jack]

6. These facts are too-often overlooked by the Left. Nicely summarized. nt

[NaturalHigh]

10. Well said.

[dbackjon]

12. You also just effectively described

You also just effectively described The Christian colonization of the Americas

[elljay]

13. Yes

Christianity, too, is an imperialist religion whose followers are commanded to "spread the word." A main difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christianity doesn't have rules describing how to spread it, so the violence we saw in the past (and which my family personally experienced) could transition to the less-violent missionary work and right-wing Christian political activism we see today. Islam, on the other hand, specifically requires followers to offer non-Muslims the choice of conversion or death, or if Christians or Jews, the imposition of religiously-required discrimination. It will be much more difficult for Islam to abandon its bigoted and violent teachings because they are so specifically enumerated as the true and perfect word of Allah that Muslims are required to follow.

[Aerows]

54. Bingo. n/t

[TipTok]

59. Sorry...

They've been backward and regressed since their inception...

Some groups have made progress since the 7th century... Others not so much...

[Orrex]

22. I don't believe that comparison works

The "blowback" in the OP's example is a retaliatory strike against one nation for literally attacking another.

A Radical Christian who bombs an abortion clinic is not retaliating against an attack but is in fact enforcing their corrupt vision of their mythology through violence.

[malaise]

24. +1,000

Couldn't say it better

[merrily]

36. The point is whether a violent act is labeled with the religion of the violent actor.

No comparison is identical in all respects or it would not be a comparison.

[Orrex]

37. I don't see that as the point

The post came across as trying to draw some equivalence between the motivation for one violent act versus another, following DU's recent trend of calling out the perceived tolerance of Muslim extremism versus Christian extremism. To that end, the comparison falls flat, and I pointed out the reason why.

For that matter, our US media invariably labels attacks by Muslims as "acts of terror by Muslim extremists," while
Christian extremists are never labeled as such. They're rarely called terrorists, though they're sometimes said to have committed acts of "domestic terrorism," which the media doesn't treat as "real" terrorism.

Hell, even during the high of Ireland's Troubles, the US media never described IRA terrorists as Christian extremists, when that was exactly and explicitly what they were.

Christian extremists might be called "a fringe group" or "a radical sect," but media is always careful to distinguish these individuals from "mainstream" Christians, whereas non-violent mainstream Muslims (the vastly overwhelming majority) are a a little-mentioned afterthought for our media, at best.

Can you find, say, five somewhat recent articles in the mainstream US media that uses the phrase "radical Christian" or "Christian extremist" to describe the acts of a Christian terrorist operating in the US? I doubt it.


I appreciate your attempt to explain "comparison" to me, though. I was really struggling with that.

[merrily]

38. It was my point.

[Orrex]

39. Sorry... My phone doesn't show the posters in the whole thread-view

And I lost track of who posted what.

Still, your post didn't come across that way, and it resonated with DUers' recent complaints of perceived tolerance for Muslim extremists in a way that doesn't seem especially helpful, effective or accurate.

[merrily]

40. Reply 1 was inaccurate? um, ok. nt

[Orrex]

48. well, no.

The point is still valid, insofar as I maintain that your intent wasn't effectively conveyed by your first post and that it resonated with the oft-expressed view that DUers tolerate Muslim extremism while condemning Christian extremism.

Your comparison between Christian and Muslim extremists remains ineffective.

[merrily]

56. um, ok nt

[yeoman6987]

3. All I know is if somethings not done it will be a way of life for everyone

[billhicks76]

5. Oceania

[malaise]

7. Precisely

and it's that simple

[Bonx]

41. Or not.

[joshcryer]

8. Turkey was a US based Junta for decades...

...it became a Democracy, and has shifted toward Islamism in response to the PPK in recent years. Do all Muslim countries have to be dictatorships or juntas?

[pintobean]

9. Making excuses for terrorists is what's sick.

[NaturalHigh]

11. I had a similar thought.

[gratuitous]

15. Yes

But what does American militarism look like to, say, the people of Yemen? Our country's invasion and occupation of Iraq had plenty of excuses both before and during; is the aftermath there our responsibility at all? Would an Iraqi whose home was destroyed and whose family was wiped out during an American attack (which we called "collateral damage&quot have any right to call us terrorists, or are we too virtuous to be sullied with that label? In which case, any reprisal against us for those actions is the real terrorism, right?

