World events

Religion is all things to all people, and most people are good or average, even in spite of religions that teach otherwise. This is why confusion abounds with Islam. Clearly not all 1.6 billion Muslims can be bad, therefore Islam can't be bad, and these terrorists aren't 'real Muslims' because it immediately indicts the rest. This is the strawman that critics of the faith have to deal with all the time. They are Muslims, they're just Muslims who take the faith just a little too seriously. (Even Muslims in the West can be oblivious to the specifics of their own faith, and get confused when thugs like ISIS come along, or the appalling statistics that come from any Islamic society. Far left types love to parade these people as examples of the faith, saying we critics are being "Islamophobes", but it obfuscates the core ideas that drive the bad Muslims.)

What should be named and fought are specific ideas, and those who promote and act on them. I don't blame religion. That's right, me, the staunch atheist, does not blame religion. Broadly speaking, I blame faith-based reasoning, but specifically I blame certain facets of certain faiths -- political and jihadist Islam in this instance. I stand with decent religious folk who fight this nonsense.

Except the attack from Karst Tates was directed solely at the royal family. There was no higher goal or intrinsic hatred towards every single person that did not believe the same as he did.
Horribile dictu, but the bystanders that were killed by his mad drive were collateral damage.

Bouhlel's goal -by his very actions- was to kill as many innocent people as possible. Aside from his truck, he used a firearm, and was overheard to shout Allah Akhbar multiple times.

Even if this was a 'lone wolf' attack -as is quite possible!- rather than an orchestrated, coordinated strike, the very core of the attack was another one: it was still done motivated by religion, with an apocalyptic goal, and likely (an assumption based on the fact that firearms are NOT easy to come by in France) aided and abetted by those with Islamist terrorist links.

So all that remains of the comparison was the use of a motor vehicle in both cases.

At the end of the day, loneliness, mental illness, sad history, missed opportunities and everything else aside, it was based on a book that tells you to destroy those different from yourself.
Which people following that book do. Time and time and time and time again.

And while I am with Stewart in that we MUST stand by those brave people who, within that religion, condemn and actively fight extremism and radicalism, I also have no qualms at all in utterly condemning people in that sameself religion who are too mentally lazy, indoctrinated, xenophobic or stupid to recognise evil for what it is. Even if it IS the so-called word of God.

The more I think of it, the more I realize that the whole "religion of peace"/"religion of war", #NotAllMuslims, #NotAllWhatever is quite whitewashing the issue. The real problem that comes with Islam as a religion isn't that it's inherently warmongering or peace-offering. Even looking at the Wikipedia article about killing of whoever in Islam, which is downright laced with quotes from both the Quran and hadith, the official Islamic statement on all things terrorist could be boiled down to:

Well... no... but yes, but no, however, yes, but no, and still... well... and that all ad nauseam.

The fun people have with for example the Christian stance on homosexuality is a quoting game. If you say that being gay is evil, because of Leviticus then let's quote something else from Leviticus that is as absurd if not more (as I don't remember the exact signs on manifestations and parades, I'm not gonna give much of an example). With Islam you could spend years talking to the same imam throwing quotes at them to and fro and it would lead you nowhere.

The problem is that it's both and none at the same time. The lack of centralization is the worst thing and if you look at it, it does seem that many of the terrorist-related fatwas weren't issued by people who got the formal and necessary training to issue them (Al-Qaida, for one, doesn't seem to have a proper Mufti to discuss that). Of course the attacks will be denounced by many and praised by those connected to the IS and, maybe, Al-Qaida, though even not that recently, as the IS seems to be at war with AQ, so the more they can denounce each other on the propaganda level the better (though in case of Al-Qaida it would be hypocritical at best). Hell, even many terrorist organizations DO denounce the IS attacks as they are not attacking the "real" enemy (think Israel), so it becomes quite a complex issue even among the radicals.

What is happening, I think should be looked at from multiple points of view, including attacks on the multi-cultural approach to state (attacking that stance would actually probably make you Christian, because the "Europe for Europeans" stance stems from the idea that the roots of Europe are Christian, which is pretty much bullshit as it ignores the classical tradition wholesale). France, for one, dealt with the multi-cultural approach wrong. It's not about the famous burqa law. It perhaps could've been presented more subtly. The reason why France is attacked so often is, well, first the French caricatures, of course (I wasn't a fan of them, but the response is something quite else), then the fact that the French government (and good that!) was always referring to IS as Daesh, which is a term they downright hate. It was always a symbolic war and I do think that's the basic way to start attacking these movements. So yeah, let's call the Islamist ideology Wahhabi (as opposed to Salafi) or Qutbist (ie. Al-Qaida), because they hate those terms.

I think though that what should be looked at is the cultural war against, generally, immigrants especially late on. In France the first generation of immigrants from the former colonies (it happened after they gained independence, right?), but fast-forwarding to now, these people get worse marks and/or job interview results based on their names alone (there WAS a social experiment when they delivered the same essay to the same teacher, once under a properly French name, once under an Arabic/African one andthat's exactly what happened, the Arabic-named version got worse marks from the get-go, same test was done with job interviews). The problem is that integration is a two-way street and not all, of course, but some people want to integrate and hit a wall. What happened recently in France and Belgium doesn't help the case. And from a propaganda perspective it's a lose-lose situation. The far right rise in the West is in huge part because people stopped believing their governments and felt they have no choice in what they want and in case of the recent refugee crisis... nobody actually listens to "people on the ground". The EU went into panic mode. We need to properly look at what's happening. That's the only way.

In case of Hadith though the legitimacy isn't chronological as it is about how many sources confirm them. So for example there is a well-sourced hadith recommending to read one of the sura featuring a famous quote "to you your religion, to me mine".

There is another thing which makes things a bit complex and that's the issue of jihad itself. Let me give you an example.

Say, a Muslim neurosurgeon performs a life-saving surgery that takes hours, as these things tend to do. Not only, from what I understand, he is allowed to call that jihad (as it most certainly was "a struggle"), but for a religious man it wouldn't be quite improper and shocking if he said "Allahu Akbar" afterwards, even if as a sigh of relief that the patient survived.

On the other side of the spectrum we have a terrorist doing the same thing while blowing himself up and/or shooting innocent people.

What could we make out of that?

Not sure if it's true, but I've heard about an Arab going to a public toilet somewhere in Israel, saying Allahu Akbar after taking a huge dump and being shot by a sniper right afterwards. However, I never confirmed if it's a real story.

That sounds like something out of South Park!

I wouldn't consider Maoist or Stalinist communism to be "rational thought", Pawel. And I plead "too long ago" on the French Revolution.

Really the problem is with any ideology that insists its is the only way and that anyone who doesn't subscribe is somehow less or, in the extreme cases, deserves punishment. That includes both religion and something like communism.

Islam is a huge problem. The ideology and their religion in general, esp. the radical sides of it. End of story. All those Snackbars are a real, a very frighteningly real problem. All around us. And yes, fanatic religious dicks of every kind, not just from Islam, are dangerous and a problem as well, but for the time being, only the religion of piss goes out blowing innocent people up for no reason. And Europe has to do something very fast. It's disjoint and weak right now.

At least the new vice presidential nominee for the Republican Party in America didn't try to introduce a law earlier this year making funerals mandatory for all dead foetuses, whether as a result of abortion or miscarriage.

Oh, wait, he did.

When I see posts by American friends on Facebook asking how the British can be so stupid as to lend support to Boris Johnson etc... well, really. You've got this game sewn up.

Good grief.

If it's what I think it is, the Army is using their constitutional powers against Erdogan. Which means they started considering him going into a religious state.

When faith fails, blame atheism.

For the umpteenth time, atheism is not a position, it is the lack of one. Blaming fascism on atheism is like blaming it on tiny mustaches. 20th century fascism were political religions borne of other reasons, whether theistic or not. I'm as against those ideas as I am political Islam. Had we been talking in the 40s, my main concern would of course be Nazism.

As for anti-religion, to imply that the atrocities committed by revolutionists and communists is in any way incumbent upon the brave people who fight theocracy is an insult.

How dare you.

It really, really, REALLY was not.
The PRIMARY reason behind the French revolution was to depose the King and change the foreign policy and economic state of France, witha very definite military drive behind it (through Napoleon's machinations). That elements from the enlightenment were used to define some of the actual improvements over the Ancien Régime is hardly cause to BLAME Enlightenment for The Terror.

If we go down that path, you could as well blame Athens fopr introducing democracy, as more democratic ideals are arguably a hugely larger component of the French Revolution than the Enlightenment!




And if my grandmother had wheels and a gun, she'd be a tank.
Spurious logic, Pawel, and you know it.
Secularism as an form of state (it's not an ideology. It's a *principle*) does not have a "book" of "universal and unassailable truth" that causes people to kill people that disagree with that book. If you continue to define principles as if they were religions we're getting into ridiculously murky waters, as following your logic the law is an ideology, and is in fact a "book of unassailable truths" that in some societies actually causes people who contravene against the rules in the book to be killed.

It's NOTHING as postmodenistically convoluted as an "abuse of ideas" in the sense that any and every idea can potentially be dangerous. That's not only muddying the water, it's an obfuscation. It's about ONE BOOK, containing the UNCHANGED AND UNCHANGEABLE WORD OF GOD. And that book tells people to kill people who disagree. And people take it literally. As they should. As it's the unchanged, unchangeable...etc.
The only option that will work is if that very idea is successfully challenged, and religion-once again- becomes a very personal relation with whatever higher power suits you.

White noise, Pawel. White noise.

Annnd they just did.
Far too late, in my opinion, to be properly credible, especially as we now already know that Bouhel was not a very religious man (he was at least no regular visitor of ANY of Nice's 18 mosques).

So at this point it doesn't look like a clearly organised attack by an IS cell, but rather a thoroughly disenfranchised, dangerous individual grabbing on to the tool of Islamism flouted liberally through IS and their ilk to justify indiscriminate mass murder.
IS may be responsible, but only in the sense that they actively call on the insane, the criminal and psychopath to take up arms and destroy. In this case they're the equaivalent of a gun dealer on the street handing out weapons to only the most wild-eyed, scary individuals he sees.

In that sense I agree with a French publiciit (whose name I can't for the life of me remember...Popel?) who sugegsted that it's not Islam that is radicalised. It's radicalism that is Islamised. He absolutrely has a point.
So here I agree with Pawel that ONE of the tools to stem this tide is indeed to offer the severely disenfranchised ANOTHER way out. ... though now the challenge is only to figure out what these 'other ways' may be, as none of the classic occidental socialist/liberal tenets actually still hold water: a disturbing part of radicals is in fact NOT poor, uneducated, jobless and/or mentally ill.

But to be sure: that by no means undercuts the necessity to alter the tool -Islam- itself.
As long as it is still widely believed and proclaimed (by the powers in Islam(ic regions) that matter) that it is and remains the one word of the one god, and that everything not adhering to it is inherently wrong and should be eradicated, IS' conviction and propaganda retains a firm footing, and will keep finding fruitful ground to further its apocalyptic world vision.

WORD! Fucking word mate.