[Coventina]

16. I would be totally sympathetic to Iraqis calling us terrorists. I would even say they'd be

justified in attacking us back.

My question: how many Iraqis have been implicated in attacks claimed by the Islamic State?

[gratuitous]

17. My understanding is that the good folks in Islamic State that we're arming so efficiently

Are folks who used to be in Saddam Hussein's military. For some reason, the usually very careful Bush administration didn't have any plan or provision for Saddam's military once we invaded and occupied the country, so we - kind of a funny story, really - just lost track of them. And wouldn't you know it? Some of them were pretty resentful about losing their former positions, and decided that we were to blame.

[Coventina]

18. I am firmly in favor of bringing war-crimes charges against Bushco.

And the Islamic State right along with them.

[KingCharlemagne]

58. Viceroy L. Paul Bremer arbitrarily disbanded, i.e. fired, the entire

Iraqi military. Where did those former Iraqi military go?

[SHRED]

19. Right...

If that's what you think I'm doing you are sadly mistaken.

[unblock]

26. to dismiss analysis as making excuses is to perpetuate a horrible status quo

if you want to simply dismiss terrorists' actions as insanity or religious extremism or anything else that you can't really do much about except perhaps kill more of them and take off your shoes at airports, go ahead, but do so knowing that you're doing absolutely nothing to keep more of it from happening.

we have a problem, we need to examine all angles and thoroughly understand it, and then try to solve it.

your barf emoji is not helping the situation one bit.

[pintobean]

27. As a poster below said

don't take their word for what motivates them, make your up own motives for what they do.
I think it's disgusting.

[unblock]

31. people aren't always aware of what motivates them.

republicans aren't aware that they've been brainwashed by foxpropaganda, for example.
terrorists may or may not be honest of their motives, if they're even aware of what really drives them.
it doesn't really matter.

what matters is what actually causes them to do what they do, and then to decide if we can change and should those causes.

if you want to criticize the o.p.'s analysis as simplistic or wrong, fine. i'm sure relative poverty is a contributing factor, as i'm sure temperature is also a contributing factor, as these things are known to contribute to all manner of violent acts. but the dismissive ridicule is unhelpful and simply enables the status quo.

[pintobean]

33. Why don't you tell the OP about dismissive ridicule.

This is a sick and brainwashed world.

And, I'll go by what my Muslim neighbors tell me, not what a few anonymous posters on the internet think. I'm not into blaming America for everything that's fucked up in the world, and neither are they.

[unblock]

35. guess you're right. we're saints and nothing we ever did could possibly have anything to do with it

i'm not into "blaming america" either, but i'm afraid to look at anything and everything.

nor am i afraid of soul-searching or self-examination for the purpose of self-improvement.

i'm american and i love america, but we all know our country has not been perfect. we get better by doing things like somehow abolishing slavery, somehow getting past the vote belonging only to men, and so on.

we don't get better by refusing to examine when and where we might have messed up.

yes, it's possible that terrorism might continue to exist no matter what we do. but that's a conclusion we can come to only after thoroughly examining all the facts and hypotheses and trying different things. we're not entitled to come to that conclusion because, hey, some of that might involve "blaming america" and therefore we have to put our fingers in our ears and refuse to consider it.

[Coventina]

14. Screw that. If all they did was attack Western powers, I'd buy it. But a doctrine that represses

women, kills LGBTQ, shoves little girls into burning buildings because they escaped "improperly covered", arrests women for being rape victims, lashes people for drinking alcohol......

I could go on and on, but that is not "blowback" that is repressive, backwards shit that has no place in the 21st century.

[bvar22]

29. The USA destroyed Iraq, a secular nation where Christians, Shiites,

and Sunni lived next door in peace.

The USA destroyed the most advanced nation in North Africa with the highest standard of living. Women could own and sell property, could wear blue jeans and make-up, go to clubs escorted, could own and drive cars, could have their own money, could attend the University, and many more rights....but not anymore!

Libya was an example for the backwards countries North Africa, but
not after we "helped" them with our Freedom Bombs. After we killed Gaddafi, the radicals took over (predictable), and imposed Sharia Law.
This billboard appeared all over Libya dictating how women must now dress:



One of the predicable results of Shock & Awing a country to pieces and killing/maiming half the population, men, women and children in the most horrible ways possible is that it radicalizes not only the survivors of the target country, but it also radicalizes the neighboring countries too.
This is PREDICTABLE.
Blowback is also predictable.
The two can not be separated.

[Coventina]

42. Yep, because after we "shocked & awed" Japan, they started killing their LGBTQ too!

If you'll read my posts above in the thread, I am NOT and never have been in favor of our military interventions and I think those responsible are guilty of war crimes. Period.

I just don't happen to buy that repressing women, LGBTQ, and other civil freedoms is the natural result.

[jack_krass]

57. We stuck around in Japan and rebuilt the country

Last edited Sat Jul 2, 2016, 09:54 AM - Edit history (1)

Libya, we bombed and bailed, leaving a power vaccuum which was filled by the strongest, boldest survivors.

Libya is a textbook example of failed intervention*

*not to be interpreted as critical of HRC

[Coventina]

63. Vietnam was also a failed intervention. But they don't have public stoning or beheading.

Women aren't forced to wear burkhas, etc.

[Blue_Tires]

20. I was wondering when I'd see the first

"Turkey got what was coming to them" hot take on DU...

[SHRED]

21. I don't get it

How some of you think I am somehow "justifying" terror attacks with my TP?

I'm not.

[malaise]

25. They don't want to get it

Exceptionalism justifies anything for themselves

[Marr]

23. I swear, this is the left's version of 'guns don't kill people'.

These people very flatly tell you, over and over, exactly why they do these things. They do these things because they believe their religion endorses them-- and any honest reading of the texts would tell you that they're right. They are on very firm theological ground.

And yet, despite these exceedingly frank explanations, people on the left insist they not only know the killers' motivations better than the killers themselves do, but they suggest that anyone who doesn't follow along is a bigot.

[leveymg]

28. Any excuse to attack the Left. Calling ISIS terror blowback isn't an effort to excuse it.

Blowback is what it is. If you want to call it something else, go ahead.

[Marr]

30. I don't tend to 'attack the left', because I'm very much on the left.

But on this one issue, I perpetually feel completely out of step with people I align with on a lot of other issues. There's this kneejerk reaction on much of the left to make excuses for violent Muslim extremists, as seen in this OP. Nevermind that it's paternalistic and infantilizing in the extreme, making Muslims into a sort of passive group that has no thoughts or agendas of it's own, and can only respond to the actions of the almighty white man of the west. Muslim extremists don't even understand their own motivations, to hear these people tell it, even though they happily outline those motivations over and over. No, the benevolent western liberal just ignores their actual *words* and gives another lecture on their own foreign policy views.

It seems like many of us are so anxious to jump in and defend people we perceive to be minorities, or under dogs (they are neither there, of course, but ignoring that), that we don't stop to consider that they might also be destructive, close-minded bigots.

And I disagree-- describing ISIS as 'terror blowback' most certainly is excusing it. It's passing the moral failing off on the west. Ultimately, ISIS is a product of it's homeland and religion.

[leveymg]

34. You seem to believe Muslims are a monolith. They've been divided among themselves

Last edited Fri Jul 1, 2016, 12:07 PM - Edit history (1)

for centuries, and in the last few decades those divisions have been encouraged by the west and by Israel resulting in the deaths of many millions. The responsibility is on all of us as will be the lasting consequences.

[Marr]

45. And you seem to believe they're all little children.

The divisions in Islam exist mostly because of political and religious schisms inside the Muslim world, and those divisions started happening immediately upon the death of Muhammad.

Believe it or not, they're not a bunch of passive cows who can only react to the actions of the west. They have their own motivations and their own thoughts and sadly, some of them are quite destructive.

[leveymg]

46. No, I believe they, like us, have some whose power, prestige, wealth are based on war & destruction

and need restriction.

The point of civilization is to develop laws and institutions that limit and divide control over all these destructive things. The Muslim and the Western worlds need institution-building, not an escalating Clash of Civilizations.

No, I don't think they are children or cattle. That's your suggestion, and I think you're way off the mark.

[Marr]

50. I never called for a 'clash of civilizations'-- just an honest appraisal of why the killers kill.

They do it for their religion. They'll happily tell you so.

We do ourselves no good by insisting otherwise, and providing cover to these sorts of people by mindlessly mouthing feel-good slogans about how they're 'perverting a peaceful religion'. We should be able to acknowledge the world as it is, even when it doesn't align with our preferred narratives.

[leveymg]

52. They are like us. No better or worse. Just at a different step along the same path

They haven't had their Enlightenment yet much less 100 Years War. Don't forget that Catholic was bombing Protestant and Protestant assassinating the other, over and over again, across Northern Ireland and the UK as little as 25 years ago. And terror and mass murder over religious difference and nationalism had been going on for centuries with no hope of ceasing. Yet, it did. So it can again.

[Marr]

53. There's a reason the Islamic world hasn't gone through an Enlightment period.

Every year, Spain translates more books into Spanish than the entire Muslim world has translated into Arabic in the last 1000 years. Think about that. Think about how insular and oppressive a system has to be to maintain a record like that, right into the modern age. We're talking about a nearly airtight system of cognitive repression.

I don't defend Christianity, because I consider it just as irrational as any other faith. However, there are fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam that made it much easier for the western world to put it's prevailing faith in a sort of box, and pull its tentacles from the levers of power.

There are fundamental differences that make Islam easier to leverage as a tool for aggression as well. Christianity, for instance, may encourage it's followers to spread the faith, but it provides no directions for how this is to be accomplished. That left the door open for plenty of abuses in the past, it's true-- but it also left the faith pliable enough to be massaged into a more or less benign, missionary sort of proselytizing.

Islam, on the other hand, has detailed directions on how the faithful should treat infidels, and how the faith should be spread-- and it is not gentle. I really feel that, in a nuclear world, we simply can't afford to keep on promoting comforting delusions on this issue. We need to have as honest and frank a view of the world as possible if we're to take responsible positions.

[trotsky]

44. ...

"And yet, despite these exceedingly frank explanations, people on the left insist they not only know the killers' motivations better than the killers themselves do, but they suggest that anyone who doesn't follow along is a bigot."

Nailed it.

[msanthrope]

62. This post says it all. nt

[AntiBank]

32. Chalmers Johnson on Blowback (this lecture is pre 9-11, btw)

Johnson 's Blowback Trilogy are superb books.

Blowback. The Sorrows of Empire. Nemesis.

https://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Consequences-American-Empire-Project/dp/0805075593

[trotsky]

43. What did Turkey do to be attacked? n/t

[Ex Lurker]

60. Stopped letting ISIS use their country as a conduit to Europe NT

[trotsky]

64. Well how dare they!

I guess it doesn't take much to piss off ISIS after all, huh?

[leftynyc]

47. So how do you explain

why the animals in isis burn women who don't agree to become sex slaves alive in cages? How is that blowback against the west? How does their beheading of anyone who doesn't follow their perverted form of Islam get defined as blowback against the west? I have zero problem calling them radical Islamists because that's exactly what they are. Trying to excuse their behavior by blaming the west is ludicrous.

[pintobean]

49. Gotta wonder what Bangladesh did to the poor terrorists

to deserve blowback.

[treestar]

51. But then they lose the moral high ground or victim status

When they make attacks on civilians. They can blame it on our nefarious dealings, how? Those are at best nefarious dealings. Not actually harming innocent people. I'm not in favor of the wars (in fact they don't stop these people) but these people also are pretty bad people.

[JEB]

55. Fuckin' A. You nailed that.

[Ex Lurker]

61. Some of the things we've done in the ME have allowed ISIS and kindred groups to fester

And we ought to learn from that. But we didn't create it, and I'll not let any assertion that we did stand unchallenged. They came up with this twisted ideology all on their own.

[Calculating]

65. Change needs to come from within

This horror will continue until the sensible muslims turn on the radicals within their religion. No amount of western bombing and intervention will fix this mess.